burial – Early Medieval Making

ORP: Eriswell Spearhead

June 4, 2018 pearsonh Leave a comment

Little Eriswell

In 1957, workers digging a hole for the installation of an oil tank discovered bones and artifacts indicative of an Anglo-Saxon cemetery at Lakefield airfield near Little Eriswell in Suffolk. Two years later, another patch of the cemetery was discovered while foundations were being dug for a hospital. An inventory of all the findings, including objects that were buried with the people there, was kept during the process of the excavation. In one of these graves, an iron spearhead was recovered, found well above where the left shoulder of the body would have been and with wood remains still inside the conical ferrule, the section which would have affixed the spearhead to the shaft of the weapon.

The original spearhead from the Eriswell excavation.

Spears in Anglo-Saxon Culture

Spears were believed to be incredibly prolific weapons during the time of the Anglo-Saxons, due to the majority of them having been found within burial sites; roughly 4 in 5 burial sites contained one. They were much cheaper than swords to produce, and so they were frequently allotted to foot soldiers. Anglo-Saxon spears themselves definitely had certain distinctive qualities to them, such as open ferrule sockets around the spear’s mandrel, which would lead to such an assumption. It is possible that this was the role of the particular individual who died, as also found with the remains were a shield boss, a pattern welded iron sword and a small iron knife, though it is wise to remind myself that the dead do not bury themselves. In any case, it draws a strong connection to spears being symbolic of a warrior. Despite this, archaeological data on weapons burials does not corroborate this notion.
Weapon burials were, according to research, heavily associated with the “ethnically, social and perhaps ideologically based ‘warrior class’”. This was seen as many burials that included weapons were also frequently adorned with generally far more wealth than those of adults that had not. Skeletal data also suggests against the idea of the simple fact of death in battle or of being a warrior would qualify one for such a burial; there was little correlation for wounds and weapon burials and some weapon burials even had people with various diseases and disfigurements that would have precluded their service in an army. The evidence at Little Eriswell absolutely corroborates this; among the spearhead was also found several more weapons, including those of a very advanced make, including a pattern welded sword, a quite expensive and masterful piece of equipment for the time. Furthermore, the skeletal parts that did remain showed several vertebrae with Schmorl’s nodes, a condition that denotes spinal deformity, as well as evidence of osteochrodritis dissecans on the right femur in the form of a shallow concavity, a disease that causes stiffness and locking of the joints: certainly not a boon on the field of combat. While there was not much commentary on the metalwork of the spearhead itself in the Little Eriswell report, there is some implication that it was a least somewhat well made, with iron fragments of other items having been found in the same grave, perhaps implying that the spearhead was at least made durable enough to last the test of time.

Making, Part I: Photogrammetry

I had no experience in metalwork, nor the time to learn such an art. So I “made” in the way I knew how: digital modelling. My first attempt was through a process called photogrammetry, where I was given photos of the artifact itself on a green screen from many different angles, where I then tried to construct a digital model using a computer program. The first step in this process was called masking, where I took the 37 photos of the spearhead and cut out parts of the background that I didn’t want the computer to use in the final construction. I then began to run the program through the process of building the model from these photos; aligning the photos, building a “density cloud”, which creates a cloud of points that the program will later fill in when it creates the mesh, or the digital 3D object, and then finally building the textures, which includes all the colors and finer details that are too small to perceive properly, so they are set as variations in color in order to make a less resource intensive final product. Unfortunately, after repeating this process over and over, troubleshooting many errors and watching tutorials, as well as seeking help from other students, I was left with nothing, due to the quality of the original photos that had been taken.

The program, Agisoft Professional, and the beginning vertices of the spearhead.

The density cloud. Note the lack of detail in the spearhead itself, and mostly in the mat beneath it.

The final model. Note the correspondence to the density cloud in terms of detail.

