Did Medieval People Wear Black?

black clothes slimming elegant goth really good for ninjas but did medieval people make black clothes take a look this manuscript this is a 10th century anglo-saxon calendar showing farm labourers wearing black shoes here's another one this manuscript shows a king possibly alfred the great with his witan his high council they're all wearing lovely black booties as well so black shoes seem to be something popular worn by anglo-saxons in the 10th century so in the 900s in fact we've got lots of black stuff in manuscripts from all the way through the medieval period made using iron goal ink which is a mixture of book goals and iron salts mixed in water and i'm going to make an in-depth video on the process of making iron go link because i have just made some but for now you should go over to sunday scriptorium's channel because her calligraphy and her ink are gorgeous and she plays the accordion and sometimes she sells the ink so what more could you possibly want um highly recommend but we have plentiful evidence from manuscripts and from occasional finds here and there that medieval people wore black clothes stop what you have declared that black clothing in vikings and the last kingdom and assassin's creed was incorrect historically you are a liar and a hypocrite and a shagger and a fiend no no no explain a wheel see my problem with medieval black clothes isn't that people are wearing black in medieval programs my problem with medieval clothes when they're black on tv shows is usually their fantasy the other problem is early medieval black is way different to late medieval and early modern black let me try and explain what i mean but first of all i am indebted to isabel northwood of isabel northwood costumes for her help researching this topic especially with regards to the later medieval period it's not really my area of expertise also before i forget shout out to dawn oldham for her really kind coffee donation thank you so much dawn your support is amazing and it has been for months and months and months you rock i really appreciate it you are incredibly generous so thank you very much indeed once again so early medieval black clothes most of what we see of black in the early medieval period is the shoes these boots that we see in manuscripts made with iron gall ink and this stuff writes jet black even on modern paper and especially on medieval vellum you can get a brilliant rich dark black color it's not light fast but because it's trapped between the pages of a book it survives pretty well this stuff that we make this ink from this iron sulfate basically reacts with the tannins in these alka goals to make this rich jet black color but can it be used to dye cloth well yeah it can really really well in fact be used to dye cloth it's fantastic as a dye stuff i've been playing with this stuff for the last fortnight trying to figure out if i can make black i felt like a medieval alchemist trying to make gold from lead and one of the ingredients of this the iron sulfate was actually an ingredient that alchemists used to try and turn lead into gold later in the medieval period so i've literally been doing medieval alchemy it's amazing but what i have found and this is something that's been echoed in loads of places a chap called guthrie has a blog called distillatio which i will link to in the description where he tries to die black using these oak goals using this iron goal technique and the ingredients for it are known right the way back to the assyrians in ashurbanipal the second's reign in 600 and something bc so the ingredients are there but it doesn't make black it doesn't make like black black it makes take a look this is what i've got this i'll put a little sample up take a look at what i've got this is the stuff that i have been working on which editing jimmy should hopefully have nicely spliced in so as you can see the background here is the white wool that i made my teeny tiny tunics out of it's just an old wool blanket it's potentially been bleached white at some point whilst they were producing it i don't know how it was treated i've given it a damn good scrubbing i've also got some loom state wool here which i have uh checked it has not been washed or treated beyond having a bit of a rinse of water i've also got some linen here which is loom state so that's as it came off the loom i've also got some other stuff and we'll talk about that in a second but as you can see i got grays these grays are without the iron sulfate that's just the tannin from the oak goals okay underneath that you've got the iron sulfate mixed with oak gall solution and we've got a half hour dye bath a one hour dye bath a seven hour dye bath and then three or four four separate dips for at least an hour over three days and none of it has gone black it's all gone gray now if i had some really dark wool from a black sheep which obviously isn't black it's dark brown if you ever looked at sheep wool from a sheep wool if you've ever looked at wool from a black sheep it's actually brown but if i were to dye that with this i reckon it would go super super dark on the other side of this sample sheet we've got the leathers so guthrie's results on his blog call the color that he achieved from this black enough and that's what i've got here it is a blue black it's not pure black and editing jimmy put a sample of a comparison between a modern black synthetic leather and my leather so if you