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1

Setting the scene

The link between cloth and clothing may seem an obvious one to the casual reader, and yet within the archaeological world ‘textiles’ and ‘costume’ are often treated as two separate studies. This division has arisen naturally out of

the inherent characteristics of the two subjects and out of the need for two different approaches to their research. In essence, textiles are a product of a technological process and the analysis of their structure and raw material requires at least some scientific and technical skill. This means that textile data can be collected methodically and processed numerically, out of which chronological and regional trends may be described, imports and native wares identified, economy and patterns of trade rationally argued.

The study of costume, on the other hand, deals with something more illusive and abstract. How we dress represents the face we show to society and clothing may – sometimes unconsciously – be used to express age, cultural affiliation, social and economic status and, at a personal level, our degree of conformity or independence. How costumes spread geographically and socially is entirely unpredictable. A new fashion may begin with the elite, or originate in the street, or field, or battleground. It may spread like wildfire, jumping political, race and gender boundaries, and then pull up short at the borders of some particularly conservative community. Research into costume requires the consideration of a range of different sources, visual, written, and archaeological, and also an understanding of the context of the material: for the rep-resentation of an emperor, or a priest in sacrificial robes, or an illustration copied from an earlier manuscript, may have little to do with the everyday clothing of the period. When handled intelligently, however, the study of costume has immense rewards, for it offers the chance to come closer to the heart of who people were, their self-view, their aspirations and the meaning they ascribed to their own lives.

The reason for drawing the two subjects together for the Early Anglo-Saxon period may be found in the material itself. At the core of this book lies a database of textile records collected from Anglo-Saxon cemeteries of the 5th to 7th centuries (see Chapter 3). The textiles are mostly the remains of clothing, since the Anglo-Saxons, when they inhumed their dead rather than cremated them, placed the body in the grave fully dressed. This clothing survives only as fragments adhering to metalwork (Chapter 4), but work on the textiles automatically draws the researcher into the study of costume. By the process of recording which textile is pierced by the brooch pin, and the layering of the different fabrics, or the orientation of garment borders, patterns of use and the shape of the clothing inevitably start to appear (Chapter 5). Costume then becomes a subject which can be counted, sorted, ordered and used as a research tool, just like any other form of archaeological data.

In order to complete the picture, evidence from the Anglo-Saxon settlements,

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where the people buried in the cemeteries had lived their lives, has also been reviewed. Clothing is the end-product of a long series of crafts, represented by a range of different hand tools which are found scattered through every village and farmstead of the period. The nature of these tools can help explain the structure of the textile products (Chapter 2) and sometimes even the make-up of the garments. Out of these separate but interlinked studies – textile manufacture, textile products, garment accessories, and costume styles – some consistent patterns have emerged which in turn have relevance to more general studies of the Early Anglo-Saxons (Chapter 6).

The original aim of this work was to review the available evidence and to present it as a resource for archaeologists and museum professionals. While writing the book, however, a different theme began to assert itself. Of its own volition, the volume turned into a study of women and of that significant part of women’s lives that involved clothing the community. Anglo-Saxon women were clearly and demonstrably in charge of textile production and, if Anglo-Saxon men took as much interest in changing fashions as women evidently did, the archaeological record has not shown it. Since every attempt to give men equal space within the volume failed, in the end it seemed better simply to celebrate the fact that women were for once in the spotlight. There have been any number of histories in which men are centre-stage, while women, despite our best efforts, are in the wings. On this occasion the roles have been com-prehensively reversed.

Finally, this volume is written by an archaeologist, primarily for other archae-ologists, but it is hoped that it will also prove useful to re-enactors and those who work in the heritage sector on the display and reconstruction of crafts and costume. For this reason, where archaeology is silent on certain subjects, such as the length of the Anglo-Saxon distaff or the design of the 6th-century shoe, sugges-tions for a credible reconstruction based on the nearest comparative material have been provided. Similarly, subjects outside the precise remit of cloth and clothing, such as bags, belts, purses and hair styles have been included in order to produce a more rounded picture of the appearance of the men and women of Early Anglo-Saxon England.