The most frustrating part about this failed attempt at recreation was how hands off it had been. Unlike actual metalsmithing, this approach was far less intuitive and automated; in fact, it would be less accurate to say that I had made the model rather than communicated to a computer what I wanted, which then had made the model. This led me to seek a far more hands on and involved approach, while still utilizing skills that I possessed.

Making, Part II: Freehand 3D modelling

The next process that I pursued was that of freehand modelling. This process consists of using a digital workshop within which a 3D artist can align points by hand. A 3D model is primarily built from flat triangles, which themselves are composed from 3 vertices, or single points in 3D space, connected by 3 edges, which are in turn connected by a single “face”. All this data is conveyed numerically to a renderer, which projects little lines in 3D space; if it would hit a face, it renders a solid surface there. These rendering lines are drawn for every pixel on the screen; this is why higher resolution screens generally take up more resources.

What I did was I used the various tools provided to me by my program of choice to create what I thought, based on research, this spearhead could have looked like when it was first made. So I first decided to create the head, by first creating a rectangle, then deleting and reshaping the geometry to create the leaf-shaped figure. I then “extruded” or lengthened the back of the head, and created a conical socket by folding the vertices into themselves. I then separately created an admittedly lazy “shaft”, which consisted of little more than a stock cylinder that had been stretched out like a piece of taffy. I placed this shaft within the cone, and using a “sculpt” tool, I “hammered” the edges of the cone around the shaft, making sure to leave the joint open in true Anglo-Saxon style.

The spearhead, before use of the sculpt tool to close up the ferrule

This is where the simulation of the method began to fall apart. First off, the model was far too flat and blocky, even though it held the general shape quite well. This meant I had to apply what is known as a subdivision surface, which essentially adds detail and a smoother overall shape to the model. Furthermore, both pieces were colored a very dull gray, which is standard for almost all modeling programs, but I wanted something with color. And so I mapped the faces of the model on some stock images of metal and wood for the head and shaft, respectively, which allowed them to display the respective portions of the image within the renderer. I tried my best to mimic how the metal and the wood itself bent around the shape of the spear, but without much hands-on experience with the relevant craftwork, I found this quite difficult to ascertain. There were also lighting issues being caused by some of the unseen geometry, such as within the socket, and so I had to delete it, leaving the inside of the mesh completely transparent (only one side of a face actually renders solidly; in order to have both an inside and outside to an object, two faces must be created). This forced me to close up a bit more of the joint, and flatten the spearhead even more to the shaft. Finally, I was also having issues with the aesthetic qualities of the spearhead; that is, it was far too reflective, not only looking more like a polished plastic than steel, but also washing out a lot of detail, such as the spine of the blade.

I then took this final model, and with the help of Brittany Johnson and Austin Mason it was 3D printed, and this was the most satisfying part of the experience, because I finally got to touch and feel the object that I had been creating. It wasn’t perfect; it was only about the length of my hand. But it still gave a tactile sense of this object, which is important to understanding the lives of those who used it.

The 3D printed spearhead. A little smaller than the real deal.

Conclusions from the Experience

The advantages of 3D modelling were obvious enough from the get-go. The infinite material, as well as the tools that allowed for an almost limitless range of geometry and incredibly efficient workflow meant that I could produce the most functional part of this object very quickly; its shape. One thing that had occurred to me, especially during troubleshooting and tweaking, is that the intent of my design was quite different. Indeed, I was focused more on the aesthetics i.e. the shape of the spear head, the geometric qualities of the ferrule, the reflective qualities of the metal, whereas an Anglo-Saxon blacksmith would have been more focused on function. If it were easier to not have the joint be separated when smithing a spearhead, it is unlikely that we would see the split ferrule on these spearheads.

The final product.

This, I feel, highlights the value to this sort of modeling: when I tried replicate the object, as well as ape the methods used to create, I was forced to put myself in the mindset of the smith. While maybe I didn’t learn a similar appreciation for technique and limited material that the actual craft would have, considering shape and look so closely made me feel a little closer to the material culture itself, and as a result made me feel closer to the actual people, allowing a more accurate interpretation of the culture based on the things they used. The specific value of 3D modeling is its ease and accessibility in comparison to many of the crafts that would have been practiced at the time, in particular metalsmithing.

