Dressing A Scandalous Saxon Vixen! 1066 fashion from the Bayeux Tapestry

Hello and welcome to the Petticoat and Swatch Buckler. My name is Marin and today we are recreating a potentially scandalous woman. So I've set myself the goal of making an outfit for every century throughout the Middle Ages, the period between the fall of the Roman Empire in the western part of Europe and approximately year 1500, you know the rediscovery of America by the Europeans or the invention of the printing press or the reformation or whatever you want to pick. I do have a lot of stuff from the 1260s and the 1360s so I thought I'd focus on the 60s and already I have failed. There is simply not enough archaeological or historical evidence for me to create something for the first 100 years or 200 years, 300 years of the Middle Ages accurately if I'm concentrating on western Europe, which I am. I might try to do something Byzantine at one point but not this time. For now it's the west, western Europe, northwestern Europe, that's my kind of focus. We can probably assume that in the 560s and the 660s people wore something like this, a linen shift and a woolen peplos, either woven or stitched up as a tude or with a side opening. And then in my last video I made three viking outfits so maybe they can represent the fashion from the 760s, 860s and 960s. Now when I think of the 1060s there is really one event that stands out to me and that is the Norman invasion of England in 1066. Now to understand 1066 and all that we have to go back to the Romans. It's always the Romans. I've taught a lot of medieval history in schools and museums and I always say that to understand the Middle Ages you have to go back to the Roman Empire because the moment that falls apart people start trying to recreate their own Roman Empires. And the whole story of 1066 is super interesting and super exciting and there's gazillion books and articles and pam, like papers and documentaries and audiobooks and podcasts and videos that go into that story and if you're interested in it go nuts, have fun. It's a super exciting time in Northwestern European history. I'll give you the very very short version but I would absolutely recommend learning more than what I can give you. But as I said back to the Romans. The Romans governed England for three to four centuries and then when the Roman Empire began to collapse due to many reasons that I will not get into here, the Romans pulled the bureaucracy and their army out of Britain and back into Italy and the Romans had had what you can call a violence monopoly. They were the only people allowed to have soldiers so when the Romans left the people who knew how to fight left with them. This is a very generic kind of overview. Of course there are exceptions. Go look at everything that Dorsey Armstrong has ever said or written about King Arthur for example. But that's another story, not today. When the Romans left a lot of other people came in and we get what is usually called the Anglo-Saxon invasion of England. Now there was no such thing as Anglo-Saxons. That's a more modern term but you had people from the parts of like Denmark, Northern Germany, the Netherlands, from tribes or cultures that call themselves Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Frisians. You had people from all these places coming into Britain. It used to be said that they came in, they killed all of the Romano-British citizens who had been living there and kind of replaced them. Modern historians and archaeologists think that might not have been quite what happened. Probably what happened was that you had people coming in and replacing the people in leadership positions and then the Romano-British changed their way of life to fit in with their new leaders because replacing an entire population would have meant there were no people left in Denmark and Northern Germany and the Netherlands. But you still have a lot of people coming in fighting for dominance over various parts. You have the West Saxons in Wessex, you have the South Saxons in Sussex, the East Saxons in Essex, the Angles in Anglia and they all fight each other and they fight the people who already live there, they fight the people up in Scotland. The Danes or the Vikings come into the mix at some point. But by 1066, the West Saxons control pretty much all of what we today think of as England and their king is called Edward. Now Edward, he earned the nickname The Confessor and he was generally a good king but he had a few drawbacks. He was very religious, a very pious Christian. That's not a problem per se but it became kind of a problem when he turned out to be so religious he probably never even slept with his wife. So this meant that he had no heirs. Also not a problem per se, having children or not is a personal choice. I don't have children, I don't judge anyone for having children or not having children. However, if you're a medieval king, not having children can cause problems with who's going to take control of the kingdom after you. Edward also seems to have been the kind of person who just said yes to anybody, he just couldn't say no. So when a Saxon nobleman called Harold Goodwinson asked if perhaps he could take over the throne of England when Edward died, his family was very powerful, they were related to the the royal family. Edward was like