Ask Another Laurel - How Not To Be Noticed. Part 2

Ask Another Laurel - How Not To Be Noticed.

by Caleb Reynolds

Part 2 - "People will stare. Make it worth their while."

The following was written for the AEthelmearc Gazette

This is part two of our thought exercise on how far back in time we could go and not be seen as an outsider. Our goal is to travel to a time and place and be able to wander around and ask questions without being picked out as a stranger.

First of all, I recently learned that the word "hello" as a greeting only dates back to 1824. It's a variation of the English word "hullo" which was used as a term of surprise. As in, "Hullo, what's this in my oatmeal?" Its transmorgromfication into a greeting might have based in part with the Spanish word "holla", which, at the time, was used as a cry for attention, as in "Holla! I'm trapped in the well! Lassie, can you hear me?" The OED also says that it might be derived from the German "holon", which was used like "Come here", often used to hail a ferryman, and then later a cab. So, if our plan was to show up at someone's door in the 15th Century and say, "Hello, may I look at your kitchen, please?", whomever would open the door would know, right from the first word, that we would be a weirdo stranger and that they should slam the door shut.

That being said, let us move on to part two of this exercise: what to wear. Because of the complexity of clothing, I will be splitting this portion into two parts (and even then I won't be able to cover everything).

I had mentioned towards the end of part one that we could dress up as a monk and hope that people will accept us and answer our weirdo questions. But, what type of monk? There were a variety and were color coated like the Power Rangers. Benedictines wore all black. Cistercian and Carthusian monks wore white; Franciscans, brown; Dominicans, black over white; and Carmelites, white over brown. However, unlike the Power Rangers, they didn't join their zoids together to form a giant robot to fight kaijus. Monks had territories and sometimes fought with one another for control of those territories. To start with, monk on monk violence is a lengthily subject in and of itself, so I will only touch on some of the highlights (or low lights, since monks were supposed to swear oaths to be kind and peaceful). 

Figure 1

There are plenty of records that the various orders did not cooperate with one another. Money and property were at stake and even though individual monks took oaths of poverty, abbeys and monasteries did not. At one end of the spectrum, there was smack talking. The 12th Century, Benedictine Abbot of Cluny, Peter the Venerable, said that the black of his Order's habits represented humility and the white of the competing Cistercian monks symbolized pride. His rival abbot, Bernard of Clairvaux, responded by writing that white stood for purity and virtue and black symbolized death and sin. 

On the other end there was the violence. In 1088, Benedictine and Franciscan monks got into a knock-down, drag-out, street fight in York over the ownership of certain churches. In 1422, during the funeral procession of France's Charles VI, a fight broke our between the monks of St. Dennis Abbey and the guild of salt-weighers over which group was to keep the funeral robes of the corpse. In the mid-13th Century, Franciscan monks led violent attacks on the Bury St. Edmunds Abbey, even laying siege to it. Bury St. Edmunds, the richest Benedictine abbey in Western Europe, was the hotbed of decades of violence, not only to other Orders, but to the citizens of the neighboring lands. In 1327, for instance, a group of monks, wearing armor under their habits, entered a local church and took several people hostage in response to the citizens of the town of Bury wanting greater self rule and a share of the profits the abbey was making off of the locals. The town retaliated by burning down part of the abbey. Bury St. Edmunds was not a unique abbey in Medieval Europe: hundreds of surviving court cases can be read relating to the abuses abbeys and monasteries brought to court. Many of them between the abbeys of the various Orders. The Cistercians had a reputation of chasing away entire villages, in out of the way locations, tearing down all of the houses and barns, and then building their own monastery before any authorities could show up. Then they would claim to have always been there. So, it might not be a good idea to pretend to be a monk. Violent monks could be an article all on it's own. Heck, the history of Bury St. Edmunds could be an entire book.

Figure 2

We could pretend to be a friar. No. That might be a bad idea as friars were not universally loved. In fact, friars had a well earned reputation of being philandering con men and there was so much violence against friars that the word "antifraternalism" was invented to describe the violence. But friars deserve their own article.

However disliked monks were, they were part and parcel of Medieval life. One might think that it would be easy to get a modern habit, it's not like monk's habits have changed any in the last thousand years, right? 

Right?

They have. 

Modern habits (by which I mean the entire outfit: cowl, frock, and scapular) are either made of raw cotton or processed wool. In the middle ages, they were made from coarsely woven wool; meant to be scratchy and uncomfortable, although there are plenty of references to monks wearing fine linen under tunics to protect their delicate skins from the itchy wool. Modern habits also have pockets, since the modern world requires small things that have to be carried, such as car keys. Prior to around 1950, habits did not have pockets as the Rule of St. Benedict predated pockets in clothing. The church resisted allowing pockets to be added to habits after they became common in lay clothing, because monks, friars, and nuns (oh my) were not supposed to own anything. Items could be carried in a bag or satchel so that it, and its contents, could be handed off to someone else and not kept "secreted in one's clothing". In 2022, Elisabetta Bianchetti (of Manifatture Mario Bianchetti) redesigned the habits of the Franciscan friars of the Third Order Regular and added shirt pockets and, *gasp* sown-in-pleats.

As unpopular as monks and friars have been in various times and places, nuns appeared to have been better behaved and more respected by the general community. Nuns were better known for breaking their vows of chastity than for getting into fist fights; although there are exceptions, but that will have to wait for its own article, as nuns did not travel outside of their nunneries and pirories as often as did monks. However nuns' habits were also color coated, in similar fashion to monk's habits, but nuns deserve their own article.

What about normal people? Do we really know what people wore on a daily basis? I mean, really wore while out on the streets. We have plenty of paintings of people wearing fancy clothes, and plenty of paintings of normal people wearing normal clothing, particularly in very late period. Can we trust what ended up in a painting, woodcut, or a manuscript image? Look at the 11th Century: T-tunic or dress, hood and mantle, and a coif to cover one's hair. Simple for an average person. Right? I wear such outfits all of the time. How can one mess that up? Possibly very easy.

Figure 3

Let's look at a "recent" movie that went above and beyond showing how difficult it would be to visually fit in when you don't understand the little details. Let's look at the end of "Captain America: The First Avenger". If you haven't seen the movie, let me describe the scene in question. Steve Rogers, Captain America, wakes up in a hospital recovery room. The sound of a baseball game is playing in the background. He sits up and a female, army nurse enters the room and greets him. Steve figures out that something is wrong and wants to know exactly where he is. He says that the ball game was a recording because he was there at the game, but that is only part of story. 

Whoever did the costuming for this scene should have won an Oscar for the work put into making the nurse look almost correct. Captain America, who had been frozen in ice since WWII, would have seen that the woman before him wasn't an army nurse, or a WAAC, since, to him, he would have been around them very recently. This is a list of what the costuming people put together that only a handful of viewers would have noticed in the 55 seconds it was on the screen: Her hair was not pinned up according to regulations. She was not wearing any rank or insignia. Her skirt is the wrong color for the summer weight uniform. Her tie is not only the wrong color, but it is a man's tie and isn't tucked into the shirt. The shirt also is missing both breast pockets, if she were an army nurse (WACC uniform blouses did not have shirt pockets but were cut differently, did not have epaulets, and had a different collar and neck band thingy). She is wearing makeup, but it's not the same makeup that would have been worn in the 1940s. We don't get a clear shot of her legs or shoes, but I'm willing to bet a dollar that the costuming people gave her modern stockings and shoes. There are blog posts of people who do costuming for a living who talked about the waist band of the skirt was wrong, as were the cuffs on the shirt sleeves. Others point out that she was wearing the wrong type of bra, which would have given her a different.... look, which of course Captain America would have been too much of a gentleman to mention. I even read one post that went on about the knot used on the actress's tie not being the regulation knot for an army nurse of the Second World War.

Figure 4

I know Captain America is fiction, but it was such a good example on how the little details matter. If we were jump into our time machine and visit the 1940s, would we be able to do a better job of wearing the correct clothes so that we don't stick out like a sore thumb? We wouldn't want to be arrested as a spy because we weren't wearing the correct hat to go with our suit. What do we really know bout how clothes were worn during the middle ages? We have manuscript images and paintings; we even have surviving examples of complete outfits, but do we really know all of the little details that the average person would have grown up knowing. 

Do you wear a belt high on the belly or low on the hips? Do you fluff out the tunic over the belt all the way around the waist or would you pull it tight across the belly and tuck it behind you? Or vice versa? If you wear a hood, when would you pull it back off of your head? Before you walk into a building or after you step through the door? Or would you leave your head covered? When do you tip or remove your hat? Within speaking distance or within eyesight? Is it acceptable to adjust your clothing in the middle of the street or would you wait until you are out of sight before tucking and whatever? What would be an acceptable thing to scrape the muck off of your shoes? A door step? The side of a building? We have manuscript images of men with a particular style of dagger, you know which style I'm avoiding the name of, stuck in the front of one's belt: was that common, or rare? Was the image showing normal behavior or rude behavior, or were those images satire? What size of dagger would be seen as inappropriate? Could a woman wear a similar style dagger or would she have to stick to a different style of knife? And that's just the 11th Century? As styles changed to hoopalons, doublets, and bell-shaped dresses, so did the social norms. What size floppy sleeve was considered class appropriate? How big of a hat was considered socially acceptable? When does a codpiece become outright mockery? 

Then there is the question of class separation. We do have images of "peasants" with rolled down chausses working in the fields. The upper classes also wore chausses in the early middle ages, but was it socially acceptable for them to also roll them down and expose some knee? This is an important question as this level of class distinction was the norm in much later times. Read any of the literature of the 19th Century and you will find that descriptions of the clothing of the upper and lower classes are in sharp contrast. Working class people are described as wearing a shirt with the sleeves rolled up and the upper classes never leaving the house without shirt, tie or cravat, waistcoat, jacket, over coat and hat. Photographs from the later half of the 19th Century show this; look at random pictures of street scenes and you will be able to pick out the nobs from the working class stiffs. There was a character in one of Dickens' novels, might have been "Hard Times", who is given the opportunity for social advancement to work as an office clerk, but has to scrimp and borrow money to buy the necessary clothing required to work in an office (a vest, coat, proper pants, tie, hat).

