A Herjolfsnes dress

A 14th century dress based on finds from Herjolfsnes, Greenland.

Years ago I tried 14th century tailoring and it did not go well.  But as I've discussed before, those Herjolfsnes patterns are very easy to work with, so I decided to try again and this time the result is a success.

For this project I've explored some of the details of Herjolfsnes clothing construction.  The wool is a fairly reasonable imitation of the kind of fabrics used in Greenland and medieval Scandinavia generally, where diamond or chevron twills with different coloured warp and weft threads seem to have been popular.  It’s not vaðmal, which is what the Greenland clothes tended to be made of, but it’s really, really nice.

My dress is sewn with linen thread, which is plausible, but doesn’t seem to have been typical in Greenland.  It may have been more common elsewhere; flax apparently did not grow in 14th century Greenland.  The Greenland clothes were sewn with wool thread, which is not available today, meaning I would have had to spin it myself.  No thank you.

Many of the seams on the Herjolfsnes garments were sewn from the outside.  I can confirm this is the easiest way to sew some of these seams, especially the gores and just below the waist where the dress flares out towards the hem.

Because this dress was never going to be an exact copy of the Herjolfsnes finds I decided to make it a long, fitted, fashionable one of the kind illustrated in European manuscripts, but not typical of the Greenland finds.  However, as far as possible, I tried to make it using the same construction techniques as the Greenland clothes.

A pocket slit just below the waist of the dress, as found on some of the Herjolfsnes garments.  In the 14th century, pocket slits allowed your purse to hang down inside your skirt, where it was harder for thieves to access.

This method of tailoring is an interesting process.  It requires very minimal equipment, and you can cut the whole gown using just scissors and a string to measure with if you need to.  This has obvious advantages in the medieval context, especially in isolated communities like Greenland.  I expected to be doing some math to get the pieces the right size, but no.  You don’t even have to use Pythagoras’ theorem for the gores; they are just rectangles cut in half diagonally.  Additionally, the gores’ width can be adjusted to make the best use of the amount of fabric you have available.  The whole process is very practical, and surprisingly easy.

I now suspect the popularity of diamond and chevron twills was not just an aesthetic choice.  Fabric with a striped pattern is very convenient when you're cutting it into rectangles along the grain.

Front skirt gore.  It's not so easy to see on the patterned fabric, but it has a cool little fish tail detail at the top.

It’s easy to see how this method of tailoring progressed from earlier, loose fitting gowns to the figure hugging styles of the 14th century.  Making these things fit snugly through the torso is not difficult, and doesn’t require any extra materials or equipment, though it’s probably helpful to have a friend who can assist.  Most of the Herjolfsnes garments were loose tunics without a defined waist, but a couple show evidence of having been fitted by pinching in the fabric at the waist along the side gores and then sewing it.  They were still loose enough to be pulled on over the head; none of the Herjolfsnes gowns are so tight they had to be laced up like some of the gowns worn on the mainland, but I found it is possible to get quite a tight fit without needing to add lacing.  Wool has a little bit of stretch.


HSM details

The challenge: Details.  This dress has lots of fun little details, such as fishtail gores, pocket slits, and pieced sleeves.

Material: 3.5 meters of herringbone wool.

Pattern:  I used the patterns found in Medieval Garments Reconstructed: Norse Clothing Patterns for reference, but this isn't a specific pattern.  Instead, I used the cutting method the 14th century Greenlanders used, along with my measurements, to make the dress.

Year:  Mid 14th century.

Notions:  Linen thread.

How historically accurate is it?  It's made in the same way as the Herjolfsnes finds, although the materials aren't exactly like those used in 14th century Greenland, and the cut is likely more typical of mainland European styles than what Greenlanders wore.

Hours to complete:  Probably 30-ish.

First worn: Several times to get the sleeves sitting right.  The trick here is to rotate the sleeve head relative to the armscye until it stops wrinkling around your biceps.  Have patience and don't panic, you'll get there.

Total cost: $84.  Not a cheap project, but I couldn't resist that wool. 