oil it it goes a little darker but that oil doesn't last long it seeps into the leather it feeds it it dissipates and then it goes to this sort of faded blue brown blue black brown color so we need to unpack this because this is getting a bit in depth this recipe is known for ink in the 12th century so in the 1100s this recipe is known for ink using specifically iron sulfate iron ii sulfate vitriol it's called in medieval texts green vitriol the leather dye that i'm using is exactly the same as the ink recipe and that is from the 16th century that's from i think the 1550s like 1558 or something like that from a german recipe i believe so if anyone out there can source me an earlier black leather dye recipe from a medieval source throw it at me in the community tab we've got a reading list there for sources of stuff like this so if you've got a source like that please throw it at me what this tells me apart from the fact that this iron ii sulfate was not industrially produced in britain before the post-medieval period which i already knew what this tells me is that you can make black leather but it will not look like a biker jacket get on with it okay i'm i'm trying to give them the background so impatient nice eyeliner i reckon that i've achieved early medieval black by the high late medieval periods especially by the 14th century and 15th century you see things like heraldry appearing burgundy becomes a big power in western europe their influence on fashion includes things like black becoming a really formal colour in court so in royal courts so at that point black starts to become a fashionable color prior to that black's not really a fashionable color things like blue from indigo red yellows purple these are all rich colors green is a rich color because it involves over-dyeing so dyeing yellow and then dyeing blue or vice versa and if you want to get a better richer black you can die using indigo and then over dye it with a cochineal red so that's the red that the queen's guards tunics are made of that kind of red or kermes if you do that with a load of alum as a mordant you will get black the problem is that before 1200 allen wasn't really being imported into europe that much it is from yemen and egypt and chad i think is the is the biggest source of uh alum potassium alum so early medieval but early medieval black when you look at it in manuscripts you see these monks they're almost always wearing either gray or brown or they're just not colored their clothes aren't colored in that's probably partly because the actual rule of saint benedict so these benedictine monks are following a rule that says don't worry about the shade of the wool that you make your clothes from make your habit from the cheapest world available which is going to be undyed black sheep wool because black sheep wool is more difficult to dye pretty colors white wool takes colors easier brown wool black sheep wool much more difficult so the black friars the black clothing that these monks are wearing is black because it's from black sheep but black sheep aren't black they're brown if you want to donate yards and yards and yards of richly dyed oak gold alum mordanted wool to your local monastery then i'm sure they'd accept it but black in the early medieval period is not lightfast black in the early medieval period is expensive to make reliably in fact it's virtually impossible to achieve but black in the later medieval period is doable it's fashionable but it is still expensive so if you are a nobleman and you have the money to have your yards and yards of cloth over died so dyed red dyed black dyed blue then red then yellow and then mordanted with alum to get rid of the blue to make it black go ahead you probably would but you're not a nobleman from burgundy you're one of the 99 percent of people in the medieval world who is struggling in their hovel so get back to the harvest because the nobleman need to eat pathetic churl that you are so we've got this 16th century black dye and it makes a wonderful blue black color it does fade in the light we've got this dark grey and if we were to over dye madder and road and weld with a load of alum then yes we could get black but we don't know if anyone did that in the early medieval period we certainly don't really have any evidence of that being done if anyone can cite me a source throw it in the community tab in fact if you have achieved a better black than this especially on the linen using this recipe please do let us know in once again the tab or tag me in your instagram post if you're natural dire please please please do let us know because i would absolutely love to be able to achieve proper black black but from the evidence available and from a lot of other people's experiments it doesn't really seem to be a thing all of which brings me back to you because i do get grumpy at people wearing black in tv shows that are set in the viking period and i know why they do it they do it to make it look grim and they do it to make it look dark and they do it to make it look moody to go with their nice black war paint sorry makeup sorry eyeliner whatever the hell it is but black wasn't a fashionable color and it certainly wasn't the color of the poor the dark the grim the miserable les miserables in the early medieval period were probably wearing undyed brown clothes and even then dying clothes was incredibly common like we've got huge numbers of finds of dyed cloth dyed with nuts and