The Cost of Things

When I taught high school English Literature, students were aghast at the small sums (a few hundred pounds) that a successful poet might have to live on. They had a difficult time grasping not only that prices were much lower, but also that the Age of Reason household did not use expensive machines for washing, cooking, preserving foods, calling friends, watching or hearing entertainment, etc.

I've tackled this topic at least once before, but mostly focused on food prices. Let us look at some other economic data. First, however, we have to know the currency:

1 pound (L) = 20 shillings (s)
1 shilling = 12 pence (d)
1 pence (penny) = 4 farthings

Additionally, 1 crown was only 5 shillings, and 1 mark = 13 shillings and 4 pence

The L, s, d symbols are from French Livre, sou, and denier, which are in turn from Latin liber, solidus, and denarius.

Now let's get dressed in the 1300s:

A fashionable gown (for upper class) could cost as much as 10 pounds.
A simple tunic for a working class man could cost 3-4 shillings
A landless serf's tunic anywhere from 1-6 pence
Highest quality wool for making clothes was 5 shillings/yard in 1380
If you wanted silk, it was 10-12 shillings/yard (but more easily available a century later)
(A loose-fitting tunic required 2.5 yards; a doublet (a lined tunic, so "doubled" fabric) needed 4 yards
Shoes and boots could be 4 to 6 pence
Accessorize with a hat (10 pence to 14 pence) and a purse (1.5 pence), and you were ready to hit the town

How affordable were these? Tomorrow we will look at what people earned in different professions.

Merino Sheep

The previous post on the Mesta mentioned the kings of Castile giving shepherds rights-of-way that overrode those of other landowners in order to get their sheep to good pasture. There aren't many shepherds or large flocks around these days, and so you might not realize the important stake the kings had in sheep, especially Merino sheep. Those flocks were owned by royalty.

Sheep provided wool, and Merinos were champions at it. Their wool was an incredibly valuable export because of its spinning count, or S value. The S value describes how fine the strands of wool are. The finer the strands, the more yards of fiber you can spin from it. One pound of merino wool, with an S value of 62, could produce 34,720 yards of yarn. (A "hank" is 560 yards.) Merino wool was much finer than other breeds, and produced not only softer wool, but more of it. Finer strands also enabled it to be more easily interwoven with other fibers.

They were bred in southwestern Spain in the 12th century, and there are careful records of attempts to breed them to be even more useful. The original herds might have been brought by Berbers early on, but English breeds were introduced to help develop the Merino, as described in the entry on "Wool" in The New American Cyclopaedia (1858).

Spain held a monopoly on the finest wool in the world through the 16th century. In fact, export of living Merino sheep was a crime in Spain, punishable by death, through the 17th century! The monopoly started to wane when some were sent to Sweden in 1723, and then in 1765 when King Charles III of Spain (1716-1788) sent some to his cousin in Saxony to start a private flock. Merinos started trickling out to other countries, and Spain soon lost its pre-eminence in the world of fine wool.

But the Merino is still king.

Knitting, Part 1

Naalbinding technique [link]

Technically, today's post is not about knitting, but about an earlier technique with a similar result known as naalbinding. Naalbinding, or nålebinding, is Danish for "needle-binding." In English it is sometimes referred to as "knotless knitting."

Some archeological finds have been designated as early knitting when they were really naalbinding. Knitting as we know it today appears near the end of the first millennium CE, whereas threads woven by naalbinding can be found dating to centuries earlier.

The difference is that, while knitting involves a continuous row of loops linked together by the use of two needles, naalbinding uses a needle to pass the whole length of the thread/yarn through each loop, and the loops must be bound together during the creation process (see the illustration above). In knitting, simply turning the piece around once all the links have been transferred to one needle means that the next row will be automatically linked to the row on the needle. Naalbinding uses shorter pieces of yarn, not one long continuous piece.

Despite the Danish label, naalbinding's earliest examples are found around the world, in socks used by Coptic Christians of the 4th century and hats and shawls of the inhabitants of what is now Peru dating to 300 BCE. The pair of wool socks shown here, meant to be worn with sandals, is in the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. They were excavated in Egypt and date to between 300 and 500 CE.

For those wishing to know more, a how-to for the process is explained and illustrated here.

Asbestos

Lovely ceiling tiles at Cleeve Abbey with asbestos in them

Pliny the Elder has a chapter in his Natural History on something he calls "live" linen:

It is generally known as “live” linen, and I have seen, before now, napkins that were made of it thrown into a blazing fire, in the room where the guests were at table, and after the stains were burnt out, come forth from the flames whiter and cleaner than they could possibly have been rendered by the aid of water. It is from this material that the corpse-cloths of monarchs are made, to ensure the separation of the ashes of the body from those of the pile. [Book XIX, Chap.4]

The Greeks, we are told, call this material asbestinon* ["inextinguishable"]. It was used to wrap royalty for their funeral pyres, because their ashes could be kept separate from the wood ashes. Charlemagne also used to entertain his guests by throwing the tablecloth into the fire after the meal, then removing it with all the stains burned off. Marco Polo was also shown cloth that whitened in fire and did not burn.

Asbestos was not just for cute tricks. It was used as insulation for armor, and in 9th and 10th century Afghanistan it was used to eat off. It also promoted belief in miracles:

the most fascinating use of asbestos during the period was as a magical cross sold by traveling merchants.  The crosses, cut from asbestos, looked like very old, worn wood and were advertised by merchants as "true crosses" made directly from the wood of the cross upon which Jesus Christ of Nazareth died.  To illustrate the magical cross's powers, the merchants would throw the wood into a fire where it would remain undamaged. [link]

The health risks of asbestos did not escape notice, however. Pliny did note that slaves who worked weaving asbestos had lung problems. Romans—who called it  amiantus, "unpolluted" (because of its ability to come clean from a fire)—understood that buying slaves who worked with asbestos was a bad return on investment, because they died younger than other slaves.

*"Asbestos" is used to describe six silicate minerals with thin fibrous crystals that can be woven into thread and thence into cloth.

Button, Button

Bronze-Iron Age buttons as ornament. [source]

Although evidence of buttons exists as far back as the classical era, it appears that they were used as ornamentation on clothing rather than a way to fasten clothing,

the earliest known being found at Mohenjo-daro in the Indus Valley [now Pakistan]. It is made of a curved shell and about 5000 years old. [Ian McNeil, An Encyclopedia of the History of Technology]

Rows of buttons as a necessary part of clothing were unknown. Usually a single button—a flat decorated surface with a loop attached to the back—was put on clothing to pin up a single fold of fabric.

The first evidence of "functional buttons"—used to attach clothing so that it fit snugly about the body—is found in art. Statuary on the Adamspforte ("Adam's gate") at Bamberg Cathedral (carved c.1235) in Germany shows a button holding clothing together.

By the late 1300s, buttons were being applied to all sorts of clothing in order to make it fit more closely to the body. One of the modifications that made buttons work well was the addition of reinforced button holes to clothing, which spread in the later 1200s.

A late medieval button from England [source]

Besides a change in fashion, was the addition of buttons and buttonholes significant? Well, one theory (shared by James Burke of Connections fame and Lynn White, author of several essays and books on the history of technology) is that the spread of better-fitting clothing made people warmer in cold weather and therefore increased their health...or, at least, decreased susceptibility to any illnesses that were exacerbated by cold temperatures.

This seems odd to the modern age, because we take form-fitting clothing for granted. Didn't they have looms and weaving? Of course. But much form-fitting fabric in the Middle Ages didn't appear until the development of knitting.

But that's a story for another day.