Clareyt: a balanced medieval wine

Balance was an important concept for the medieval cook, because medieval medical theory held that different foods increased the production of different humors within the body.  Thus, eating the right foods was essential to keeping your humors properly balanced.  Balancing your humors would help you recover from disease and, ideally, avoid disease in the first place, so eating a balanced diet was essential.

Medieval dietetics was a complex subject (see this link for a nice overview).  If you could afford it, you could get a physician to prescribe an individualized diet designed to help you achieve an optimal balance of humours.  In general, cooks tried to balance dishes according to the properties the ingredients were perceived to have: hot, cold, dry, and moist.

This clareyt recipe from the Netherlands is very similar to the hyppocras I made previously, but using white wine instead of red.  The term clareyt or clareit usually, though not always, meant a spiced white wine*, which had been strained through a cloth to remove any sediment.

It conforms well to medieval ideas of balance.  In this recipe white wine, considered cold and moist according to Hippocrates, is balanced with spices which were considered hot and dry.  According to medieval medical theory the ideal balance for humours should be slightly warm and slightly moist, i.e. slightly sanguine, so a wine which has these characteristics is obviously a healthy drink that will promote a good balance of humors.

Om goeden finen witten clareyt te maken

Om goeden finen witten clareyt te maken.  Neemt twee vierendeel ende een half pinte witten wijn of petau Dan neemt van dien wijn een lettel ende maecten werm in dien wijn doet bruyn suycker ende rueret so lange tot [28] dat dit suicker al wel ghesmolten es in dien wermen wijn Dan mingelt daer in een once ende een half once van de[30]sen na volghende poeder wel ende seer Dan suldijt ghie ten duer den sack acht oft neghe weruen ende clarify ceret Dyts dat poedere Neempt wt ghelesen caneel witten ghimber/ greyne lanck peper/ galigaen calini aromatici coriander asi. Maect hier af poedere ende laet al met duer loopen

To make good fine white clareyt

To make good fine white clareyt. Take two vierendeel [approx. 1.3 litres or 2 pints each] and a half pint of white wine or [wine of] Poitou. Then take a little of this wine and make it warm; into this wine put brown sugar and stir it as long until the sugar is all well melted in the warm wine.  Then thoroughly mix into it an ounce and a half of this following powder. Then you shall pour it through the sack eight or nine times and clarify it. This is the powder. Take fine cinnamon white ginger, grains of paradise, long pepper, galingale, sweet flag [Acorus calamus], coriander in equal parts. Make powder of this and let it all run through [the sack] together.

From Een notabel boecxken van cokeryen, English translation by Christina van Tets.


The original recipe makes 2.6 liters, while my modernized recipe is optimized to make one 0.75 liter bottle of clareyt.

Long pepper, grains of paradise, and galangal can be hard for a 21st century cook to obtain.  It’s worth trying your Indian grocer or an online supplier, and I've provided what I think are reasonable substitutions.  The original recipe also calls for sweet flag, a plant used in traditional medicine to aid digestion.  It probably features in the recipe because of its perceived medicinal benefits.  However there are few clinical studies on its effects “due to concerns of toxicity”.  I have omitted sweet flag from my recipe and I suggest you do too.


Ingredients 

1 bottle white wine
Brown sugar, to taste
½ teaspoon ginger
½ teaspoon cinnamon
½ teaspoon grains of paradise (substitute with a mix of black pepper and cardamom)
½ teaspoon long pepper (substitute with black pepper, nutmeg, and cardamom)
½ teaspoon galangal (substitute with more ginger)
½ teaspoon coriander

Instructions

Heat a small quantity of the wine, and add the spice powder and half a teaspoon or so of brown sugar.  Stir until the sugar dissolves, then add the rest of the wine then strain it all through a cloth to get the sediment out.

These kids of recipes were intended to be made with sweet wine so I used moscato to make my clareyt, and if I make it again I'll consider leaving the sugar out entirely.  I don't think it's really necessary, but maybe 16th century Netherlanders had more of a sweet tooth than I do.