I found some wonderful rabbit holes about Japanese clothing, which I will leave to others to run down. The first is that kimonos were put together differently for samurai than for other people. This was due to the greater mobility needed to wield a sword. The other was that hakama, the pants that are worn over kimonos, were also designed differently for the different classes, with the number of pleats being designated for each class. Three pleats were the standard for the farming classes (nobakama). They were also cut tighter to the body, saving fabric, and with shorter legs to better avoid mud and other things while working. Normal hakama were made with five pleats and were worn by the middle classes, merchants and craftspeople. Umanori hakama were reserved for the warrior classes, and they had seven pleats, set in an asymmetric pattern and representing the seven virtues of Bushido. There are other styles of hakama, which I won't get into, as well as the style of belt, or obi, which could be an article all on it's own. Even something as simple as a kimono and hakama can have reams of subtle details that we, who did not grow up surround by them, would not be able to easily pick up.

The scene in "Pride and Prejudice" where Fitzwilliam Darcy strips down to his shirt on a hot, summer day was scandalous when the book was published in 1813. The upper classes simply did not do that in public. In fact, it was almost a meme in that the upper classes would endure hot, uncomfortable, layers of clothing to set themselves apart from the lower classes. Read anything about the dress requirements of military officers up through WWII, particularly from British and French sources: "Dignity in dress; dignity in rank." Upper class women, in more recent time periods, were required to wear even more uncomfortable layers than their male counterparts: Crinoline, corsets, bustles, under dress, over dress, shawls, all pleated, buttoned, pinned, and laced according to the fashion of the time. Go back a few more centuries and we see farthingales and doublets, each might have detachable sleeves, which would have to be coordinated and arraigned just so. To appear in public with drooping sleeves, or an improperly laced dress, or (gasp), an off-centered ruff, would tell the world that no matter how rich you appear to be, you either can't afford any servants to help you dress, or the ones you have are incompetent and no one in your household respects you enough to make sure that you are dressed properly. (Ask me how often my friends have to re-center my coronet). 

A baker can be excused of walking through the street with a single tunic, and with their sleeves rolled up and their chausses rolled down. They are working, and it's hot in the bakery. Farm workers stripped to the waist as they rushed to get the harvest in was such a common sight that that image became a manuscript meme; it was part and parcel of farm life. Women tucking their skirts into their belts as they clean or do laundry was accepted for the lower classes, although frowned upon if too much leg was exposed (see saucy wench characters at any renaissance faire). But would that sort of behavior be acceptable from the upper classes? The poor might not care, but if you were trying to pass yourself off as a lord or lady, and you unbuttoned your cotehardie because you were getting a bit warm, would the nobs you were trying to fit in with stare at you and wonder what your problem was? The higher up the social ladder you went, the more layers of clothing, and social norms, there were to separate the classes. Remember, the upper classes had entire outfits to wear while they mulled over what clothing to wear for the day. Lucy Worsley did a documentary on the history of upper class clothing for the BBC, a number of years ago. In the segment she did about the Regency Period, she was dressed to the nines in the most fashionable of men's clothing of the time, which included not one, but two cravats. When she complained that she could barely move her head, she was told something along the lines of "that's the price of being rich."

What about colors? We know from manuscript images and from accounts of the production and sale of dyes that the middle ages were a lot brighter and more colorful than depicted in movies and TV shows. But what colors would you wear? What colors would let you blend in and which ones will make you stand out like a sore thumb. Certainly the people at the bottom of the food chain would only have one or two sets of clothes to wear, so having access to a rainbow of garb would out of the reach of most people. But, anyone can decorate their plain garb with some brightly colored ribbons. But, again, which colors. Wearing the wrong colors in Constantinople, particularly around the hippodrome, could get you killed. Wearing the colors of some household's rival could get you accosted in the streets. Were some colors restricted by the season or by the upper classes? Were there bad color combinations, bad enough that you would stand out in a crowd? Mixing stripes and plaids? Would wearing plaid to the court of Edward Longshanks be a bad thing? Were plaids a distinctly Scottish thing in the late 13th century? (BTW: the whole story of clad plaids can be an article by itself, if anyone wants a research topic.) Can anyone reading this article explain to me why we shouldn't wear white after Labor Day?

I have recently stumbled into an interesting rabbit hole about black silk. In the early 16th Century, certain cities in Italy had sumptuary laws restricting the wearing of silk that had been dyed bright colors, indeed, any color other than black. "In order to preserve the distance between the nobility and the nouveaux riches, who could not afford to dress in silk, one of the the recurrent edicts prohibited non-aristocrats from wearing silk of any color except black. Production of dark fabrics must have increased, and the search for quality been stimulated by the demands of this wealthy clientele. The new fabrics that arrived on the market attracted the aristocracy North of the Alps by their originality; these members of the nobility probably knew nothing of the discriminatory significance that black fabrics had acquired in the country of origin." (Piponnier and Mane, "Dress In The Middle Ages")

Visitors to cities such as Genoa, Venice, and Florence, would have seen more wealthy people wearing black silk than colored silk and assumed that the desired fashion was black silk. This was at the same time that a new dye was created that produced a deep, rich, long lasting black. This started a major export trade of both the new dye, and pre-dyed silk, North to the rest of Europe. The rich enjoyed their new black silk, and the social ranks below them started to adopt black wool clothing in a age-old story of trying to copy one's superiors. The taste of black clothing (Europe's second Goth age) can be see throughout Europe for the next century, but was adopted most of all in Spain and in the Netherlands. Look through the works of Rembrandt. Most of the portraits he made of the wealthy Dutch elites show richly patterned, black clothing with tasteful white lace. Dutch wealth wasn't shown as shiny or colorful jewelry, but in the quality of the fabric and lace. The newly unified Spain also adopted the new dark fashion, only they used the starkness of the black silk and wool as a backdrop to highlight the gold, silver, and gems that they adorned themselves with. Black became the de facto uniform color for household servants, in the 19th Century, because of new, cheap, artificial dyes, but in the SCA time period, black was the color of wealth. 

 

Most people didn't have a choice when it came to color: you wore whatever colors you could afford or were given to you. Fabric was expensive and most of the population of Europe didn't have enough money to own an entire closet of clothing. Perhaps a change or two of under garments, a tunic, hood and hose. Maybe a nice tunic or dress for church that was gifted to them by the local noble or through church alms. Medieval Europe didn't have any JoAnne Fabrics where anyone could walk in and buy as much cheap blizzard-fleece fabric as one could ask for. (What? Too soon?) Fabric, and the time to turn it into clothing, was a luxury of sorts. We see employment records straight through to the Edwardian era where annual wages included a "new suit" or the like. This wasn't the uniform or livery required for an apprentice or for a household servant; no, this was a new outfit that that person could wear on their days off. You didn't want the world to know that you can't take care of your servants; making sure that they had nice clothes that they could wear out in the world showed off how wealthy and generous you were; that you don't employ riff raff, only the best people.

Figure 5

Clothing was often mentioned in wills, after all, you can't take it with you. Servants and family members often had specific items of clothing left to them in people's wills. The 1462 will of Joan Buckland states, "...all my other gowns and kirtles, that they be given to my women servants dweling with me and my departure. Also to the woman that is by me at the time of my departing... one gown furred with mink." Joan Mudeford's will of 1484 leaves clothing and fabric: "...I bequeath to Joan Edmundis, my servant, one entire cloth. ... Item, to the Abbot of Adillney, one entire best cloth of blue colour ... …..Item, to Joan Mudeforde, my daughter, my best gown a tunic called “Kyrtyll,” and my best barred girdle, and my best rosary."

"June 27th 1554. David Moris of Mynhed, My body to be buried where as pleaseth my company. To Nicholas Thomas  botswayne in the mynyon my barbara purse. ~To Thomas Corbet my Rapyre. To John Myrie my chest and my writing boke. To Fraunces Savyor my blacke fustion dublet a payer of blewe briches and a clooke. To Sander Lambard a Cassake and a payer of briches. To Lawghwilles wief a pece of paynted clthe. To John Beysars wife of Bristowe the bygger pece of Beme clothe and thother pece to my sister."

New, and hand-me-down, clothing was often a perk of working for royal and noble house holds. Not only was it a bond between the the noble family and their retinue, but it ensured that their people were properly dressed and fit to be seen as companions and servants to the uppermost of the upper crust. In May 1306, Edward Longshanks knighted 267 men in Westminster, including Prince Edward and the notorious Piers Galveston, at what was known as the Feast of the Swans. The king purchased eighty rolls of scarlet and other colored cloth, 2500 yards of linen and 5000 yards of canvas for new clothing for the new knights. As women's fashion kept changing, the expectation to keep up with it made sure that there were plenty of "old" gowns and dresses available to be taken apart and turned into "new" outfits, many of which would be for ladies-in-waiting: the nob got a new dress, her ladies-in-waiting remade the old dresses for themselves. The ladies-in-waiting might re-gift their "old" gowns to servants lower down on the pecking order. Expensive items like fur or pearls would be removed to suit the social status of the giftee.

Clothing was also handed down within families; it still is today. The eldest child out-grows an outfit, it gets handed down to the next child. If there are no other children to receive the clothing (you've run out of siblings or cousins), then the clothes could be sold or traded at one of the many second-hand markets. Clothing could be picked apart and re-sewn for a better fit, or taken apart and remade into an entirely new outfit. Old fashions could be zhuzhed up with new trim or buttons. Francoise Piponnier and Perrine Mane in their book, "Dress in the Middle Ages", write that such secondhand merchants were closely monitored to make sure that improper clothing wasn't sold to the wrong people; more on that in part three of this series.

Then there is the quality of fabric. The quality of the fabric would indicate the social status of the wearer. The higher up the food chain, the more access to better quality clothing. Take my garb, for example. Most of what I wear to events is made from 100% linen from The Fabric Store: the 5.3 ounce variety. Let us just talk about the fabric: how good quality is it? Good enough for an actual late 11th Century, Norman Baron? Would it be seen as too good for an actual Norman lord, or not good enough? Would the nobs scoff at me for slumming it or would they wonder if I stole the tunic from a Duke or Earl? The trim on some of my tunics would definitely stand out with their mechanical precision. If our goal is to blend in, it wouldn't be a good idea to wear something that would attract the attention of the Fashion Police, particularly, as I discussed in Part 1, I wouldn't be able to communicate with the locals in a convincing way. "Whaire did you get zis devilish trim and why did you put een on zis chéap linén?" "Er, mon crayon est gros et jaune."

