cl-Wales-msg - 8/28/04 Clothing of medieval Wales. Resources. NOTE: See also the files: Wales-msg, Roman-Wales-bib, clothing-msg, cl-Anglo-Saxn-msg, merch-cloth-lst, seamstresses-msg, underwear-msg, p-shoes-msg. ************************************************************************ NOTICE - This file is a collection of various messages having a common theme that I have collected from my reading of the various computer networks. Some messages date back to 1989, some may be as recent as yesterday. This file is part of a collection of files called Stefan's Florilegium. These files are available on the Internet at: http://www.florilegium.org I have done a limited amount of editing. Messages having to do with separate topics were sometimes split into different files and sometimes extraneous information was removed. For instance, the message IDs were removed to save space and remove clutter. The comments made in these messages are not necessarily my viewpoints. I make no claims as to the accuracy of the information given by the individual authors. Please respect the time and efforts of those who have written these messages. The copyright status of these messages is unclear at this time. If information is published from these messages, please give credit to the originator(s). Thank you, Mark S. Harris AKA: THLord Stefan li Rous Stefan at florilegium.org ************************************************************************ From: Heather Rose Jones Newsgroups: rec.org.sca Subject: Re: Welsh clothing Date: Wed, 23 May 2001 10:26:08 -0700 Organization: University of California at Berkeley Ken Chapin III wrote: > My wife and I are just getting involved with the SCA. She wants to take a > welsh persona. We've been searching the net for info on very old welsh > clothing but are having a hard time of it. Could someone suggest somewhere > to look? Everything I've found dates to the 17 and 18 hundreds, I think > she'd prefer something much earlier. HELP!!! Does anyone have patterns? For a variety of reasons, not least including the low volume of (easily accessible) information, the topic of Welsh clothing is very sparsely covered before the 18th century (when Lady Llanover singlehandedly "invented" Welsh National Dress, from the ordinary clothing of the time). One of the difficulties in researching this topic, when compared to other pre-modern European cultures, is the small amount of information available on the visual arts in Wales, as well as the difficulty in disentangling representations of "native" culture in that art from art that represents a more universal pan-Insular or pan-Western-European style. The reasons for this scarcity of visual arts are varied and include the relative poverty of the native Welsh nobility before the Edwardian conquest, the cultural shift of focus towards England after that event, and a simple disinterest in publishing what _does_ survive among those studying the subject. (For example, there are illuminated manuscripts that were produced in Wales that, as far as I can tell, have never been published, in full or in part, in a way that would make their art available to researchers.) This last deficiency is being remedied in part by Peter Lord's excellent series "The Visual Culture of Wales" (University of Wales Press), of which the volumes "Industrial Society" and the early modern volume whose title I forget are available, with the Medieval/Renaissance volume expected within a couple years. Written descriptions of clothing in Wales are more available, but must be winkled out of their hiding places in a wide variety of genres, and then evaluated for evidentiary value. I've done a start on the latter approach (as well as including what few visual representations I can find) for Welsh clothing up to around 1300, in my booklet "Medieval Welsh Clothing to 1300" (available from a few SCA booksellers -- unfortunately I'm not taking orders myself at the moment). I hope to turn this booklet into a web site at some point in the future, but I'm trying to avoid such distractions while I'm supposed to be finishing the dissertation. The overall picture for the period I was studying seems to be that Welsh clothing did not differ drastically from that of their neighbors, although there were certain characteristics of material or style that were recognized as being associated with the Welsh, although not uniquely so. (This included characteristics like the continued use of rectangular cloaks into the medieval period, a haphazard attitude towards the wearing of shoes, even in battle, and often comments on what foreigners considered to be sparsity in clothing, e.g., a single linen tunic and cloak rather than both linen and wool tunics.) After the period I was studying, clothing, especially of the upper classes, looked to England for style and inspiration. There is evidence for various "regional styles" or characteristic garments among the ordinary people, but this should be set in a similar context of regional styles within different areas of England -- there was no real characteristically or iconically "Welsh" dress, in the sense of a style of clothing that was uniquely and universally associated with that region. There's plenty of room for further research in this field, especially in terms of combing through written accounts for fragments of information. Tangwystyl ******** Heather Rose Jones hrjones at socrates.berkeley.edu ********* From: Heather Jones Newsgroups: rec.org.sca Subject: Re: Head-gear Date: Wed, 23 Apr 2003 10:30:52 -0700 Organization: University of California, Berkeley Jen wrote: > Does anyone out there know where I could find information on what sort > of head gear a women in 12th century Wales would wear? Thanks. In vague terms, there are 12th c. references to women's headgear styles in Giraldus Cambrensis (Itinerary Through Wales / Description of Wales), and there are references to at least two different types of headgear in the Welsh laws (although it is much less clear what dates of usage these references can be considered to cover), but to the best of my knowledge, there is nothing available that will give you direct information on what to make and wear. Giraldus describes Welsh women as wearing a headdress "like what the Parthian women wore" ... well, given that he's comparing the style to that of a people living a millennium earlier in another part of the world, about which he would have had zero direct informtion, all this tells us is that Welsh women were wearing something that was similar to what Giraldus _imagined_ Parthian women to have worn, which doesn't really help at all. The laws use two terms for women's headdress: "pen-lliain" (literaly head-linen) and "pen-guch" (literally head-boat, probably referring to some shaped object that vaguely resembled a coracle). The latter seems to have been considered either a lower class or less formal item of dress. It would be reasonable to associate these terms with some sort of linen veil and some sort of coif-like item respectively, but that's about as much as you'll get. Tangwystyl Edited by Mark S. Harris cl-Wales-msg Page 3 of 3