Historisk tidskrift 124:2 • 2004
Innehåll (Contents) 2004:2
Uppsatser (Articles)
Vad kostade kläderna? Manliga tjänares dräkt under första hälften
av 1300-talet
Eva Andersson
Fulltext (pdf)
Summary
How Much Were They? The Prize of Male Servant Clothing
in the First Half of the Fourteenth Century
My aim in this article is to show how it is possible, by combining
information from different kinds of evidence, mostly wills containing
gifts of clothing to servants and archaeological evidence, to
gain knowledge of how common working men were dressed in the
Middle Ages. I compare several wills from the fourteenth century
in which clothes were given to male servants and where both fabric
width and price were stated, with the clothes of the so-called
Bocksten Bog man. The most common material in clothes given to
male servants during the first half of the fourteenth century
was cloth from Brabant: Nivelles and Poperinge. In a large number
of cases the material is not stated, which reduces the value
of this information. Nevertheless, even this information is valuable
when calculating the yardage and cost of those gifts, which usually
consisted of a tunic and cloak. The prices of many of the materials
are listed in king Magnus Eriksson’s statute for Kopparberget,
the copper mining area in Dalecarlia, from 1347, while the width
of woollen cloth from Brabant is documented in weaver’s regulations.
The results show that a tunic and cloak of the same type as those
worn by the Bocksten man, in many ways the basic garments for
a man in the Middle Ages, was a substantial investment, since
the cost of only a tunic of imported cloth can be compared to
the cost of 126 litres of beer. The cost of the tunic and cloak
of the Bocksten man, which were probably made from a coarse homespun
called ”vadmal,” would have been approximately the same as for
a barrel of herring, less than a tenth of the cost for the same
clothes made from material imported from Poperinge.
A much debated
issue among historians concerns which groups in society were
affected by fashion. Both the fact that the clothes from Herjolfsnes
in Greenland, which were found in the graves of people of lower
social status, corresponds well with current European fashion
and that the same garments dominate in written descriptions of
the time, irrespective of social group, suggest that the fashion
ideals spread to most parts of society. The frequency of gifts
to servants of the master’s or mistress’ own clothes show that
there were no fixed rules concerning materials or cut for different
social groups. This is also confirmed by the lack of detailed
regulations on dress in the few Nordic examples of sumptuary
regulation.
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