Fulling cloth: smells and stamping in Rome

I’ve had an astonishingly ‘crafty’ summer. Plus, there’s work (bechod) and, what with one thing and another, blogging has taken a bit of a back seat. But I’ve still been brooding on fulling. I realise lots of people will know all about this, but I didn’t. Well, I knew bits, but only bits. I didn’t realise, for instance, that urine had ever been taxed and, quite apart from why, how? I have to admit that I still don’t understand the fiscal process. How on earth do you tax pee?

Ahem. Fulling cloth – kneading the woven cloth until the fabric thickens as the threads felt and close together, while also cleaning it – was one of the earliest cloth-making processes to be mechanised, but that wasn’t until the early middle ages. Before that it was largely down to feet.

Roman fulleries had their slaves treading away in booth-like structures, and similar processes – often called ‘walking’ (Ireland and Wales) and ‘waulking’ (particularly in the Hebrides) – have persisted as part of a commercial process almost into the present.

There can seem to have been an excess of fullers in some Roman towns, but that’s probably down to a form of sampling bias. A fuller’s workroom / shop is one of the easiest places to recognise, which may make them seem more prominent than they might have been at the time. Maybe. Probably not, though: Romans did not wash their clothes (or anything else made of cloth) at home. Fulleries are completely distinctive, with their booths, vats and large sinks.

Few trades leave clearer traces behind them:

Fullers (preparing cloth before it went into use) and laundries (not just cleaning cloth but often refurbishing it too) generally seem to have been the same place. Fullers, with common Roman snobbery towards the ‘working classes’, were a source of amusement to the elite, and Cicero’s detractors often teased him with being the son of a laundry owner. Fullers might also have been part-timers; one piece of Pompeiian construction graffiti states that ‘Mustius the fuller did the whitewashing’ – so he clearly had a sideline, or maybe he was moonlighting to make ends meet. Also in Pompeii is a house with an ‘oversized’ dining room which had a lot of graffiti celebrating fullers; Mary Beard has suggested (in Pompeii) that it might have been where they went for after-work drinks, and why not?

It was a smelly trade, though, which makes the fact that fulleries could be next to elegant houses rather surprising, to us. It was pongy because of the importance of pee in the cleansing process, and that is why the emperor Vespasian taxed human urine – it was a levy on the textile industry, and specifically on the fullers; nicely stale urine was a source of ammonium salts which helped to whiten the cloth. It was collected in large clay pots which were placed in strategic locations – outside shops, public urinals, road intersections (!) – though the fullers deliberately avoided some, notably the pots outside inns. That’s because post-piss-up pee is lower in nitrogen and not so effective. The things you learn.

First, the fabric was soaked in a heated mixture of old urine and water in a fulling stall, and then the fullers – or more likely the slaves – would go into the stall, rest their hands on the sides and start stamping. Once the fulling process was complete the fabric was thoroughly rinsed (thank heavens), wrung out (took at least two people; a toga could be nearly 7 metres long) and then spread out over frames to dry. Once dry, the nap was raised by using thistle heads, and then trimmed to a constant height using ‘cropping shears’, which are often represented on gravestones.

Incidentally, there is evidence that any dyeing often took place before weaving the cloth, which is probably not surprising given how throughly the finished fabric was worked afterwards. The effectiveness of the fulling process can be seen in reports of the spotless white togas of senators; they were woollen, and – naturally – subject to this process for cleaning as well as finishing the cloth in the first place.

If you were of more humble status your clothes were more likely to be dull and brownish rather than white, largely because they would not be so expensively produced or laundered. Harriet Fowler (in Women of the Roman Republic) thinks they may have been produced / cleaned separately, probably in different establishments, which seems highly likely to me – you’d probably be using less of the taxed constituents, maybe watering them down more, if you were doing it for people who couldn’t afford much. There were different types of fulleries: broadly, small local ones, often near market places, and huge imposing ones which clearly had many more workers / slaves. Bigger, smarter places for those who could afford them? Also highly likely, I think. (The parallels between the Roman world and our own just get stronger and stronger – for instance, they had their celebrity chefs and obscure equivalents of things like birch-sap reductions too). And, just as a final note, the slaves who did the treadling did so in bare feet.

Moving on, rather hastily, to Wales, though the stained glass with a fuller treading away at top left comes from France. The other panels are the next stages of cloth finishing, too.

It may seem that Ancient Rome and Mediaeval Wales have not got that much in common (apart from some vocabulary the Romans left behind, now preserved in the Welsh language), but fulling, as elsewhere, is one thing: the fact that it was almost the only part of the textile production process which not done at home. Prepping fibre, spinning, weaving: yes, all done in your home (or in the home in which you worked as a domestic servant). Fulling: nah. Not surprising, really, even when Fuller’s Earth was being more frequently used. Fulling still involved a lot of stamping about in – well – stale piss. Or it did, for a considerable time. And then came fulling stocks, which must have been a relief….

Main source for Rome: Miko Flohr, The World of the Fullo, OUP, 2013. Wales next (and this time without a gap of several weeks!)

Archaeology and clothing (or maybe not)

Hee hee… I was down in the basement the other day when I came across a small stash of Ladybird books among all my files. For anyone not familiar with these, they were – and to some extent still are, though they’re not the same – a British series of books for children. The non-fiction ones were intellectually respectable, and they were much beloved by middle-class parents of a certain type. A type which definitely included my own parents.