yes of course you can my lad, that'll be great, thank you, yes go ahead. But then at another point Edward talked with another relative of his, a guy called William who was the bastard son of the Duke of Normandy and William was like do you mind if I became king of England when you're gone? And Edward was like sure my boy, yes I'd be great, go for it, have fun. So when Edward died on January the 6th 1066 and was buried in Westminster Abbey which he began building, there were two pretenders to the throne. It was Harold Goodwinson who was a Saxon nobleman and it was William of Normandy who was a French nobleman. And well, Harold kind of had promised to support William's claim to the throne, however he apparently changed his mind when the old king died because he got crowned as king of England the day after on January the 6th. So things moved pretty quickly. Now Harold Goodwinson probably expected trouble from William, he had after all promised to support his claim. He did not expect trouble from the north, he should have because Harold had a brother called Tostig and Tostig was very jealous of Harold. You know, Tostig felt like maybe he also could be king and it would be nice. So Tostig went north to Norway to talk to the Norwegian king because for some centuries Danish and Norwegian rulers had ruled over parts of England. So the king of Norway, which in English texts is usually referred to as Harold Hardrada, I'm gonna just to, because there are two Haralds, I'm just gonna pronounce his name the Norwegian way, Harald Hardrada, just to differentiate between Harold and Harald a little bit. Harald of Norway was also related to people who had ruled England at some point, at least part of it, at least probably. So he was very excited by Tostig's idea of kind of going together and taking control of England. I can't talk, otherwise good. So they made a deal, Tostig was going to rule the south and Harald was going to rule the north and they set off. Now in the late summer or early autumn of 1066, the Norwegians arrived in the north of England and they fought several Saxon leaders and won and did quite well because Harald had not expected people to come in from the north, so he kind of kept all his men in the south. So they needed some time to move up north and the Vikings had laid siege, I'm saying Vikings, Norwegians, you know what I mean. The Norwegians had laid siege to a small city called Stamford, a small town called Stamford. They weren't really expecting much trouble and also it was a really hot day, so they left a lot of their stuff, including their armor and King Harald's son Olav, for some reason, in the boats, in their ships. So when Harald and his men attacked, they were very unprepared, they were expecting a small skirmish, they got full on battle, they fought at Stamford Bridge and the Norwegians lost and Harald won, yay! Harald won, Norwegians nil. However, poor Harald, four days, four days after the Battle of Stamford Bridge, William of Normandy and his Norman knights, his Norman soldiers, arrived on the British Isles. He landed at Pevensey in the south again and they'd already fought a battle and they were really tired, probably had some injuries and some people who had died and they met the Normans and William in Hastings, two weeks after the Battle of Stamford Bridge. So things, again, are moving pretty quickly here and they fought and Harald Goodwin's lost and that battle really changed England and, in some ways, the world. Forever. Now, when we talk about historical change, things often change over a very long period of time. People do not simply wake up one morning and be like, I feel like this is a renaissance, I should play the lute, discuss philosophy and burn witches, you know. However, the Norman invasion really was overnight change, pretty much. William was crowned on Christmas Day less than one year after Edward the Confessor had died. So there had been one year of, like, tumultuous fighting in battle and then a new ruler. He changed the languages spoken instead of all of his kind of noblemen speaking what we called Old English, which is almost closer to German than to English, actually. He had people speaking French dialect, Norman French. So he introduced a new administrative language, new foodstuffs, a new culture, new laws, a new class of rulers. Pretty much all of the Anglo-Saxon noblemen were wiped out. Their families lost a lot of power, they lost their land, some of them lost their lives and were kind of replaced with Norman nobles. Up until 1066, if you lived near a forest and your family was hungry, maybe your crops weren't as good as you'd hoped, you could go out into that forest and you could hunt for game, you could fish in the streams and the lakes, you could get food other ways, you could let your pigs forage in the woodland. But the Normans privatized much of the kind of wilderness, making fishing or hunting without a permit or without owning the land punishable sometimes by death. So the stories of Robin Hood where the Merry Men hunt in the Sheriff of Nottingham's woods and they are about to be executed for it, that's historical, that happened. Perhaps not with Robin Hood and I don't think they were usually saved and ran away but, you know, the background of that is historical. So people went from having the resource of a forest, being able to