ORP: Eriswell Girdle-Hangers

June 4, 2018 mcilhaneye Leave a comment

This class focused very closely on material engagement as a way of understanding the culture and people of the past. Individually, we each chose a specific artifact to reconstruct either physically or digitally with the intent that focusing closely on a specific object and performing the steps of making a model would teach us about the process that the original makers of the objects would have experienced. I chose the 6th-century bronze girdle-hangers from the Eriswell cemetery in Suffolk for my reconstruction project. Through the process of researching and recreating the artifact, I learned not only details about how it was originally made but also how it served a wider culture of displaying one’s status and identity on their body in a visible manner.

Background

Beginning in the 5th-century, Anglo-Saxons buried their women with accessories and ornamentation to indicate who they were while alive. The growing inequality between the rich graves and poor graves throughout the 6th-century indicated changing power dynamics in society as individual families grew more powerful and wealthier than others. Styles of dress became an important vehicle through which to display one’s status, and regional styles of dress began to develop across Early Medieval England. A shared elite style of dress began to spread as well as contact between the powerful Anglo-Saxon families increased. Girdle-hangers were a part of this growing shared elite culture.

Girdle-hangers were a symbol of status that powerful women would have worn. The distinctive shape of these specific girdle-hangers was meant to resemble that of keys, signifying that the woman who wore them was the keeper of her household. These objects were discovered across England, from Little Eriswell on the eastern side to Cowdery’s Down in the west. It becomes evident through burial archaeology that the women, many of whom wore brooches and other jewelry in death, likely served as walking cultural symbols. Their regional-style dress made it instantly recognizable where they came from, and their level of finery indicated their place within society.

Reconstruction

My wooden model girdle-hangers

My reconstruction of the Eriswell girdle-hangers led me on an adventure in which I encountered many of the problems, complications, and limitations that the makers of the original girdle-hangers would have faced. When I began my reconstruction, I had planned to make a digital model with Agisoft Photoscan, but the program was unfortunately unable to orient the photos of the artifacts correctly. Lacking the technological prowess to fix this problem, I decided to make a physical model. Lacking the knowledge and ability to cast things out of bronze, I decided to make my models out of wood. Already I encountered some common problems with which any maker must contend: the limitations of my own set of skills and availability of my materials. These limitations would shape the form that my finished girdle-hangers would take.

Preliminary sketch-plan of my model girdle-hangers. I learned during the creation process that some of the measurements are actually wrong because I am bad at math.

The key shape sketched onto the plywood. Notice the “X” at the end of the key where I continued to modify the design right up until I cut the shapes out.

The key shapes and the band saw used to cut them

During my initial design process, I attempted to sketch out the exact dimensions of the girdle-hangers when I realized how little this would have mattered to the original makers. Exact measurements did not matter when it came to these objects. What really mattered was their distinctive key shape, since they had no actual functional purpose at all beyond sending a visible message. The designs I had made turned into a rough guide for the creation process, but by no means were they a step-by-step manual. I knew that when I began the process of making the models, I would need to mostly just think on my feet and, as before, allow my particular skill set and the materials available drive the project, which they did indeed. While making the models, I found myself constantly running into problems and reacting to them, adapting always to what my materials and tools would allow me to do.

One of the best insights I gained when making the girdle-hangers was the fact that each key must have been made either from two different pieces or had a transition cast in the metal. Halfway down the shaft of each key, they turn 90-degrees to fit onto the crossbar that holds the two keys together. This transition, either a twist or a seam, occurs on a part of the key that appears to be wrapped with bronze wire. It was my conclusion that the bronze wire served to hide the 90-degree transition from view. I came to this conclusion when attempting to recreate this part of the models; I chose the two-pieces approach, attaching an eye bolt 90-degrees to the broad side of the wooden key and wrapping them with string to strengthen the seam.