Hats, veils, hoods, belts, jewelry, badges, gloves, cloaks, capes, shoes, all of these things can be dictated by social classes and professions in ways that no one ever wrote down, because it was part and parcel of daily life. The people who lived in those past times would instinctively know how to wear their clothing and accessories "properly" and would be able to tell, just by how another person was dresses, where each person stood on the social ladder. Knowledge of these minute things would allow us to fake it and fit in with one group of people or another. At least long enough for us to ask some questions or to learn the lost secrets of the past. Unfortunately, there is so much that we just don't know, and don't have a lifetime of observations, that no matter how careful we would be, and how much planning we would do, our clothing would most likely stand out as if we would to show up to a funeral wearing a powder-blue tuxedo. 

We do have plenty of manuscript images and paintings of head wear, but there is only so much we can glean from them. We have to make some assumptions based on those images. We do miss out on complete context because people, during those times, didn't bother to write down the nitty-gritty details. Many written sources are complaints about the latest of fashions, rather than details about why a hat is worn in a particular way. As a modern example, let me take a moment to talk about baseball caps. Up until about 15 years ago, how someone would wear a baseball cap would clearly indicate if someone was working class or upper class depending on if the person curved the brim or left it flat. (this was, of course, before pre-shaped cap brims and limited edition collector caps with flat brims). When I was in the army, I could tell the difference between an officer and an enlisted soldier, at a distance, by how the brim of the field cap was shaped. I served in the Army as an MP and I had a field hat that was starched and shaped to look perfect for high-profile guard duties (much like how officers prepared their hats), and my other field hats were crumpled from being shoved into a pocket. 

People who wore baseball caps while working outdoors would shape the brim to help shield their eyes from the sun. This shaping was done by the wearer as the needed more or less sun coverage. Management, working indoors, never needed to learn how to shape the brim so their caps always sat awkwardly on their heads at company picnics. Cowboy hats are also a sign of social distinction. The perfectly shaped hat of the upper classes was a status symbol, made to look impressive while worn on the heads as well as sitting on a shelf or a desk, while the working hat of an actual ranch hand was hand shaped to fit snugly on the head to shield the face from wind wind, rain, and sun. 

So, a good question would be this; would there be a similar class distinction for people wearing bycocket hats ("chapeau a bec" in French)? The "Robin Hood" or "Peter Pan" hat. This is a hat worn by both men and women, often while riding, hunting, or hawking. There are certainly other medieval hats, but the bycocket is a very recognizable hat from the late middle ages. Based on manuscript images, the hat was more commonly worn by women in the 14th Century and the style drifted to mostly men in the 15th Century. Images show that the hat was worn by both the upper and lower classes, based on the depicted clothing. Eleanor Von Atzinger's "The Bycocket: A Study of Felted Headwear" list statistics of manuscript images breaking down who wore the hats (more males than females and animals combined), where they were worn (more outdoors than indoors) and even the colors (26% depicted are red). 

Figure 6

Looking at images, women tended to wear the bycocket over a hood or veil, although there are plenty of images of women wearing just the hat atop the hair, while men are more often depicted either wearing the hat without a coif, or with a hood pulled up over the hat. When would one know how to wear one? Under what circumstances would a woman wear just the hat? Was it age related, or based on marital status? Was it expected that woman would remove their hats in the same fashion that men were expected to, or did women pin their hats to their veils or hair knowing that they weren't expected to tip their hats to social superiors? 

"What about the use of pointed hats by women? From what has emerged from iconography and previous studies, it seems that this hat was worn by women in very specific circumstances. The only analysis in a costume history text that I have been able to find is that of R.L. Pisetzky (History of Costume in Italy, vol. II, 1964-69, p. 118) who, regarding women's headdresses, says:

“Often over the hood, when it is not lined with fur, and also over other hairstyles, women, like men, when traveling or riding, wear the heavy hat with raised brims.”" Anna Attiliani, "Medieval Tacuinum: The bycocket in women's garb".

 

We can assume that a man might pull their hood up over their hat if it were windy or cold. We can assume that the wealthy would decorate their hats with trim, fur, or pearls, while the poor would either have plain hats, or decorated with pilgrim badges or ribbons. The wealthy would also have access to more expensive material to make their hats from, while the poor would be stuck with felted wool. 

Would someone wear the hat "backwards"? With the point pointing backwards? I have seen plenty of people in the SCA wearing the hat backwards, but I can't seem to find any period images of anyone doing so. I can think of circumstances where someone might not want the brim blocking light, but didn't want to take the hat off of their head. Would this be an acceptable thing for someone to do? There are plenty of people who wear baseball caps backwards, today, to the derision of certain people. 

What about the fashion of wearing a scrunched up hood as a hat? Known as a chaperon, this started out in life as an alternative way of wearing liripipe style hood, but turned into it's own distinct head-cover by the 16th Century, becoming more turban than re-purposed hood. “Nowhere is change more apparent for both sexes than in headdresses. A short shoulder-cape with hood, the chaperon, continued to be fashionable and the liripipe or taper grew and grew until, by about 1420, it sometimes reached the ground and, to avoid tripping over it, the wearer frequently tucked it into his belt or wrapped it round his neck.” (Madge Garland and J. Anderson Black , "A History of Fashion")

Figure 7

"The liripipe is somewhat vestigial at this point in time, but aided in the wrapping of the garment. The ca. 1445 chaperon in figure 3 was created by wrapping its liripipe around the brim at the end of the process and folding it in; later chaperons may have lost the liripipe and original hood structure entirely. The ca. 1525 chaperons in figure 4 have firmly rolled brims from which the rest of the fabric cascades out and down, and one man accessorized his with a brooch." (Kenna Libes "Fashion History")

At what social level did this become off limits? Was it permissible for rich people to wear them and ridiculous for poor to? Would it be the equivalent of someone, today, wearing a stovepipe hat and overalls? We must understand that people of the middle ages were far more adept at knowing their place in society and the place of those around them. They would know when someone was faking it by picking up on clues that, I feel, would be too subtle for us to pick up on. Our modern society doesn't work in the same way; blue jeans and t-shirt are worn by all classes of our world. 50-60 years ago, they were the stock "uniform" of kids and the working class. Now we have people wearing $500 jeans and designer t-shirts, so we have developed other observations to determine the rich from the working poor. Torn jeans used to mean either you were poor or had a blue-collar job that tore up your clothes. Today, people pay a premium for pre-torn blue jeans.

Remember, the goal for this experiment is to be able to not stand out if we were to have a time machine. If we show up dressed like an actor from "The Tudors", "The Vikings", or "Ironclad" would people think we were stupid? Or that we had stolen everything like a fashion magpie? Or would they think that we were there to drum up business for a play? The subject of hats could be an article all on it's own, as could hoods, cloaks and other accessories, and I've spent too much time researching, writing, and editing this one. Part three will be about the dark side of clothing.

 Image credits:

Figure 1: Image of monks; Wikipedia Commons.

Figure 2: Yates Thompson MS 13 f.174r; British Library. 

Figure 3: Bocksten Man clothing - WIkipedia Commons. 

Figure 4: Screen capture from "Captain America: First Avenger" and images from The "Women's Army Corps, 1945-1978" by Bettie J. Morden

Figure 5: Dyers Immersing Bolt of Cloth in Vat of Dye Placed Over a Fire, 15th Century

Figure 6: Detail of Saint Helena from Agnolo Gaddi's frescos at the Basilica of Santa Croce, 1380, Wikipedia Commons

Figure 7: Quentin Massys (Flemish, 1466–1530). The Tax Collectors, ca. 1525. 

Ask Another Laurel - What is a Mark?

by Caleb Reynolds

The following was written for the AEthelmearc Gazette

I'm still working on part two of the how not to be noticed series, but I keep getting distracted: orange omelets; certifications for work; medieval riding horses; cleaning the house; car repairs; Roman dodecahedrons. Part 2 is being written but I needed a mental pallet cleanser. I will keep this short.

So, I was doing some research and kept coming across a Mark as a unit of currency. I kept finding references such as "A 1265 French ordinance ruled that a squire could not spend more than twenty Marks on a rouncey", or "The Bohemian King Wenzel II rode a horse valued at one thousand Marks in 1298", or "[London] servants and artisans were not allowed to buy cloth costing more than 2 marks a length". But, what is a Mark? Why did France, England and Bohemia use the same currency?

The short answer is that they didn't. Kingdoms used a Mark to do monetary transactions. A medieval Mark, unlike the pre-Euro German Mark, wasn't a coin, but an international unit of accounting that was the equivalent of 160 Pennies (ish). This allowed people to easily convert money from one currency to another, since most European kingdoms used a similar form of currency derived from ancient Rome: Denarius (Penny, Pence, Pfennig, Denier), Sesterius or Solidos (Shilling, Sous, Groschen, Quentchen), and Libra (Pound, Pfund, Livre, Gilder, Taler). All rabbit holes lead to Rome. See, one Imperial Roman pound of silver was minted into 240 silver coins called denarius or denarii.

Each currency followed similar rules, although the actual numbers changed over time: 12 pennies to the next biggest coin, 20 of those to the next step up. On paper, 240 pennies would weigh one pound-weight of silver and the Pound, Livre, etc, would be the equivalent value of a pound-weight of silver: an ancient Roman pound-weight, which is less than a modern pound-weight (329g vs 454g). A Mark (from the Latin "Marca") was 160 silver pennies (ish) from anyplace, or 2/3 of a pound-weight of silver, ancient Roman pound-weight, of course. Or 8 troy ounces; about 250g. This dates back to the time of Charlemagne's father, Pepin the Short. I have been unable to find out why this arbitrary weight was used. I couldn't find anything obvious, like the annual salary of a Roman soldier or the cost of a plow horse. There probably was a logical reason for the 2/3rd of a pound-weight, but I have been unable to discover it.