Previous studiesThe study of archaeological textiles has a long and respectable history within the academic world. Hans Dedekam and Bjørn Hougen began with Migration period burials in Norway (Dedekam 1925; Hougen 1935) and were followed by Agnes Geijer on the textile finds from Birka, Sweden (Geijer 1938), Margrethe Hald on the Danish material (Hald 1950, republished in 1980), and Marta Hoffmann on eth-nographic and archaeological evidence from Norway (Hoffmann 1974; 1991). The early pioneers in Britain were Audrey Henshall (1950; 1952) and Grace M Crowfoot. The latter had learned traditional textile crafts while travelling in Arab countries and, having encountered Rodolphe Pfister, a chemist working on textiles from the Silk Road, she came to recognise the value of scientific analysis of dyes and fibres. When she died, her daughter Elisabeth Crowfoot took up her work and the majority of the textiles in the database reviewed in Chapter 3 come from Elisabeth’s published and unpublished reports. Also operating in Britain is John Peter Wild, whose influential doctoral thesis on the northern Roman Provinces amalgamates both textiles and

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costume, although the two elements had to be split for publication and his work on costume (1968; 1985) is perhaps less well known than his book on textiles (1970). Finally, the surveys of Lise Bender Jørgensen, first of Scandinavian textiles (1986) and then of European textiles up to AD 1000 (1992), form an essential background to any study of this kind. Many other researchers have now joined what has become a popular field, especially among women, and their publications may be found in the bibliography.

Costume has always attracted the attention of historians although it has been the subject of political manipulation and romantic wishful thinking as often as genuine academic research. Amongst the more sound of the early authors is Joseph Strutt, whose two-volume work, The Dress and Habits of the People of England (1796, revised 2nd edition 1842, reprinted 1970), includes a review of early medieval his-torical sources as known at that time. The Nordic countries again led the way with Charlotte Blindheim’s series of papers in Viking, especially ‘Drakt og Smykker’ (Blindheim 1947), and more recently Inga Hägg on women’s dress at Birka, Sweden (Hägg 1974), Pirkko-Liisa Lehtosalo-Hilander (1984; 2001) on Finnish costumes, and Margareta Nockert (1991) on the Migration period burial at Högom, Sweden, and its comparanda. For Anglo-Saxon costume studies the first major landmark was Gale Owen-Crocker’s doctoral thesis Anglo-Saxon Costume (University of Newcastle, 1976), rapidly followed by Hayo Vierck’s essays on the Continental and English evidence in Sachsen und Angelsachsen (Ahrens 1979). Elements of her thesis were published in Owen-Crocker’s Dress in Anglo-Saxon England (1986, updated in 2004), which is an accessible and highly readable review of the evidence for the whole of the Anglo-Saxon period, from the 5th to the 11th century. If there is relatively little reference to the work of Vierck and Owen-Crocker within the present study, it is because the aim has been to look at the archaeological evidence afresh, and to focus on the function of the textiles as the primary resource before comparing the material with the visual and written sources.

The historical frameworkThe limits of the study have been set by the geographic and temporal span of clothed burial in Anglo-Saxon England. Some burials may be a little earlier than the mid-5th century and some perhaps as late as the early 8th century, but essentially the period covered is from AD 450 to AD 700. The material comes from the area of Anglo-Saxon settlement up to the end of the 7th century, which effectively means the zone to the south and east of a line from Northumberland to Dorset. In order to understand the influences on Anglo-Saxon dress during this period, and the origins of the textile technology evident in their clothing, a brief review of the historical background is required.

