Wow, what a title!
I finally got around to doing something I’ve wanted to do for a while– going through one of my favorite books (Textiles and Clothing 1150-1450) and summarizing how to make a garment I make a lot as close to how they would have done it as possible– a late 14th century dress or tunic.
Note: this is in no way a substitute for this book. Please buy it. Please read it. Please stick it full of little post-it note tabs with Japanese mac’n’cheese characters on them (that might just be me). It’s not expensive, and it’s an absolute wealth of information if you care about this kind of thing.
Also, apparently I need to add a disclaimer with a few things I thought were fairly obvious but I guess are not: this book is, of course, limited in scope, and the archaeological record is by definition incomplete. If you are very serious about a reconstruction from a specific time or place, you should of course do your own research.
Ok, firstly– materials.
Fabric
One of the most fascinating things about reading this book is the sheer variety of fabric that would have been available for garment construction in this period. I always think about wool 2/2 twill and plain weave, but there are so many other variants with supplementary weft patterning, or bands of twill on plain weave, or even just using multiple wefts to create texture and pattern! There’s also a ton of detail on stripes and plaids and selvedge types, all of which are probably unavailable to you, unless you know a weaver who really loves you (sadly, I do not).
In terms of what is actually available to you, for the late 14th Century, you probably want a plain weave wool. Emphasis at this point had moved from fabric construction to fabric finishing, so you see a lot more plain weaves as opposed to twills (from 49% in a set of finds from the 1340s to 90% in the late 14th century), and many of them are heavily fulled. Period fabric barely frayed, which definitely influenced their choices of construction methods. Madder was a very common dyestuff, but in terms of color options, have fun, although follow the usual rule of more saturated==more expensive.
(ETA: Ok, some dude on a facebook group decided that he really hated this post, so I went back and reviewed all of the scholarly info I could find, and I would like to edit the above to say this is probably about half right. You see a lot more plain-weave materials in urban settings, while there are still 2/1 and 2/2 twills used in places where people would be more likely to make their fabric than buy it. So a 2/2 twill is still a reasonable option, and if you find anyone in the US who sells 2/1 twills, please let me know)
There were silks available, including lots of different patterns, lampases, plain-weaves with satin bands, and even half-silk velvets, but you’d have to be pretty rich to afford those, as all those materials were imported in most of Europe. Nevertheless, they are represented in the finds!
Thread
As you may or may not know, different materials survive to different extents in archaeological environments, and protein fibers tend to do better than cellulose ones. As a result, the use of cellulose-based materials (such as linen) often has to be extrapolated, so the authors of the book have made the educated assumption that evidence of a seam but with no thread remaining means that the seam was probably sewn in linen.
And the vast majority of them were! There was likely some use of wool thread for construction among the poor or the isolated (see: the Herjolfsnes finds) but that does not seem to be common in a bigger city like London. Silk thread is used for all surviving buttonholes and eyelets (although, of course, that does not mean all buttonholes and eyelets ever). It was also commonly used for applied tablet-woven edges, along with wool (more detail on that later).
Facings & Bindings
Again, all the surviving facings (there are very few examples of bindings, mostly they seem to have been used on the edge of those long mitten-cuff thingies) are made of tabby-woven silk, cut on the straight grain. One example of a set of buttonholes shows the remnants of a linen facing, so they were probably used, just see above re:mud being stupid.
Now, the fun part!
STITCHES AND SEAMS
Firstly, an interesting one– there is no certain evidence of backstitch. None. Again, see above re:mud being stupid and most sewing threads being gone, and I would not want to try and distinguish a running stitch from a back stitch just by stitch holes, but I trust Frances Pritchard. We’re mostly looking at running stitches for construction, with a stitch length between 2-3mm.
Double-fold hems are also rarely used– they’re mostly found on silk garments, and usually on wrist cuffs. For wool we’re looking at single-fold hems that are hemstitched (slash whip-stitched) for the bottoms of garments, and single-fold hems that are running stitched or top stitched (or both) for cuffs, necklines, and armholes. If there is a facing the top of it is usually secured in place with the topstitching used to define the original hem, and then the bottom of it whipstitched down. Facings for buttonholes and eyelets seem to be whipped along the top and bottom but running stitched along the long edges.
Both eyelets and buttonholes are stitched with a buttonhole stitch (although there are few eyelets in the extant finds, which is fascinating given how common of a closure method it seems to be in period depictions?!) There is no evidence of buttonholes being running stitched beforehand for strength, or for any buttonhole bars (but I think most of us knew that was a later development).
Many edges, but particularly sleeve cuffs and anywhere there are buttons, were often strengthened and tidied off with applied tablet-weaving, and we even have details on how to do that! If you are using silk, you want to use 12-16 tablets threaded in two holes, and use a tubular weaving method. Wool is also tubular, but using fewer tablets threaded in all four holes. Isn’t it nice to have clear instructions?
Because this book deals with the London finds, all of which are fragmentary, this book does not go into detail on garment patterning. For that, you have to turn to other archaeological finds, many of which are helpfully summarized here, as well as in Medieval Garments Reconstructed or Woven into the Earth (one of my other favorite books of nerddom). In short, your options for a garment are four-panels, eight-panels (with narrow side panels) or twelve panels, but note: these side panels are not, I repeat NOT, cut like a princess-seam. They are only the width of the horizontal portion of the armscye, and they do not go over the bust point. You see that cut occasionally in the late 15th Century, and in the 1870s, but as far as I know there is no evidence of it in the 14th.
I hope this level of detail is interesting to someone other than me, although at the very least the next time I’m sewing something I can just refer back to this mess rather than flipping back and forth through the book. Yay for the crazy! Yay for having evidence for sewing seams with linen, which is much easier to get than wool sewing thread!
*(as someone with diagnosed mental health issues who tends to be on the far side of the obsessive and neurotic bell-curve even in a profession that encourages that kind of thing [art conservation] I use this term to describe myself with love, kindness, and a dose of self-awareness)
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