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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

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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.