I mentioned in a much earlier post (HERE) that gloves or mittens would come in very handy for handling some of the plants around here, such as poison ivy.  They are also essential, of course, for keeping warm.  I decided to make a pair of medieval split mittens as seen in the Luttrell Psalter.  

The Luttrell Psalter shows both solid colored mittens and those that are particolored.  The Tübingen house book has an image of mittens that show fur at the bottom edge.  I think many (or most) of these split mittens were likely crafted out of pelts with fur/wool on the inside.  This very much simplifies the construction, as you can do butted seams with the edges of the leather, and there are no bulky seam allowances to worry about.  

I do not have a pelt I can currently cut up, and I am still trying to use items from my stash as much as possible for my projects, so I choose to work in wool.  I have some lovely coating weight wool with a heavily brushed (and warm!) surface on one side.  This cloth will fray, but not readily as it is well fulled.  This means that, while sturdy, I cannot rely on a butted seam for the construction.  This presented some issues as I need seam allowances and to get that in the the split of the mitten I would need to have the finger chambers angled awkwardly outwards.  A gusset in the split could work, but not for my tiny hands because it again creates bulky seams too close together.

My solution was to treat the mittens as I think the parti-colored option could be constructed, and add a seam down the center to join the two halves of the mitten.

I used the basic pattern from Medieval Tailor's Assistant and eliminated the gusset and added the center seam.  I did my first test in some heavy synthetic fleece, recrafted the pattern to fit my hand and worked one up in the wool.  That still was not quite right, so I worked from that to create a thir pattern from which I made my final gloves.  I am very pleased with the results and might eventually make a parti-colored pair!

Don't sew and need mittens?  Historic Enterprises also sells split mittens!

I decided on a male persona for my Forester work mostly because I like the clothing and I really like the idea of chausses because the chiggers in the summer here are just off the charts annoying.  I do plan to make 14th Century English women's clothing as well (mostly because I can get away with sandals that way at Pennsic, and because I have always loved that classic 'medieval' look).

But it is interesting that, in period, both roles that I am pursuing, Forester and Apothecary, could be held by women during the Middle Ages.  I had already read a fair bit about female apothecaries but the following article was posted to the Atlantian Forestry group on Face book discusses female Foresters in the 13th century in England.  This is key because it gave me better insight into how the position of Forester in Fee worked, and that my persona idea (being trained as an apothecary in London but returned to the family home to take over the Forester role after the plague wiped out my persona's father and older brother) is actually viable and not as convoluted as it sounds.

The article is HERE for those interested.  

For the SCA Foresters' Guild there are requirements to progress from one rank to the next.  Æthelmearc currently is falling under the East Kingdom and the Checklist, as well as other pertinent documents with rules and regulations, can be found HERE.  

Once you swear the Forester's oath, you can work towards different goals within the guild.  This is one thing I love about some of the guilds within the SCA.  They give you tangible goals, AND have people willing to jump in and help you along the way.  (Another great guild with goals is the Company of the Silver Spindle in Atlantia.

 I took the Oath at Pennsic and now am starting on working towards Underforester.  For this you need to start a fire, cook a meal for one, have some green garb and participate in camping (yes, Pennsic camping counts).  Most of my garb is green, but the Forester kit I am building out has that goal in mind.  Currently I have green chausses and hood, along with a brown wool and blue linen tunic.  Eventually I will have a green wool and a green linen tunic as well.  I have cloth for two green cloaks as well, I just need to get them cut out.  

The next rank is Forester.  For this you need period gear and equipment (working on it).  Period shoes (have them).  Full forester garb (technically have that except that cloak that needs cut out, BUT I want to revise the garb I made this year already).  You need to be helpful and cook for a group over a fire.  And you need to start a fire with a period method.  I have done this in the past several times with flint and steel, but my technique is, um, rusty.  I also started a fire with charcloth and a magnifying glass at the Shire Day in the Park this past June.  I tried to do it today, and got the charcloth to catch and started to get my nest going but the flax that I was using as the base of the nest was not catching.  Like, it was REALLY, not catching.  It came from a very damp room and I think that it might have taken on moisture?  I used this same flax years ago with no issues but it honestly did not want to take right away even with a lighter (which I ended up using just to keep things moving.

So, enough about what went wrong, lets talk about what went right!  I had a great time.  I chose a semi-flat spot near a fallen tree in an area where there is no grass or other growth to worry about burning.  I also opted for Safety First and had a can of water and a fire extinguisher stashed nearby.  We live in the woods, it is autumn so leaves are falling, and we have not had rain in several days.  I also used some stones to build a small firebreak on the downhill side from where I was working.  

