On Wed, 6 Dec 2006, Cat Dancer wrote: > The Castilian law specifies types of cloth (which I will have to look > up when I get home) but the London law just says 'rayed cloth'. [I > highly recommend /Governance of the consuming passions : a history of > sumptuary law/ by Alan Hunt, if you want to dig deeper.] The rayed > cloth of the London law is probably woven-in stripes, stripes being > what you, the weaver, do if you have leftover yarns but not enough of > any one color to do anything useful with. I want to say that cloth > woven of dyed wool is going to be cheaper than cloth that is woven and > then dyed, but I don't have enough knowledge of the medieval textile > industry to be saying that. [Here is where someone who does, steps in > and corrects me. ;-)] Certainly the comments in the inventories and > accounts are specific that rayed cloth is for the members of the > household fairly far down on the social scale--the valets and such.
I've just finished editing an article by John Munro that will appear in the next volume of Medieval Clothing & Textiles (vol. 3, to be released in spring 2007). He is discussing color trends in Flemish woollens from 1300-1550, based on a variety of accounts, mostly purchases of woollens for city officials in Bruges and Mechelen. His focus is not specifically on rayed cloth, but he discusses their appearance along with many other types of cloth. Among the points he makes is that some scarlets (the most valuable, expensive woolens) were rayed, and their price was equivalent to other scarlets (indicating they were considered of equal value to solid cloths). The bulk of the article describes shifts in color preferences in the 14th and 15th centuries, and he notes that the introduction of cheaper heavyweight woollens (I'm summarizing a lot here) in the late 14th century, combined with a fashionable shift away from multicolored cloths in general, accounts for the disappearance of rayed cloths from the purchases for the highest echelons of Bruges city officials in the 1380s; even so, in Ghent, where local industry specialized in striped woollens (including expensive striped scarlets), these striped cloths continue to appear in local accounts well into the 16th century. It's much more complicated than that, but the take-home points for our purposes is that stripes were clearly being worn at the top levels for some of this period, and that the fashions were different even from city to city, in part as a reflection of industrial and economic factors. In other words, there's a huge amount of variability in the use (and class significance) of stripes from one time and place to another. A side note: Given that the high-end Ghent industry specialized in rayed clothes, including rayed scarlets, that suggests that rayed clothes were deliberately woven that way, not just made from leftover wools, at least in that time and place. As to the economics and mechanics of weaving wool before or after dyeing: this is touched on both in Munro's article and in another in the volume (the latter being a paper by John Oldland on wool finishing methods for the same period). Apparently one consideration was the specific colors being used, as mordanted dyes made for more trouble in the weaving process, so weaving was typically done with undyed wools or wools dyed in woad, which did not require mordants. Not true everywhere, of course. > What we've found, in going over some amazingly huge number of > illuminations, frescos, panel paintings, book illustrations, etc., is > that when someone is portrayed in stripes and/or parti-colour, that > person is somehow a social inferior to at least one of the other > people in the artwork. So we see stripes (and sometimes plaids) on > musicians and on the people that my consort refers to as > "minions"--the various servants, lackeys, etc. that tend to hang > around important people in the art. Clearly we need to remember that symbolic conventions in visual art don't always reflect reality! > Except in the Manesse Codex, where I suspect that stripes indicate > someone who is a fop or otherwise on the edge of fashion. Note that > that's only a hypothesis--it hasn't made it to theory yet. ;-) Aren't many of the "heroes" profiled in the Manesse Codes supposed to be warrior-troubadours or troubadour-kings? The stripes may be used here to indicate which ones are the musicians (in addition to whatever else they may be). --Robin _______________________________________________ h-costume mailing list [email protected] http://mail.indra.com/mailman/listinfo/h-costume
