The origins of the present project lie in Gale Owen-Crocker's research into the dress and textiles of the Anglo-Saxon period (Owen-Crocker 2004; Owen-Crocker and Netherton 2005–6). The project is entitled ‘The Lexis of Cloth and Clothing in Britain c. 700–1450: Origins, Identification, Contexts and Change’. As the title suggests, it has a twin focus: dress and textiles; and the vocabulary that existed for them in medieval Britain. What we are interested in is the question of how textiles and garments were named. The vocabulary of the various languages spoken and written in the British Isles is documented in different specialist dictionaries, yet geographical proximity and interaction through labour and trade indicate that this evidence should be categorised and analysed together.

The Lexis of Cloth and Clothing project prompts us to think both semasiologically (what did this word mean?) and also onomasiologically (how was this object described in language?). In practice, this means that investigators on the project will analyse terms and their citations from both documentary and literary texts in the light of surviving textiles and dress accessories, and graphic images in medieval art, investigating the complex relationships between vocabulary, artefact and image. We will also include definitions in modern English of medieval technical processes and artefacts. This orientation towards interdisciplinary material will, we hope, enable a re-examination of the medieval vocabulary and potentially the redefinition and refinement of existing information found in established medieval dictionaries.

We will catalogue the sources of the lexis, questioning whether the same naming practices governed the Celtic, Germanic and Romance languages of Britain. For example, medieval English garment-names derive variously from the part of the body they cover, from the cut or shape of the garment, from the texture of its fabric; cloth may be named from its technique, place of origin, real or supposed, or from its trade route or the merchants who carried it. Even allowing for the limitations of relevant texts, regional and dialectal variations within the languages may emerge.

We will try to contextualise the introduction of loan words within historical and cultural developments; for example, the Flemish textile trade or the popularity of French, Italian and Latin literary texts. Loan words are a particular focus of interest for questions of semantic shift: did loan-words (as well as other lexical items) regularly or rapidly become divorced from their original sense? If this is so, can any socio-economic reasons explain this?