At Home - Bill Bryson [205]
Historically, the two most common fibers were linen and hemp. Linen was made from flax and was popular because flax grows tall—up to a height of four feet—and quickly. Flax can be sown one month and harvested the next. The downside is that flax is tediously demanding in its preparation. Some twenty different actions are required to separate flax fibers from their woody stems and soften them enough for spinning. These actions have arcane names like braking, retting, swingling (or scutching), and hackling or heckling, but essentially they involve pounding, stripping, soaking, and otherwise separating the pliant inner fiber, or bast, from its woodier stem. It is striking to think that when we heckle a speaker today we use a term that recalls the preparation of flax from the early Middle Ages.
The result of all that effort was a sturdy and adaptable fabric: linen. Although we tend to think of linen as snowy white, its natural hue is brown. To become white, it had to be bleached in sunlight, a slow process that could take months to execute. The poorer stuff was left unbleached and made into canvas or sacking. The principal drawback of linen is that it doesn’t take a dye well, so there isn’t a great deal you can do with it to make it exciting.
Hemp was roughly similar to flax, but coarser and not so comfortable to wear, so it tended to be used for things like rope and sails. It did, however, have the evidently very considerable compensating advantage that you could smoke it and get high, which Barber believes accounts for its prevalence and rapid spread in antiquity. Not to put too fine a point on it, people throughout the ancient world were very, very fond of hemp, and grew more of it than they needed for ropes or sails.
But the primary clothing material of the Middle Ages was wool. Wool was a lot warmer and more hard-wearing than linen, but wool fibers are short and difficult to work, especially as early sheep were surprisingly unwoolly creatures. Their wool, such as it was, originally was a downy undercoating beneath dreadlocks of tangled hair. To turn sheep into the blocks of fleeciness we know and value today took centuries of devoted breeding. Moreover, wool wasn’t sheared in the early days, but painfully plucked. It is little wonder that sheep are such skittish animals when humans are around.
Even once medieval people had a pile of wool in front of them, their work was really just beginning. To turn it into cloth required washing, combing, carding, teaseling, warping, sizing, and fulling, among many other processes. Fulling consisted of beating and shrinking the cloth; sizing involved the application of a glaze. Combing the fibers flat created a hard-wearing but comparatively stiff fabric: a worsted. For softer wool, carding paddles were used to make the fibers fluffier. The hair of weasels, stoats, and other animals was sometimes blended into the mix to make the finished cloth more lustrous.
The fourth principal fabric was silk. Silk was a rare luxury, literally worth its weight in gold. Accounts of crime in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries nearly always dwell on the way criminals were imprisoned or transported to Australia for the theft of a handkerchief or packet of lace or some other seeming trifle, but in fact these were often items of great value. A pair of silk stockings could cost £5 and a packet of lace could sell for £20—enough to live on for a couple of years and an exceedingly serious loss to any shopkeeper. A silk cloak would cost £50—well beyond the means of any but the highest nobility. Most people, if they had silk at all, had it in the form of ribbons or other trim. The Chinese ferociously guarded the secrets of silk production; the punishment for exporting a single mulberry seed was execution.