​You can see my staged area below, as well as the stages of my fire.  I had wood ready, and yes, I did use a few sticks of fatwood.  I currently do not have period cooking pots, but did use a small dutchoven, griddle and a little clay vessel I made myself (it is actually a pinch pot for early Celtic stuff, but it is what I have).  I have two trivets from Rabenwald Metalsmything but only needed the shorter one for this project.  I used a tent stake for lifting the pot around and removing and replacing the lid.

So, what was I going to make?  I wanted to do more than just make random food to fill a checklist.  I wanted something period appropriate to my persona.  So, my assumption here is that I would actually be traveling from London where my persona's uncle lives, back to his own home in York, and realistically, I was not traveling alone as that was very much asking for trouble.  We would have more than bare minimum gear with us.

So my personal checklist is:

• Period food items for my persona
• At least somewhat period methods of cooking/compiling them
• Ingredients that would be in season at the same time

​
In the end I opted for a:

• Dish of parsnips and onions
• Apples with cinnamon and honey
• Flat breads (rye and oat)
• Cheese (for this I opted for Brie that I had at home already)
• I choose to go vegetarian for this as, in additional to Lenten Fridays, there were many days during the 14th Century in England where meat was not allowed

My foodstuffs can be seen below.  Most of these vessels are NOT period to my persona, and while some are close (the glass containers), I would not be slinging those around during travel.  I would also definitely not be traveling with two heavy mortar and pestle sets, but I needed to grind the cinnamon for the apples so took them outside to work on while the fire was reducing to coals.

While the fire was making coals for me, I went ahead and started the onions in the pot with butter.  This is a modern sweet onion as I have serious sensitivity to onion and do not react to this type IF it is cooked until completely dead.  I also have some apple and butter in the earthenware pot.  I have not fire tested my own pottery yet, so did not want to sit this directly in a bed of coals at this time.

When my onions cooked down some, I added the chopped parsnips and continued to cook those close to the fire, stirring often.  When the fire died down enough, I moved the Dutch Oven to sit directly over coals.

Once the parsnips started to soften a little and the onions were VERY cooked, I added white wine, water and a bit of salt.

While this was cooking I mixed up a little olive oil into the rye and oat flour with a touch of salt and a small amount of honey.  I formed these into little patties and put them on the griddle that I had preheated with butter.  For the griddle I am using the low trivet and it is placed directly over coals.

Did I mention the apples were taking forever?  I was not quite ready to explode my drinking cup with high heat, so I ended up finishing the apples on the griddle with the flat breads.

Before dumping them from the cup onto the griddle I stirred in a bit of the cinnamon I ground.  Part of my research on medieval apothecary revealed that the cinnamon sold in the US is typically cassia, a similar plant, but not true cinnamon.  I do, however, keep celyon cinnamon sticks in the house as I have a friend who is allergic to cassia, and I ground one of those for this project.

To finish off my main course, I added the foraged sorrel as well as the harvested chives and parsley to the pot, along with a little more water and wine.  Then I did a very period thing and thickened the whole thing with bread crumbs (from old bread that I foraged in my kitchen).  I believe that bread, a staple of the medieval diet, could easily be bought in towns we would pass through, and eventually one might have an older hunk not really suitable for a meal, even while traveling. 

The photo to the right shows the veggie dish right before I added the lid and set the whole thing over coals to finish it off.

So how was it all?

Honestly?  It was excellent.  I forgot to add the honey to the apples so drizzled it on at the end.  (My persona, as an apothecary, would have ready access to both honey and several types of sugar, so sweetening a dish is not unreasonable.)

The parsnips and onions were quite savory and had an almost lemony twang with the addition of the sorrel (locally called "sour grass").  The bread crumbs thickened the broth so that it clung to the vegetables making it more "main course" to me than it would have as a soup.

The flat breads were good, but a bit crumbly.  They might be made better with a different source of fat (butter, tallow or lard), which is something I can experiment with later.  I went with the olive oil because I had it handy here.

And yes, I had help from local wildlife with my meal prep and with helping eat the rind from the Brie!

​Also, I did this in garb!

Typically I fall in love with a material culture (usually clothing) and learn about the garments, build a wardrobe and then start to learn other information to more fulling try to build out a persona.  This approach rarely gets me very far into the persona building, but I have a great time with what I do craft and learn.

With my SCA Forestry/14th Century project I made an outfit just to get started, and dove right in on the herbs.  Before I go further I am really diving into reading to build a better framework from the ground up.  