Ladybird books’ golden age was in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. My mother used to hunt them out in second-hand bookshops so some of mine are quite old, and the pics are fab. One thing that is quite noticeable is the fact that I held onto those featuring dress (like Clothes and Costume) or archaeology (such as Stone Age Man in Britain, yup, ‘Man’). The whole reason why I went on to read Archaeology may, indeed, have had something to do with my desire to stand around on sites in a white headscarf and yellow top, while an Indiana Jones type peered at pots (not that Indiana Jones had even been thought of when this was painted).

I just have to share some of the illustrations, so here are a few which really focus on what people are wearing.

Skins, generally, it does have to be said. Often curiously fitted skins, sometimes daringly off-the-shoulder skins, but almost always skins.

Here we see two prehistoric bods actually making up their clothing (I can’t help feeling that cowboy movies may have had some sort of influence here). Note the apparent crudeness of the stitching – quite possibly using gut or sinew as thread, since they’ve evidently not progressed to the cord stage – but also note the interesting fact that he has managed to shave efficiently and she has successfully dealt with any underarm hair, so they were evidently more skilled than the stitching suggests. Her fringe is pretty cool, too. Unlike the hut roof, which I can’t help feeling would have blown straight off if anyone had so much as breathed on it.

And here we have preparing the skins. I clearly remember this one, because I wanted to wear skins and prepare them like this (why, I do not know). Now, of course, my first thought on looking at the clothing is to wonder about the impact that entirely accurate historical epic One Million Years BC, featuring Racquel Welch in a skin bikini, had on the illustrator. Clearly it’s toned down for an audience of children, but I can’t help feeling there’s a certain reminiscent something in the tailoring.

I also remember asking my father what it would have been like to wear skins – I may have imagined that someone of such immense age (he must have been 37 or so) would actually know. He looked at the picture closely and said ‘draughty’. I caused a major diplomatic incident by complaining to my mother about this flippant response, but maybe it was better that he didn’t give me the practical demonstration I was demanding.

Moving on a little, in actual Ladybird years, comes this contribution from the book on food and cooking, which must have been from the 1970s, given the dreadlocks.  I have an friend who was brought up on a hippy commune in Dorset – and looking at this, it’s all I can think of. Bare-arsed kids strolling about, cooking on a bakestone over an open fire, living in something that could almost be a bender, stereotypical roles ever so firmly entrenched… you can almost smell the fumes of a Camberwell Carrot carrying on the breeze.

There is one difference, though: cleanliness. Here, not there.

We do eventually move away from the skin clothing, and now we are in about 500BC. I know that, because this is from The Story of Clothes and Costume (originally published in 1964), which was clearly written for older children, and the text gives me some real information. As well as giving a rough date, it also informs me that this illustration is based on actual clothes from the period found in Denmark, and indeed some are clearly derived from garments discovered in bogs which come from about this time, like the Tollund Man‘s cap.

The female clothing, I’m less certain about; garments retrieved from Danish bogs tend to be full length and these dresses are more like something bought in Chelsea Girl, which may be where the artist found them. (It’s probably just as well that the artist did not use the Egtved girl’s clothing from the – much – earlier Bronze Age as inspiration, something which I wittered on about in my very first post on this blog, because there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that the girl wore anything under – or, for that matter, over – her string mini skirt.) I’m also intrigued by the colours, since much of what I manage to produce with natural dyes is… well, khaki or, as my mother once unforgettably put it, ‘shades of shite’. But then I don’t suppose that would have made a very fetching illustration.

But I’m not sneering, I really am not. These books captivated me, and did so to such an extent that I spent years up to my knees in mud or marking up bones in some breezy finds hut / tent / old outside toilet / broken caravan. There is something wonderfully atmospheric about some of the illustrations, and you can almost crouch over a guttering fire with a hunter as he tries to keep himself warm on a snowy day in the Neolithic, or walk up towards an Iron Age village on the downs in autumn:

It was many years later that I learned the truth of Bettany Hughes statement that ‘just because you feel you can reach out and touch the past, don’t presume you can describe its face’. I’m quite glad, because you have to start somewhere, and being fascinated by a standing loom leaning against an Iron Age hut is certainly somewhere. Now where did I put my fluff?

More general sheep strangeness

I wrote a post a while ago, before I got bogged down in work and distracted by creepy stalker person, about the apparently odd things that have cropped up in the long, long relationship between people and sheep. No, not that sort of relationship – for heaven’s sake. Ahem. It’s also taken me a while to recover from the idea of nanny tea. Bleagh.

(And if nanny tea had left you traumatised too, be grateful I didn’t share some medieval contraceptive advice: drink sheep pee. Mind you, that pales into insignificance when compared to the alternatives, such as you won’t get pregnant if you wear weasel testicles on your thigh or hang the amputated foot of a live weasel round your neck. I bet you won’t. Couldn’t find pic of this, so settled for some lovely sheep from the Bodleian.)

A lot of the uses and significance of sheep are only strange to us, now, at this point in time and place. Had we, for instance, been fishing in the North Sea in previous centuries, we might have been wearing clothing made from oiled sheepskin; doesn’t seem too unreasonable. Coracles could be covered in cured hides, too (and inflated skins have been used to make rafts, especially in central Asia).

Further back we’d probably have cooked using a sheep’s paunch. Not cooked the paunch – can’t imagine what that would be like – but cooked in it. You suspend the paunch over a fire and fill it with water, which heats up and also prevents the paunch from igniting. You pop some hot stones in which keeps the temperature up – or maybe you don’t; in experiments there wasn’t much difference between cooking with the stones in and without – and then you add whatever you want to cook. Grain was found to be edible within a couple of hours.

