Say ȝes to the Chausemles: Fashion in the Medieval West

(Host: Kristin)

Medieval clothing was much more than simply a way to keep warm and decent: it was a statement about social class, wealth, and increasingly personal taste. Clothing meant something – and what people wore could change with a mood or the day or the family they were born into. Find out what medieval people were wearing, this week on Footnoting History!

For further reading suggestions and more, please visit: https://www.footnotinghistory.com

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Medieval clothing could be much more than simply a way to keep warm and decent:
it was a statement about social class, wealth, and increasingly personal taste. Clothing meant
something – and what people wore could change with a mood or the day or the family they
were born into. Find out what medieval people were wearing, this week on Footnoting History!

(00:23):
Hello Footnoting History friends, it’s Kristin, back with some lighter fare than my usual for you:
medieval clothing and fashion. For someone who tends to live in jeans and the same three
hoodies on rotation, it’s a topic that I find fascinating. Because, kind of like the history
of food and eating, it really lets you stand back from all the big political stuff and the

(00:48):
wars and the grand historic narratives and just … be in the moment a bit, think about everyday life
and how ordinary people were doing the things that we do every day. It’s one of those Distant

Mirror instances in history (01:01):
things are both  really familiar and also … not. I’m probably
going to be saying a lot of weird-sounding things to you in this episode – terminology
for clothing and stuff like that – so if you have a “uhwhatdidshesay?” moment and you’d like
a captioned version of this episode, remember you can find it on our website, FootnotingHistory.com

(01:27):
or our YouTube channel. And before I start, and before you get to the end and say: She
didn’t talk about armor! No. I’m not going to talk about armor today – it does have certain fashion
elements to it and there are arguments made that the fashion of armor influenced civilian dress,
and I tried to fit it in here but medieval armor is just too big of a topic. But do I love it,

(01:52):
and if you’re interested, let me know and armor can be the star of its own episode down the line.
Now, the history of fashion for “ordinary people” is somewhat limited because of the source material
we have. Yes. Kristin is going to talk about source material. Source material is the best.
You’re gonna love it. So. There are a few ways we know about medieval European clothing. And right

(02:18):
off the bat, you’re probably thinking, uh, THE CLOTHES, but sadly I got news for you friends,
not much medieval clothing survives for us to look at and most the stuff that does is super fancy and
not terribly representative of what “everyone” was wearing. Especially if the clothing is made
from vegetable fibers, that stuff does not tend to survive very well when it’s buried in the ground.

(02:43):
Leather survives pretty well so there are a fair number of shoes that archaeologists have found as
well as things like buttons and buckles and belts. A lot of the humbler clothing was also re-used and
handed down and handed down and patched and worn until it fell apart. Additionally, actual pieces
of clothing that we do have are difficult to date precisely unless there’s an actual date

(03:07):
embroidered on the clothing – and stuff like that is super rare. Museums will have pieces worn by
royalty or cathedral treasuries will have stuff that elite clergymen wore. Clothed burials were
considered a remnant of paganism for a chunk of the Middle Ages, so graves don’t always give you
anything either – though Europeans started burying people clothed later on and saints’ shrines will

(03:32):
sometimes have the body of the saint clothed … but the clothes do not necessarily reflect what
that saint wore in life. And you don’t always know that what you’re looking at in a museum
was how the clothing looked when it was made – it may have been altered over the years and
we just don’t know – and all that other “boring” ordinary stuff usually doesn’t make the display.

(03:54):
Ok, so that’s frustrating but that’s not all we have to go on. There’s art,
right? Sort of. I mean, yes, you do get something of a stylized idea of
what clothing looked like based on medieval images. However, the majority of images we
have were religious or devotional – they were supposed to teach you something,

(04:15):
so the images aren’t giving you a snapshot of reality necessarily. Religious images are also
pretty heavy on the dudes and women are not as often shown. The art changes a bit in the 14th
century and there are more non-religious themes and artists are trying to depict the everyday,

(04:37):
so that’s good. Françoise Pipponier and Perrine Mane – whose book is in the Further Reading for
this episode and that I highly recommend – they argue that you also have to consider the
art medium itself. Was it a super tiny miniature and therefore limited on the detail? Is it a big
sculpture that shows you the drape of the fabric really well but not the color or the texture? Is