To be fair, this is also much easier to research with an aim towards persona building than anything I have done before.  The materials are readily available and mostly in English.  This is entirely unheard of for me, and it is rather refreshing.  

You can view most of my library for this subject matter HERE, though I still do have a few more books to add. 

Below I am going to review two of the items that read this past month that immensely helped me set the stage for the work I plan to keep doing.
​

I have three books I am tackling next.  Two are based on the works of the ancient physician Galen (129-216BCE), as this knowledge was still studied and in use in the Middle Ages.  The first is The Alphabet of Galen and the other is Galen: SelectedWorks.  The other book that is currently sitting next to me, just waiting to be picked up is Popular Medicine in the Thirteenth Century England by Tony Hunt.  I hope to review these as I read them as well.  

A Wandering Elf participates in the Amazon Associates program and a small commission is earned on qualifying purchases. This commission allows the purchase of more books!

I am continuing to build out my Forester kit.  As I read more about the 14th Century, I am fleshing out bits of the persona, and have chosen 1450ish as my time period.  Initially I thought I would go a little earlier, but I didn’t want the first round of the Great Plague to land on me (given that I am still living the current plague), so am opting for just past that catastrophe.

As noted before, my location will the the Forest of Galtres in Yorkshire.  My persona is educated and had studied with an uncle in London to be an apothecary before opening a shop in York.  He was recalled to the family manor in the forest to take up the work of Forester there as the other male members of the family were taken by the plague.  The family is not noble, but has a well-to-do estate and also owns an apothecary in York.

So far for my kit I have created wool tunic and undertunic which you can read more about HERE.  Because I was originally planning to be a little earlier, I am now going to bring up the hemline just a touch on this tunic, as well as the cobalt linen one that I made for warmer weather.

As you can see here the Chausses are finished and I have made two pairs of braies and purchased third.  I am not entirely happy with the two I made, so will need to revise those.  

After wearing the chausses for an evening, the thick stretched out immensely, so I want to alter those and properly add eyelets for the points.

I made a linen hood as a prototype and have wool to make another that will be lined with linen.  I dyed some additional cloth to make a Bocksten cloak as well.

The next tunic will have set-in sleeves, but will otherwise be very similar.  I want another set of chausses as well, and I might pattern them a bit differently too. 

At Pennsic I purchased 14th century boots that you can see here.  Next up will be a belt (I am wearing my Viking one here), for which I have already purchased the hardware.  Eventually a pouch will be made or purchased.  And I need to research proper garters.  These are merely wool twill tape.  I do love the red against the green though, so might stick with that color for this item.

I also have a passable drinking cup.  I am going to start collecting some appropriate cookware as well, and am working on building out a period fire-starting kit.

And yes, still more herbs!  I have projects planned and the research is ongoing and I have to say that I am immensely enjoying all of this!

​

We were glamping this weekend so most of my SCA work was funneled into geeky conversations with friends and continuing to finish up the seams on the brown wool tunic.  I need to state here that I really hate running stitch.  I like earlier period where it is appropriate to pretty much avoid it entirely.

But, last week I also mostly finished my chausses that I dyed myself, got the cloth dyed for the hood and cut out the braies!  As I finalize things I will be adding them here.

Today I also continued to uproot more poison ivy and yet more garlic mustard.

​And I made a new friend.  Lol

Because this plant is damaging to the environment, I started pulling it up by the roots where ever I found it in the woods here last year.  I removed huge piles of it (and ate huge piles as well, usually sauteed with spinach or other greens from my garden).  My efforts did do at least some good, as I was able to cut the amount that sprang up this year in half.  Onward with this year's weeding!

I uprooted a fair bit of garlic mustard today, and also collected some to add to ingredients from my garden for some cheese and herb hand pies.  My thoughts are that a Forester who rode out to survey his territory every morning would be taking a meal with him so I thought I would both used this foraged item (which was available in medieval Europe) and incorporate it into a portable food source.  Note that this project today is less about redacting a truly medieval recipe, than it is about eradicating a plant that is damaging to the local environment (read more HERE), and making use of a foraged item (as well as random leftovers foraged from my fridge, lol).

So, to that end, I made hand pies that I might craft again when I have the opportunity to do a garbed woods walk with friends.  For the filling I used 6oz of cream cheese (softened), and chopped up two small fronds of parsley, a handful of large spinach leaves, a few chives and the leaves of quite a few Garlic Mustard plants.  I did not note quantities but you can see what I used in the provided image.  I mixed the chopped greens, salt and pepper as well as one egg into the cream cheese and added in a hefty tablespoon of freshly shaved parmesean.