Before the Anglo-SaxonsThe earliest inhabitants of Britain were coastal-dwelling hunter-gatherers, whose clothing was almost certainly made from stitched skins, with twined rushwork for cloaks, hats and shoes. When the Neolithic megalith builders arrived, they brought cattle and sheep, arable farming and pottery making, but despite the availability of sheep’s wool, there is no evidence for weaving until the Early Bronze Age. Then, textiles woven in

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plain weave (tabby) from naturally brown wool began to appear, and also the flax plant and linen production. The next major change came with the Iron Age, which saw hill-forts ruled by a warrior aristocracy, the intro-duction of ‘Celtic’ art-styles in metalwork, and also new strains of sheep, a new loom and new weave structures. This culture originated with the Celts of central Europe, whose textiles can be seen several centuries earlier at Hallstatt, Austria. Already in the Hallstatt period the Celts were using the warp-weighted loom (Fig 1.1), were commonly weaving the more complicated twill weave, and most importantly keeping sheep with black, grey, roan and white fleeces, so that dyes could now be applied to the white wools (Bichler et al 2005). Although the textiles from Iron-Age Britain are relatively few, the factual and circumstantial evidence combine to show that the warp-weighted loom, wool twills, including diamond twills, checks and stripes, a range of natural fleece colours, blue woad dye, and plain linens formed the textile culture of Late Iron-Age Britain.

On to this scene came the Romans. They had taken control of Gaul in stages during the 2nd and 1st centuries BC – in the process passing comment on the col-ourful checked textiles of the Gauls (Wild 1970, 53) – and the campaigns of Caesar and Claudius added Britain to the north-west provinces. The Romans introduced the army, a legal and administrative system, and access to an enormous commercial network, and yet they made little attempt to change native textile production, at the same time as they boosted its output (Fig 1.2). The army drew on local weavers wherever it was based, and textiles from the civilian settlement attached to the fort at Vindolanda, Northumberland, prove to be typical Iron-Age products, combined with some Gallo-Roman weaves and an occasional import from the Mediterranean world (Wild 1977). Even so, the Romans had an influence on native textiles. They introduced new strains of sheep (see Chapter 2) and new dyes such as madder, although the fact that the latter disappeared after the departure of the Romans suggests that it was an imported dyestuff, rather than an intro-duced plant. The Mediterranean taste for lighter plainer textiles with a more subtle use of dyes may also have had an impact; and imported prestige textiles incorporating bands of purple shellfish dye, tapestry work, and damask weaves were also reach-ing Britain (Wild 1970; Crowfoot and Walton Rogers 2002). At the same time some British goods were filtering back to Rome. An imperial weaving work-shop or gynaeceum had been set up in Venta (probably Winchester) (Wild 1967a; Bender Jørgensen 1992, 133–4) and British garments such as the birrus (byrrus) britannicus, a large hooded cape,

figure 1.� The Iron-Age inheritance: a checked twill from Falkirk, probably mid-3rd century AD. © The Trustees of the National Museums of Scotland

figure 1.1 The crafts depicted on this Hallstatt period vessel from Sopron, Hungary, include spinning, and weaving with a warp-weighted loom. After Eibner 1986, plate 1, and Bichler et al 2005, fig 12B

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were traded commercially within the empire (Wild 1963).

Roman officials and their wives wore the fashions of the city of Rome, but the main costume of the Romano-British population was the Gallic coat, a garment adopted throughout the north-west provinces. This was a large, loose, sleeved garment, which extended to the knee on men and to the ankle on women (Fig 1.3). Although the clothing of Roman Gaul and Britain appears from the evidence of carved reliefs to be essen-tially the same, the cloth from which it was made may have been woven on two different looms. Gaul, which was closer to the Mediterranean world and had been conquered before Britain, had acquired the Roman two-beam loom (Fig 1.4) (Roche-Bernard 1993, 80–2, 90–1), while Britain at first retained the Iron-Age warp-weighted loom. Whether the two-beam loom did eventually cross the Channel in the Roman period is unclear, although it seems likely (Wild 2002, 10–11) and there are features of the 5th-century material which suggest that it did.

By the 4th century, Britain had become relatively prosperous, but turmoil elsewhere in the empire led to the removal of troops, and a poorly defended Britain presented a target for raids from Scotland and Ireland and a tempting prospect for the Germanic tribes across the North Sea who were already in search of land. When in AD 410 the British appealed for help to the emperor Honorius, he was unable to supply the

protection they needed and this marks the turning point at which the culture of Roman Britain starts to disappear and the Anglo-Saxon immigration begins.