The end of the bronze girdle-hangers turned 90-degrees to the broad end of the key shafts, the transition wrapped in wire

The ends of my girdle-hangers, made of eye bolts turned 90-degrees to the broad end of the shafts and wrapped in string

While my process and the end results of my project were not perfect – from the materials and tools used to the processes that I created in my mind – creating these girdle-hangers helped me engage with the objects made centuries ago and allowed me to step into the shoes of the original makers to experience the limitations and complications that they experienced.

Further Reading

Kevin Leahy, Anglo-Saxon Crafts (Stroud: The History Press, 2010).

Robin Fleming, Britain After Rome (New York: Penguin Group, 2011).

Gale R. Owen-Crocker, “Dress and Identity,” in The Oxford Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Archaeology, ed. David A. Hinton, Sally Crawford, Helena Hamerow (Oxford University Press, 2011).

Christopher Scull, “Social Transactions, Gift Exchange, and Power in the Archaeology of the Fifth to Seventh Centuries,” in Hinton, Oxford Handbook.

Patricia Hutchinson, The Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Little Eriswell, Suffolk (Proceedings of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society, 1966).

Object Reconstruction Project

ORP: Double-Sided Comb

June 3, 2018 sidmorem Leave a comment

About Object 1402

A double-sided bone comb found at the West Stow Settlement.

Object 1402 was described in the archeological records as a “double-sided bone comb in very fine condition.” The comb was found during the archeological excavations at the West Stow settlement that were undertaken by the British Department of the Environment beginning in 1965. During the excavation process, the department uncovered the remains of around 75 buildings and thousands of artifacts that served to add greatly to the known material culture of these people. The comb was found in Sunken Feature Building 51 (SFB 51), one of the most northern structures present at West Stow. This small building, about thirteen feet by seven feet, had a pit dug into the ground (it was estimated to have originally been about two feet deep) over which the building was situated. SFB 51 had two central support posts, as was fairly typical of the other buildings found on site, with straight walls and rounded corners. Interestingly, despite the comb being considered one of the better examples found at West Stow, there was very little else discovered in this building, only a single hook, and a few broken pieces of pottery. The small size of the building and the artifacts that were found suggest that SFB 51 was originally a domestic area that probably housed relatively few people, as would be expected in a single-family settlement.

Combs in Anglo-Saxon England

Bone and antler combs are by no means rare finds in excavations of Anglo-Saxon settlements, and at West Stow, they were one of the most commonly uncovered items. These included single- sided, double-sided, and triangular combs that were found scattered throughout many of the roughly 75 buildings uncovered on the site. While it is clear that these items were prevalent throughout England during this time, it remains uncertain of their cultural significance as they do not appear in textual sources from the era. Object 1402, for instance, though it is an unusually good specimen, but it still leaves many questions about its uses and those of many combs found throughout Britain. Were the broken teeth the result of the last 1,500 years underground, or were they teeth that snapped off before it was discarded? Who would have used it? Were combs primarily used by women, or would they have been seen as ungendered during the period? What does this comb tell us about the values of the Anglo-Saxons, does the level of detail put into the comb suggest vanity or merely a concern for hygiene? Many of these questions will never be answered, and certainly will not be will not be derived from a single artifact, but if observing an object will not bring us to understand the lives of the people who owned it centuries ago, attempting to recreate its production and use will at least serve to bring us closer to the headspace of those who produced these objects and interacted with them years ago.

Recreation Process

I attempted to make a 3D model of the comb using the process of photogrammetry. Much of the process did involve mind-numbing struggles with the computer program or merely setting the computer system to run while I sat and read a book, but I also found that some of the process did give me a greater insight into the original making process. Through the process I had the ability to look at the object from many angles greatly improved my understanding of how the comb was put together, and allowed me to view the sides of the comb in much greater detail than I would have seen in a side-view photograph of so thin an object.

