Cutting Voluminous Garments: A Rumination

Tacuinum Sanitatis (BNF Latin 9333)
Fol 103, 15th century CE*

Detail of mural at
Kanonikerhaus in
Constance, Germany,
c. 1320 CE*

Just a few days ago, I was reading a paper by Tina Anderlini on Academia.edu about 13th century European clothing, and how important it was to have the right elements in a costume, even though the basic element was simply a voluminous robe.   In a supplement to the paper, Tina gives sketches as to the cut of the clothing components. Links to the supplement may be found on Tina's French-language blog, Paroles d'Arts.  (The supplement itself is in English.)

As is apparent from the patterns sketched in the supplement, and from the photographs with Tina's blog post, 13th century garments such as the robe she writes about were voluminous, and featured from four to about half a dozen shaped gores.   That fact raised a question in my mind; how did people manage to cut out the pieces necessary to make such garments?

The answer may be simple for rich people's robes.  They would likely have been made by professionals, who could simply use a big table on which to spread the fabric and cut out any gores.  Because both fabric and gores were not very wide by modern standards, it was only necessary to have a reasonably smooth flat surface that was long enough and high enough off of the floor for ease of cutting.  The art of the 14th through 16th centuries does show clothes makers using or having such a table (see the images to the right).

Taymouth Hours (Brit. Lib. Yates
Thompson, fol. 180v), c. 1325-1335 CE*

But I have not been able to find, so far, a piece of period art from the 13th century showing the cutting of garments at the time of the clothing types described in Tina Anderlini's paper.  That raises a question.  Were big tables used at that time for clothing cutting? And what did poorer people do when they wanted to try making similar garments for themselves?

Tacuinum Sanitatis (BNF NAL 1673) Fol. 94,
Fol. 94, 1390-1400 CE 

The earliest art I found was an early 14th century mural of a woman trying to do something with shears and fabric held in her lap, though it did not appear as though she was cutting shaped fabric pieces for a tailored garment (upper left). I also found a 14th century marginalia piece purportedly showing St. Francis making himself a robe using the ground as a work surface, but that robe is not really a shaped or terribly voluminous garment, and the rolling hills shown in the image are not a plausible work surface, even for simple tailoring (lower left).

During the early Iron Age, fabric was woven and then sewn or pinned into garments with little or cutting, so this question did not arise.  Nor did it arise during the Migration Period or the Viking Age.  Based upon period artworks, clothing in those periods was fairly short (ankle length or just touching the floor at most) and was not very voluminous compared to fashions in later centuries.  In addition, most tailoring was simple.  It involved either small pieces (such as the Thorsberg trousers), larger pieces cut or torn along straight lines, perhaps with small cutout areas such as the curved sleeve heads and armpit gussets for which evidence was found at Hedeby, for example.  Some of the scraps found at Hedeby show slightly curved seams, which likely were made by subtly changing the width of the seam as one sewed. Probably all of these items could have been made without a solid horizontal surface.  I did most of the work on one of my apron dresses without a large flat surface.

In her study of the medieval Greenland clothing finds, Woven Into The Earth, Else Østergård suggests that the kind of shaped-piece cutting necessary for the kinds of late medieval garments found might have been accomplished by temporarily removing a door from its hinges and using it as a cutting surface.  (p. 94).  It is difficult to imagine a better cutting surface available to poorer people who made their own clothing, or a better example of people living far from the center of Europe, trying to emulate current fashions.

I will have to look more seriously for 13th century art depicting the cutting of clothing, to see whether better evidence for the door theory is available.

* All images in this post located on Karen Larsdatter's Medieval Material Culture pages.