The origins of the Anglo- SaxonsThe ultimate origin of the Anglo-Saxons is obscure but it probably lies in a group of people inhabit-ing the region between the Rivers Aller and Elbe in the Nordic Bronze Age, and in the Iron-Age Jastorf Culture stretching from southern Jutland to Lower Saxony and into Pomerania. In the pre-Roman Iron Age some of these peoples spread south and west into Celtic territory, and also east

figure 1.� The two-beam vertical loom

in a wall-painting in the hypogeum of the

Aurelii at Rome. © Fototeca Unione,

American Academy in Rome

figure 1.� A veteran of the Sixth Legion

and his family all wear Gallic coats in

this carved relief from York, dated to the

2nd or 3rd century AD. Father and one

child wear a hooded cape over the coat,

mother a mantle, but the second child has

no additional garment. © York Museums Trust (Yorkshire

Museum)

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along the Baltic shore. Eventually the latter moved on southwards to the Carpathians and the lands north of the Black Sea, which gives rise to the distinction between the east and west Germanic groups, and by the mid-2nd century there was a broad spread of people of the same Germanic background across an enormous expanse of northern and eastern Europe. Early commentators such as Tacitus and Caesar at first remark on the semi-nakedness of the men and women of Germania (Owen-Crocker 2004, 16–17), but later descriptions and visual representations show the Germanic peoples, from west to east, fully clothed and wearing essentially the same costume. For men this was a long-sleeved tunic, trousers and cloak, and for women the ‘peplos’, a tubular overdress fastened by a pair of brooches on the shoulders, over a close-fitting long-sleeved gown. There are tribal variations in the cut of the trousers, or the shape of the peplos brooches, but essentially clothing with the same general characteristics was worn from the Rhine to the Black Sea.

Some of these people lived peacefully inside the Roman frontier and early Roman funerary reliefs from the Rhineland show women wearing their traditional peplos dress. During the 2nd century AD, however, the peplos disappeared from monuments of the region and paired shoulder brooches vanished from graves, presumably as women adopted Gallo-Roman costume (Wild 1985, 398–9). Men are a different matter. In the 3rd and 4th centuries, Germanic auxiliaries were drawn into the Roman army, where they continued to wear their own costume, and clothing that almost certainly belonged to Germanic soldiers – a tunic, two pairs of trousers and a cloak – was discovered with a cache of Roman arms and armour beyond the frontier at Thorsberg in Schleswig (Wild 1985, 377; Nockert 1991, 120). Joining the Roman army seems to have become a tradition and Germanic men continued to serve in the emperor’s guard long after the northern frontier had crumbled.

The migration into BritainDuring the later 4th century, eastern Europe began to suffer incursions from the Asian steppes. Always a mobile group, the East Germanic peoples quickly escaped westwards, but this triggered off a chain of reactions, as tribe after tribe began to move, some driving deep into Roman territory. The empire, already weakened by internal difficul-ties, could not rebuff the intruders, despite enlisting many Germanic laeti and foederati to fight on its behalf, and Rome was sacked by the Visigoths in AD 410 and the Vandals in 455. In the north, the West Germanic people must have felt the westwards pressure, at a time when those living by the North Sea coast were also having to deal with the rising sea levels that threatened their lands. The appearance of paired peplos brooches in burials east of the Loire may indicate that there had already been some movement into this area as the Roman frontier drew back. A move over the Channel into a poorly defended Britain must have seemed the obvious next step.

In Britain, archaeological evidence shows the rapid contraction of towns, a decline in occupied villas, the cessation of mass production of pottery, and an end to new coinage in the early 5th century (Millett 1995, 132–4). Written sources indicate that as the administration fragmented, regions came under the control of local leaders, some of whom offered land to Germanic mercenaries in return for their help – which only gave into their hands a series of bridgeheads from which to establish further territory. The immigration seems to have progressed in fits and starts, through treaties made and

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broken, and battles lost and won, until by the end of the 5th century the incomers were firmly established in the south and east. It is highly unlikely that the native Romano-British were wiped out in these areas, but their culture seems to have been submerged in that of the Anglo-Saxons (but see Chapter 6).