Top of the comb during the photogrammetry process.

Bottom of comb during the photogrammetry process.

In addition to this, I believe that part of the photogrammetry process gave me a taste of the actual process of cutting the teeth of the comb. I spent many hours laboriously cutting away the excess material that the computer had produced from the background, carefully shaving it away from the teeth of the comb.

Cutting excess material away from the teeth of the comb.

This long and intricate process (one that would have been made infinitely harder in the Anglo-Saxon period by the absence of an undo button) gave me an appreciation for the delicacy of the work. A bone worker would almost certainly have failed many times before he was able to create a comb so intricate with nearly uniform teeth. It would assuredly have been an arduous and often frustrating process, which led me to wonder, how these combs could have been so common throughout the West Stow settlement.

Insight Gained

While a digital recreation of the comb found at West Stow did not necessarily shed great insight into the physical process of bone carving during the early medieval period, it did add give a greater appreciation for the time and energy that would have gone in to such a creation and the delicacy of much of the work involved. I discovered this in the process of cutting the excess material from the model, as described above but also through time spent examining the object and trying to place it within its larger context. This is one of the benefits of the field of digital humanities and the possibilities it presents for the wider exploration of history. It certainly should not replace physical models or other forms of recreation, but as an added tool, it offers the chance to produce a greater number of models of items and helps us to integrate interdisciplinary fields to better our understanding of archeological sights such as West Stow. Through the process of photogrammetry, I was able to take pictures of an item on the other side of the Atlantic and produce a physical, printed model that gives us a good idea of the original. It may not be an exact replica, but I have a much better idea of the complexity involved in the original object, and it can now be seen by a wider audience.

A 3-D reproduction of the West Stow comb.

As is often the case, the greater understanding of the piece does not necessarily offer a greater simplicity to its historical narrative, but it does serve to enrich it and to give a more wholistic view of its place in history. Perhaps the recreation and reclamation of ancient objects and crafting techniques will not serve to answer all our outstanding historical questions, but it will, without a doubt serve to enrich our historical understanding. It is a journey of self-discovery that may vastly complicate our ideas, but it will also, overtime, allow for a greater exploration of Anglo-Saxon Britain through personal experience and immersion in many different avenues of historical exploration.

Further Reading

Ingold, Tim. Making. New York: Routledge, 2013.

Leahy, Kevin. Anglo-Saxon Crafts. Brimscombe Port Stroud, UK: The History Press, 2003.

West, Stanley. West Stow: The Anglo-Saxon Village. Ipswich, UK: Suffolk County Council, 1985.

Object Reconstruction Project

Craft Fair: Funeral & Burial Practices

June 3, 2018 lekkis One comment

One of the areas our class spent time considering and researching was Anglo-Saxon burial practices. Due to the prevalence of cemeteries in the archaeological record, this is easier than researching clothing for example which tends to disintegrate while in the ground, but it is not without its own issues. The main challenge in understanding burials is deciphering why certain decisions were made. Without a well-maintained written record, archaeologists must infer based on objects that did not decay, such as those made of metal, and what texts have survived such as riddles and epic poems such as Beowulf.

Our group decided to explore burial practices through making by re-creating the burial process of grave 28 at the Little Eriswell cemetery in Suffolk, England. This consisted of making the grave goods and reenacting the procession and burial process at the craft fair. We were limited, however, by our own skills and experience, as well as time and access to appropriate materials. In order to assemble an exhibit that satisfied our desire to correspond with the materials but still echo an Anglo-Saxon grave, we limited the number of artifacts and substituted some of the metal objects for ones made of wood or clay.

We procured many of our items from the costume department, including glass beads, the bases for our brooches, and a pillowcase to form a bag. We made the brooches, wrist clasps, belt buckle, and “ivory” ring from clay, and Elise made wooden replicas of the girdle hangers that well-to-do Anglo-Saxon women wore on their belts. The textile group made a peplos-style dress for our “body” (a borrowed plastic skeleton) to wear in the grave.