(05:01):
it stained glass and details of clothing don’t really translate that well onto the glass?
So, what about written stuff? Did people write about clothes? Yes, yes, they did and they did
it a lot but it doesn’t always tell you the stuff that you want it to. Medieval literature
like romances will kind of mention clothing but it’s both somehow very idealized and not

(05:25):
terribly descriptive. Your heroine is wearing a beautiful gown, the knight has some shining armor,
the peasant is in some animal skins. Stuff like that. Churchmen get mad at people’s focus on
clothing and produce written rants about vanity and they sometimes have descriptions of clothes
but we’re cautious about taking them at face value, there’s probably some exaggeration going

(05:47):
on there. There are lots of secular laws about clothing that we can look at – regulations of
manufacturing and trade, guilds, sumptuary laws passed by towns telling different classes what
they could and could not wear. There are also account books – what people were buying and
what they owned and these survive pretty well for the kings and nobility. There are also documents

(06:11):
called inventories which were usually taken when someone died, they itemize all the moveable goods
or property – and that’s great but you’re only seeing what a person had at the end of their life,
and maybe not the stuff that family already took or that was given to charity. Some people have
wills but only people who have enough money to write them – or better, have them written.

(06:35):
So, there’s a lot of ways we can know what people wore but you have to look at them all and there
will always be a few holes and a lot more things we wish we knew but don’t, at least not yet.
All right then. First, let’s talk about what the clothes were made of. Wool, guys,
it’s a lotta wool. And linen. But just … TONS of wool. There were a lot of sheep in the medieval

(06:58):
West and a lot of smaller households had them – it’s generally pretty chilly and there’s a good
chunk of the year when sheep can graze, those sheep just keep growing wool and people keep
shearing it off them. The quality of the wool could vary a lot – and England was well known
for producing really good wool and exporting it to Continental Europe. English wool started to lose

(07:21):
out to the Spanish but the English had a good run for a while. The Cistercians monks also developed
a kind of super sheep and Cistercian wool came to be very prized and pricey and that’s partly how
they supported their monastic order – so much so that the Cistercians grew to be a really wealthy

(07:42):
order. (Iron too, they also were good ironworkers those Cistercians.) Spinning wool was something
that almost every medieval woman seems to have been able to do – and it was one of the few ways
they could make money, working from home. But they also produced for their households as well
and those final products weren’t as fancy as, say, the Cistercian stuff but it did the job.

(08:05):
People also wore a lot of linen. There was cotton but that came from Egypt and
it wasn’t a thing that most people had and when you see it, it’s often mixed with hemp
and it’s not pure cotton. People did wear fur – they lined their clothes or cloaks with it and
people especially wore furs in areas like Scandinavia or Eastern Europe, you know,

(08:25):
the super cold places. There were furs that were only for the very upper classes – ermine, vair,
and sable, which are weasels or martens or squirrels, so … fancy. Leather was a very
practical and durable fabric and a lot of the peasant and working classes wore it and that’s

(08:46):
what a lot of shoes were made from – and that’s what chausemles are. I’m sure I’m offending some
15th-century English person with my pronunciation and I’m sorry, I tried. According to the Middle
English dictionary, they’re “a variety of leather-soled footgear,” and the word can
be parsed as an adjective modifying hose. Sometimes people just had leather soles sewn

(09:11):
onto their hose – kind of like hard-soled tights and that worked as a type of shoe.
Silk was the fancy fabric. It was gorgeous and mysterious and really laborious to manufacture.
People had been doing it in China since at least the 3000s BCE – and the cultivation of silkworms
is called “sericulture,” just FYI, important things to know. Over the centuries silk crept

(09:35):
over Central Asia to the Roman and then Byzantine empires. China had the monopoly for a long time,
though, and there is a famous story about Emperor Justinian stealing silkworms from
the East and smuggling them back to Constantinople in the 6th century.
Constantinople was famous for its silk factories but they couldn’t keep their monopoly forever,

(09:57):
especially when parts of Byzantium fell to the Arab conquests, and other places started
to produce silk as well – Sicily and Italy and Spain were big silk producers in the Middle Ages.
This was very much a luxury item and it’s not what most people were wearing at least in terms
of their actual clothing. Some people were able to enjoy silks in little bits, though,

(10:19):
and they had silk ribbons and braids and woven belts and stuff like that.
Ready-made-clothing was not a thing in medieval Europe, not the way that we think of it today.
There were plenty of peddlers who sold old or used clothing and so I guess in that respect,
yeah, you could buy a cloak or a robe or stockings or something. But people were not going into a

(10:40):
shop and buying something new, ready-made, unless you’re counting like hats or belts or stuff like
that. Rich people had their personal tailors. You could go to a tailor shop and have something made
for you – “made to measure” is the term Pipponier and Mane use. A lot of the skill came from cutting
the cloth but the stitching was kind of simple, I found that interesting. To make most stuff fit,

(11:04):
you’d get a belt or some buttons or some pins maybe. You could purchase new things to spruce
up your outfit. People probably didn’t have many – or sometimes not even a second – change
of clothing and peasants working on farms away from the towns, mostly had just one
set of clothes and if they were going to dress up, they might change their headgear.