We have a tendency to think of sheep as a source of either meat or wool, but there’s milk as well. Perhaps we’re more likely to consider that now than we might have been, say, 20 years ago, but in earlier times it was a perfectly normal consideration. Take one Medieval example: villeins on the Templar estates in Wiltshire had to send a women to milk the sheep every day, and she got half the whey or buttermilk for her labours.

(Of course, until the Industrial Revolution every single thread used in every single piece of cloth was handspun. We spin for pleasure, by and large. Our ancestors did not; they spun because they had to.)

Sheep milk was considered the most important product in Medieval England, in fact. It ranked above wool and well above meat… and between wool and meat in the hierarchy of importance came dung. It wasn’t just useful as a manure, though it was common practice to put a flock on a field which needed some extra oomph. It was used for fuel, along with cow dung (horse droppings and those of other non-ruminants are not much good), and in Ireland was also used to scour wool (which seems a bit counter-productive to those of us who spend ages trying to get sheep shit out of raw fleeces). Basically, a sheep was much more useful alive than dead. Lamb – well, eating that was a terrible waste. Mutton was better.

Once a sheep was dead, nothing was wasted; the guts were incredibly useful, and gut-dressing was a specialist trade. It probably wasn’t quite so specialist in the Bronze Age (when most people would have done many different things), and it’s been suggested that the cord decoration on some BA pots was probably made with sheep gut. Sheep guts have also been used to make fishing lines, strings for bows and musical instruments – and that use goes way back; a bow with a string of sheep gut is mentioned in the Odyssey.

Skin – well, that had all sorts of uses from the boats and clothing mentioned above to becoming parchment, especially in Medieval France (calf and goat skins were also used). It was soaked and limed, and then stretched and dried. Finally, the skin would be treated to make a better writing surface for the scribes; parchment is very resilient and can be re-treated and re-used; it is often possible to see hints – or even read – what was there before. In Greece, cured skins were used to store wine and olive oil.

Bones, especially the astralagus, the ankle bones, could be used in divination. All sorts of bones have been used in this way, for millennia, but these almost cuboid bones are still used in some places; they’re known as ‘shagai’ in Mongolia (photo from Wikimedia Commons):

and are sometimes painted in bright colours. If you want to know the future, or get an answer to a question, you roll four on the ground. The two more convex sides, known as horse and sheep, are lucky (horse is the luckiest – this is a Mongolian thing, after all, and horses are inseparable from the traditional Mongolian way of life). The concave sides, called goat and camel, are the opposite: unlucky. They’re also used for loads of games, in much the same way as dice could be used.

There are records of these bones being used in Greece to foretell who a girl would marry, and they were certainly used for playing games there, too, in more ancient times (these two girls playing ‘knucklebones’ come from the British Museum, and about 330BC). It wouldn’t surprise me at all if there were other incidences of their use, for either fun (they’re also used to set the position of the strings in a traditional Kazakh musical instrument) or fortune; they’re such a convenient shape. Anyone know of any others?

It’s not surprising that sheep have accumulated such a wealth of apparent oddness. They’ve been significant for so long; something strange is bound to stick. And it’s not surprising, really, that there are signs of sheep being worshipped, or venerated at the very least. It’s not just the ancient Egyptians with their sheep mummies; at Catalhoyuk, a very early settlement in Anatolia, skulls of rams were given the same respectful treatment as those of bulls, which seemed to be the main focus of the people’s religious life. There are many other incidences, but I draw the line at worshipping Madam, the ex-pet lamb and now escapologist ewe from up the hill, whom I found in the garden again this morning… Knucklebones seems like a good game, my lady – you are warned.

The strangeness of sheep

Rattling around, researching sheep and wool and incidentally realising that a very ancient, fully functioning economy was partly based on wool long before the invention of coinage, I’ve been ferretting all sort of strange sheep things out.

Given that humans have been living in proximity to sheep for a very long time – written records mention sheep as soon as written records exist, as it were; they’re mentioned in the legend of Gilgamesh, and that’s very old, maybe from about 2750 BC – it’s not surprising that they’ve accumulated a wealth of … associations. Of odd facts and snippets, which I feel the need to share. They’re mostly historical, because that’s what I’ve been researching, but some are older than others and some are just plain weird.

First, let’s get medical.

To cure toothache, put a ball of wool in your ear. Presumably a small one, rather than a 100g ball complete with ball band. Buy why in your ear?

If you’ve got pneumonia, you should tie a sheep’s lung on to your feet, because it will draw the illness down. What you do when you’ve finally got all that pneumonia in the feet (!), I do not know, but it must have got rid of unwanted visitors rather quickly.

Going right back, Hippocrates advocated the use of ‘greasy wool’ as a compress in dressing wounds. Smelly, but it’s just possible that this could have worked – the theory is that the wool would promote clotting, the lanolin would control drying, and other ‘complex substances’ would help the growth of new tissue.

You should be grateful not to have been alive and suffering from measles or smallpox in the nineteenth-century USA. For many reasons, of course, but principally this one: the fine but startling tradition of ‘sheep nanny tea’, or just plain ‘nanny tea’. It was – and I sincerely hope the past tense is right here – an infusion of sheep dung in water, often sweetened with sugar, and was supposed to cure both diseases. Presumably by making patients so worried in anticipation of someone coming in with a teapot that they cured themselves spontaneously. (Dung is used in lots of cures, incidentally; maybe I shouldn’t skirt my fleeces too thoroughly? No, I think I will.)