Unlike mulled wine today, clareyt was served cold (presumably cellar temperature, not fridge temperature), and a similar recipe in the same book recommends the clareyt is better if it's allowed to sit for a day before drinking, so I let it sit for a day before trying it.

For a modern wine drinker, clareyt has a strange taste.  It's sweet and a little syrupy, like a dessert wine, but it has clear notes of pepper and ginger with a warm, peppery after taste.  It tastes more like some kind of cordial than a wine, or maybe a wine-based cocktail.  Presumably that's how it's supposed to be, but it's so hard to know how these things tasted in period.

I want to try this recipe with other types of white wine like Riesling or chardonnay, because I think the results could be interesting.  And from a modern perspective, treating it like a cocktail opens up interesting possibilities.  What if it was served over ice, with a garnish of lime and sliced ginger?  There are a lot of summer drink possibilities here.


The Historical Food Fortnightly challenge: Balance.

The receipt/recipe: White clareyt from Een notabel boecxken van cokeryen.

The date/year and region: 16th century, from the Netherlands, but these recipes were popular all over medieval Europe.

How did you make it: See above.

Time to complete: 20 minutes, plus a day's waiting time.

Total cost: $9.50 for a bottle of Banrock Station moscato.

How successful was it?  On the whole I prefer hyppocras, but that's just because I'm more of a red wine drinker.  It's a very pleasant drink, and if you enjoy sweet wines you'll probably like it a lot.

How accurate is it?  I'm not sure how moscato compares to the kind of wines that would have been used, so it's hard to tell.

*  The term claret came to refer to French red wine around the beginning of the 17th century. 

St Birgitta's cap

In the later medieval period, caps were an everyday clothing item for both men and women.  They kept people's hair clean and out of the way, stopped people's heads from getting sunburnt, and gave women something to pin their veils onto.  Like other utilitarian objects they don’t usually survive, but there is a 14^th century cap which has been preserved as a relic, because it’s said to have belonged to St Birgitta of Sweden.  It’s an interesting item, made from two halves joined together with knotwork and finished with an embroidered band.

YouTuber Morgan Donner has put together two excellent videos on how to make this cap.  She has a video specifically about how to do the knotwork:

...and a longer video, which takes you through the entire process of making the cap.

Thanks to Morgan's videos, I was able to replicate the cap.  There is also a very good tutorial from Cathrin Åhlén at Katafalk, complete with a pattern, which I found really useful.

My knotwork is made from 6 linen threads, each of which should be about 5 times the length of the knotwork.  I started at the back of the cap and left half of each thread as a tail while I did the herringbone rows.  Then I used the tails to weave around the herringbone stitches and thus complete the knot.  It’s annoying if one of the tails isn’t long enough, but not a huge problem because you can darn in another length of thread.  Small mistakes in the weaving aren’t obvious either.

I'm 98% sure this photo shows the place where I had to darn in another length of thread.

And this is the back of the cap showing where the knotwork starts.

I found that a strip of thermal-backed curtain fabric works really well as a backing to stabilize the two halves of the cap while you complete the knotwork.  However, you’ll need to be very careful that whatever you use to draw the grid on your curtain fabric isn’t going to rub off onto your cap, or use a washable fabric pen that won't matter if it rubs off.  I used a biro, and was not very happy to discover that even when dry it transferred itself to my cap.  Fortunately, Sard Wonder Soap lives up to its name.

In the comments on Morgan's video about making the cap, someone suggested it might have originally been made for a child, with the knotwork added later so it would fit an adult.  I also wonder whether it might have been a regional style.  The images of caps which don't appear to have embroidery come from other parts of Europe, and the design feels very Scandinavian to me.  It reminds me of the wire posements found at Birka and other places, and it's based on the number 6, which is a recurring pattern with ancient Scandinavian textiles.



HSM details

The Challenge:  Everyday.  Caps like this were part of the 14th century European woman's everyday wardrobe, although they weren't always embroidered.

Material: Part of a pillowcase that I'm reasonably certain is linen.