(11:24):
The colors of people’s clothing could be pretty vivid – and yeah, a lot of the peasantry had
undyed garments that were tan or grey and maybe a little drab (or understated if you
will) but there were some clothes that were dyed extraordinary colors. Probably the most
famous of these is scarlet – which was actually a type of fabric before it was known as a color.

(11:47):
Scarlet was wool that was treated in a very specific way – as Pipponier and Mane explain,
medieval textile workers fulled it (meaning they scoured and beat it) then they teased
and clipped it so it looked felted and smooth. But then what they did was dye it with the most
spendy dye there was at the time, which was made from kermes – which if you’re anything like me,

(12:11):
makes you think of a Muppet – but it was an insect that lived in the Mediterranean regions. They’re
weird looking, but Google them at your peril if you’re not into looking at bugs up close.
Female kermes produce a red color that is great for dyes and that results in really vibrant reds
which scarlet cloth took incredibly well – so the cloth became known for the color it was dyed and

(12:37):
that’s where we get our word “scarlet” today. And there were lots of other dyes that used
all kinds of organic things and minerals – and the dying process evolved a lot throughout the Middle
Ages – people really liked darker colors toward the end of the era because they were expensive
to make and thus became status symbols – black was hard to do and required a lot of saturation.

(13:00):
Woad – which is a plant from the mustard family whose leaves produces a blue color – was not that
expensive because it was a pretty common plant in medieval Europe and grew all over – so many
lower class people wore blue and if you mixed it with other things, you could make green.
Clothing didn’t change a whole lot until the 13th/14th centuries, and some historians argue

(13:22):
that medieval fashion doesn’t really get going until the 1300s. It’s around this time that
medieval chroniclers start to take note of “enormis novitas,” or extraordinary novelty,
in the way people are suddenly dressing. Was it really all that sudden? Hard to say because
they tend to write about things a bit after the fact. Many of these texts are moralizing,

(13:44):
meaning, the 14th century was kind of a hard one for people, what with all the Hundred Years’
War-ing, the famines, and Ye Olde Bubonic Plague. So, these guys talk a lot about bad
omens and sometimes the bad things are blamed on people’s extravagant dress. They’re also
not happy that technically lower class (but rich) people are wearing things that

(14:07):
make them indistinguishable from the ruling classes. So there are a lot of undertones to
unwind here but something is happening in the realm of fashion in the 1300s and it’s big.
In the earlier part of the Middle Ages, people wore things that were very similar to Roman
clothing. Think tunics and draped togas and you get to the robes and dresses of a good

(14:30):
chunk of the Middle Ages. Carolingian men in the 800s sometimes wore more fitted, shorter,
knee-length tunics with belts that they could tuck their swords into. There were minor variations to
what people wore until the end of the 11th century. Then the textile industry starts to
expand, as does travel and trade – especially the wool trade that just explodes in the 12th

(14:52):
and 13th centuries – and men really start wearing long robes – perhaps because they were following
the fashion of Norman knights who were following the fashion of the so-called Saracens they were
fighting in the crusades. When you hear about medieval “robes,” in the sources, they usually
mean a set of outer garments that are layered and made of the same material. They could include the

(15:14):
“cotte,” or surcoat or mantle – outer garments, or over-tunics – and robes are around in some way
until the end of the Middle Ages. University men wore robes – when universities started to appear
in Western Europe in the 1200s, and right from the get-go, universities cared about what their

(15:35):
students and professors, who were considered clerics, wore. Paris, one of the earliest
universities, regulated their staff and students’ dress. They wanted them to be dignified, so their
clothes had to be full-length and no flashy colors. Except if you were a high achiever and
became a doctor of your subject, you could wear that scarlet cloth – sometimes a scarlet hood.

