Colors the Peasantry wore in the Middle Ages and Renaissance Part Two

In part one, we looked at various paintings that show the poor were anything but monochrome. Now, we'll look at writings and archaeological evidence that further proves the poor had dyed clothing.

I'm going to go with the most obvious first.  Why and how could the poor have access to dyes to have colorful clothing?  The easiest way was to get hand me downs.   Just like now, giving clothing to the poor was very much a thing in the middle ages and renaissance.  Works of Mercy included giving away clothing to the poor. 

There were also second hand shops; basically pawn or thrift stores, in the middle ages.  Again, it wouldn't be the latest fashion but it would be a way for someone with a few extra pennies to get a nice dyed garment that is a season or three too old to be fashionable.  Second hand clothes shops were essential to medieval life.

However, probably the most compelling evidence that the peasantry wasn't monochrome comes from the archaeological evidence itself.  In a study of textiles from both bog and grave digs in Northern Europe, all time periods, including 8th-10th C, showed indications of blue dye being used.  Sometimes, the blue dyes were found in conjection with a yellow dye - meaning that green was a probable color.  In fact, red appears to only show up in the wealthier graves but both blue and green are in the archaeological remains.

More fun is a test of textiles found in the waste layers from Medieval Prague.  172 samples were taken for dye analysis based on a dig site that dates from between the 14th and 15th Centuries.  The entire paper is here and is a fascinating read on it's own.  The 172 samples are broken down into (34 silk and 138 wool samples - which is slightly disproportionate to the overall finds.  Only 4% of the textiles found were silk.  However, some of the textiles were also items such as rope or other non-clothing piece as well as the silk pieces possibly being larger or more easy to test for dyes than some of the wool fragments.

Taken from a presentation by Helena Březinová

Of the 172 pieces tests, only 27 or 15% of all the samples had no dyes detected.  85% of the samples had at least one dye at this medieval dump site.  The dump site would have pieces from across the classes; however, those with estates would dump items on the estate.  (I've been to one too many archaeological field schools where you are digging in the trash pit for the kitchen of some sort of manor/plantation house.)  So, for this dump site in the "New Town" area of Prague, it's pretty safe to assume you are mostly looking at the lower and middle classes with only a few upper class textiles involved in the dump.

The coccid is most likely polish cochineal which makes for a nice variety of orange, pinks, and reds depending on the dye bath and mordant used.  Madder is more oranges and reds.  Cochineal is brighter and more pinkish in it's hue while madder is more the color of a natural Ginger's hair.  :-)  Brazilwood is another red; this one is most likely the east Indian stuff and not from the New World.

Woad gives you a beautiful range of blues.  Tannin dyes, most likely walnuts, gives an array of browns; from khaki to almost black.  Weld will give you primary color yellow. Persian berries is the one outlier and also gives you a neat yellow.

Basically, in this pit, you have a range of reds, woad for blue, some browns, and two different ways to get yellow.  You have your primary colors so any color, pretty much, is possible.  Again, this is the waste layers of a city - you'd expect to find a high amount of items from a variety of classes but mostly the lower and middle classes.  Only 15% has no dye.  Everything else comes in a wide variety of color.

Want purple?  According to this archaeological report, madder (red) and woad (blue) together (purple!) account for 19 of the 60 double combinations; it's one of the most popular.  The tannis were most likely used to give the dye a darker overall hue so the 2 pieces that show woad (blue), weld (yellow), and tannis (brownish) probably came out to a lovely forest green.

Granted, this is just one archaeological report but it does show that the lower classes had color.  How popular that color was, based on the other archaeological paper focusing on digs further north and a few centuries older, depended on both time and location - just like everything else in the SCA period.  So wear that pink tunic with purple trousers as a serf, it's completely period.  :-)

My little Viking Cap

What I wrote in my documentation:

Based on the Jorvik excavation, this cap is made out of brown silk with buttercream silk thread stitches. The linen twill tape was used based on speculation within the archeology reports due to stitches showing that some sort of tie was at the bottom of the cap.


The original cap is made from a single rectangle and then shaped at the crown to give it a curve. I pieced my cap due to the limited amount of fabric I had that looked correct for the 10th Century. Brown color, achieved with madder among many other popular dyes in the 10th century, is plausible as well as the soft yellow from lichen. Silk was believed to be imported from the Byzantines at this time.
The cap I have presented to the A&S is entirely hand sewn and uses the closest possible materials to the original artifact.

You can read more about Norse dyes here and see the extant cap here.  Since this particular competition was "Winner take all", I didn't want to have something that was completely awesome - since I might not win- but I did want something that was accurate, fun, small, and something that I wouldn't mind having in the garb closet but wouldn't mind loosing either.  However, I - and everyone else- really didn't have a chance since someone made an accurate bone comb.

The only way to have competed with that would have been to enter a fully embroidered, hand woven apron with complete documentation on the embroidery style.  Pretty much everyone else was wire weaving - which was cool but yeah, we never really had a chance.  ;-)  

Admittedly, the cap was out of scrap silk.  The silk originally was used for lining of bell sleeves in another gown I made last year.  However, I had enough to make a decent cap.  I still have some and might do another cap - but with purple silk thread because that would be awesome.  :-)