Next, into ancient history.

Egyptian mummies are well known, and many people are also aware of mummified cats. But how about mummified sheep? Sheep – rams rather – were sacred to Amun, and that’s why they were sometimes mummified. However, they were not mummified like people. Generally, the sheep bones were ‘bundled together’ in a papyrus basket. Then the skull and neck bones were fixed to the basket in such a way that the whole thing looked like a sheep sitting down. And then it could be bandaged – and adorned, if necessary.

In Ancient Greece, a piece of woollen cloth was put over the house door when a baby girl was born, possibly because weaving was women’s work. It was also notably prostitutes’ work, as I’ve wittered on about before, in Spinning for Pleasure.

Wool was really important in many cultures, with an importance we spinners and knitters can appreciate but which can come as a surprise to others. The quality of fleeces was obviously critical to the quality of the final cloth, and great care could be taken when producing the very finest. In Ancient Rome, Varro tells us that finely woolled sheep – when freshly shorn – were smeared with a mixture of wine and oil, to which some people added wax and lard. The sheep would then be dressed in ‘jackets’, so covering precious fleeces is nothing new. Except they’re no longer destined for the Imperial Court, but for discriminating spinners.

Let’s get a bit more recent.

I didn’t realise that there had been huge sheep drives in the nineteenth-century US, though how I thought flocks were transported from one side of the continent to the other, I don’t know. Westerns should evidently feature sheepboys rather than cowboys: ‘Cowboys provided the drama, but the sheepmen laid the economic foundation of the west.’ The flocks were driven no more than ten miles a day and it was difficult to find routes in some places. It was equally difficult to get suitably trained drovers, who lived in covered wagons, moving with the flocks. They generally marched early in the day, halting at noon at appropriate eating places.  This system lasted for about thirty years until the growth of rail transport, and millions of sheep were moved in this way. And then there were the sheep wars.

Sheep aren’t just used for their fleece and their meat, either. Obviously the meat has been important for a very long time, but the old adage about pigs – that you can eat everything except the squeal – is almost true about sheep. Except I’d say ‘use’ rather than eat, of course. Don’t try eating fleece.

Cooking vessels? Yes – a sheep’s paunch, thoroughly soaked and suspended over a fire, makes a container which actually works. It takes a couple of hours to cook grain to the point at which it is edible, apparently.

Clothing? Not just from the processed wool, that is: of course. Shepherds have often worn whole sheepskins as rough and ready cloaks and still do, in some parts of the world. Fishermen in the North Sea used oiled sheepskin garments for protection and waterproofing, and sheepskin has been used to make footwear and bags for time out of mind. And weapons – slings.

Musical instruments? Of course. Stretched hide was used to cover drums. There’s evidence for that from as long as ago as 2000BC, in Ancient Egypt again – and I’m sure Egypt wouldn’t be unique; it’s just that the level of preservation there is so very good. Bones can be used to make pipes and whistles, and they survive from all over.

And then there are the bagpipes. There’s a bagpipe museum in Morpeth and they used to have – not sure if they still do – a set of Bulgarian pipes made out of the entire skin of a small sheep. The wool’s on the inside; the chanter is bound into the neck opening, the mouthpiece into one foreleg opening and the single long drone into the other. In Eastern Europe, gaida or gajde pipes are commonly made with either sheep or goat skins, and there’s a somewhat disturbing online video of a man playing a goat some, er, goat pipes. No, I’m not providing a link! (You can get pipes made to look like Shaun the Sheep, but that is definitely NOT what I’m talking about here.)

And all of this is without plumbing the British folk tradition, too.

If you are going on a journey by horseback, or if you work with horses, you should suspend a strip of sheepskin from your horse’s collar. It averts the evil eye, but probably only in Lincolnshire.

And if you are going on a journey, it’s lucky to meet a flock of sheep – which I hope will placate the tourists held up today by a small one, a flockette really, which climbed a wall and ran up and down the road to Barmouth for a bit. And if you own a lovely little Staffordshire sheep, like the one above, you’re already very lucky. That’s because you got to the antique shop in Machynlleth before I did. Rats.

Bury me in sheepskin

Ah yes – being buried in fleece is something which could all too easily happen to me if my stash were to fall over, but I’m not talking about me specifically here… I’m talking about something much older.  Someone much older. Ages older.

In late 2011 archaeologists excavated an undisturbed Bronze Age burial in Spinningdale, south-east Sutherland. Over 4000 years earlier a woman had been buried there, close to the water of the Dornoch Firth. She’d been placed in a metre-long stone cist (a bit like a large box made of stone slabs), lying on her side, her knees bent up, facing the south east and the open sea. A pot and a stone were put in the cist, probably before she was lifted into it herself, and were positioned so they lay behind her head. The top stone was put on and the pit in which it lay was filled in (parts had already been filled in, to support the sides of the cist). Then, four millennia later, and in a completely different world, a team of archaeologists arrived. Their results have just been published.

But it’s not only the fact that I knew the area – oh, and trained as an archaeologist – which interested me (Spinningdale was usually where my brother and I would first try to kill each other on car journeys to Inverness – my mother’s rule was only to interfere if there was blood; nature red in tooth and claw and the back seat of an old Ford Cortina). There’s a rather fine woolly element, too, and not just because of the textiley element in the place name.

