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Oct. 31st, 2012
Documentary evidence from Florence in the mid 15th century
This talk was less about individual garments, and more about evidence of textiles in the household of Bernardo Machiavelli (the more famous Machiavelli's father), who was a meticulous diarist and record keeper. Jane has examined his diaries for a stretch of time in the late 15th century, when the family kept a house in Florence, and a country estate in Percussina 18 km outside the city.
The estate, probably maintained by tenant farmers, grew produce, had a vineyard, and also grew flax, and it was the references to flax and linen that was the focus of the talk. It seemed this wasn't a commercial venture, but simply a project to keep the household (more than just the family, but included the immediate retainers) in linens, and the house in indoor textiles. Not clear if 'household' included tenant farmer families as well or not.
Mssr Machiavelli's records talk mostly about the steps that require the exchange of money, rather than each step of the process (harvesting, retting, spinning). He picked up yarn from farmers? spinners? and takes it to local weavers and records the weight of the yarn left with them, and then what lengths he picks up from them a couple of months later. Flax harvest seems to be in the spring, and the earliest you can collect your finished goods seems to be summer.
In some years, he buys additional materials, for ordering specific products: one example was from 1477, when he bought cotton yarn (imported from Syria or Cyprus) to add to his weaving order, possibly to make a blend fabric (what I'd call fustian) for quilts. Cotton was used as the weft, for items you wanted 'filled' or thickened like towels (though this is not a terrycloth, just a thick cloth).
Another time, 22lbs of yarn turned into 36m of cloth for household napery, possibly including what we'd now call Perugia towels (the table linens with indigo-coloured border patterns), which were made in lots of places in Italy, not just Perugia. She had some examples of Italian terms for different items of napery, but it's still not clear which ones were which.
Specific orders included hand kerchiefs, literally, and head coverings woven with blue or black bands in them, both of which measured out to 56cm square. (Jane digressed to explain the weights and measures, Imperial and medieval.)
Very fine linen was required for specific items, like collars - these might have been separate collars that lined the gents' tight doublets, to protect them from wear around the neckline. The shirts of the period are collarless and wouldn't serve.
So basically: you order your linens in the spring and you get them in the summer. The weather can affect the schedule though, particularly in the bleaching step that needed good weather for laying out fabric in sunlight. Jane said there were letters from mothers, concerned that they could not make up new shirts for their (apparently dependent) sons, because the weather was bad, and the linen wasn't back from the bleacher yet; or complaints in a letter that 'I just can't get the right linen to make your collars'.
Jane illustrated the talk with photos from Tuscany - lovely lush green farmland even now.
Her blurb, from a book cover so you know who she is.
I know very little of life in medieval Italy, either rural or urban, and because I live in a money-centered economy, I forget that most people, effectively, lived off what the farm produced. I'd never stopped to think about a household growing its own linen (I had thought of raising sheep for wool, but mostly my imaginings ended with fleeces at market). My mental picture typically is of people buying fabric in town.
I've known of people doing sheep-to-shawl projects, but in our current middle ages these are fun projects, not ongoing lifestyles. The grow-your-own aspect brings new life to the idea of making your own clothes.
