A Beginner’s Guide to Medieval Textiles

EPOCH
4 days ago
10 min read

Mary Chavez | The George Washington University Museum and The Textile Museum

Elisabeth Crowfoot (1914-2005) was the author of Textiles and Clothing: c.1150-c.1450, a book compiling and analysing medieval textiles and clothing from archaeological digs in London. It covers materials, techniques, and even methods for cutting and sewing medieval garments, and has been an invaluable source for costume designers and textile historians alike. Elizabeth was also the daughter of Grace Mary ‘Molly’ Crowfoot (1879-1957), a British archaeologist and one of the first scholars to study archaeological textiles in detail. She trained her daughter, along with many other textile scholars, in the study of archaeological textiles and helped to establish it as a legitimate field of study. For both Molly and Elisabeth Crowfoot, their hands-on knowledge of working with textiles greatly contributed to their scholarship.

As a textile historian, I love fashion and clothing. As a fibre artist myself, I cannot help but wonder about the makers who made the clothing. What of their stories that remain? So many hours of labour went into making historical clothes before we mechanized everything during the Industrial Revolution. Much of that labour was done by women and their work was often unacknowledged, left to the margins of history.

A young woman in a black and red costume carrying a red fan blows bubbles for two little girls in a grassy square. The first child is dressed in a red gown with a flower crown and the other is dressed in a yellow and white patterned cape with a green hat. A crowd of people in the background are sitting at wooden tables and walking around the square. — Women and children in medieval-inspired costumes at the Renaissance Faire. (Credit: Luke Airforce Base, Public Domain).

Medieval fashion is making the rounds yet again, with outfits inspired by the Middle Ages popping up throughout this year’s fashion week and in many celebrity red carpet looks. Medieval fashion also features, through various creative forms, in Renaissance Faire and other themed festival outfits. Medieval clothing in popular modern media can range from gilded and fantastical to drab and dreary. We know from medieval manuscripts and other historical depictions of medieval dress such as in tapestries and embroideries that people across class and occupation loved colour and fun accessories. Trends came and went throughout the medieval period, championed by ladies of high status and scorned by the Church – meaning, not much has really changed today.

This guide will introduce the materials, techniques, and specific methods behind medieval textiles, as well as where to source further information on these techniques. The lack of extant medieval textiles left today forces us to get creative in finding sources for research. Understanding how these textiles were made provides a special glimpse into daily life in the medieval period, and places what we understand of medieval history on a surface level into further perspective.

Source Materials: Where To Begin?

You must get rather creative with the types of sources you use to study nedieval textiles. Textiles are delicate objects and historically often repurposed into other textiles until they were too damaged to reuse again. There are few existing examples of actual textiles from the medieval period left, and what exists is often quite damaged or fragmented. These objects are also rarely accessible to the public, and only a select few are on display in museum collections or available as a high-quality image online.

The internet is nonetheless an excellent place to begin research, once you know where to look. What can we look for which can be found digitized online as a source to see what medieval textiles may have looked like? There are several options.

Medieval artworks depicting people dressed in contemporary fashions make for an excellent starting point. This can range from manuscripts and marginalia, to paintings, to tapestries, to woodwork, to stonework, and more. Once you have identified a period or region within Medieval Europe you would like to investigate further, there are several websites where you can begin your search. The Walters Art Museum has several digitized manuscripts freely available online.

Page from a Medieval manuscript illustrating a man dressed in blue, seated at a desk and writing in a book. A horned animal lays at his feet. — Book of Hours, French, ca. 1470. (Credit: Walters Art Museum W.249, Creative Commons).

This image above is a page from a fifteenth century Book of Hours, showing a masculine figure seated and writing, dressed in what appears to be a surcoat of dual tones. The dual-toned fabric illustrated in this manuscript is likely meant to represent a shot silk, a fabric woven with two different colours of yarn to create a changeable effect in the light. This technique has existed since at least the Early Medieval period.

Written descriptions of clothing and textile processes in medieval literature can also be particularly useful. Word-weaving, or the use of textile allegory in medieval texts, is especially common in earlier Old English and Latin texts. These textile allegories require that both the author and the reader have some sort of intimate familiarity with clothing and textile work. The excerpt below from the robing of Sir Gawain in the fourteenth century middle English romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is one example of the significance of clothing to medieval literature.