I can't imagine that Pepin was brain storming about what weight they should use to make international commerce easier and instead of using a full pound-weight, he picked up a 12" Philly cheesesteak and said, "Yes, this cheesesteak is the right weight for these new Marks." And, of course, since he was the king, they had to go with the cheesesteak's weight, much to the disappointment of team-double-order-of-Buffalo-wings. The only "logical" explanation I could find, while searching academic sources, was that a Libra (Pound, Pfund, Livre, Gilder, Taler) was 12 troy ounces of silver and a Mark was 8 troy ounces of silver. You will notice that while this is technically correct, it doesn't answer our question as to why.

Seriously, I can't think of any logical reason why. Everyone already agreed to use the 12 troy ounces as the weight of 240 silver pennies (more or less), so the Pound, Pfund, Livre, Gilder, and Taler would represent the same mass of silver. I don't know why everyone didn't just use that as the inter-kingdom standard. Why 2/3rd of a pound? How is 13s 4d an easier number to deal with than 20s. Both 160 and 240 are divisible by 10, 8, and 4, but 240 is also divisible by 12. I've been racking my brain as to what logical reason why a Mark was such an arbitrary weight. It's about the weight of two adult hamsters, or ten 'AA' batteries, or an empty heart of a child. Or a medium sized russet potato. Or a small, paper-back book. Or, as Google AI tells me, a handful of coins (I hate AI because of answers like that). Maybe Pepin just hated exchequers.

Robert Tye's "Coin Weight and Historical Metrology (Third Revision, 2022)" gives the following explanation: "The simplest and most readily available measure of volume available to mankind, at least for a stuff like grain, is using a kind of cup made up of the two hands, when used to scoop up a small heap. My own trials of this with modern wheat grain suggest this amount of grain weighs about 250g. In addition, many authors have estimate the average human daily bread ration at about 500g, thus approximately double that amount. These two physical measure arise out of the basic facts of human beings themselves, and might well be connected to the prominence of 500g and 250g standards in Europe, Persia, and China, as will be accounted below." [p116]

This is an interesting idea, but the 2/3rd of a Roman pound-weight was never, as far as I can tell, used to measure out grain or bread; only silver. Most set pricing for bread mentions a full pound of bread to be sold a certain amount. Criminal charges were handed out to bakers who sold bread under a full pound; the whole concept of the baker's dozen was a way of making sure that a dozen small rolls weighed a combined 1 pound, with an extra roll thrown in to make up for any undersized rolls. Philip Grierson, in "Money and Coinage under Charlemagne" theorized that there were two different Carolingian pounds, a heavy one of 16 troy ounces and a light one made up of 15 troy ounces, which might have had something to do with the difference between a Roman pound and an Arabic pound. Or it might have had something related to internal and external commerce. Tye went on in his paper to write, "...but with a general lack of consistency in the coins and apparently no weights or texts to corroborate anything, we are left somewhat whistling in the dark." [p143] We might never know the real reason.

Unfortunately, despite the general agreement about the theoretical weight of the penny, the number Pennies to a Mark varied, based on the time and place, being 144 in some parts of Germany and 160 in others, 160 in Britain, Scotland, Ireland, Flanders and France, and between 160 and 384 in Scandinavia, probably due to the physical size of coins minted in various places. Several sources I found list the weight of a Mark in Gotland as 200g, whereas in Pomerania the Mark was just under 250g. Spain had a complicated history of coinage in the Middle Ages due to the various Islamic and Christian kingdoms that were rivals and what was done after the unification of Spain under Ferdinand and Isabella. And don't get me started on what the Italians were doing. But, for the purposes of this short article, let us just agree that a Mark was 160 silver pennies and move on.

The purpose of the Mark was to make commerce easier, particularly between kingdoms. If you owed someone 1 Mark, you could either count out 160 pence, or the local equivalent, or you could hand over 2/3rd of a Roman pound-weight of silver, about 250g, as mentioned above. As long as the weight of silver was sufficient, that was what was used to pay your debt. Coins, ingots, serving plates, cutlery, rings; the weight of silver was all that mattered. If you owed 100 Marks, you would need to turn over 25kg of silver as collecting and transporting 16,000 pennies would be more of a challenge. Richard the Lionheart's ransom was set at 150,000 Marks, which was 32,900kg of silver. No fiddling about with converting English Pounds to Austrian Talers, the English just had to fork over almost 33 metric tonnes of silver. The huge amount of silver was split between The Holy Roman Emperor, Heinrich VI and the Duke of Austria, Leopold V. The Austrians used the silver to improve the walls of several cities and to establish the Austrian mint. What the Emperor used his share for is a subject for another article.

Marks weren't used for small debts; if you owed someone 50 Pennies, you paid in coins. Either 50 silver pennies, or, 4 Shilling coins and 2 Pence. Pound coins, and their equivalent, were used for medium sized payments within one kingdom. Because of the difference in weight between various coinage, an exchequer or a money changer could figure out the the relative value between coinage which could be various sizes and weights, particularly in port cities where sailors and merchants could have money from almost anywhere in their pockets. The exchequer did this using an exchequer, which is defined as a calculation board used by an exchequer. This is like how a casserole is any dish that is baked and served in a casserole dish. Writing about how to use an exchequer is already on my to do list, but if anyone in the Kingdom's Coiner's Guild wishes to write about it, I would be happy to share the spot light.

Buying a cheap horse from a local seller was normally done with coins, but buying a expensive horse from the other side of Europe was normally done with Marks, or with letters of credit that could be redeemed for a named weight of silver. Marks continued to be used for international accounting until the early 16th Century when new coinage were created for high denominations, minted in gold. But, that will be a more complicated deep dive because everyone kind of went nuts with making new coins. Gold became more common, in Europe, as the new world was looted of everything shiny. The Spanish and Portuguese crowns were using that gold to buy influence across Europe, and gold coins can always be melted down and re-minted.

I hope this helps puts things into perspective when you do your research and come across prices in Marks. Now, back to researching sumptuary laws.

Ask Another Laurel - How Not To Be Noticed - Part 1

Ask Another Laurel - How Not To Be Noticed.

Part One: English, my friend, do you speak it.

by Caleb Reynolds

The following was written for the AEthelmearc Gazette

How far back in time could you go and not be identified as an outsider?

Probably not very far. Aside from the question of if we could talk to people and be understood, cultures of most of the world, throughout history, have been hyper focused on belonging. If you aren't from our village, or our town, or our kingdom, then you are an outsider and not to be trusted or accepted. Read up on the propaganda Henry VII used to make Catherine of Aragon acceptable to the English populace; it took years before she was fully accepted by the English people.

Being able to blend in was a requirement throughout human history. Knowing your place, and having neighbors who knew who you were and where you fit in, was essential to survival. Going all the way back to the Tale of Gilgamesh, we read of characters who ask strangers who they were and where they came from. In "The Odyssey" a common refrain is "Who are you and who are your people."  We have plenty of records from the middle ages of how travelers were treated and where they were allowed to go in a town or city. We have records of traveling peddlers and merchants being welcome in the town square by day, but had to be outside of the town gates by nightfall. Accepted when they had goods to sell, but not trusted after dark. 

Go back far enough and we find a legal system that was based on your place in your community. Your jury was composed of people who knew you personally. If you were accused of a crime, you called in your friends to stand as your jury, who would speak of your character and your innocence. If you had no local friends, if you were a stranger, the chances of someone standing to speak for you would be slim to none. We read of instances where a crime was blamed on a stranger, an outsider, who was convicted because no one was there to speak on their behalf. During the Norman occupation, a violent crime against a Norman had to have someone who was convicted and punished for that crime, otherwise the punishment would be meted out against the people who were near the place of the crime. The logic being that they must have seen who did the deed and they must be withholding evidence. The records that have survived show that, often, random people were held to blame; either people of the area whom no one liked, people who had a bad reputation anyways, or strangers. If someone had to be punished, it might as well be someone who wasn't one of us.

Half of the witch trials in England were against men and women who lived outside of the community. The shepherd whom the town rarely saw; the old woman who had no family and lived out in the woods alone with her cats. The charcoal burners who lived in the forest, always watching their fires. The dye makers who lived way, way, way over there because of the stench of making dyes. To be alone in the middle ages could be dangerous. Exile was a punishment: We don't want you, go find some other people who will take you in. If you were wealthy and interesting, you might find a new home. If not, you better hope that wherever you go, there are people from your homeland who might be kind to you. Look at how our country treated the Irish and the Italians. Look at how Paris treated Russian exiles. Look how England treated people from India and the newly created Pakistan. Un-welcomed by the general public, but finding homes next to fellow countrymen who were also forced to find a new home. Look at the mass migration of human beings today and the general protest of "no more foreigners in OUR country."

But the question here is could we fit in in an alien time and place? Could we walk the streets of Rome, or London, or Mainz without notice? Could we blend in enough so that we can find the answers to the mysteries of the past? Let us assume that you had access to a time machine that would put you at any desired time and place in Earth's history. You can bring whatever gear you could carry and return at anytime, but, you don't have a TARDIS to translate for you. Or one of Star Trek's universal translators. Or a holographic Al to feed you information from a supercomputer. Just our own current technology. You can have a team of helpers to prepare clothing and accessories, but you have to go alone. Exactly how far back could you go and still interact with people and not be run out of town?

Language changes. Sometimes slowly and sometimes quickly. Colloquialisms and slang can change very quickly. Watch a movie from the 1930s or '40s and try to follow the slang used. Words like cockamamie and gobsmacked are still used today, but if you go to a diner and the waitress asks you if you want some dog's soup, would you say yes? If someone invites you to a jook, would you go? Would you walk into a blind pig? Go back a another hundred years and would you be able to fit in with the mudsill? Would they think that you were a Philadelphia lawyer? Could you be someone's huckleberry? 