Making

Grave Goods:

Brooches:

Brooches were worn by many Anglo-Saxon women: one on each shoulder and sometimes one in the center of the chest with beads strung between them. There were different types of brooches, some of which would have indicated higher status than others. There were also regional styles of brooches that could indicate where people were from or whether they had traveled in their lifetime. Some even display influences from cultures outside England itself, indicating contact with continental societies.

We suffered a slight complication in the display of our brooches which stemmed from a misreading of the architectural report from the Eriswell cemetery. The brooch pictured above is a square headed brooch and would usually be placed in the center of the dress. We instead placed a model of a bronze rivet in the center of the chest with a square headed brooch at each shoulder. In there Eriswell grave, two cruciform brooches would have adorned the shoulders of the dress, keeping the peplos on the body. See Gale R. Owen-Crocker’s “Dress in Anglo-Saxon England” for further readings on brooches and their ritual significance.

More information on brooches can be found here or here

Girdle-hangers:

The girdle-hangers were metal key-shaped items discovered hanging from the belts of a few different buried Anglo-Saxon women across Early Medieval England, and likely indicated that they were of high-status. The significance of they girdle-hangers is that they either resembled keys or had keys hanging from them, and symbolized the individual as the ‘keeper of the household’ because they held the keys.

More information on girdle hangers can be found here

Wrist-clasps:

Wrist clasps are small rectangular pieces used to hold together the sleeves of women’s dress. They would have been symbols of status due to the specific skills required to cast them. Ours were made of clay like many of the other representations rather than their original bronze. Due to the need to make inferences about what the dress would have looked like, we are unsure if these clasps were functional parts of a long sleeved dress or merely decorative adornments to a cylindrical gown

More information on wrist clasps can be found here

Belt Buckle:

The peplos garment would have been belted and the belt buckle would have held the belt together. Though they were often made of bronze, fancier belt buckles made from other materials such as silver indicated that some women were of wealthier means.

Necklaces:

Most women wore beaded necklaces as accessories, though finer pieces were probably worn by wealthier women. They often became heirlooms, passed down for several generations from mother to daughter (or daughter-in-law), and as a result archaeologists have found necklaces in graves that were already decades old when they were buried.

Bag:

In addition to girdle hangers and other items that hung from the belt, women carried bags made of cloth with a sturdy ring to shape the opening. The ring in the Eriswell grave that we copied was made of ivory, but our recreation was made of unfired clay.

Peplos:

A dress in the traditional style of East-Anglia, it is belted at the waist and secured at the shoulders with a pair of brooches. Because clothing rots away and does not exist in the material record, we based the dress of of contemporary dresses from the continent and the archeological remains of more durable materials such as fasteners like brooches or belt buckles.

More information on textiles can be found here

Funerary Pottery:

Many Anglo-Saxon graves were found with pottery, usually containing ashes. However, other “storage pottery” have been found; usually, the type of pottery found in these graves were funerary urns or food bowls/pots. It was also common for normal food pots to be repurposed into funerary urns.

For more information about Anglo-Saxon pottery click here or here

The grave itself:

Though it is difficult to know exactly the significance of every single detail of Anglo-Saxon burials, archaeology can provide some information for us as we went about digging and preparing the grave in which the deceased was to be buried. The grave was designed to accommodate a supine burial. It was oriented north to south, lined at the bottom with wooden sticks and the edge surrounded with stones.

Pyre:

Anglo-Saxons cremated their dead by burning them with a pyre, though it is debated how it was done. One idea is that the Anglo-Saxons would stack the wood on top of the body, but there are debates against this, as some people believe there wouldn’t be enough oxygen to sufficiently burn the entire body. Another idea is that the body was instead stacked on top of the pyre that was filled with brushwood. The cremation process was most likely a public event.