forage for food, for firewood, to that being taken away from them by people who spoke a language they didn't understand and following laws and cultures that they did not recognize. So quite a massive change. Now to commemorate the Norman victory, a massive embroidery was commissioned, probably by William's brother Odo, who was the Bishop of Bayeux in France. It is 70 meters long and a half a meter wide and embroidered with storage from 1066 probably by women in Kent in England and it's a massive beautiful work. It is like a cartoon and experts who've studied it, they can even tell when one needlewoman's work stops and another one's begins and it's where an experienced embroiderer has been working and then where the apprentice has been allowed to do something. Today we know it as the Bayeux tapestry, although it's not made in Bayeux and it's not a tapestry. It has survived by chance, having been forgotten and stashed away and at some point I think used as a wagon cover during the Napoleonic War. So it's a miracle it has survived but it has and it is a beautiful source. Now with such a wonderful source I thought I am going to pick one of the women on that tapestry on that embroidery and replicate her outfit and there are 626 characters depicted. How many of them do you think are women? If your guess was three, then you're right. There are three women in the entire tapestry. One is an unnamed woman fleeing from a fire, one is Queen Edith, who's, that's pretty cool, she is the sister of Harold Goodwinson and the wife of Edward the Confessor, but she's barely visible as she tends to her husband's deathbed. It's kind of standing behind that bed. And the third one is Alf Giver, who did that thing with the priest, you know. No really, that's basically what it says. Here a certain cleric and Alf Giver. Who was Alf Giver? Who was the cleric? Why is there a small naked man underneath? Was this some 11th century scandal? How can we figure out what happened? It's a mystery. But Meron, you might say, should be simple enough. Alf Giver is not a very common name. It should be simple to find an Alf Giver of the right time and the right kind of social strata in the sources. Well, in Anglo-Saxon England, Alf Giver was as common a name as Jane or Mary is today. There are tons of Alf Givers and a billion theories. Was it Emma of Normandy who changed her name to Alf Giver when she married King Ethered II, or was it King Ethered II's first wife who was also called Alf Giver, which makes it really weird that his second wife changed her name to Alf Giver? Was it King Harold Godwinson's sister who was also named Alf Giver, or the first wife of King Canute who was also named Alf Giver? So many Alf Givers. So if you're looking for a beautiful name, not very common today, but with a lot of historical background, may I suggest Alf Giver? It means the gift of the fairies, so it's quite cute. No matter who she was, the scandalous lady who did that thing with the priest, you know, she's my inspiration today. So let's take a look at what she is wearing. So she is the most detailed of the female figures, but it's still just embroidery, so there are limits to the amount of details one can expect. Some things we must just guess at, like her underwear. She's probably wearing a linen shift next to her skin, like women have done for hundreds of years. We can't know if she's wearing socks or hosen, but I'm going to go with needle-bound socks. There's a hint of a green dress, or perhaps we should use the word kirtle, which is the most Anglo-Saxon word for this garment, at her wrists. So I'm going to use a very simple green kirtle, wool kirtle, to go on top of the linen shift. The garment that we see the most of is her overkirtle from olive green wool. It is very wide and long, with long wide trumpet sleeves, and there's a pale line at the hem, which I thought at first was the lining of the overkirtle, but looking at the sleeves, it doesn't seem to have a lining. So perhaps it is a hem, or perhaps it's the underkirtle peeking through. Her head and shoulders are covered by a sort of hood or veil, and it looks very draped. So I'm guessing a veil, but as I couldn't find an old English word for veil, let's call it a hood. The hood or veil is easy enough, it's just a long rectangle of red wool. I have a madder dyed diamond twill wool, that would be perfect. I'm just hemming it, and it'll be done. The overkirtle is a bit more of a mystery. It can be constructed in many different ways, but I'll go with this one as it will give me a lot of width with very few seams. I'll make the kirtle a little too long, about 170 centimeters from shoulder to hem should be perfect. Double that over the shoulders and down the back, and that'll be 360 centimeters. The sides will be angled out to about midway down the body, and the triangles will be attached to the straight sides, straight edge to bias edge. And the rest of the fabric will be long wide seams. And with all of that stitched together, time to go for a walk, see if I can find any naughty cleric. It is the most comfortable, but also one of the heaviest dresses I've ever worn. But yeah, I'm very happy with my elf giver cosplay. Let me know if you've ever tried to create any of the costumes from the bio tapestry, and welcome back next time when we'll be looking at the 1160. Until then, bye!