Did you watch the Ken Burns' Civil War documentary? Did you notice how the cadence of the letters that they read sounded so foreign to our modern ear? Read through the Sherlock Holmes stories in the format that they were originally printed. The English that was spoken (and written) at the time of Doyle is different enough from our English that we would sound out of place if we were to visit his time. Let me give you an example, and yes, it involves pretzels, 'cause of course it does. This is part of the oldest recipe for pretzels that I know of, from 1881: "throw them into a cauldron of strong hot lye made from wood-ashes; as soon as they rise to the surface, throw them on fine salt; immediately after put in the oven and bake" Look at the sentence structure: "throw them on fine salt" not "throw fine salt on them". This might seem to be trivial but if you speak differently, people will know that you ain't from 'round these parts.

My example was from 150 years ago, which in terms of the SCA was just the other day. Do you think that we would be able to talk with William Shakespeare, if we could go visit him? Shakespeare didn't speak like he wrote. No one actually spoke in iambic pentameter. Normal people don't talk in rhyme regardless of what '80s cartoons taught us. Shakespeare is the bane of English high school students because it is almost modern English, but different enough that it might have been French in places. The sentence structure, of his time, is strange, many words have different meanings or are no longer part of modern English, and what pronoun to use is more complicated than today. Which is correct: "you" or "thee"? "Your" or "thine"? Using the wrong word could be seen as insulting to the listener, or make you appear to be foolish or putting on airs. 

That's just English. Let's say you want to go back in time to France, or Italy, or Germany, or Spain. Those languages have also changed over the centuries, and to add to the complication, those languages have gendered nouns. Are you certain that the genders haven't changed? Today, German bridges are girls (die Brücke) and Italian bridges are boys (il ponte). Was this always the case? I honestly don't know, but that is something that you would have to learn before you take your trip. And speaking of French, Victor Hugo's "The Hunchback of Notre-Dame" is the bane of high schoolers in France. The book was only written in 1831 but the changes to the French language are as significant as the changes to English from Shakespeare's time to ours. France has an official government agency tasked with reigning in changes to modern French and to stop the influx of new words from other languages. 

Of all of the European languages, Icelandic and Basque have the least amount of drift over the last 1000 years. English, the most. There isn't much data about Welsh, Cornish, Scots or Irish Gaelic because the English tried for a few centuries to destroy those languages completely. (Strangely enough, in the most North-Eastern corner of England, there is an out of the way place that still speaks a version of the Old English dialect used in Northumbria before the Norman Conquest: The late historian Terry Jones did a documentary where he visited that place with a professor of Old English to act as a translator with the local farmers.) Hebrew and Arabic have also had little change in last thousand years. A former co-worker of mine, who is a devoted Muslim from Pakistan, once told me that the 7th Century Arabic of the Quran is very similar to modern Arabic, although, he said, no one really speaks Arabic in the same fashion in day to day life. His description reminded me of the English of the King James' Bible compared to modern English. Very readable, but not how we speak today: very old fashioned. I have no clue about Persian, Indian, Chinese, or other Asian languages; someone who knows more than I do about those parts of the world would be better suited to research that.

 Then we have to acknowledge that there really is no one English language. Or German. Or Italian. Or most any language, for that matter. Medieval French can be broken up into Picard, Limousin, Gascon, Langues d'oïl, Occitan, and other dialects. What version of French you speak would tell the listener where you came from and even give hints as to your political leanings. Patois and Québécois are North American-French dialects and if you try to speak either one of them in Paris, the locals will know that you ain't from 'round here. German also had a lot of regional dialects: Hochdeutsch, Plattdeutch, Bayerisch, Sächsisch, Swabian, just to name a few. And don't even let a Sicilian and an Italian talk about who's great grandparents spoke Italian "properly." Thanksgiving get togethers turn into a dinner and a show over how to say "lasagna". (Don't even ask why there are peas in the lasagna. That's a different fight.)  

The Castilian Spanish that I learned in high school allowed me to go to Mexico and get around, but it wasn't the same language as what the locals were speaking. It probably won't help me any better in Catalan Spain, if I were to visit. Since our goal is to visit the past and not be noticed, speaking the wrong dialect, or with the wrong accent, will mark you out as an outsider. Why would someone answer weird questions from the weird stranger with the weird accent? Must be up to something. Somewhere in my house I have a book on cold war spy craft. There was a chapter on the difficulties of teaching someone how to sound the right way, which is why spy agencies prefer to recruit locals. The book told of a British spy working in Moscow, in the 1950s, who explained away his horrendously bad Russian accent by saying that he grew up in Siberia and deliberately played up the rural aspect of coming from the back waters of the USSR. He got away with it for a couple of years until a KGB agent, who was actually from Siberia, heard him and wanted to know what language he was speaking. The British spy's story fell apart and he was arrested.

Regional accents would also give us away; we really don't know what the accent of a particular town or city was 500 years ago. There are no audio recordings and I don't know of any written descriptions of accents outside of works of fiction, and we can take those with a big pinch of salt. Our accent would tip off not only that we are foreign, but what class of society we belong to. If we sound like we grew up on a farm, people will know that we aren't the Lord or Lady that we claim to be, and vis a versa. If we are trying to pass ourselves off as a commoner, in town looking for work, and we sound like an Oxford educated BBC news announcer, people will notice.

So, our best bet to not give ourselves away with what we say is to say nothing at all. We could try to get by using nothing more than hand gestures (and, perhaps, with a wax tablet if we found someone who could read what we wrote). We couldn't use ALS to communicate: while there was a kind of sign language used by monks to get around the whole no talking during meals rule, it mostly concerned food and doesn't translate well into interactive conversation. I would have to say that trying to communicate with someone from 15th century Europe using ALS would attract far more attention than speaking "bad" French with a strange accent. We could try to get by dressed as a monk and miming that you have taken a vow of silence, but outside of Victorian novels' plot points, I don't think that monks traveled outside of the monastery still under the vow of silence. They would have had to communicate with people to ask for directions, conduct business, or beg for alms. But, pretending to be a monk who was traveling from one monastery to another would be a good cover story. The habit and cowl would identify you as a monk, someone who was both part and apart from everyday life, and if you didn't speak the local lingo well, then you could always use the Conehead ploy. A nun's habit would also work, although I don't how often a single nun went traveling long distances by herself. I will leave the research of the migration patterns of medieval nuns to other curious minded people.

Perhaps you could learn Latin; that was a universal language for learned people, right? You will be able to communicate with other learned people, right? Right? I've been reading about how even Latin had dialects. Is 'V' pronounced "vee" or "wee"? Is it "vivat" or "wiwat"? "Veni vidi vici" or "Weni Widi Wici"? Would you pronounce the "C" in Caesar as "see" or as "kai". Both are correct, in the middle ages. During Rome's imperial days, it would have been pronounced "kai-sar" by the elites and those that wrote the poetry. Language historians believe that the lower classes might have said "see-sar" in the same way that the lower classes of London drop the "h" from many words. Caesaria is now called Kayseri, in Turkey. Kaiser is the German derivation of Caesar. In French, and then English, the "kai" sound migrated to a "see". Spanish kept the "kai" of the "C" but pronounced the "S" and "R" sounds differently. Italian turned the "C" into a "jay" sound over the centuries. The pronunciation of Caesar could be an article all on its own. You probably won't be able to communicate with the average person, but you might be able to get into a university library and ask for a book. 

Idioms would also be an issue for us. Not only would most of our modern day idioms make no sense to someone from the Middle Ages, (just think of explaining "swipe left" to someone who lived before cell phones were invented) but their idioms might have no meaning to us. If it's 300 years before china reaches Europe, then a bull in a china shop would make no sense. And trying to change the idiom (a bull in the pottery shed) might earn you a dirty look and a "Why didn't you just say clumsy?" "Shaka when the walls fell" only makes sense if you've seen one episode of one TV show. "To the word and to the letter" makes sense to us, or should. As does "Once an abbot", but what does "To drink like a Pope" really mean? Without the cultural context we only have a 50/50 chance of figuring it out: drink a lot or alcohol, or no alcohol? It depends on which Pope we're talking about, because the phrase is attributed to several Popes, some who abstained from sin and others who acted in most un-Pope like fashions, and using that phrase in an insulting manner might get you arrested for heresy. 

Many books have been written about how language has changed over the centuries, so I won't spend any more time on it, in this article. I was planning on a single article covering language, clothing, and mannerisms, but I decided to split it into three separate articles so that readers won't be overwhelmed by my rambling. Part two will cover what to wear and part three will cover how to act.

The following was written for the AEthelmearc Gazette

Ask Another Laurel - It's Flat, Like a Pizza

by Caleb Reynolds

Did people in the middle ages really think that the Earth was flat?

I'm certain that some people did, just like some people today hold that supine view. But most people, particularly the people who made the maps, sailed the ships, and surveyed the land knew that the Earth was a sphere. But, why do we keep reading that the medieval world thought that the Earth was flat and only "The Great Navigator" Christopher Columbus (Cristoffa Corombo in his native tongue) knew that it was actually round and he spent years trying to convince the Crown of Spain that he was 100% correct and everyone else was 100% wrong?

To answer that question we first have to go back into time. All the way back to 240BCE to the Greek City-State of Alexandria, where the chief librarian and mathematician, Eratosthenes of Cyrene, heard about a particular well in Syene, along the Nile. On the summer solstice, the sun shone directly down this well, at noon, illuminating the water but not the sides of the well. Eratosthenes knew from observation that this phenomenon did not occur in Alexandria and, like all really smart people, wanted to figure out why. Eratosthenes made the connection that since the Earth was a sphere (The Greeks knew about this fact since the 4th Century BCE), he would be able to use simple trigonometry to figure out the actual size of the Earth. Eratosthenes hired three different people to accurately measure not just the distance between Alexandria and Syene, but the distance between the well at Syene and a stick Eratosthenes had positioned vertically in Alexandria.

The average of the three measurements was 5,000 stadia (a Greek stadion was about 185 meters but an Egyptian stadion was about 157.5 meters. Alexandria might have been a Greek occupation, but it was an Egyptian city) and the angle of the shadow cast by the stick was 7.2 degrees. Simple trigonometry tells us that the circumference of the Earth, using Egyptian stadion, would be 250,000 stadia or 39,425km: about 2% off of the modern measurement of 40,008km. (If you use the Greek measurement you end up with 46,250km, about 16% off. [1] Ancient Indian, Persian, Arabic, and African astronomers and mathematicians confirmed the circumference of the Earth, by a variety of methods, and this measurement was used by Medieval European scholars.