Burial Presentation:

Display:

Funeral:

There is little known about actual Anglo-Saxon ritual funeral practices beyond how bodies were prepared, because the rituals do not leave traces in the record. However, evidence can be found in primary sources such as Beowulf, and also deduced from what does remain archaeologically.

Procession:

We began with the body prepared and displayed on the island where the rest of the fair took place. It was meant to symbolize the preparation and display of the body and all of its grave goods within the Anglo-Saxon village before it was to be buried.

Classmates and visitors alike helped to pick up the body and carry it over to the grave site. Everyone walked together with the body as Elise, leading the procession, read laments from The Word Exchange, including excerpts from “The Husband’s Message,” “The Riming Poem,” and “The Song of the Cosmos.” When we reached the grave, the body was placed inside and Elise then gave a eulogy for the deceased which had been planned beforehand by her and Spencer. (See video below)

Eulogy:

The eulogy for the deceased, “Ecgwynn,” described some of her accomplishments during her life and the significance that she had based on the burial context and grave goods chosen to be buried with her.

The girdle-hangers were meant to signify that she was the keeper of the household, and the eulogy indicated this by describing how Ecgwynn advised her husband and took charge of various duties within the household, such as making clothing and overseeing the production of food. It was also significant that, under her care, none of the family was cast out, all debts were paid, and nobody starved or froze.

To indicate the generally poor health of the Anglo-Saxon people, the eulogy claimed that Ecgwynn died of the ‘black pox,’ which is an ambiguous name for any number of diseases that may have killed the deceased.

Another important detail about Ecgwynn’s life would have been her role as a mother and the contributions that her children had made to the household. It was described that her two oldest sons, ‘Aescwig and Aldwin’ were warriors who effectively defended the household’s herds from another neighboring clan.

Early Medieval Craft Fair

Craft Fair: Early Medieval Textiles

June 3, 2018 murphyh2 Leave a comment

“Of all the proceeds of human artifice, string is perhaps the most widespread and least appreciated.” -Tim Ingold

Basic Textile History

Textiles were certainly an important part of life during the Early medieval period. Unfortunately, due to the nature of the materials used, there are very few remnants from this period. Much of the information surviving about clothing from this period comes from a few scattered objects found on the European continent, or from supposition based on archeological records. The design of early Anglo-Saxon women’s dresses, for instance, has been surmised based on the surviving metal fasteners, including brooches and wrist clasps, found in women’s graves scattered throughout early British burial sites. Indications of the processes of such as spinning, weaving, and rope-making are occasionally left by indentations and patterns of decay in graves or the sites of decayed buildings, not to mention the discovery of many loom weights and spindle whorls in domestic areas. Given the lack of textual or remaining physical evidence of Early Anglo-Saxon textiles, many of their nuances may remain a mystery, but they will likely continue to fascinate historians due to the tremendous impact they had on the everyday lives of ordinary Anglo-Saxons.

Spinning & Weaving

Spinning in Early Medieval England began with carding and cleaning the wool, unless you wanted to leave the lanolin in to make the cloth more waterproof, in which case you would leave it unwashed. The wool was then spun into yarn using a drop spindle, basically a stick with a bead-like spindle whorl on it to help it turn. We procured a drop spindle and tried out spinning some wool into yarn, but most of ours was over-spun, causing the yarn to twist around itself and break off of the main cloud of wool more often.

Demonstrating a drop spindle.

We didn’t get a chance to try out weaving our minimal amount of yarn, since we had made nowhere near enough yarn to weave so much as an inch of cloth. However, Early Medieval people would use giant looms with sticks to pull out alternating threads on the frame to speed threading yarn through it.

Making Clothing

Since linen would have been available, if not exactly common, during the Early Medieval period, we set out in search of tablecloths (we definitely didn’t have time to weave our own cloth). Sadly, Target didn’t have cheap, non-printed tablecloths, so we instead went for a sheet set. Fast forward through several hours of ripping the seams and elastic out of a fitted sheet, and we begin attempting to figure out how to make an Early Medieval gown.