Pattern: Cathrin Åhlén's pattern, which is available on her blog.

Year:  14th century.

Notions:  Linen thread.

How historically accurate is it?  It's made from linen like the original, in the same way as the original, so far as I can tell.  While it's not an exact copy, I like to think it's pretty close.

Hours to complete:  Around 10.

First worn: around the house after photographing.

Total cost: Probably a dollar or so.  I got the pillowcase, along with another pillowcase and a sheet, for $6 at the Sallies. 

14th century hippocras for the 21st century consumer

Happy Solstice everyone!

Down here, of course, it is Yule.  Mulled wine is traditionally associated with midwinter, so this week I tried the medieval ancestor of the mulled wines we enjoy today: a hippocras recipe from 14th century France.

This recipe comes to us from the Jérôme Pichon’s book Le Ménagier de Paris, dated to around 1393 CE.

HIPPOCRAS. To make powdered hippocras, take a quarter-ounce of very fine cinnamon, hand-picked by tasting it, an ounce of very fine meche ginger and an ounce of grains of paradise, a sixth of an ounce of nutmeg and galingale together, and pound it all together. And when you want to make hippocras, take a good half-ounce or more of this powder and two quarter-ounces of sugar, and mix them together, and a quart of wine as measured in Paris.And note that the powder and the sugar mixed together make "duke's powder".

English translation by Janet Hinson and available here.

I chose it because it’s simple to make, and because unlike some hippocras recipes the quantity of sugar involved is reasonable.  Some of these recipes were pure bottled diabetes.  Since most of us today buy our wine in 750ml bottles, I've developed a modernized version of Pichon’s recipe which makes a 750ml bottle of hippocras.


Ingredients:

1 bottle of wine (I've used a merlot rosé - see the section on red wine to find out why)
½ teaspoon ground cinnamon
⅓ tablespoon ground ginger
⅓ tablespoon grains of paradise (or substitute a mixture of black pepper and ground cardamom – grains of paradise usually aren’t readily available today)
¼ teaspoon ground nutmeg and galangal (if you don’t have galangal just use nutmeg, as galangal tastes somewhat like ginger anyway)
¾ tablespoon of brown sugar

Heat a small amount of wine and stir in the sugar and spices until the sugar dissolves.  Add the rest of the wine, and strain the mixture through a cloth to remove the sediment.  This is an important step which Pichon’s recipe omits to mention, because he assumed all his readers would know you have to strain hippocras.  Its name actually comes from the “Hippocratic sleeve” used to strain it.  You can make a Hippocratic sleeve at home by placing a cloth inside a funnel.

You may be thinking “Wow, that’s a lot of pepper”, and yes, it is.  Unlike modern mulled wine recipes, hippocras typically did contain a lot of pepper or grains of paradise, which taste similar to pepper.  It also seems to have been drunk at room temperature, not heated.


What’s it like?

Surprising, and I mean that in a good way.  Hippocras tastes unusual to a 21st century palate, because we're not used to the combination of pepper, ginger, and wine.  But it's an enjoyable drink full of complex flavours that complement the wine nicely.  If you consider your wine pairings, you’ll find spicy foods are often suggested as a pairing for different styles of rosé wine.  Peppery, spicy flavours work very well with the right choice of wine.

The pepper isn't as noticeable as you'd think, but it's definitely there and it gives the drink a pleasant level of heat, while the ginger and cinnamon enhance the wine's fruit flavours.

Personally, I think it could use a little more cinnamon and nutmeg, so measure those generously if you make the recipe.  I would also be inclined to skip the sugar next time, or perhaps to use honey instead.


Red wine in the Middle Ages

For the best approximation of a 14th century hippocras, I suggest choosing a rosé instead of a red.  This is because medieval red wines were very different from the reds we enjoy today.  They were pale coloured, more like a modern rosé, and fairly low in alcohol.  They were also drunk very young.  Medieval people preferred to drink new wine where possible because the wine tended to be poor quality by today’s standards, and it didn’t age well.

