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 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!

​

The good folks who introduced me to SCA forestry have a very definite focus on things like survival skills or long 'survival' hikes (not literally survival, but carrying 50lbs for 20 miles and being cold or wet are not my idea of fun).  I assumed, mistakenly, that this was all of what the Forestry program was about.

What I have learned since is that what folks choose to do in it is entirely up them.  One's path might encompass fishing, herblore, edible plants, cooking outdoors, thrown weapons, research... there are so many options.  Knowing that makes this all that much more appealing.

And also?  If I am to be honest, the idea of putting an SCA spin on things I plan to do here mean they are much more likely to actually get done.

While I learn more about the roles of actual Foresters in England in period, I am going to start testing some different paths from an SCA perspective.  One will involve local plants and I am starting that here!

Poison Ivy - Nemesis of the Forest

As a Forester, I would be maintaining the forest for Royal use.  While this particularly annoying plant did not exist in Medieval England, I am fairly certain that if it did it might well have been eradicated from royal presence.

I have been fighting the battle with this weed since before the pandemic.  At one point, the small side yard here was entirely full of it and it was growing as high as my hip.  Weekly battles that involved pulling up the entire root system now have that bit of yard fairly free of the plant, and my garden thrives there in its place.

I now am tackling the ivy in other locations here.  I confess that I get very little reaction to the plant myself.  I only breakout if it touches an open wound, such as a recent scratch.  I still handle the plant with care (and gloves) and make sure to wash any oils off of my skin and clothes because I live with someone who is highly allergic.

At lunch yesterday, I did go out and start to pull the plant from the area around the garage.  I was impressed that one root system that I extracted was nearly 30 feet long!  It is no wonder that this plant spreads as rapidly as it does.

I also did a very small bit of research on this monstrosity.  While the plant is native to North America and Asia, those who came to the New World were fascinated enough with it that they TOOK SOME BACK TO EUROPE AND DELIBERATELY GREW IT.  (Read more HERE )

So, I tackled the weed, and will be continuing to do so as the summer progresses.  Eventually the wood will be safe for his Lordship's wanderings. ;-)

I did start to think of other things as I was ripping up the vines, such as the fact that using gloves is necessary.  While they did not deal with this particular plant in period, there are other tasks that would involve gloves and that brought my mind to the rather cartoonish mittens from the Luttrell Psalter.

The mittens are often depicted as colorful, and below you can see a parti-colored pair and one that is striped, leading me to believe that could well have been crafted from wool in addition to possibly leather.  My next steps here will be to attempt some research on period two-finger mittens to see what I can find out and work towards crafting a set as part of my kit.  I can then test these out against the blistering ivy.

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.
 
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.
 
Crowfoot, Elisabeth, Frances Pritchard and Kay Staniland. Textiles and Clothing 1150-1450 (Boydell Press), 2006.
 
Egan, Geoff and Frances Pritchard. Dress Accessories 1150-1450 (Boydell Press), 2008.
 
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.
 
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.
 
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.