The sources we had showed what was basically a large cylinder, the two sides pinned together at the shoulders with brooches, tied around the waist with a considerable amount of extra fabric bunched over the belt. So we began by pinning together the sides at various different widths, trying to figure out how wide, exactly, the cylinder needed to be to allow enough extra room for arm holes without making it look like we were actually wearing a sheet.

There was also the question of whether we should sew the gown in a straight cylinder, or taper it a bit at the top to give it the slightly more drapey look in the pictures in our sources. In the end, we settled for more or less a perfect cylinder, a few inches longer than the person it would fit to allow for the bunched, loose top over the belt. Sewing was a straightforward affair: we just hemmed the bottom and stitched up the single seam at the sides. The two shoulders we pinned together with safety pins, as we were short authentic Early Medieval brooches.

On the skeleton we used at the fair for our burial, the gown was a bit loose, but it looked satisfyingly authentic. And it was, after all, a skeleton fairly short on flesh.

Ecgwynn in full Early Medieval regalia.

Making Rope

Rope making is one of the foundations of farming communities like those of the early medieval period in England. It is the area where textiles leave the exclusive domain of the home and become part of the larger economic driving force used both in domestic and more industrial settings such as farming and fishing. We took inspiration for this activity from the descriptions of Tim Ingold in his philosophical treatise Making. In it he describes the process of making two core rope with palm leaves as a means of discovering the full possibilities involved in creating through the hands. Our somewhat less ephemeral purpose, was to explore the process involved in this basic medieval craft, and to find a greater appreciation for the labor involved and the quality of the rope obtained. This began with a search for materials that would best serve our purpose. Palm leaves seldom grow in Minnesota (nor do I imagine they were common in medieval Britain) so it was necessary to find an alternative source of fiber. In this case, rather than trying to find the fibers that would have been used by the early Anglo-Saxons, we focused instead on how they would have solved the problem themselves, they would have found the best material they could source locally. We followed suite using the dried leaves of last year’s prairie grasses we collected as a substitute fiber.

Collecting Grass in the Carleton Arboretum

Once we had collected the leaves, the most arduous step of the process was tearing them into long strips that were thin enough to be incorporated into rope. This time consuming step would have occupied craftsmen a good deal longer than the actual creation of the rope and, depending on the amount of rope desired, might have taken weeks or months to complete. After this process was complete, the fibers had to be soaked overnight to make them pliable for weaving (enter our authentic medieval trash can).

After this step, we were ready to begin the rope-making process. Using the process of ‘hand rolling’ string described in Ingold we attempted to weave the rope. This involved rolling two bunches of the fibers between the two hands before lifting one bunch over the other so that the twists work against one another to hold the rope straight.

Weaving Process. Willeke Wendrich, The World According to Basketry (Los Angeles: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Publications, 1999), 299.

While Ingold suggested using your hands to roll the rope, I found this to be much more difficult than weaving it on my lap. I discovered that rolling the rope in hands would have been difficult, especially for women with smaller hands, and that they likely would have rolled in on another surface (though it also stained everything it touched which suggests that aprons or some other sort of covering for clothes must have been used for similar tasks).

Some finished rope from the fair.

Actually recreating some of the textile items Early Medieval people would have used allowed us to get a sense of the logic behind their creation process that we wouldn’t have gathered simply by reading about it or seeing it in a museum. For example, the cylindrical gowns would have allowed for easy adjustment during periods of growth — useful in a place where creating fabric was an arduous, multi-person task and children might or might not survive the next year. Spinning and weaving would probably have been a task for multiple people, as the many different tasks necessary to perform could have been done fairly simultaneously. Our efforts gave us a better understanding of the world of Early Medieval England, beyond the farming and fighting that we usually associate with it. Also, making rope is a strikingly applicable skill in braiding hair:

Tag: burial