...while he [Gawain] put the fairest raiment on himself; his coat with its fair cognizance, adorned with precious stones upon velvet, with broidered seams, and all furred within with costly skins. And he left not the lace, the lady’s gift, that Gawain forgot not, for his own good. When he had girded on his sword he wrapped the gift twice about him, swathed around his waist. The girdle of green silk set gaily and well upon the royal red cloth, rich to behold…

This passage is meant to fully demonstrate Gawain’s high status and expensive tastes. Furs, silks, and precious stones are all costly materials, and silk was typically a foreign import. That royal red cloth – likely a rich crimson – would have been dyed with Mediterranean Kermes insects which produce a vibrant, deep red shade. Velvet, embroidery, and lace are all highly specialized and labour-intensive techniques. Clothing is a form of language in of itself, and the author assumed that the reader would intimately understand the significance of Sir Gawain’s textiles.

Digitized museum collections and archival images are also incredibly helpful in the search for medieval textiles. It takes quite a bit of refined browsing and fiddling around with the filter settings on various collections websites, a rabbit hole you can easily fall into for several hours with seemingly no end. The Victoria & Albert Museum as well as the Metropolitan Museum of Art are examples of two museums with ample collections of medieval textile artefacts available to view on their websites.

Image of a bright red velvet historical religious vestment with elaborate embroidery of religious figures done in shining gold thread on top of the fabric, pictured against a plain white background. — Chasuble (Opus Anglicanum), ca. 1330–50. (Credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art 27.162.1, Public Domain).

Materials & Methods

The primary materials for creating medieval textiles were wool, linen, leather, fur, and silk. Wool yarn and woollen fabrics, woven and felted, were great for insulation and retaining warmth. Lanolin, the wax-like substance on sheep’s wool, made wool water-resistant, making it great for outer layers of clothing. Linen, from the flax plant, creates a lightweight and breathable textile. It is perfect for undergarments and summer clothing, and it can also be cleaned more often than wool. Leather is a durable and heavy material, along with ensuring that no part of an animal would go to waste. It can be turned into accessories like shoes, belts, or garments like protective armour. Furs were also warm and insulating, ranging from more accessible hunted animals like rabbits to luxury furs like ermine. Silk was the most expensive and luxurious thread and cloth, as it was not produced locally and had to be imported through the East. Metallic threads were also popular for embellishment in the Medieval period, using precious gold or silver wrapped around a core of silk or local horsehair for a cheaper alternative.

With a background of a white picket fence, the picture focuses on five wound-up hanks of yarn dyed with varying shades of red using natural dyes, all hung up to dry on a clothesline. — Skeins dyed naturally with madder root at Colonial Williamsburg. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons).

Various natural dyes like woad (blue) and madder (red) provided a range of colours from greys and browns to bright yellows, blues, and reds. Woad and madder are both plants, but natural dyes could also come from minerals or insects. Alum and iron oxides were used for dyeing, typically to either adjust the hue of the dye or to increase the colourfastness and permanence of the dye. Insects such as the previously mentioned Kermes could be used not only to make a vibrant red, but to deepen blue fabrics to a darker blue or black shade. Murex sea snails could also produce an expensive, deep purple colour which was popular with nobility.

Page excerpt from a Medieval manuscript illustration showing four women weaving and spinning. A woman in the back wearing a crown and a blue dress is weaving a red fabric on a large weaving loom. Three women at the front dressed in blue, red, and green dresses from left to right spin yarn and comb wool in preparation for the weaver. — Gaia Caecilia or Tanaquil and other women spinning and weaving from De claris mulieribus, early fifteenth century. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons).

For most of the Middle Ages, thread was spun by hand, using a drop spindle and a tool called a distaff which held a wound-up ball of wool. Spinning was so universal in medieval households, the woman’s side of the family was referred to as the distaff side. The spinning wheel was not recorded in Europe until at least the thirteenth century, and in many areas the spindle and distaff dominated as a method for producing yarn. Drop spinning is a simple and accessible fibre arts hobby to invest in. A bottom or top-weighted drop spindle can be purchased reliably online, as well as wool roving for spinning. It is a portable hobby and a repetitive and calming process.

Black-and-white linework illustration of a woman in historical dress spinning thread with a drop spindle in her right hand and a distaff with unspun wool wrapped around it in her left hand. — Illustration of a woman spinning with a distaff and drop spindle. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons).