The 5th century saw the establishment of large urnfields for the cremated remains of the dead in eastern England (Hills 1980, 82–3). The styles of the pottery urns and their associated artefacts reveal that the immigrants came from parts of the Jutland peninsula and the island of Fyn, from Schleswig-Holstein, and from the region between the lower Elbe and the Weser in Lower Saxony. It is obvious that they were already a mixed people by the time they arrived, and further waves were to follow, but as they settled down regional groups began to emerge. By the 6th century, when bodies were more frequently inhumed rather than cremated, the metalwork has begun to show clear differences between the Anglian north and east, and the Saxon south, with a separate culture in Kent and the Isle of Wight. Bede, writing in the early 8th century, recognises these three main cultural groups, although he probably over-simplifies their origins when he says that the east, south and west Saxons came from Old Saxony, the Angles from ‘Angulus’ (Angeln), and that the people of Kent, the Isle of Wight, and the mainland opposite the Isle of Wight were originally Jutes (Historia Ecclesiastica I, 15). Elsewhere he notes that there were a number of different peoples of the same general stock in Germany, which was why the Anglo-Saxons were ‘still miscalled Garmans by their neighbours the Britons’ (Historia Ecclesiastica V, 9).

Some of the early immigrants seem to have ‘shared’ Roman villa estates with the owners, but mostly they settled into their own small village communities, support-ing themselves through farming, hunting, and fishing. At first they are likely to have been organised in small groups under local chieftains, perhaps with temporary regional overlords (Scull 1999, 22–3), but by the 7th century small kingdoms with dynastic rulers had emerged. The most significant of these were Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia, Essex, Sussex, Wessex and Kent, though each had subdivisions which probably reflect earlier tribal groups (Northumbria included Deira and Bernicia, for example). The difference between ruler and ruled now became more exaggerated. In the 6th century, high-status burials had been placed within the general communal burial ground, but in the 7th century richly furnished princely graves appear at separate sites, such as Sutton Hoo, Broomfield and Taplow (Welch 1992, 88–96). In burials of this kind, clothing, tapestries and other soft furnishings have been used to emphasise the status of the dead, along with gold garment fittings, and imported glassware and metalwork. Arms and armour have a special place, as befits the warrior society that gave rise to the heroic poem Beowulf, and there are musical instruments, drinking horns and gaming pieces. The supply of status goods to royal courts must be part of the reason that wics or trading stations came to be established in the 7th century. During this phase, Christianity was also introduced, first with St Augustine’s mission to Kent in AD 597 and then through the offices of the church on Iona, which brought the faith to Northumbria (634), East Anglia (653) and Mercia (655). The new religion was only part of the cultural influence emanating from the formerly Roman Mediterranean world, and in its train came increased literacy. Law codes were now written down, so that England, though still ruled by a warrior class, was steadily acquiring the attributes of a stable, peaceful society.

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This, then, is the setting for this book. A new group of people of mixed cultural background, predominantly Germanic, arrives from overseas and settles into an agri-cultural way of life. Although at first organised in small-scale tribal units, their society steadily changes and grows into something larger and more structured. As will be shown, textiles and costume hold a mirror to these changes, textiles reflecting the practical and economic life, and costume the shifting pattern of Anglo-Saxon society.

A note on chronology and colour-codingThere is no generally accepted terminology for the subdivisions of the Early Anglo-Saxon period, although work currently in progress should resolve this problem in the near future (Penn and Brugmann forthcoming; Hines et al in prep; see also Chapter 4). In the mean time, for the purposes of the present study, a line has been drawn between the Migration period, which in Britain is regarded as ending between AD 560 and 580 (or perhaps more exactly in the 560s: Hines 1999a), and the rest of the period, for which the term Later Phase has been introduced. The Later Phase was once known as the Final Phase (that is, the final phase of furnished burial) but Final Phase is now often applied to a narrower time-span within the 7th century (eg Brugmann 2004, 70–1). Conversion period has also been avoided because this technically begins with Augustine’s mission in AD 597, somewhat later than the end of the Migration period.

The two main phases have been colour-coded in maps and diagrams: red for the Migration period and blue for the Later Phase.