died with various plant dyes like matter and wealth especially weld very very common so that is problem one that i have with these tv shows is they're trying to make people look well too grim the other problem i have is that they're wearing synthetically dyed industrially produced modern black which is black you just saw you know if you've ever seen a bike jacket hell if you've ever seen a pair of black jeans you'll know that they're black but just like a pair of black jeans always fades to grey medieval blacks always faded so do i expect these shows to suddenly start making all of their black clothes using this natural dyeing process that i've just made in my back kitchen for like two pounds no why on earth would i expect that from multi-million pound budget tv and films what i expect is people to come up to me at reenactments and say did they really dress like they dress in the vikings did they really dress like they do in the last kingdom did they really dress like they do in the tutors and for me to have to say no that's just tv in hollywood and as a living historian and re-enactor it is a problem because it does seep into the public consciousness people see these things and go oh that's a viking and it's just a bit of a bummer to people like me and i know a lot of you guys who put loads and loads of effort into making their clothes look accurate as accurate as possible and if you look at the medieval dye stuffs that were available they make incredible colors they make a huge range of colors from reds and pinks and purples and oranges and greens and yellows and chocolate and brown and jam it's a weird film but they all fade they fade in the light they fade in the rain if you wash them they fade and the short answer to all of this the tldr is could medieval people make black clothes yes after 1100 absolutely and they were doing it more and more and more as it became more popular in court after the 14th century in the 15th century black is a popular court colour and it has specific uses in court you use it for morning by the 16th and 17th century you use it in your portraits in the 17th century it is your formal black clothing your blacks are your formal wear for religious ceremonies for funerals which is why black by the victorian period becomes kind of the formal color the morning color is a late medieval idea okay in the early medieval period and that is my main period that i reenact so prior to in britain the norman conquest of england in 1066 wales and scotland were not conquered in 1066 haha could they dye their clothes black kind of they could get really dark clothes they could get a brownie black by using iron gall over dark wool you could over die with madder and indigo and you get a kind of bluey black color again if you use the iron goal and then over dye with those colors and you've had different results please do tell me but could they get black black no jet black clothing i don't think was a thing in the viking age i really don't i wish it were i wear black all the time i mean my standard uniform day to day is a black heavy metal band t-shirt black jeans black boots a black jumper and a black hat so i would i would love if the vikings were the gothic creatures on earth but they just weren't they left blue blue was blue and purple were their colors their fashion colors so there you have it thank you guys so much for indeed for watching i hope you found this interesting i really hope this was interesting to you again please do share your experiments with natural dyeing i love natural dye i have never had so much fun experimenting with dye stuff as i have trying to get this black it's been really really interesting and now i've got bottles of ink in my kitchen i need to buy some vellum so thank you so much for watching i hope you enjoyed if any of you guys are interested in supporting my channel then please do like the video and subscribe to the channel i've got so many wonderful subscribers now there's nearly 3 000 of you and it's incredible to have you guys here enjoying my videos so thank you ever so much i have a coffee account if you would like to support the channel in a tiny way financially it helps to buy things like the iron sulfate and the fabric that i'm using for these dye experiments and i need a couple of new light bulbs for my lighting rig so feel free so that's there if you are interested so thank you once again ever so much i hope i see you all again next week uh we are going to be talking about lots and lots of different things as lockdown continues and i have some interesting guests hopefully who will be joining me oh and uh next week if you go over to agnes edgren's channel which i will link to uh you will see us chatting about our time playing in the sca so if you're interested in that go and have a look at agnes's channel she's amazing she is a wonderful swedish reenactor who has lovely cats and it's just brilliant so thanks very much for watching who let me draw bye for now you probably should give him a couple of quid if you could afford it i mean he's doing quite a lot of research for these videos and some people can be really nasty in the comments

Channel: The Welsh Viking

Views: 48,643

Keywords: Medieval clothes, natural dye, oak gall, The Welsh Viking, MySCA, Regia Anglorum, Viking, viking clothes, norse clothes, medieval fashion, medieval clothes

Id: zJDqJDRd_jk

Length: 19min 48sec (1188 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 04 2020