The Medieval Magazine No.67 | Page 4

Medieval women better dressed than men, researcher finds

Women in the Middle Ages often wore better quality clothes than men. This is one of the conclusions drawn by Leiden archaeologist Chrystel Brandenburgh, who studied textile remnants from the period from 400 to 1000 A.D. She will be defending her PhD dissertation this month at the University of Leiden.

Apart from differences in the clothes worn by men and women, Brandenburgh also found many regional variations in textile use. Women in Rhenen and Wijchen, for example, were mostly buried in linen cloth, whereas Brandenburgh found twill cloth in the graves of men in the region. In Lent-Lentseveld, on the other hand, she found no traces of linen in women’s graves, but linen was found in the graves of men and children.

Searching in museums and archives

In other countries, research on textiles has really taken off in recent decades, but no comparable development has been seen in the Netherlands, Brandenburgh explains. For her PhD research she searched in museums and archives for textile remnants from burial grounds and settlements spread over the Netherlands. The textile remnants from sites that have already been excavated have in most cases not been described at all or only described very summarily. ‘In the collection at the Museum of Antiquity, for example, I found two pieces of clothing that people didn’t even realise existed.’

Cloth disintegrated

There was generally very little left of the material that she found. ‘You have to imagine that people were put into their graves completely clothed. In many cases, they were buried with all kinds of gifts that were also wrapped in cloth, and then sometimes there was even another cloth on top of that. Of all that material, you might find just a couple of remnants of about a square centimetre.’ The cloth has often completely disintegrated and all you can see is the impression left by the cloth in the worn layer on metal accessories like clasps and pins.

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