As with many archaeological discoveries, the burial was found by accident – in this case, during the installation of a new septic tank – but the whole area has plenty of archaeological remains; just because it is comparatively unpopulated now doesn’t mean it always was. Initially, they found the cist in its big pit, but lifting the top stone revealed the skeletal remains of a person. The radiocarbon dates put the burial in the Early Bronze Age, some time between 2150 and 1910 BCE (2051-1911 BCE from the bone; others are from wood which may be older), so she – for it proved to be a woman – is over 4000 years old. She was also amazingly well preserved, and as a result we know a lot more about her than you might think.

First, she was about 5 feet 6 inches in height and somewhere between 35 and 50 years old, possibly nearer to 45 to 50. There’s no visible cause of death (that would be asking a bit much, this isn’t CSI) but she did have ‘some degenerative changes’ to her lower spine – signs of osteoarthritis – and hints of a possibly genetic spinal condition, and very good teeth. She might not have been at the older end of the age range (and that would have been a respectable age in the time she lived, anyway); she could just have had a life full of hard work. And she probably looked after her teeth, or had a diet low in sugars. But it wasn’t just the bones that were well preserved.

When they were being lifted, traces of something else were spotted. Some of this proved to be the remains of her soft tissue, but some wasn’t – it was wool. There were two possible explanations for the wool, which were associated with traces of some more soft tissue: either she’d been wearing a wool garment or – and this has emerged as the favourite explanation – she’d been buried with a sheepskin. Out of the 35 fibres (average 21 microns) which were examined, some showed signs of pigmentation but most did not. Soays are highly likely to be the direct descendants of Bronze Age sheep and many have a brown body but a white underneath, and that white underfluff generally has some dark fibres in it, plus the micron size is similar. So, Soay then. Or similar.

Even though such a huge amount of time separates us from the Early Bronze Age, other burials have survived in which the body is wrapped in something. There’s one instance of a wool textile in the UK (Rylston in West Yorkshire), and a brown cattle hide was wrapped around another Sutherland burial, from Strath Oykel; there are others with hides. This, if it is a sheepskin, is the first. Sheepskin garments have been found in later Iron Age burials in Denmark, but never in the UK and not so early. Findings of fur or hide in graves tend to be linked to ‘rich’ burials, and are rare in Britain anyway. Of course, we just don’t know how much evidence has been destroyed or how much remains to be uncovered, but for now this is extremely unusual. So, mind you, is the size of the pit which was dug for the burial. It was large  (2.36m by 1.68m and more than a metre deep) and would have taken a considerable investment in time and energy to dig, especially with Bronze Age tools, so the woman buried there must have been respected by her community.

One other thing – it’s been suggested that she was placed to face the February and November sunrise, which would match the alignment of some other monuments in the area. For me – well, we just don’t know and we probably never will exactly what went on. But I do know one thing: I certainly wouldn’t mind being buried at Spinningdale myself, wrapped in a Soay sheepskin (er, or cloth) and facing the sea…

The photograph of Spinningdale is by Bill Fernie and comes from Caithness.org; the one of the burial is from GUARD archaeology. There’s a brief account of the dig in the November/December issue of British Archaeology, and the full report can be found at Archaeology Reports Online.

Colour: called to the purple

When I started to think about what colour I should think about next, the choice was obvious in one way – I’ve already looked at the three primary colours and two of the three secondaries – but it wasn’t at all obvious in another. Purple is the missing colour, and I don’t really ‘do’ purple.

Then I had a good look at what I am – very laboriously – knitting at the moment, in Noro Blossom.

No, of course I don’t do purple. Not in the slightest.

How is this possible? Purple is – well, it’s so purple. So I got out the stash, and I found more. Much more… and then I realised there was a lot of purple in the garden too, at almost all seasons of the year – there’s even some right now. I’m surrounded by it. I popped down to the shop and the new fascia of our village post office is – you guessed it – purple. How has purple suddenly become so common, almost without me noticing it?

At the moment, it’s just a phase. Give it a couple of years and the shop will be blue, or red, or green. Like all colours, purple has gone through phases since the discovery of synthetic dyes in the nineteenth century – sometimes it’s been seen as vulgar; sometimes it’s been seen as luxurious.

And some shades (notably those with more grey in them) have almost always been respectable. I seem to do the lot.

Except I don’t, of course.

Going back well before William Henry Perkin and the discovery of synthetic purple, the colour was marked by its association with wealth and status. Everyone knows – well, everyone with an interest in textiles, that is – about the Romans and purple: senators with their purple stripe on their togas; emperors swathed in robes of this most precious, sea shell-derived colour. In actual fact, the Roman purple could be quite disappointing. Here is Pliny on the colour:

‘…it illuminates every garment and shares with gold the glory of the triumph. For these reasons we must pardon the mad desire for purple, but why the high prices for  …  a dye with an offensive smell and a hue which is dull and greenish, like an angry sea?’  

There were long periods when only the emperor and his immediate family could wear entirely purple robes, and throughout time purple is probably the single most legislated-about colour (Nero punished anyone who breached his sumptuary laws about it with death). It could even be too expensive for emperors: Aurelian had to tell his wife that they couldn’t afford the purple dress she wanted.

(I’d have been fine, because I don’t do purple.)

The reason it was so pricy was because it took vast quantities of shellfish (usually Murex and Purpura) to dye even the smallest amount of fabric. In fact, nearly 10,000 individual animals for a single gram of dye. And they had to be really fresh. And the way they were used was complex, too – for instance, they had to be broken as part of the dyeing process, and in just the right way to get at the dye sack (that makes it possible to distinguish the shells from food remains). When the dye comes out it’s actually a yellowish white; oxidation turns it purple.