For the pastry, I used 1.25 cups of flour (about half wheat, half white), 1/4 teaspoon of salt, a stick of butter at room temp, cut into small cubes, and 3T cold water.  I mix the flour and salt and then when I add the cubes of butter to the flour I mix them in with my hands, pressing the butter and flour together between my thumb and forefinger.  I work it until the flour and butter is a grainy mixture with some pea sized lumps. I also had a package with about a heaping tablespoon or so of commercially grated parmesean cheese in it that I needed to use up so I mixed that into dough as well.  I have no idea of anyone in the middle ages added hard cheese into crust but it makes a divine pie crust so I used it (sharp cheddar also works well in a crust).

At this point I added in the 3T of water, but I will note, it was almost too much, so I added in a little more flour and, well, pretty much spilled too much into the mix.  This left my dough a bit too dry, but I rolled with it anyways at this point.  I left this to chill in the fridge for 20 minutes while I mixed up the cheese and herb mix.

I rolled out the dough and used a plastic lid to cut circles that I filled with the cheese and greens mixture, rubbed a bit of water around the edges and folded in half, pressing the seam with a fork.  I had enough space on my pan for 5 or so pies so made that many and turned the remaining crust into a small tart.  I could have gotten about 7-8 4.5inch circles out of the dough I made had I done all hand pies.  I brushed the tops with an egg wash and I baked them at 375 degrees F until they were lightly browned.

The pastry is very light and flakey (almost going into puff pastry territory rather than like a denser pie crust).  I over stuffed the hand pies and did not well seal them so they were some what bursting while hot but hold their shape very well once they have cooled down.  They taste FANTASTIC and I will absolutely make these again in a month or so with whatever greens and herbs I have in the garden (or woodlands) at that time.

Persona Summary:

• This plant was likely known to a 14th Century Forester in England
• Plausible foraged or grown food source, potentially used in pottages or where greens are needed

Projects:

• Remove the weed as I see it due to its invasive nature in the US
  • ​Ongoing work
• Cook with the plant
  • ​Completed, see above​

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​List of Resources can be found HERE

This project is a threefold project for me.  Firstly, I have joined the Æthelmearc Foresters’ Guild and part of that involvement is to create a kit for a forester persona.  Secondly, I signed up for the Atlantian Persona Development Challenge, which is sponsored by Their Majesties, to develop or expand your persona’s kit by creating 4 new items.  Despite missing the first deadline, I hope to continue to share my work towards this and am therefore combining items 1 & 2 in this document.  Finally, I am attempting a serious round of stash busting here and this kit will be largely comprised of stash items.

This documentation is somewhat sparse for me, but in order to meet the project deadline, I will be rolling with this and can update later as needed.
 
For the purpose of the Atlantian project the specifics are (this might alter over time as I do more general research on the profession and period):
Time: 1335 CE
Location: Forest of Galtres in Yorkshire, England
Persona: Forester (profession), male – More detailed information has not yet been determined
 
For the tunics, I looked first at existing items that could be used as a source.  None exist from Enland at all, so I had to range further for examples.  Many of the garments such as the Tunics from Kraglund, Moselund and the Guddal tunics all skew too early (none date later than 1165) and are from Scandinavia.  There are shirts that belonged to St. Louis (French, 13th c) and Francis of Assisi (Italy, 13th c), and others of similar provenance.  Many of the Greenland garments do fall into the correct time period, as does the Bocksten Tunic from Sweden.  Because I wanted to move forward with this project swiftly, I chose the simpler Bocksten garment as my base rather than the examples from Greenland which often exhibit more complex tailoring.
​

The Bocksten Tunic
This garment is dated to 1350-1370 from Varberg, Sweden.  The find consisted of a tunic, hood, hosen, cloak and accessories.  Details are as follows (based on information in Clothing the Past.

• 2/1 twill wool that was fulled
• Currently yellow brown outside and reddish brown on the interior
• The original fabric was 21.6 inches wide
• The garment had no shoulder seams
• Lighter area at the waist shows that a leather belt was work with it
• There are gores in the front, back and sides
• There are triangular gussets under the arms
• Length is 90.5 inches
• Width at hem is 98.4 inches
• Sleeve lengths – 24 for the right sleeve, 23.4 for the left
• Wrist circumference is 8.6 inches
• Neck circumference is 32.2 inches
• There is no thread left, so the presumption is that is was linen
• One selvedge the length of the body was preserved

​Personal observations:  One thing that I noticed while looking at more detailed images of this tunic (something that has become a ubiquitous garment in the SCA) is that the sleeves, while having a straight edge where it meets the body panel (i.e. no curved sleeve cap), they appear to still be inset into the garment itself (we see this with very early tunics like Lendbreen as well).  This sent me out to look at how different the sleeves and the armscye can be even amongst samples from a similar time and place (for example, some of the Greenland garments have shaped sleeve heads, but the armscye itself is not cut away). 