Image with a plain white background, focusing on a long wooden spindle used for spinning wool yarn with a circular wooden weight at the bottom. Already spun white wool yarn is wound around the middle of the spindle. — Early Middle Ages Drop Spindle Replica. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons).

Weaving on a warp-weighted loom is one of the most ancient weaving technologies. The warp - the base structural threads of the fabric - would be weighed down with stone or ceramic weights so that the weaver could then insert the weft threads to make cloth. This style of loom is typically worked standing up with the loom placed against the wall. The technology for looms became more advanced throughout the Medieval period, leading to the production of more complex textiles and patterns like incredibly detailed tapestries and luxurious velvets. Advancements in weaving technology also led to a commercialized structure of production and rise in the formation of weaving guilds.

Looms are specialized equipment and much harder to get than a set of knitting needles. I would not recommend purchasing a weaving loom to someone who has not already tried weaving before. Try it out first with a small loom made of cardboard before committing. Or find out if a handweaver’s guild meets near you. Finding local weaving workshops and showcases will allow you to gauge your interest before making a leap into a rather expensive new hobby.

Image is zoomed in on the hands of a seated woman in a white shirt and grey dress. She is weaving a long-patterned strap of fabric using threads strung through several small, holed cards. — Tablet Weaving Demonstration. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain).

There is another weaving technique which is more accessible than weaving on a larger loom. Tablet-weaving is another ancient weaving technique on a much smaller scale, with several examples from the Medieval period. It uses ‘cards’ with holes to separate the threads, making narrow strips like belts and often with diagonal designs. There are several good written and video tutorials online that explain how to arrange the warp and how to make the holed tablets for weaving, which can be done with a hole puncher and spare cardboard squares.

Image of a red-orange wool sock which resembles a knitted texture but is fragmented and holed, on a plastic model of a foot, with a plain white background. — Coppergate Wool Sock, Anglo-Scandinavian, ca. 930 – 975. (Credit: York Archaeological Trust, Creative Commons).

Nålebinding is a technique which appears like knitting except it is made with one needle, typically thick and wooden with a large hole on one end. Nålebinding predates knitting and crochet and has been found in Anglo-Scandinavian archaeological textiles such as the Coppergate wool sock above. All three techniques are methods of inter-looping textiles, though where nålebinding and crochet use either only one needle or one hook, knitting can involve two or more needles. Knitting with multiple needles involves using double-pointed needles, which are used when making objects in the round such as socks and mittens. The earliest evidence of knitting comes from the eleventh century. Depictions of knitting appear frequently in the Late Medieval period, particularly in art of the Virgin Mary, sometimes referred to as the ‘Knitting Madonna’.

Painting of four figures, focusing on the Virgin Mary in a red and green and green dress with a shining golden halo. She is using four double-pointed wooden knitting needles to knit a small red garment, presumably for the baby Jesus. The baby Jesus lays on the grassy ground next to her with an open book. — Master Bertram: The Buxtehude Altar, ca. 1400-1410. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons).

Sewing is defined as securing fabric together with a needle and a thread and is one of the oldest textile techniques, developing independently across the world. The Medieval period saw the transition from draped fabrics more like a Roman tunic to more structured cut and sewn garments. Sewing and at least the ability to mend clothing were necessary skills. Even monks were expected to carry a needle and thread on them to repair their clothes as needed. Embroidery, the act of embellishing fabric with a needle and thread, was often a mark of higher status. To stitch for luxury rather than utility. Elaborate embroideries involved expensive imported threads of silk and gold. The skill of goldwork embroidery was so precious that a nobleman in the eleventh century Domesday Book reportedly gave a woman an allotment of land for teaching his daughter to do goldwork embroidery.

Close-up image of a pattern of foliage done with gold embroidery thread on a background fabric of crimson velvet. — Opus Anglicanum (Goldwork) Example in the care of the Berne Historical Museum in Switzerland. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons).

Conclusion

Textiles were significant to every facet of life in the Medieval period. Understanding how textiles were made and the amount of labour that went into these crafts allows us as researchers and hobbyists to connect with historical people on a much more personal level. Hopefully this brief overview also inspires you to pursue a medieval craft of your own! In an age of fast fashion and artificial intelligence, enjoying that slow and sensorial process of making something with your own hands is incredibly gratifying.