Figure 1

So, where did this idea that everyone thought that the Earth was flat except for Columbus come from? Well, most of it comes from Washington Irving’s "A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus" (1828), an anti-Catholic screed masquerading as a history book. Irving, who is well known for his other history books, "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and "Rip van Winkle", wrote of the narrow mindedness of the Catholic Church, clinging to biblical texts that the Earth was flat; stonewalling the genius, secular thinker Columbus, who I have to add, was also a Catholic. Historian Darin Hayton puts it succinctly and diplomatically, "Whatever liberties Irving took in crafting his biography, he did not lose sight of historical truths. Instead, and perhaps more disturbingly, he enlisted those truths in the service of truthiness. In Irving’s version, Columbus had struggled against “errors and prejudices, the mingled ignorance and erudition, and the pedantic bigotry” of the Spanish Church that refused to listen to reason and evidence. His biography was less about Columbus and more about the timeless struggle between on the one hand rationality, science, individuality, and anti-aristocratic modernity and, on the other hand, a retrograde, oppressive, medieval Church. It was the story’s truthiness that appealed to other 19th-century authors. ... By the latter 19th-century, the supposed truth of the Columbus story had completely replaced the historical truths. In works like John Draper’s "History of the Conflict between Religion and Science" (1874) we read nothing of the reasoned objections raised by the Council at Salamanca or of Columbus’s errors."

Like all conspiracy theories, it begins with a grain of truth as to why Columbus wasn't instantly given what he wanted and why it took 7 years before he was given the ships and the funds to sail off into literally uncharted waters. The actual details are quite interesting and certainly nothing like what I was taught in school, but there are several reasons why it took so long for Columbus to get a fleet.

The first being Columbus had no experience as a ship captain, pilot, or navigator. He did sail a lot, as he was a trading agent for several wealthy families of Genoa. But, and this is important, Columbus was a passenger on all of his trips, not a sailor. While Columbus wrote that he went to sea at the young age of 14, there is no evidence that meant anything more than moving with his family from Genoa to Savona. Columbus would have been working an uphill battle to be taken seriously: He was proposing a radical trade route, which he would lead, while at the same time having nothing on his CV that would make anyone want to take the risk. Those of you who know me, know that I've been working in IT for almost 30 years. If I were to interview someone for a data center operator and they tell me that they would be perfect for the job because they spent a few years driving delivery trucks and they've watched "Sneakers" 100 times, I would ask them to leave.

In fact, comparisons of the pilot logs recorded by Columbus (on the Santa Maria) with the logs of Martín Alonso Pinzón (Captain of La Pinta) and his brother Vicente Yanez Pinzón (Captain of the Santa Clara, which was nicknamed La Niña) do show that the professional sailors were meticulous in their logs and their measurements of latitude and speed. Columbus, on the other hand, used a technique called "dead reckoning" and was very sloppy in his log recordings. Unfortunately, details on the three Captains' work is difficult to find outside of academic pay-walls. The few bits of technical information I did manage to find point to Columbus' inexperience with taking readings and doing the correct math. The Pinzón brothers were very good at their jobs [2] but there are questions about what length league Columbus used and there are serious questions about if he logged fake celestial observations. 

The following is from the late Keith Pickering's "Columbus Landfall" website, in which he goes into some detail about celestial navigation: "The quadrant readings Columbus obtained on his first voyage are horrible by any standard. Some have suggested that Columbus mistook another star for Polaris, but that seems ridiculous: Columbus used the stars of Ursa Minor to tell time at night, so he was very familiar with that constellation. In 1983, James E. Kelley, Jr. provided the solution to the mystery: as mentioned above, many quadrants in maritime museums have tangent scales. If Columbus misread the scale, he might have recorded the tangent of his latitude (without the decimal point) instead of his actual latitude. If that were the case, Columbus's measurements would only be wrong by a couple of degrees or so, which is not bad considering the technology. In any case, it is clear that at this point in his career Columbus was not familiar enough with celestial techniques and tools to use them successfully. So it is not surprising that on his second voyage, there is no record that Columbus attempted to use celestial navigation (except for the fraudulent eclipse longitudes). Instead, he stuck to the tried and true dead reckoning practice of "rhumbline sailing", keeping a constant west-by-south course the whole way from Gomera to Dominica in the West Indies."

Columbus would have had to prove himself to competent people, not just royalty who would just give him money based solely on fancy words. If he could not show to professionals that he, someone with no experience sailing a ship, did know how to use the tools of navigation or properly do the math to calculate a ship's position, then he would have been shown the door, regardless of how charismatic he might have been.

The second point being timing. In 1486 Columbus used his trading contacts to get an audience with the joint monarchs of the newly unified Spain. They referred Columbus to a maritime commission who eventually rejected his plan, but Ferdinand and Isabella did hire Columbus as "an agent of the court" with a salary of around 1,000 maravedis per month, or about $3,000 in today's money (based on the work of William Thomas Walsh), good money if you can get it. Spain might have wanted to keep Columbus happy, and in Spain, even if they didn't think he could do what he claimed. We should note that Spain was involved in a war with the Moors in southern Spain and couldn't afford the expense of sending ships and sailors off on what might have been a wild goose chase. In 1488, Columbus went to Lisbon to see if the Portuguese would back his plan, but, Bartholomew Dias had just returned from his successful trip around of the Cape of Good Hope, opening up a trade route to India that bypassed the Middle East. King John wasn't interested in sailing West to India when he was gearing up to set up colonies along Africa that would act as way points for his ships sailing around that continent.

Columbus sent his brother Bartholomew to the Court of Henry VII in hopes that the English would finance the voyage. Henry didn't, and Bartholomew left England for the sunny climate of the court of France's Charles VIII, who didn't care about the plan either, but did convince Bartholomew to stay in France as a royal map maker.

In 1490 Columbus made another appeal to Ferdinand and Isabella and the royal 8-ball said "Try again later." In 1491 he was summoned to the Spanish Court to pitch his proposal to the Dragons. Which leads us to point number 3.

The third point was what Columbus was asking for. Ten million maravedís to outfit a huge fleet of ships and sailors that would have had no oversight. Formal titles for himself and his family. The hereditary titles of Viceroy and Governor over all lands he discovered as well as any lands discovered after his voyage. The perpetual office of Spain's Admiral of the Ocean, which would be passed on to his descendants forever. And 1/10th of all of the gold, silver, pearls, gems, spices, silks, and all other goods produced in all of the lands discovered on this journey to be awarded to him and his descendants forever. Not brought back to Spain, but 1/10th of everything produced in all of the lands discovered. It is worth noting that Columbus was looking for a short cut to Japan and China, so any additions to the European maps would be controlled by Columbus and his family in perpetuity. The Crown sent his offer to a financial committee.

The fourth and final point has to do with the nature of the proposition. Columbus wasn't promoting the idea that the Earth was round; he was promoting the idea that the Earth was small. We must go back into time, again, to find out why. In the 2nd Century BCE a Greek astronomer named Posidonius of Rhodes made observations of the star Canopus. He recorded that when the star was visible at the horizon at Rhodes, it was 7.5 degrees above the horizon at Alexandria. Posidonius used a distance between the two cities as 5,000 stadia which would give a circumference of 240,000 stadia, which was close to Eratosthenes' 250,000 stadia. Unfortunately, this is wrong. The distance between Alexandria and Rhodes is 3,750 stadia and Canopus reaches a height, visible at Alexandria, of only 5.25 degrees. 

Claudius Ptolemy, writing in his "Guide to Geography" used Posidonius' calculations instead of Eratosthenes', and he did correct the error in the distance between the two cities. Unfortunately, he used the inaccurate 7.5 degree figure obtaining a value of 180,000 stadia, or around 28,386 km: 14% smaller than what Eratosthenes calculated. This miscalculation was known about almost immediately; Cleomedes wrote about the error in the 1st Century AD, and other mathematicians also noted Ptolemy's math error among other errors (like the Indian Ocean was a large, inland sea and not an ocean). Ptolemy was translated into Latin and other languages in the 10th and 11th centuries and printed in 1475 with movable type: it was very popular and wildly read despite its errors. 

We don't know if Columbus owned his own copy of "Guide to Geography", but we know that three people who influenced Columbus did. The first was Pierre d'Ailly, who wrote "Ymago Mundi" in 1410. We know that Columbus did own a copy of this book. In fact, his copy with his hand written notes still survives. d'Ailly wrote that the Atlantic and Pacific oceans were the same ocean, since Ptolemy didn't write about any antipodes, or dry land, in the same latitude as Europe and Asia. Ptolemy also influenced a German map maker named Martin Behaim who also made globes. Behaim was a resident of the Portuguese Court at the time Columbus visited, and Columbus brought one of Behaim's very inaccurate globes with him on the Santa Maria. 

Finally, one of Columbus's teachers was Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli, who was a brilliant architect and astronomer. He was also a less than brilliant map maker. He had taken Ptolemy's figures and made his own calculation on the size of the Earth and ended up with a number smaller than Ptolemy; some 25% smaller than what we know today. Toscanelli was the one to come up with the plan to sail West until you hit China, which according to his calculations, should only take three weeks if one leaves from Lisbon. Toscanelli had written of his plan to Afonso V of Portugal and had given a copy of the letter, along with one of his maps, to Columbus. [3]

 

Figure 2

So. We have Columbus, who had no experience in navigating, promoting a crackpot theory of how the world was smaller than what was observed, asking for an extraordinary amount of money and titles to sail off to parts unknown at a time when Spain was in the middle of a war and Portugal was making plans to sail around Africa. I can see why Irving made up the story of how they thought the Earth was flat. It was clearly an easier argument to make. Wrong, but easier to write about. 