The trade brought enormous wealth to Phoenician cities – as always, the merchants and traders of the ancient world par excellence –  especially in the Levant. The scale of it can be judged even today, by the many layers of crushed shells which still remain  at places like Tyre – the imperial colour was often referred to as Tyrian purple – and Sidon in what is now Lebanon, and  at Tarentum in southern Italy.

But purple is older than Ancient Rome, of course. Layers of crushed shells have been found on Minoan – Bronze Age – sites on the island of Crete, and at Akrotiri (the ‘Minoan Pompeii’) on the island of Thera. They come from another old site, too. Ugarit is on the coast of Syria, opposite the long pointy bit of Cyprus, and there an apparent dye pot has also been found, still stained with purple. More broken-shell mounds and deposit pits are being discovered around the Mediterranean all the time.

(I’d not have been interested, had I lived then. No purple here.)

Interestingly, there are also texts from this very early date – the earliest writing systems had been going strong for some time – which refer to purple wool and purple cloth, which implies that the yarn was died before weaving, rather than the cloth being dyed afterwards.

You can even chart colonisation through broken shells. Yet again, it’s the Phoenicians. They had to range further and further in quest of shells, and their colonies on the Atlantic shores of both Spain and Africa are marked by – yup – tell-tale mounds of broken shells. Had I lived in the ancient Med, I’d obviously have been the only person without the slightest interest in purple.

I like the grey…

(By the way, sea shells are still used as a source of purple on the other side of the Atlantic – but differently. On the coasts of Central America, local women dye their wool by pressing the shells against the yarn. They’re using a different animal, one where the dye sack is more accessible. I’d love to try it – well, I would if I did purple.)

Spindle, schmindle

Who needs it?

Well, I suppose I do. Just because I can’t do it – practising just makes me want to hurl the spindle at people, guess it would make a great projectile – doesn’t mean I don’t want to do it. I’m hoping it will be like riding a bike: one minute I was falling off all the time unless Dad held onto the seat, and the next I was zooming along the quiet roads of York University campus with Dad in a wheezing heap in the background. Of course, my inability may be related to my hand injuries – hang on, that wouldn’t explain the lack of co-ordination. Hm.

One of the reasons I want to learn to spindle spin is because women have been doing it for millennia. If they could do it, I should be able to – and I’ve excavated enough spindle whorls like these

to know how universal it once was (the UK’s Portable Antiquities Scheme web database lists nearly 2,400 which detectorists / amateur archaeologists have picked up, and that’s just those found accidentally and which ping on a metal detector or are next to something that does).

The two above, by the way, come from an Iron Age crannog in Ayrshire; the left-hand one is in stone, and the other in clay.

(Of course the less – er, edifying – reason for me to want to spin is that other people can do it. Men can do it, for heavens’ sake.)

I devoted one of my early posts to ancient string (the logical consequence of simply twisting fibre), and yes, you can make string by hand twisting. But there’s no control – especially once you get the end beyond arm’s length, or before that if you’re me – as it tangles, bends back on itself, curls and twists and knots. It needs to stay under tension, and that’s where spindles come in. Plus, you get faster twirling. So it’s not surprising that spindles come from all over the world, and from very early periods of history – logic and human ingenuity guarantee that – and in Europe the technique probably developed in pace with the domestication of sheep (really wooly sheep only came about with domestication).

It probably started with women – probably women, rather than men – holding a stick in a rock crevice, and there are historical ethnographic accounts of spinners working like this comparatively recently in places as far apart as Scandinavia and the Sudan. But something extra gives momentum – so maybe a combination of the stick and a stone with a hole in it was the next logical leap.

And then you get clay spindle whorls coming into use too, starting with rounded and perforated pot sherds in places like the Aegean (you can almost see spinners working them into the right shape, though as one writer said ‘just because you feel you can reach out and touch the past, don’t presume you can describe its face’), and eventually metal ones.

These are lead, and are probably Macedonian going by the royal sun insignia. But I can’t track down provenance – they were in a antiquities sale. Don’t get me going on the antiq– no, not now.

But how do you tell whether the round thing you’ve excavated is a spindle whorl or just a round thing with a hole, maybe a big bead?

Well, size is a good indicator, as is the position of the hole – it has to be central. And it has to be big enough for the spindle, of course, and the whorl needs to be balanced. Context is useful too – you often get them with other wooly artefacts like loom weights or bone needles. And sometimes the spindles are preserved in place, though that’s comparatively unusual. And then there’s quantity. We tend to forget that all thread – all thread – would have been handspun, and you’d need a heck of a lot for even a short length of fabric.

Thousands and thousands of baked clay spindle whorls were excavated in the various levels at Troy, for instance.

(illustration from Barber, Prehistoric Textiles)

but only a couple were found with their spindles in place – one was carbonised wood, and still had some thread wound on it. The other was in bone.

Metal spindles have been found, though not at Troy – there’s an example from a female royal grave at Alaca Hoyuk which is about 4500 years old. But is it a spindle? It’s certainly luxurious: a ‘silver disk impaled by a silver shaft with a carefully shaped gold or electrum head’. Some people think it’s a dress pin or for ritual – after all, why would a utilitarian object like a spindle be so luxurious? – but it looks like a spindle to me (and it’s blunt). And, astonishingly, it looks like one of my spindles:

Incidentally, it was found close to one of the woman’s hands. Yup, I think it’s a spindle. And why shouldn’t a spindle be beautiful, precious and made in expensive materials? After all, Helen of Troy had a gold one:

…his wife presented Helen her own precious gifts
a golden spindle, a basket that ran on casters,
solid silver polished off with rims of gold.
Now Phylo her servant rolled it in beside her,
heaped to the brim with yarn prepared for weaving;
the  spindle swathed in violet wool lay tipped across it.

