Relationships in academic life are often reminiscent of those in families: what begins as a quasi-parental relationship with a supervisor often shifts into a more equal and collegial connection. I was lucky enough to be a junior colleague of Gale's when she was head of the Department of English and American Studies at the University of Manchester. She invited me to be co-investigator on a project she was planning that became the website and database, “The Lexis of Cloth and Clothing in Britain c. 700–1450: Origins, Identification, Contexts and Change (LexP)”. I then had the pleasure of inviting her to be co-investigator on my follow-up project “Medieval Dress and Textile Vocabulary in Unpublished Sources”, the main outcome of which is Medieval Dress and Textiles in Britain: A Multilingual Sourcebook (hereafter Sourcebook). This paper makes use of information and data from both of these projects to explore the language with which garments and textiles are represented in wills written in England in the Old English period. I focus on two issues prompted by these texts: first, the kinds of evidence the wills offer about the multilingual situation of medieval Britain; and second, whether we can discern linguistic structures used in the description of garments and cloth that seem to be specific to this text type.

Texts

The initial aim of the “Medieval Dress and Textile Vocabulary” project was to transcribe and edit extracts from two sets of documents dealing with cloth and clothing in the medieval period: accounts relating to the Royal Wardrobe, and petitions to king, council, and Parliament from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The further aim was to contextualise this material within a range of examples of different text types, bringing together selections from non-literary text types as well as some literary texts to produce an anthology offering textual extracts from the Old and Middle English periods and reflecting the multilingual situation of medieval Britain. The text types have in common their concern with textiles, clothing, armour, and furnishings. I was interested in examining the particular ways which the terminology relating to the semantic field of DRESS AND TEXTILES was deployed in medieval England, and so planned to use the text base we collected for the project as a set of data with which to test theories about linguistic choices in the different text types.

In the Middle Ages, very much more than today, dress was an identifier of occupation, status, wealth, gender and ethnicity. The textiles in circulation ranged from the opulence of gold racamaz of Lucca and cloth of gold baldekyn d’outremer, through to russet (a grey or brown woollen cloth) and the more utilitarian worsted (smooth wool cloth distinguished commercially from the more expensive woollens). Discussions of dress and textiles in the medieval period took place in a variety of spheres of activity, and it is therefore from a wide range of text types that information is to be obtained about the nature and sources of cloth, the desirability of particular garments and accessories and contemporary thinking about dress. Fashion is revealed by inference in the attempts to restrict the use of particular textiles, furs and ornaments to certain categories of people by means of sumptuary legislation. Fashion is also indicated, again by inference, and negatively, in the many diatribes inveighing against its various manifestations.

The discourses surrounding dress and textiles were constructed by the literate classes, clerical, aristocratic and mercantile, but were of concern across all the social scales. The seven chapters here contain extracts from wills; accounts of the Royal Wardrobe; inventories; moral and satirical works condemning contemporary fashions; sumptuary laws; petitions; an Old English epic; and insular romances. We have included wills dating back to the Anglo-Saxon period which are written in Old English, with the occasional Latin abstract. The Old English will of Æthelgifu (I.4a), a wealthy secular woman, makes several gifts of clothing: ‘selle mon beornwynne minne blæwenan cyrtel is neaþene unrenod J hire betstan heafodgewædo J selle man lufetat J ælgifu godwife. hire .iii. godwebbenan cyrtlas. J wulfgife selle mon oðera hire dunnan cyrtla’ (my blue gown which is untrimmed at the bottom and her best head-dresses are to be given to Beornwynn. And her three purple gowns are to be given to Lufetat and Ælgifu and Godwif, and Wulfgif is to be given some of her other, dun-coloured gowns). This will, in particular, offers us a unique insight into the dress of an eleventh-century woman and her ideas about what might be appropriate for other women to wear.

Introduction

As with the accounts extracted in the previous chapter, rolls of inventories, livery and other forms of medieval business writing provide an excellent source for the detailed naming of medieval clothing and textiles. Often the intent in such record-keeping is not just to keep an accurate record of who possessed or who received what, but to provide a precise description of the item or garment in question.

The three extracts which open the chapter are all drawn from the very detailed inventories of the medieval cathedral of St Paul in London, dating from the middle and later part of the thirteenth century and from the beginning of the fifteenth. The descriptive detail they provide of vestments, altar cloths, cathedral plate and so forth is exceptionally descriptive for the text type, and gives us a very vivid account of the cloth and clothing in the cathedral’s possession at the times of the inventories.

These are followed by a collection of extracts taken from the middle of a roll of liveries of Edward III for 1347–9. The extracts are noteworthy because they contain various items of dress and accoutrements for royal tournaments and celebrations, including some of the first references to the uniforms of the Order of the Garter, as well as costumes for ludi (pageants, entertainments) celebrated at Christmas.

Extracts from the inventories Three inventories of St Paul’s Cathedral

Inventories compiled in 1245, 1295 and 1402 list the treasures, including metalwork, books, vestments and soft furnishings, belonging to St Paul’s Cathedral, London. They testify to the vast quantities, the richness of fabric and the gold and jewelled ornament of the textiles owned by the cathedral. The first two inventories coincide with a period of expansion of the Norman cathedral (‘old St Paul’s’), the fourth to be built on the site, which was, by its completion in 1314, one of the largest in Europe, with a 400-foot spire and a magnificent rose window. In the 1530s King Henry VIII would begin confiscating church wealth and dissolving monasteries. About the same time more austere approaches to worship were advocated as a result of the Protestant Reformation, rendering outdated the medieval Church’s relics in their magnificent shrines, opulent furnishings and sumptuous vestments.