(15:56):
Secular men wore things called “braies” that are basically pants or they wore hose – and it’s not
always easy to tell one from the other in the art. Some wore long cloaks; some wore shorter ones.
The fit and length were supposed to allow for better handling of weapons and for riding horses.
Some of the doublets that men wore were pretty tight (and a doublet is like a jacket)

(16:22):
and if the doublets were short, tailors would sew the hose to the bottom of the doublet … for
decency’s sake. But the length people wanted changed a lot, and in the later 1300s, young
whippersnappers wanted a long-looking silhouette, so they wore longer doublets. In the 15th century,
men’s clothing generally becomes more form fitting and some of those tunics get reallllly short. Some

(16:48):
men were wearing super short tunics that … really showed off their butts (they had on tights but,
they were TIGHT tights) and England prohibited anyone but the upper classes from wearing these
short tunics in 1463 (I guess upper class butts were nicer to look at? Or maybe they were the
ones making these laws and they wanted to wear them.) Men’s fashion tried to accentuate masculine

(17:14):
traits, and people started wearing padded garments that filled out their chests and their shoulders.
Looking at these pictures, these guys remind me of those superhero Halloween costumes with the
fake muscles, but they thought they looked good, so who am I to say? I guess it’s not really that
different from when people put shoulder pads in suits now. There were accessories too, of course,

(17:36):
and in the 14th century, you see a lot of fancy buttons for those fancy doublets and embroidered
decorations. Men also wore purses that they hung from their increasingly fancy belts.
Oh, and the SHOES. When shorter clothing was the fashion, that’s when the shoes really
start to get crazy. This will probably drive all the podiatrists out there nuts,

(18:00):
but the toes on these shoes they were really long and pointy – they were called “poulaines”

(named after their kingdom of origin (18:05):
Poland)  and they could get so long that people had to
tie them up so that they could actually walk. Imagining people doing this delights me to no
end. People loved to hate these things, and like, I get it, especially the church who saw
them as the epitome of ego. Some rulers were also not so fond of them. In 1366, the French

(18:29):
king forbade the making of these long-toed shoes because he hated the fashion so much. (Spoiler:
it didn’t work.) People loved them until they found something new. Toward the end of the 1400s,
they started wearing square-toed shoes and archaeologists have also found a
lot of decorated sandals and all the medieval podiatrists sighed in relief.

(18:51):
So, what about the women? Well, we know a lot more about men’s fashion in the Middle Ages
because the sources talk about it more and depict it more. Royal account books show that women spent
less than men – and at court, it was men who were generally the ones setting the trends. From what
we can tell, women of all classes wore long robes and many – especially married – women covered

(19:13):
their hair. From the 11th century on, they wore over-tunics called “bliands” – but not a whole
lot changed except maybe the style of the sleeves or the headdresses. At the start of the 1400s,
women wore sleeved garments called “cote hardie” that were tight to the upper body and that showed
a bit of shoulder. Some of these cote hardies had decorated buttons that ran along the shoulders.

(19:37):
Of course we’ve all seen the pictures of the medieval ladies wearing these crazy conical
hats – and yeah, they did do that. Women’s headdresses could get really elaborate,
and some of them sat on top of padded “bourrelets” or “escoffins” which kind of look like a hat with
horns? That’s the best way I can describe it. This you should Google, unlike the kermes,

(20:00):
or take a look at some of the illustrations in the books in the Further Reading. These
headdresses were popular from the 1200s to the end of the Middle Ages. Some of them were
conical instead of flaring out horizontally. The “hennin” is what you’re thinking of though with
those pointy hats with the veils attached to them and that shows up in the 1430s, and it's a style

(20:20):
that originated with the Franco-Flemish upper classes. Women of the lower classes did still
also cover their hair, though less elaborately. They tended to wear hoods open under the chin.
Italian women of all classes were less likely to cover their hair than their northern sisters. They
did their hair up like Princess Leia buns under gauzy veils and the back necklines of

(20:41):
their dresses were kind of low. German women wore their veils in layers and theirs had frilly edges.
Both men and women wore the “houppelande” in the 1400s. The houppelande was an outer garment, kind
of like a robe, but it had a front opening that went from top to bottom (the ladies’ houppelandes
were worn closed though). It kind of looks like a gown or a long dress. The sleeves and hems and

(21:05):
the slashing of the fabric changed over time. (Slashing is also sometimes called “dagging,”
and they did it so you could see the clothing underneath, like a pop of color.) Sometimes the
collars were high, sometimes the sleeves were wide and so long they hit the ground. Women tended to
cinch their houppelands under the bust, men did it more at their natural waistline. Women’s were