Apparently darker coloured wines were considered desirable, and there are several extant recipes for using food colouring to improve the colour of wine.  Shortly after his hippocras recipe, Pichon supplied a recipe for making white wine appear red:

TO MAKE WHITE WINE RED AT THE TABLE, take in summer the red flowers which grow in the wheat, called rose-mallow and other names, and let them dry until they crumble into powder, and secretly drop them in the glass with the wine, and it will turn red.

Did this really fool people into thinking they were drinking red wine?  Medieval wine must have been very different from 21st century wine if colour was the only way people could tell whether they were drinking white or red.  Even with a lot of spices in there, it should be possible to tell the difference.  I now have many, many questions about just what exactly wine was like in the 14th century.

Anyway, back to the hippocras.  Despite the variable quality of medieval wine, hippocras wasn't intended to mask the taste of bad wine.  No one would want to waste expensive spices on bad wine, and some recipes specifically suggested using high quality wine if it was available.  In the Middle Ages high quality meant fruity young wine with a deep, rich colour; in a modern context I recommend a full-bodied wine at the sweeter end of the spectrum.


The Historical Food Fortnightly challenge: Solstice.

The receipt/recipe: Hippocras from Le Ménagier de Paris.

The date/year and region: 14th - 15th century France.

How did you make it: See above.

Time to complete: 20 minutes.

Total cost: $10.99 for a bottle of Peter Yealands merlot rosé.

How successful was it?  I like it!  This is definitely something I'll make again and, as an added bonus, you can get suitable wines very cheap if you shop carefully.

How accurate is it? I used a 14th century recipe and tried to choose a wine similar to what I think was used in period, but I'm not an expert in medieval wines and therefore I'm not sure how well the taste matches 14th century hippocras.

Modern medieval

Happy New Year!   I hope you had a wonderful break over the holidays.

One of the things I did on my holidays was to take a look at medieval tailoring using the garments from Herjolfsnes described in Medieval Garments Reconstructed: Norse Clothing Patterns, and finds such as the Moselund tunic.  The main purpose of this exercise was to explore how medieval sleeves were constructed.  And then I tested the fit of my sleeve pattern by making a modern shirt, because why not?

I love how it's possible to make such a modern-looking garment with an 800 year old pattern.

Overall, I really like Medieval Garments Reconstructed, and I think it works well as an introduction to medieval tailoring.  It has patterns for a number of different garments and a detailed discussion of how they were constructed.  The patterns are easy to use and a great way to get a feel for medieval clothing construction.

By the end of the 11th century (probably earlier, considering some of the 10th century finds from Hedeby) the basic principles of medieval European tailoring were already well established.  Construction was based around rectangular lengths of fabric, with triangular gores for skirt shaping.  Sleeve heads had shallower curves and followed the shape of the arm more accurately than is usual in modern sewing patterns.

Where pattern pieces were cut on the bias, such as for skirt gores, they were usually sewn to a piece cut on the grain.  Even shoulder seams were made this way.  The back piece was cut straight across, parallel to the fabric weft, while the front piece sloped down towards the arm like a modern shoulder seam.  This may have been done to create stronger seams which were less likely to stretch out of shape.

The yellow lines in this photo show the seams on my shirt.  The red line shows where a sleeve gusset would go if my pattern had one.  Many, but not all, of the Herjolfsnes garments had sleeve gussets, which meant the sleeve could be cut from a narrower piece of fabric.

Unlike modern patterns, where the sleeve seam is usually placed underneath the arm, the seam on a medieval sleeve was located at the back of the arm.  This allowed medieval tailors to make sleeves which closely followed the shape of the arm without constricting the wearer's movement.

Despite all these differences between medieval and modern patterns, my experimentation resulted in a very modern-looking T-shirt, and all it really took to achieve this result was to use an obviously modern fabric.  Even if I had made it up as a dress with a long, gored skirt like the Herjolfsnes examples, it still wouldn't look obviously medieval.  I think the lesson here is that in some ways the fashion aesthetic of the Middle Ages was similar to our current 21st century aesthetic.