A wide variety of bone, metal, and leather medieval dress items have been discovered in South East Scotland. As well as significant finds from large-scale excavations, metal detecting activity has produced a considerable body of pins, brooches, rings and other item of personal adornment. Stray finds can potentially make an important contribution to our understanding of medieval dress. In particular, they can provide insights into medieval rural costume – a topic which has seen limited study.
Medieval rural dress should be a priority for research in South East Scotland. At present, we have a poor understanding of the degree to which clothing in rural areas aligned with that in towns. The extent of variation in clothing between upland and lowland areas of South East Scotland is also unclear. It is possible that future excavations will uncover new large-scale assemblages associated with medieval costume. However, it seems likely that understanding of medieval rural dress will be primarily furthered by a gleaning of evidence from artefacts found at a wide range of sites, often as stray finds. To this end, better cataloguing of museum collections and improved recording of finds, both stray finds and artefacts discovered during larger excavations, would be highly beneficial. Greater efforts to compare the material evidence with information from written sources may also be helpful, as legal records and inventories provide a surprising degree of detail about clothing in Scotland during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Of course South East Scotland also had several notable burghs. Many of these urban centres had international connections which appear to have influenced local fashions. Excavations in Edinburgh have made a major contribution to our understanding of the evolution of medieval urban costume. Numerous brooches and leather items have been recovered from sites in the capital. Recent excavations by AOC at East Market Street in Edinburgh also revealed several textile items, including a probable fourteenth-century wool twill garment. Accompanying the textiles were several pointed leather shoes – a reminder of the extent to which the residents of late medieval Edinburgh were following contemporary fashions. The South East of Scotland holds considerable possibilities for research into medieval dress. However, for the region’s potential to be fully realised greater resources need to be allocated to post-excavation analysis, to cataloguing and photographing museum collections, and to improving the accessibility to researchers of information on finds associated with personal adornment.
Clothing and Dress Research Questions
- What types of materials were used for clothing?
- Did the textiles used for clothing change during the medieval period? Was there a notable difference in materials used in rural / urban and upland / lowland communities?
- How widespread was the use of linen? Where was linen produced?
- What dyes were used for clothing? What proportion of textiles were undyed?
- How widespread was the use of cloth woven on warp-weighted looms? Can we see a decline in the use of warp-weighted looms over the course of the medieval period?
- How common were other forms of textile production (e.g. felting, sprang)?
- What can we learn about embroidery and other forms of decoration?
- To what extent were furs and animal skins used in clothing in the region? What furs were popular? Did the popularity of particular furs change over time?
- In what ways did the cut of clothes change during the medieval period?
- To what extent did the clothing of men and women differ? Did gender differences in clothing become more noticeable during the medieval period?
- What can we learn about children’s clothing?
- How were infants clothed? To what extent did infant clothing in South East Scotland alter during the medieval period? Can we discover more about swaddling practices in the region?
- How did the design of shoes and boots alter during the medieval period? What proportion of the population wore shoes? Is there evidence for different shoe-wearing practices in urban and rural areas?
- How was clothing fastened? To what extent were pins and brooches used? How common were buttons? Was there a rise in the use of buttons during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries?
- How did the design of brooches and other metal dress items evolve during the medieval period?
- How prevalent were imported textiles and other items of dress? What sectors of society had access to imported items?
- To what extent did clothing in South East Scotland reflect wider European trends?
- Were there regionally distinctive aspects to dress in South East Scotland during the medieval period?
- Did sumptuary legislation change what people in South East Scotland actually wore?