Modern depictions of Medieval life frequently show people living knee-deep in filth, with drab-colored clothes, living unfulfilling lives – and, often, being happy in their ignorance. When we look at Medieval fashion, we can see that that is anything but true! Just like today, people had varied and personal tastes encompassing different colors, materials, styles and designs. And also, just like today, they were highly conscious of the meanings displayed by their clothing: if you committed the Medieval fashion faux-pas equivalent of wearing brown shoes with black trousers, you could bet that your host would notice.
We’ll take a quick tour through some of the highlights of Medieval fashion – from the Crusades to pointy-toed crackowes.
Crusader Fashion
The Crusader era dawned in 1096 CE, when a motley expedition of Western Christian nobles set out to ‘reclaim’ the city of Jerusalem from the Sultanate of Rum, one of the successor kingdoms of the disintegrating Seljuk Empire. Modern historians (rightly) understand the Crusaders as brutal adventurers who carved a path of pillage across the known world on their way to their destination, whose supposed religious zeal often played second fiddle to the chance to steal whatever wasn’t nailed down. But we don’t often think of them as fashion trendsetters – yet this is exactly what they became.
The Crusaders blundered into a diverse and thriving society in the Medieval Levant, where Muslims, Orthodox Christians and Jews largely co-existed with one another in a sophisticated and literate region that had been an integral part of a flourishing Islamic empire for three centuries. One thing that had not accounted for, however, was the ravages of the sun. Knights wearing thick Western European woollens underneath metal chainmail and great helms were in constant danger of exhaustion and heatstroke. A typical 12th century knight would wear four or more layers of protection on their head in battle: a linen coif, a cervelliere (close-fitting metal skullcap), a chainmail hood and a huge barrel-shaped great helm – this would be uncomfortable in cool Northern Europe, but in the Middle East it was deadly. Lack of water and heat exhaustion were critical, for example, in the Crusaders’ abject annihilation at the hands of Saladin at the Battle of Hattin in 1187 CE.
Quickly, the Crusaders adopted the clothing of the local populace: loose, flowing clothing worn over their armor, like the hooded djellaba and the coat-like kaftan. Not only do these garments shade the knight from direct sunlight, they also create cool air flows which draw heat away from the body, and would have been critical to sapping the heat building up in chainmail in direct sunlight. The traditional medieval clothes of the Knights Templar, wearing a long flowing white mantle emblazoned with a red cross patée, is in fact a direct import from traditional Middle Eastern garb. When the Crusading knights returned home, laden with stolen wealth and wearing these flowing coats which they had adopted purely out of necessity, they were hailed as heroes – and the tradition of wearing flowing coats over the top of one’s armor was soon adopted by the noble class as a whole. By the end of the 12th century, wearing a colorful surcote over one’s armor, bearing one’s personal symbol or arms, was the height of fashion in Western Europe.
Colorful Fashion and the Law
Look at any piece of popular culture set in the Medieval era, and you can be sure that it will be fairly monotone: the clothing of peasants is almost uniformly grey or brown, with even nobles only wearing dull colors (and, inexplicably, lots of leather). In reality, almost everyone would have had access to the ability to dye cloth with good, bright colors made from a handful of locally available vegetable and mineral dyes. Dyeing was a messy and caustic job, and required the use of nasty chemicals like alum (and large quantities of urine!) – but a peasant could have access to red, green, yellow, orange and blue clothing quite easily. So Medieval life was probably far more technicolor than we imagine!
However – this doesn’t mean that Medieval life was an unrestricted riot of color. Today, clothing is an important means of projecting one’s status – being able to afford designer labels, and being seen to be able to afford designer labels, is a means of declaring one’s position in society. The phenomenon of counterfeit clothing is a means of gaining the social cachet of a class category that you might not be able to afford. It was exactly the same in the Middle Ages – but instead of designer labels, Medieval monarchs literally passed laws to dictate what you could and couldn’t wear.
These ‘sumptuary laws’ had a complex set of motivations. Some were designed to protect public morality – for example, in 1336, King Edward III of England passed a law banning ‘any shoes or boots having spikes or points which exceed the length of two inches, under the forfeiture of forty pence’; such pointed shoes, or crackowes, were thought to outrage public decency with their lewdness! Edward’s later sumptuary law of 1363 was more explicitly hierarchical: it set literal price-limits on the cloth you were permitted to wear, according to whether you were a tenant farmer, a knight or a gentleman. Thus, at a glance you would know, for example, that a lady wearing fur would be the wife of a landowner of more than 200 marks a year in income. As well, it banned the import of fine lace: these were also economic measures aimed at propping up domestic industry.
So, in Medieval fashion, we can see the same complex mixture of class, morality and economics that exists in modern clothing. Just as today we debate the labor conditions of garment workers, thus in the Medieval period they would have discussed the impact of foreign lace imports. We’re not really so different, are we?