In January 1492, Spain defeated the Moors in Granada and the Crown once again considered Columbus's plan. Luis de Santangel, financial advisor to the crown, managed to convince Isabella to change her mind about the venture. He argued that the plan “offered so little risk yet could prove of so great service to God and the exaltation of His Church, not to speak of the very great increase and glory of her realms and kingdoms”. So convincing was his argument, that Isabella offered to sell her jewels to finance the mission. Luis told her that that would not be necessary; that Spain had the funds, now, to pay for the expedition, albeit a much smaller one than Columbus had asked for. Instead of 20 ships and 10 million maravedís, Columbus got only the three ships, one newish carrack, a fat and slow cargo ship, that Columbus took for himself (because it was the largest of the three at 18m and 100 ton displacement, and two caravels, the newly built La Nina, small and fast at 15m and 50 ton displacement, and the 50 year old, refitted La Pinta at 17m and 70 ton displacement. He also received 87 sailors instead of the hundreds he had asked for. All future rewards and titles would be determined by the success of his expedition.

I will end this article here, on the dawn of Columbus's voyage: 3,400 words is enough for now. I might add a part 2 to my list of future projects. 

[1] Unfortunately, most of Eratosthenes work has been lost over the last 2,000 years, but other writers quote his work quite extensively, so we have a good understanding of what his methods were. Some of the maps that he created were dutifully copied over the centuries and it appears that he preferred the Egyptian standard of distance over the Greek.

[2] Vincente later charted the mouth of the Amazon river, on an independent voyage to South America, and was the first European to report observations of the Coalsack Nebula.

[3] Afonso had died before Columbus reached Lisbon.

Images:

Figure 1: Measure of Earth's circumference according to Cleomedes' simplified version, based on the approximation that Syene is on the Tropic of Cancer and on the same meridian as Alexandria. Wikipedia Commons.

Figure 2: A modern version of Toscanelli's map. The Americas' landmasses are depicted in gray. Bartholomew, J. G. - A literary and historical atlas of America, by Bartholomew, J. G Public Domain.

The following was written for the AEthelmearc Gazette

Ask Another Laurel - Skyclad warriors.

by Caleb Reynolds

Did the Celts really fight naked?

Bronze statue of a naked Celtic warrior with horned helmet
and torc. Originally from northern Italy, and presently in the
Antikensammlung (SMPK), Berlin

We must understand that language is not constant; it is ever flowing and ever changing, based on the time and place it is uttered. A subsidy used to be an English tax on moveable goods. Now it is a payment from the government to cover in whole or in part the cost of something. Pain is different in English than in French. What was said can have quite different meanings based on context. One of my absolute favorite phrases is from Homer: "The wine-dark sea". Almost 3000 years later and that phrase still evokes imagery. And confusion. There has been this idea, that started in the 19th century, that the Greeks mixed their wine with some kind of alkaline substance that turned their red wine blue; under the assumption that the Mediterranean Sea is a clear blue, therefore "wine-dark sea" must mean blue since the ancient Greeks didn't have an equivalent word to our "blue". But in order to translate from one language to another, it is not only necessary to know both languages, but the context of the text. [1]

Oînops póntos can be literally translated to wine-faced sea, as in the red face of one who has drunk too much wine, or wine-eyed sea, or blood-shot eyed. Homer uses the phrase over a dozen times in both the Iliad and the Odyssey. In context, Homer was either describing rough seas, as like to the reddish face of a drunkard about to explode into rage, or describing the sea at sun-rise or sun-set, where the low hanging sun turns the water red. A wonderful visual of setting sail so early in the morning that the sea is red, or just reaching land as Helios departs for His slumber. Homer also uses it as an metaphor of the bloodshed Odysseus leaves behind as he moves from one island to another: the sea is figuratively stained with blood because of the actions of Nobody.

So, when writers of antiquity say that the Celts fought naked, what did they mean. Did they literally fight wearing only their birthday suits: unclothed? Or did they fight not wearing armor: unarmored? Or did the Celts fight outside of the strict formations the Romans and Greeks used: undressed, as we would say in modern, military terms. Or, did they mean something else, entirely?

We do know from ancient Roman and Greek texts that the Gauls did not fight shoulder to shoulder with interlocking shields, like the Romans or Greeks did, but in loose, open groups that could quickly be deployed from one area to another. A Roman soldier, used to fighting in a phalanx, would most definitely comment on this. A single Roman soldier, even in full armor, would be overwhelmed; their main defense was the mass formation of troops who protected one another. "Look at these barbarians. Too simple to fight in dress formation. Practically naked, out there." Diodorus Siculus wrote that the Celts, "when they are formed for battle, to step out in front of the line and to challenge the most valiant men from among their opponents to single combat, brandishing their weapons in front of them to terrify their adversaries."

The Roman Legions were also pretty unique in the ancient world. Most soldiers did not wear metal armor. Bronze and iron were expensive and turning it into armor was a luxury that most citizen-soldiers could not afford. Most soldiers were part time warriors, and conscripted farmers might have a helmet and a shield issued to them, but little else. While some veterans of war might have kept armor they had looted, most made do with the clothes on the their backs or with cloth armor, like linothorax. People slightly higher up on the wealth ladder might invest in leather armor. Professional soldiers and their commanders might have metal armor as befits their stations. But Rome equipped their Legions with standardized metal armor. From the newest recruit to the generals; the entire army was fully armored in bronze or iron. The Spartans were also fully armored in bronze but they were the exception in Greek culture and the Spartans never really had a huge standard army. [2]

Imagine if you would, you and your buddies do street racing. Y'all have some tricked out Hondas, you might have a '68 Mustang or a '73 Stingray and y'all think that y'all are the best. Then along comes a new team of racers and they all show up driving Bugatti V1100 supercars and they have their own pit crew that follows them around. That would be the the Roman Legon. You show up to fight wearing linen armor and your captain has a leather breastplate and a fancy iron helm but each Roman is wearing more metal than you see in a year and there are 10,000 of them. By comparison, the you would be figuratively naked.

We are told that the ancient Celts charged into battle, against the Roman Legions, wearing only a shield and smile. We have many contemporaneous account of the nakedness of the Celts. Nakedness was not a unusual thing in the ancient world, particularly with the Greeks and Romans, who participated in sports and games sans clothing. Depictions of gladiators represent them as wearing minimal clothing, and those that wore armor were not covered head to toe; there was plenty of skin to show the gathered crowds.

The "Battersea Shield" is a bronze Celtic shield facing from
the 4th - 1st Century BCE. The shield facing is decorated with red
enamel in the La Tene style, and was probably made in Britain. From
the British Museum in London.

But in warfare? In active combat? Do we have any actual first hand accounts?

First, I think we can set aside the statues, friezes, and victory columns of the ancient Greeks and Romans. I think that their representation of naked warriors is an artistic approach that glorifies the human body rather than an actual depiction of combat. While we do have plenty of examples of naked Roman Legionnaires fighting, in artwork, most surviving examples of the stela of dead legionnaires depict the soldier wearing armor. Christopher H. Hallett wrote in "The Roman nude: heroic portrait statuary 200 B.C.-A.D. 300" that soldiers and rulers "were given “heroic” costume (nude with weapons) basically to symbolize “agonal qualities and youthful vigor". Other writers indicate that the Romans often depicted defeated or captured enemies as naked as symbolically defenseless against the might of Rome.

But, what did the Greeks and Romans actually write? What were their contemporaneous accounts?

Plutarch wrote that the Spartans would remove their armor and charge at an enemy that the Spartans wanted to humiliate, although he does not give any exact circumstances where this might have happened. Nor does any other writer from that time period. This might be part of the Spartan myth, or might have been a tall tale invented by Plutarch, since his was the earliest mention of this behavior.

Livy tells of how the Tolistobogii of Galatia fought naked: "They did battle naked, armed with large shields, long swords, and any available stones". ("The History of Rome", Book 38) He also wrote, "The fact that they fight naked makes their wounds conspicuous and their bodies are fleshy and white, as is natural, since they are never uncovered except in battle; so that both more blood flowed from their abundant flesh and the wounds stood out to view more fearfully and the whiteness of their skins was more stained by the black blood." But, in the paragraph beforehand, Livy wrote, "Their shields, long, but not wide enough for the size of their bodies and, moreover, flat, offered poor protection to the Gauls. They had at this time no other weapons than their swords, for which there was no use, since the enemy did not meet them in hand-to-hand conflict. Stones —but not of suitable size, since they had made no preparations in advance, but took each what happened to come to his hand in his hasty search —they did use, but like men untrained in their employment, with neither skill nor strength to add effectiveness to the blow." This sounds more like the Gauls were caught off guard and unprepared than their standard battle procedure. It's backed up by Livy's comment in Book 26 where he wrote that the Tolistobogii soldiers each carried seven javelins into battle. This sounds more like Livy was trying to make a Roman victory over surprised, unprepared, unarmored soldiers a bigger deal than it was.

The Greek historian Polybius wrote about the Gaesatae, mercenaries hired by the Celtic tribes the Boii and Insubres to fight with them at the Battle of Telamon in 225BC. From Book II of "Histories": "This order of the Celtic forces, facing both ways, not only presented a formidable appearance, but was well adapted to the exigencies of the situation. The Insubres and Boii wore their trousers and light cloaks, but the Gaesatae had discarded these garments owing to their proud confidence in themselves, and stood naked, with nothing but their arms, in front of the whole army, thinking that thus they would be more efficient, as some of the ground was overgrown with brambles which would catch in their clothes and impede the use of their weapons. At first the battle was confined to the hill, all the armies gazing on it, so great were the numbers of cavalry from each host combating there pell-mell."

And then a couple of pages later: "The Romans, however, were on the one hand encouraged by having caught the enemy between their two armies, but on the other they were terrified by the fine order of the Celtic host and the dreadful din, for there were innumerable horn-blowers and trumpeters, and, as the whole army were shouting their war-cries at the same time, there was such a tumult of sound that it seemed that not only the trumpets and the soldiers but all the country round had got a voice and caught up the cry. Very terrifying too were the appearance and the gestures of the naked warriors in front, eight all in the prime of life, and finely built men, and all in the leading companies richly adorned with gold torques and armlets. The sight of them indeed dismayed the Romans, but at the same time the prospect of winning such spoils made them twice as keen for the fight. But when the javelineers advanced, as is their usage, from the ranks of the Roman legions and began to hurl their javelins in well-aimed volleys, the Celts in the rear ranks indeed were well protected by their trousers and cloaks, but it fell out far otherwise than they had expected with the naked men in front, and they found themselves in a very difficult and helpless predicament. For the Gaulish shield does not cover the whole body; so that their nakedness was a disadvantage, and the bigger they were the better chance had the missiles of going home."