(21:28):
longer, men’s could be shorter. People start to move away from the houppelande in the later 1400s,
though, and go more for the tighter-fitting – and if you were male – shorter-fitting clothes.
As it happens today, some medieval people loved to hate on fashion. It could get silly and expensive
and it was a good illustration to churchmen who wanted to make a point about greed and

(21:51):
ego. Although, I will say that some of those churchmen wore some pretty fancy things too.
Go check out the Chasuble Front with Orphey Cross from the Art Institute of Chicago, linked under
the Further Reading for this episode. That bad boy made in 15th-century Florence, worn by upper-level
ecclesiastics, is elaborately embroidered and made out of cloth of gold. So … you know. But

(22:15):
the church wasn’t the only one who was unhappy with all the fashion and the consumption. It
was becoming increasingly difficult to tell the upper classes from the lower, and that
ambiguity in the social hierarchy was unsettling to many people. There was a lot of effort put into
what are known as “sumptuary laws,” in the later Middle Ages, and most areas and towns have them,

(22:36):
though the enforcement and practicality of them is questioned by historians. Pipponier and Mane
talk about the Statutes of Savoy from 1430 being the “most illustrative surviving example” of
medieval sumptuary law. These were written by Duke Amadeus VIII and have 39 categories
of people and what they can wear. The duke’s family can basically wear whatever they want,

(23:00):
nothing is too good for them, though there are some notes on length and when kids are
allowed to start wearing gold. Because that’s important to know, you don’t want to give your
baby gold too soon. The non-ducal residents of Savoy were forbidden from wearing scarlet,
artisans couldn’t wear those pointy-toed shoes (alas) or heeled boots and the lower-class

(23:20):
peasants couldn’t wear clothes made from two types of fabric or have slashed or scalloped
enhancements. This thing is really comprehensive, and Savoy was not the only place to care.
Laurel Ann Wilson has a really helpful chart laying out the English sumptuary law of 1363,
broken down into knights, esquires, clergy, and commoners. She argues – pretty persuasively – that

(23:42):
between the 12th and the 14th centuries, social status was becoming more fluid as lower classes
gained wealth and so ruling classes tried to put a finer point on the social hierarchy,
in an attempt to preserve their status. With the commercial revolution of the Middle Ages,
the explosion of trade and manufacturing, a lot of people did become quite wealthy and more things

(24:04):
were more accessible to people further down the technical social ladder. Medieval people wanted
to know who they were looking at by looking at them – and this went for social class but
it also encompassed people of other religions – though that is another story for another day.
And finally the big question you’ve all been wondering: did people wear underwear?

(24:25):
I know. It’s important. And there’s something of a debate over it because yeah there is. Mostly,
though, it’s about when they started wearing it. Some historians believe it was only
after the 14th century, but others think that there’s just not written documentation for it,
and also, you can’t tell from the pictorial evidence because, well, it’s underwear,

(24:46):
you can’t see it. But sometimes you can see it – there are illustrations of peasants working in the
fields that show them stripped down in the summer heat and you can see they’re wearing shifts,
which are these loose tunic things that could be long (especially for women) or kind of short
(for men). From the 14th century and on, there is evidence that people of all classes wore
underwear – usually those shifts but also braies for men – and caps and bonnets and kerchiefs,

(25:09):
usually made out of hemp, or linen if you were wealthier. There’s not a whole lot of
variety in this department, but there is a there there with the underwear.
So there you have it. If you were an everyday medieval guy or gal, working in the field or
in the village, your clothing was much simpler than in the later Middle Ages, less prone to the
whims of fashion. But. There are more individuals who have both the desire and the means to follow

(25:33):
the fashion of the day, thanks to changes in the economic environment, trade relations and routes,
and exposure to different manners of dress. The clothing people wore – and how that clothing was
represented in literature and art – can tell the modern historian just tons of stuff about medieval
ideas about the body, gender and sexuality, social status, changing economic conditions,

(25:55):
even emerging ideas about ethnicity. It can show us how the medieval world was connected
and glimmers of personal taste. And thinking about what people wore, puts me a little more firmly in
their world and makes the medieval world a little more relatable. And I hope it does for you too.
This has been Footnoting History. If you like the podcast, please be sure to like us on social media

(26:18):
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Thank you for listening and remember, the best stories are in the footnotes.