That’s from The Odyssey, Robert Fagel’s translation.

Bet Helen didn’t heave it at the Bronze Age equivalent of the television, though. Well, Neil Oliver was on. That’s my excuse.

Spinning for pleasure?

We spin – by and large – because we enjoy it (well, we do when we’ve not – no, not mentioning injuries; they might go away – damn, just have). It’s all too easy to forget that in the past women must have found spinning a chore, something which had to be done to earn money or, even more directly, done simply to clothe themselves and their families. And testimony to that type of relationship with spinning and weaving goes right back.

What also goes right back is a link between spinning and prostitution.

I know – difficult to imagine it today: standing on a street corner with a drop spindle; alternative – ahem – uses for hand carders… but I’m talking about Ancient Greece, not dodgy parts of South London, and understanding the link started with pots, of all things.

Woman spinning; vase from the British Museum

Many Ancient Greek vases depict women spinning, weaving or in association with wool in some way, perhaps just with a workbasket by their feet. However, some of these pots also show the women who are working with the fibre in another, simultaneous context – being approached by men with money bags or gifts (and in one instance by man holding a hen and a boy with a bird and an octopus, but hey). There was some debate about whether these pots showed happy-family shopping scenes, but as more and more – er – unequivocal pots were found that rather domesticated/niave explanation eventually faded away.

It’s pretty clear what was in it for the men, and for the women to some extent, but why were the women so often depicted spinning or weaving, or accompanied by others who were working with wool?

Were Ancient Athenian men turned on by drop spindles as well as by pretty boys? Did these pots show virtuous women being lured away from a life of domestic bliss by rich young men with bulging money bags? This debate – known as the ‘spinning hetaeras’ debate – has now virtually ground to a halt, as most classicists have accepted that the women illustrated are indeed prostitutes and the men are their clients. And archaeology has now helped to clarify the link with spinning and weaving.

The unpromising patch of stones is part of a really important archaeological site. Honest.

Kerameikos, from stoa.org

(Well, it’s important if you’re at all interested in archaeology, classical history, the role of women and the history of cloth working.) It’s known as Building Z, and it’s in the Kerameikos district of Athens. It’s a potentially complicated site, too, with the rather labyrinthine building going through various stages from its foundation in the fifth century BC, even being abandoned completely at one point.

But it’s quite clear that for most of its life Building Z was a brothel. For one thing, it was in the right part of the city; we know from surviving writing that the Kerameikos was the red-light district where you could be guaranteed to find streetwalkers, and it was next to the city walls, a notorious place for a quickie. Then there are the rows of small chambers, a bigger (meeting?) room with a mosaic floor, a large number of finds only associated with women – described as ‘feminine accoutrements’ – and the sheer quantity of crockery of a type specifically used in entertaining. Oh, and there was evidence of a cult of Aphrodite, the sex-workers’ favourite goddess. Also, interestingly, of other goddesses, some of them foreign. These facts all led to a clear conclusion: a brothel. Well, a combination of brothel and bar, perhaps.

Life would not have been much fun for the women in the brothel (it was very rough indeed for streetwalkers). They weren’t hetaerae, the almost courtesan-like sex workers who could become rich if they were lucky, and who had a freedom unknown to most women. They were pornai, and would most likely have been slaves or captives, possibly foreign, auctioned off to the brothel keeper. The life of a brothel was feared by hetaerae, and a modern commentator says that ‘even slave girls thought of it as a fate worse than death’. One comic play refers to a Kerameikos brothel having about thirty women working there, and they seem to have stood in a semi-circle for clients to make their selection – something which probably took place in the larger room of Building Z. One writer says that they sang during this process… difficult to imagine, perhaps.

And then there were the loom weights. Over a hundred were found in the fourth and fifth century levels.

That’s many more than you’d expect to find in a domestic context, but of course making cloth was a trade.

There are some allusions to a link between prostitution and wool working in ancient literature – one elderly prostitute is described as now having to get by on what she can earn from her loom, for instance. It’s also noticeable that on some vases the ‘woolly accoutrements’ are being packed away as the men (money bags in hand) arrive. Perhaps the time had come for a change in the nature of their work?

Decent women, in Ancient Greece, didn’t work. Women were respectable wives or would become them shortly, or they were everyone else – and then they weren’t respectable. Well, that’s a simplification, but it sort-of works. The unrespectable could earn money in two major ways (minor ones included market trading and running a wine shop): prostitution or cloth working. Yes, there’s that evidence from literature that women moved from one to the other, but Building Z provides proof that the two could be simultaneous.

Bear in mind that even the most popular brothel would have had slack times, and the reason for all the loom weights and the illustrations of wool-working on the vases becomes clear. If you’re an ambitious and avaricious brothel owner, you’re not going to let the staff sit around and do nothing in the off-peak periods. They’ve got to earn their keep all the time, not just when the brothel is busy.

And there you have it: you work at your spindle or loom during the day, and at night you stand around in a semi-circle and sing.

One of the most evocative facts about Building Z and its weaving and spinning prostitutes comes from the third level, Z3. It looks as though this building met the same fate as the oldest one on the site – destruction in an earthquake around the end of the fourth century BC.