Polybius is considered one of classical Europe's greatest historians. He traveled as far as he could, visiting battle sites, interviewing survivors, copying down inscriptions and after-action reports. We can take his writing perhaps not as gospel, but as the baseline of accurate reporting. I have no doubt that Polybius used the best information that he could gather. He even joined in on the combat in Carthage, in the company of Scipio Aemilianus, so that he could write effectively of what fighting in a shield wall actually felt like. That being said, eight naked warriors at the, I hesitate to say, tip of the spear, doesn't sound like a normal fighting formation. It sounds more like the behavior of champions. Or, as more modern writers would put it, as ritual sacrifices to the Celtic gods of war. To charge into battle naked, with only a sword and shield, sounds like intentional suicide. A "good death" as the Spartans would say. Some modern writers call these warriors "religious fanatics", but in that time and place, charging into battle with nothing more than a smile would make for a legendary, nay, heroic death. The stuff of legends and would guarantee a place in what ever afterlife one could ask for. It might also convey riches or privileges to one's offspring. And if you survived, you would be treated as a king.

The Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, writing in the 1st century BCE, says the Celts "think so little of death that they fight wearing only a loincloth, without armour of any kind." But he also wrote "Some use iron breast-plates in battle, while others fight naked, trusting only in the protection which nature gives." So, some wore armor and some wore nothing. Writing almost two hundred years after the Battle of Telamon, Diodorus praises the Gauls' quality of armor, shields and swords while at the same time saying that they also fought naked.

Strabo, another 1st century Greek historian, wrote extensively about the Celts north of the Alps and frequently mentioned how lazy they were, while at home, and how few clothes they wore, while at home. But he also wrote, "The Gallic armour is commensurate with the large size of their bodies" and describes the armor in very decent detail.

Celtic warrior`s garments, replicas. In the museum
Kelten-Keller, Rodheim-Bieber, Germany - WikiPedia Commons

Pliny is often quoted as one of the sources for naked soldiers in battle, but while I have found several references to the Celts fighting sans armor, I was unable to find any sources of Pliny describing actual naked people fighting. Victorian translations of Trajan's Dacian Wars tell that the Dacians fought naked, but modern translations use "defenseless" instead. The Victorians also produced plenty of pictures of buff, nude Celts for their history books. I wonder if they used the literal translation for the salacious imagery rather than for the pursuit of historical accuracy.

Both Polybius and Livy wrote about the mercenaries Hannibal employed at the Battle of Cannae. Polybius describes them as fighting completely naked and Livy describes them as fighting bare chested. It must be noted that the army of Hannibal was geared for hit-and-run guerrilla warfare rather than for stand-up fighting. Lightly or unarmored troops would make sense. And there is evidence that Italy was experiencing higher than normal average temperatures during Hannibal's invasion: it is likely that his troops took every opportunity to strip down to stay cool. This might explain why Roman soldiers had such a difficult time trying to corner Hannibal: if there was a heat wave, fully armored Roman soldiers would have been hard pressed to keep up with light infantry who were able to ditch heat retaining, metal armor.

The Picts of Scotland are wildly claimed to have charged into battle naked, but Cassius Dio, one of our best sources of the Picts living North of Hadrian's Wall, never described the Picts as fighting naked, only living naked ([The Caledonians] ...they dwell in tents, naked and unshod.) Cassius describes both the Caledonians and the Maeatae tribes as "They go into battle in chariots, and have small, swift horses; there are also foot-soldiers, very swift in running and very firm in standing their ground. For arms they have a shield and a short spear, with a bronze apple attached to the end of the spear-shaft, so that when it is shaken it may clash and terrify the enemy; and they also have daggers." He also describes the pictish warriors as wearing colorful pants and cloaks with painted or tattooed bare chests.

So, we do have a few contemporaneous sources for some Celts fighting shirtless or completely in the buff, but does that mean that they all did? What examples do we have of Celts wearing armor?

Cassius Dio writing on Boudica's revolt said, "Our opponents, however, can neither pursue anybody, by reason of their heavy armour, nor yet flee; and if they ever do slip away from us, they take refuge in certain appointed spots, where they shut themselves up as in a trap."

Strabo said of the Lusitanians, Celts living on modern day Portugal and Western Spain, "[They] wear linen cuirasses; a few wear chain-wrought cuirasses and helmets with three crests, but the rest wear helmets made of sinews. The foot-soldiers wear greaves also, and each soldier has several javelins; and some also make use of spears, and the spears have bronze heads."

Appian of Alexandria, writing some two hundred years after the battle of Magnesia in the Seleucid War, described the Galatians as "mail-clad."

Gallo-Roman statue of a Gaul warrior wearing Roman clothes
and weapons - WikiPedia Commons.

The Roman historian and linguist Varro describes the word "lorica" as being derived from armor made of leather straps called lori, "but afterwards, the Gallic corselet of iron, an iron tunic made of rings, was included in the same word."

Plutarch wrote in detail about the arms and armor of the enemies of Rome. Of the Cimbri tribe, "They wore helmets, made to resemble the heads and jaws of wild beasts, and other strange shapes, and heightening these with plumes of feathers, they made themselves appear taller than they were. They had breastplates of iron, and white glittering shields; and for their offensive arms, every one had two darts, and when they came hand to hand, they used large and heavy swords." And of King Britomartus, "The king of the Gauls […] with his armour, that was adorned with gold and silver and various colours, shining like lightning. These arms seeming to Marcellus, while he viewed the enemy’s army drawn up in battalia, to be the best and fairest, and thinking them to be those he had vowed to Jupiter, he instantly ran upon the king, and pierced through his breastplate with his lance."

Plenty of ancient writers described the iron and leather armor of the soldiers of Concolitanus and Aneroëstus, the joint leaders of Celtic mercenaries who terrorized Roman settlements in Northern Italy. Diodorus Siculus wrote "For armour they use long shields, as high as a man, which are wrought in a manner peculiar to them, some of them even having the figures of animals embossed on them in bronze, and these are skillfully worked with an eye not only to beauty but also to protection."

The 2nd Century Greek geographer Pausianas wrote of the Gaulish invasion of Greece, "The Gauls were worse armed than the Greeks, having no other defensive armour than their national shields, while they were still more inferior in war experience." Pausianas was writing about "The Other Battle of Thermopylae" which took place in the 3rd century BCE. The above line was written a few paragraphs after, "Hither Brennus sent some ten thousand Gauls, picking out the swimmers and the tallest men; and the Celts as a race are far taller than any other people. So these crossed in the night, swimming over the river where it expands into a lake; each man used his shield, his national buckler, as a raft, and the tallest of them were able to cross the water by wading." This sounds more like an unarmored strike force than a full company of soldiers. Particularly if they had to swim across a river. This might reinforce the idea of naked Celts if this strike force striped down to their ancient skivies in order to swim across the river. Pausianas does not describe the armor of the Celts, during the invasion, in any detail: armor was only mentioned in passing, as in this paragraph about the Celts and Phoncians, who were allies, mistaking each other for the enemy: "So rushing to arms they divided into two parties, killing and being killed, neither understanding their mother tongue nor recognizing one another's forms or the shape of their shields. Both parties alike under the present delusion thought that their opponents were Greek, men and armour, and that the language they spoke was Greek, so that a great mutual slaughter was wrought among the Gauls by the madness sent by the god."

But, equal in number are the references to the clothing worn by the Celts, what we might call plaid, today, and their heavy cloaks of wool. I think that this is keeping with the fact that most soldiers on the ancient battle field were only part time soldiers and farmers don't need fancy armor for the occasional fight they might be involved in. We also have plenty of sources describing how the Celts fought bare chested, showing off tattoos or body paint. In fact, the word Pict comes to us from the Roman Picti, meaning painted one. I think that we can draw the conclusion that without armor, many Celts attempted to use intimidation and bluster to cow their opponents. Think of modern football fans at a game, bare chested and covered in body paint, hooting and hollaring. Or, go on the YouTubes and watch a Haka challenge. Either one from a rugby match or from the Māori themselves: unarmored and covered in tattoos, shouting a challenge at anyone who would dare to stand up to them. You don't need armor if people are too afraid to fight you.

I could possibly write a book about all of the ancient references to ancient Celtic armor, and the various translations of ancient text, so I will end this with one final note. If the Celts regularly fought naked, why didn't Julius Caesar, in his "Commentaries on the Gallic Wars", mention it once? Nine years of observations and not once does he mention naked Celts. He does describe the armor the Gauls wore, and the clothing worn by the unarmored soldiers, but no salacious account of naked people. The closest I was able to find was a mention of how King Teutomarus managed to escape from a surprise attack, wounded and bare chested.

So, I think that we can make the following conclusions:

1) Warriors stripping naked on the battle field was such a rare occurrence that it had to be mentioned.

2) Soldiers surprised in their encampments did not take the time to get dressed before rushing to defend themselves.

3) There were circumstances that required the Celts to remove their clothes, i.e.: extreme heat, swimming across a river.

4) Most Celtic participants on the battle field weren't full-time soldiers and did not have any armor to wear and chose to look menacing by going bare chested and showing off body paint or tattoos, like some uber-macho shirts vs skins game.

5) Language changed over the years and, after a century or two, sometimes exact details were lost or were changed to make for a better story.

6) The underlining sub-text of Greek and Roman artwork was interpreted literally by historians.




[1] I have tried to use, for this article, the very latest English translations of sources that I could get my hands on, under the assumption that modern translators would be better equipped to deal with shifting language and meaning.
[2] Perhaps 9000 able-bodied male citizens at most, in all of Sparta, with about half on active service at any one time. The Spartan Agoge method of training children to be soldiers, and full citizens, was brutal and we really don't know how many children died, or were crippled, each year, but it was enough that female full citizens outnumbered male citizens by two to one. The 292 Spartans captured at Sphakteria (425BCE) were a considerable percentage of Spartan's active fighting force. But, that is a subject for another article.