Loved this info! Wish I ‘d done a couple of years of Graduate study drilling down into Textiles of the Medieval Period. Thanks for adding to my ‘continuing’ education. I am now a 70 year old Fiberholic and in retirement still exploring all things fiber & textile. 🧡🙏🏻
The Merovingen were a dynasty of Frankisch kings. They spoke the ancestor of my own language. Scholars discovered a sentence in a manuscript :'Hebban olla vogala nestas hagunnan hinase ik ande thu. All birds started making nests except you and me. You can look it up. The second dynasty was the Karolingen (Charlemagne, Karel Martel etc.)
In this day and age, very few of us would be able to afford completely hand grown, harvested, cleaned, spun, and woven fabrics. It’s simply not feasible.
Perhaps in a new earth age, at some point in the future, the many benefits of the natural cycle of fiber ‘from land - to body’ fiber production will once again be realized & made commonplace. One can dream… 🧡🙏🏻
This is so interesting. Much later, my several greats grandparents were weavers on the post revolutionary out posts of what became New York. State in the US. Later, in the early 20th century, my. Husband's grandparents fro Italy were silk weavers. I have some materials from both, as well as linen they wove
I’ve noticed that in medieval stories, wealth is sometimes indicated by gold, ivory, and jewels, but more often by luxurious fabrics. Much like us, I suppose, our ancestors dreamed of having high-status clothes and house furnishings.
Most definitely; all textile making was labor intensive period. Just to hand drop spin - on a whorl - enough ‘yarn’ to weave into cloth to even clothe the typical family of BASIC peasant clothing used up every available hour in the day by the females (predominately, though children & some men did help out) in the household. And next comes the actual weaving & clothing construction sewing. This of course in addition to field work, gardening, cooking & cleaning. So, naturally, only the wealthy could afford the luxury of silk & an entire team of slaves etc to prep, spin, dye & weave the fiber into garments, trim, furnishings.
@@maureengauvin1768Relative to people’s incomes and general wealth, both the cost of materials (wool, linen, silk, etc.) and the amount of labor required were much greater than they are now. In our lifetime, clothing is the cheapest, adjusted for inflation and so forth, that it has ever been in human history. I’m a fairly poor person, yet if I wanted to, I could buy new clothes (although the cheapest available), wear them once, and throw them away when they get dirty or torn (instead of cleaning or mending them). That was unthinkable even in my parents’ generation, for all but the richest people. Until the last few centuries, most people didn’t have more than one set of clothes, or two at the most, which they wore every day of the year. So even wearing different outfits for different occasions was a display of wealth. Even in the 18th century, the religious leader John Wesley defined being wealthy as owning two coats instead of one.
In Exodus 28:39 in the Bible, there is a description of the fabric used in the priest's garments. Many translations use the term "checker work, or checkered," for the fine linen used in the fabric, which seems to indicate that in ancient times, people were using different weaving techniques. This was a very interesting video. Thank you for producing it!
I live next to the city where Clovis was buried and they erected a (controversial?) statue on the roundabout where his remains were found. I took that roundabout everyday for two weeks when i did a costuming internship a few months ago and everytime i look at it it makes me think of this re-creation of a Merovingian dress Edit: just looked on Google to see if we have any picture of his grave and he was born in Tournai but died in Paris, i heard the square the statue is in was named after hil and the statue was of a "bee" (allegedly) because that's where they found his body , now it's possible he was transported back here after he died but it's not impossible it was where he was supposedly born or maybe even baptized (there's a church next to it)
That is a nice and clear presentation. I just want to add that the fabrics that you say the elite had were not for the elite but those who cared for nature, the woods and the animals, water etc. The idea or assumption or explanation that society is ordered in a hierarchical way with an elit class that wore the best is very dum. That idea -elite has the best- changed society from a custodian caring mother nurturing world, to the bastard selfish frightening version we are forced to live in today.
Agreed, very interesting. I am also interested to find out what weaves came out of Africa with baskets, shawls/fabrics when humans migrated over the many years. I guess that would apply to fabric sources (animal and plant) and dyes as well. Thanks for doing this video.
I think the lack in our modern day of many, many luxury fabrics that were created in antiquity really points up the losses in favour of expediency of our modern world. And not even luxury fabrics…….it’s all but impossible to source linen as finely woven as that used by the Egyptians, and even cottons are no longer made to the quality that they were even 100 years ago. This makes recreating ancient clothing at best, an approximation. A worthwhile one tho.
