MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1yr ago·Edited 1yr ago
Great post - it is far too easy for us moderns to underestimate the cost and importance of textiles pre-Industrial revolution. Textile production (fibre preparation, spinning, weaving, and sewing, but mostly spinning) was the main work of pre-modern women and was far more labour-intensive than what we now see as housewifery. I first learnt about this from Lisa Jardine's Worldly Goods which spends about half the book talking about how increased Mediterranean trade during the Renaissance gave the urban middle class access to dyes (including the most brilliant colours, and also the fast colours which could survive washing) which had previously only been affordable to the aristocracy - thinking about this in the context of your article makes me wonder if kings and lords losing the uniqueness of their vivid colours could cause social change all by itself.
One quibble - you say that a peasant girl might get a new outfit every several years. I don't know if that was intended as a creative exaggeration, but Brett Devereaux (a Roman historian in his day job, but primarily famous for blogging about the historical accuracy of Paradox games) says in this series of posts that a single full-time semi-skilled textile worker could produce 5-6 outfits a year with Roman technology (spinning wheels, which reach Europe around 1300, double this) with most of the work being spinning, which is easy to multitask with childcare or basic animal husbandry. So one outfit a year per family member was a perfectly attainable goal for an ordinary peasant family (unless they were poor enough that they needed to sell the spun yarn to commercial weavers for additional food, or oppressed enough that they needed to sell it to pay taxes), and a family with an unmarried teenage daughter would be doing better than that - if she did ruin her first date dress she would be able to make another one.
[Raw wool/flax and basic vegetable dyes were cheap - unless you were after Worldly Goods level colour the cost of clothes was dominated by the labour involved in the production process]
His ‘how do they make it’ post serieses heavily imply and sometimes outright state that an average family would be selling some portion of the yarn produced by its female members, up to the majority if there was a bad harvest.
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Notes -
Great post - it is far too easy for us moderns to underestimate the cost and importance of textiles pre-Industrial revolution. Textile production (fibre preparation, spinning, weaving, and sewing, but mostly spinning) was the main work of pre-modern women and was far more labour-intensive than what we now see as housewifery. I first learnt about this from Lisa Jardine's Worldly Goods which spends about half the book talking about how increased Mediterranean trade during the Renaissance gave the urban middle class access to dyes (including the most brilliant colours, and also the fast colours which could survive washing) which had previously only been affordable to the aristocracy - thinking about this in the context of your article makes me wonder if kings and lords losing the uniqueness of their vivid colours could cause social change all by itself.
One quibble - you say that a peasant girl might get a new outfit every several years. I don't know if that was intended as a creative exaggeration, but Brett Devereaux (a Roman historian in his day job, but primarily famous for blogging about the historical accuracy of Paradox games) says in this series of posts that a single full-time semi-skilled textile worker could produce 5-6 outfits a year with Roman technology (spinning wheels, which reach Europe around 1300, double this) with most of the work being spinning, which is easy to multitask with childcare or basic animal husbandry. So one outfit a year per family member was a perfectly attainable goal for an ordinary peasant family (unless they were poor enough that they needed to sell the spun yarn to commercial weavers for additional food, or oppressed enough that they needed to sell it to pay taxes), and a family with an unmarried teenage daughter would be doing better than that - if she did ruin her first date dress she would be able to make another one.
[Raw wool/flax and basic vegetable dyes were cheap - unless you were after Worldly Goods level colour the cost of clothes was dominated by the labour involved in the production process]
His ‘how do they make it’ post serieses heavily imply and sometimes outright state that an average family would be selling some portion of the yarn produced by its female members, up to the majority if there was a bad harvest.
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