It probably struck in the daytime, because none of the looms had been packed away. They had been in use when the building was destroyed.

Damn and bast…

I’ve been going through my stash, finding small lengths of attractive yarn to make my knitted necklaces, because I can just about manage a necklace in a couple of evenings with my hands as they are.

I came across this,

and just before I put it back with a shudder – not because of the yarn, but because knitting it up was rather traumatic – I took a better look, and it started me thinking. It’s hemp. This left-over bit is still rather stiff, even though I washed it before knitting, but the colour is glorious and I like the natural sheen (bast – woody plant – fibres like this have smooth surfaces, unlike wool which is scaly, allowing it to felt). My problem was the pattern; it needed a lot of adapting, and getting the tension right was a pig. The yarn was lovely, though – once I’d got used to working with it.

I’d not worked with a 100% bast fibre before – with anything like flax, nettle or hemp except as part of a blend. Their history is amazing, and that always gets me going, which is probably partly why I succumbed (that and the colour, of course). Somehow I feel a connection between me, knitting away here in 2011, and the remote past.

Very remote, in the case of bast fibre.

Very, very remote.

These are small samples of flax (Linum usitatissimum) fibre – the longest is only about 200mm – and are among hundreds that were found at Dzudzuana Cave in the Caucasus.  Their discovery was something of an accident – the archaeologists were looking for pollen samples – and they come from deposits going back 32,000 years. But they’re not just naturally occurring flax; they have been artificially modified: cut, twisted and spun. Some even showed traces of colour, and one was knotted.

Despite the evidence, it can be difficult to appreciate just how long people have been using bast fibre. It’s just a very long time ago… But when the earliest Dzudzuana fibres were made, mammoth were being hunted and their bones used to make hide-covered shelters; Europe still had a population of Neanderthals, some coming into contact with modern humans for the first time (modern humans were responsible for the fibres), and the painted caves of Lascaux were, oh, about 15-10,000 years into the future… that is a long, long time. But we’ve still got using bast fibre in common.

So what were those early flax fibres used for? Could have been in some form of basketry or as cords, or they could have been used in clothing – bone needles have been found of comparable date. There is also evidence of corded or string clothing from the Paleolithic, the period of these fibres. Some of this evidence is more recent – still 25,000 years old, mind – than the earliest of the samples, but there’s a huge chronological range at Dzudzuana and there are many fibre samples which are contemporary with this:

She’s the Venus of Lespuge, and she’s wearing a string skirt, something which I talked about here in the early days of this blog. My betting is that it would have been made of a bast fibre; after all, sheep’s wool only became usable to any marked degree with domestication and that happened much, much later.

But preparing plant fibres isn’t just a matter of using something that’s lying about. It requires work and planning, whatever the nature of the original plant; after all, they’re woody – and some ancient ones are very woody, like the willow and linden which were used in the Mesolithic for netting. They need to be made more flexible, the unusable material needs to be separated and removed, and you ultimately need a good length of fibre, too. Take preparing flax in say, the Swiss Neolithic. You’re a woman (well, you most likely are), and you need to:

1. Pull up your plants when they’re just the right age. Young plants give finer, paler fibre – that’s where the expression ‘flaxen-haired’ comes from – and pulling them up preserves the length of the fibre.

2. Dry or cure it to just the right point.

3. Ret it. Put it out in order to rot away most of the plant material which binds the usable fibres to the stem – just until it’s reached the right stage again; you don’t want to over- or under-ret it or it’s no use. Retting can be done in the fields using the dew, on rooftops, in rivers, or in ponds or lakes.

4. Now you’ve got to dry and process the fibre. Basically, it has to be ‘scutched’ – beaten free of the stuff you don’t want – and ‘heckled’. Heckling separates the short or broken fibres from the longer, useful ones (the poet Robert Burns worked briefly as a flax heckler, by the way). Then you lose a heckling tool and an archaeologist comes along and finds it about 4000 years later.

Now you’ve got something you can actually use. And the method for producing other bast fibres is roughly similar, plus nothing much changed for thousands and thousands of years. Phew.

When it comes to hemp, which I’ve been using, the process is much the same, and there’s also ancient evidence.

But of course hemp has other, ahem, properties, and it’s been suggested that the seeds found on archaeological sites come from plants grown for their medicinal purpose. Quite probably – certainly there’s plenty of evidence for the use of hemp as a drug. But I can’t believe that was the only purpose; ancient societies were anything but wasteful, and if a plant had multiple uses it was usually used in multiple ways.

The hemp grown for fibre nowadays won’t give you much of a high, mind; the levels of chemicals aren’t the same. Having said that, I was sorely tempted to try smoking the yarn instead of knitting it when I was battling with my hemp cardigan. It would undoubtedly have been much more fun, even given the ineffective narcotic properties of hemp fibre, but then I wouldn’t have ended up with this baby:

Modelled on Doris (or possibly Madam), my new companion. And from the front:

I really must get some proper pins instead of using the centre proddy bit from a hair thingy. And I need to – er – pad out my dress form at the front, but I do like the finished garment. I like its slightly Edwardian air when I pull it in at the waist (admittedly much reduced when worn with jeans), its softness and the silky drape of the yarn now it’s been washed several times.

Worth it? Oh yes, I think so. Especially since I didn’t have to do any heckling, scutching and, above all, retting. The garden already smells attractively of fleece some of the time; imagine adding rotting plant fibre. Lovely.