Ok so obviously my range of interests completely befuddles the great algorithm because mostly I get the same stuff in my feed over and over…..and over, and over…. But, every now and then a gem like this pops up. The last one was a wonderful video on recreating Minoan clothing……yes!! This was great. I love learning about ancient textiles, their creation and the roles of women in the development of textile production.
This video is amazing!!! I want all the info! 😂 I am reading a book called Women’s Work by Elizabeth Wayland Barber that touched on this time period and location. It’s all incredibly fascinating. Thanks for putting the effort into making this video.
@@suviaslettersI’ve just finished this book and was driving friends nuts by telling them loads of the fascinating things I learnt; so many things now made sense.
Omg!! I'm a Francophone Studies major (with a special interest in the Frankish monarchies), a Classical Archeology minor (with a special interest in numismatics and its use as a propagandistic tool by rulers in antiquity), and a newbie sewist with a love for historical clothing and textile... this video is genuinely the holy grail culmination of my interests!! Thank you for doing all of this amazing work and sharing it with the world!!
Very interesting! I'm just getting into weaving and I'm taking a deep dive into historical fabrics. Also equally interesting to this language nerd is your pronunciation of "textile." I assume it's a regional pronunciation that' I've simply not heard and I'm curious to learn because language is also fascinating.
I'll keep an eye out for s-twist and z-twist linen here. There is still a thriving industry where I live and I'll ask about it the next time I go fabric shopping. Lots of pics online, but I'm not sure what the Unicorn Linen really looks like. Perhaps you could post something...? Even if it's a sketch...
I just found a PDF of a doctoral thesis on the Burial "field" of Neudingen, Blackforest in German by Tobias Brendle written in 2014. It's over 1000 pages. The contents reveals much of what you were talking about in the video with respect to focus on metal items - there seems to still be a significantly greater interest in the jewellery and coins than in the textiles, although there is some information on belts and even horse gear. Not sure when I will have time to delve into it in greater depth, but will return to share any info that might be of value when I do. Several hundred pages of written description of the brooches and pins, very few sketches. I've only skimmed the thesis so far, but have saved it. It is disappointing to see how little information is presented on the textiles - although this may have to do with the author's interests.
Thank you so much to all of you for sharing your thoughts and ideas and enthusiasm🤗! @Suvia, do you perhaps still remember the title and author of the book on Merovingian clothing? I became interested in Merovingian clothing after buying a beautiful broken cross twill. I spent hours online trying to find the period so that I could make an appropriate dress. I only recently discoverd that the pattern is Merovingian and then just discovered your channel: YAY. Oddly, I found more information in English than in German - this may be due to the almighty algorithm or because there is more English material out there. Do you have any suggestions on books with pictures and patterns for Merovingian clothing? I have lots of reenactment books (Medieval Tailor's Assistant and such like) but would love to hear your suggestions, please 😊. Anyway, I really appreciate your content so far and am very much looking forward to seeing more.
There really aren't any books that provide patterns. There isn't enough evidence to provide anything definitive. We can use nearby cultures that did have more documentation. I keep hoping for some previously unknown fabulous find that has at least a few intact garments. Check out these books: Cloth and Clothing in Early Anglo-Saxon England, Penelope Walton Rogers (Anglo-Saxon was similar to Merovingian) Dress in Anglo-Saxon England, Gale Owen-Crocker Koeniginnen der Merowinger, Egon Wamers and Patrick Perin (In German)
@@suviasletters Oooooo, thank you so very much. It helps to have the titles and authors written down. I hadn't quite got to the end of the video where you are talking about the resources. (I had to comment and thank you beforehand.) I just finished watching to the end and am about to do a book search. Thank you again, ever so much.
This video is a blessing of the RU-vid algorithm. I'm a history student myself and do study medieval clothing in my spare time. (Also interested in the Alamanni, so same time periode). I really appreciate the added pictues and video clips that one does not always find in papers. It adds a lot to the obtained knowledge. And it makes it more approachable. And I'm really thankful for adding a literature list and including the links. (So much more ti read now ~✨️) I hope more peole will find this video, as it is very well researched and presented. And I also really appreciate that you mentioned that the middle ages were very colourful. One of my professors always needs to say in his lectures for the first semster students that they must forget the image of "the dark ages" because so many people still believe that 😅
Very interesting. I would like to see more videos about fabric and dress from history. I was introduced to weaving when I was at university working on my fine arts degree in painting. We had to take a number of classes in other arts, so I chose fibers for one of them. Weaving was something I didn't become good at but I developed a respect towards hand weavers down through the ages. Please keep these videos coming. Maybe they will inspire me to try weaving again.