Another observation had to do with the sleeves themselves.  I was taught nearly 30 years ago that a rectangular cut tunic had sleeves that look like the first diagram below when flattened out.  Over time, I altered that to have the square gusset sit flat against the sleeve body and taper from that point to the wrist (center image).  The Bocksten tunic does not taper until past the elbow.  This allows one to have a narrower sleeve in the upper while fitting well in the lower arm than my typical model does.
 
Another, slightly eerie, observation is that I am very similar in size to the Bocksten man.

 
The Textiles
While there are no existing tunics from England for this period, there are a range of textile fragments.  The following information on textiles come from Textiles and Clothing 1150-1450.

• Tabby is the most common wool weave through the 14th century – first half of the 15th
• Z/S (Z spun threads for the warp with S spun for the weft) are more common than use of Z or S in both systems (Z/S is more suitable for raising nap in the fulling process, which creates warmer cloth)
• 2/2 and 2/1 twill wool does show up in my chosen period and while not as prevalent is tabby, it was also not uncommon
• 2/2 twills were almost always Z spun yarn in both systems, with balanced weaves
• Wool textiles have a broad range in density of the weave
• Linen did not typically survive well but the existing fragments from the 2nd half of the 13th century show 56 threads to the inch in one system with an average of 50 in the other, those from the last quarter of the 14th century are 50 in one system and 48 in the other

 

Resources

Note that these are all resources that I have pulled to review for this ongoing project.  I last read some of them many years ago and plan to reread in their entirety as I work through this project.

Backhouse, Janet. Medieval Rural Life in the Luttrell Psalter (University of Toronto Press), 2000. https://amzn.to/43stevi 

Carlson, Marc. “Some Clothing of the Middle Ages”, 2006. http://lib.utulsa.edu/speccoll/marccarlson/cloth/bockhome.html
 
Coatsworth, Elizabeth and Gale R. Owen-Crocker. Clothing the Past: Surviving Garments from Early Medieval to Early Modern Western Europe (Brill), 2018. https://amzn.to/46VHkbx​
 
Crowfoot, Elisabeth, Frances Pritchard and Kay Staniland. Textiles and Clothing 1150-1450 (Boydell Press), 2006. https://amzn.to/3Q3WMw3
 
Egan, Geoff and Frances Pritchard. Dress Accessories 1150-1450 (Boydell Press), 2008. https://amzn.to/3NZF2iC
 
Forest, Maggie. “The Bocksten Tunic”, 2003. http://www.forest.gen.nz/Medieval/articles/garments/bocksten/bocksten.html,
 
Fransen, Lilli, et al. Medieval Garments Reconstructed: Norse Clothing Patterns (Aarhus University Press), 2010.
 
Gutarp, Else Marie. Medieval Manner of Dress: Documents, Images, and Surviving Examples of Norther Europe, Emphasizing Gotland and the Baltic Sea (Gotlands Fornsal), 2001.
 
Houston, Mary G. Medieval Costume in England & France: The 13th, 14th, and 15th Centuries (Dover Publications), 1996.
 
Newtown, Stella Mary. Fashion in the Age of the Black Prince (Boydell Press), 2016. https://amzn.to/3rwnoeY
 
Østergaard, Else. Woven into the Earth: Textile Finds in Norse Greenland (Aarhus University Press), 2004.
 
Thursfield, Sarah. Medieval Tailor’s Assistant, 2nd Edition (Crowood Press), 2015.  https://amzn.to/3NV2P3w
 
Vedeler, Marianne. “Klær og Formspråk i Norsk Middelalder” (Universitetet i Oslo), 2006.
 
“The Bocksten Man Find”, Hallands Kulturhistoriska Museum.  https://museumhalland.se/en/the-bocksten-man/
 
“The Luttrell Psalter”, British Library. http://www.bl.uk/turning-the-pages/?id=a0f935d0-a678-11db-83e4-0050c2490048&type=book
 
“Men’s and Women’s Accessories of Medieval Romanesque Period - 11th - 15th Centuries Pattern” La Fleur De Lyse Patterns.