he costume of a Christian Anglo-Saxon noble woman of the ninth century.The overdress is ankle length, wide, overdress with fairly wide sleeves reaching to mid forearm and a round neck opening.
The cut of this dress resembles the tunics worn in the Late Roman and Byzantine times, like the tunic dalmatica.
Beneath it a less wide, ankle length under dress is worn with long tight sleeves. The sleeves are longer then my arms
to create the wrinkles on the lower part of my arms.
The veil could be colored and voluminous and it could be fastened with fillet or ribbon.
The fabrics commonly used in this period where wool and linen because of it's rarity, silk was reserved for the very wealthy. My entire outfit is made out the lowest grade of silk with a very "rough" look, it looks more like linen than what we usually refer to as silk.It does however have the qualities of silk that I love so much, it's soft, warm, comfortable and it has a great radiant color.
I had a hard time finding art of the ninth century in the sources that are available to me.
In two of my costume books,
Handbook of English Medieval Costume by C.Willet and P.Cunnington and History of Costume by Blanche Payne,
I found a picture of the type of costume I was looking for however both of them where re-drawings.
The drawing in History of Costume is particularly bad, but the book does mention the colors of the original; blue under dress, purple overdress, purplish red mantle and blue head scarf.
This inspired me to use my boldly colored silks.
I was delighted to find the image you see top of the page, on left, on the Internet,
but alas there was not source mentioned on this site. Both Cunnington and Payne cite as a source Harley MS. 2908, Folio 123, British Museum.
Cunnington dates the costume to the eleventh century, Payne to the ninth century.
In my opinion it's more likely to be ninth century as the overdress of the eleventh century was tighter.
Update ! 31-01-2005
The image is from Josep Strutt's: A Complete View of Dress and Habits of the People of England published originally in London, England, in 1862.
It is image number 20.
Looking at more of his drawings I found out that
he has made re-drawings of original sources, for example one of his drawings has an image of a female devil in a laced
dress, the original is from the Whinchester Psalter. Maybe this image of the high born anglo-saxon lady is also a re-drawing
of an original 9th or 11th century source.
At this moment I am working on the embroidery, it still needs a strip of yellow silk embroidered with red cirkles, on the hemline of the overdress. And I am thinking about making a strip down the front as in the picture of the original.
This is how it looked before
For more information on ninth century costume and about live in the early middle ages, that a look at the web site of Octavia Randolph.
While surfing on the internet I found this really interesting article about anglo-saxon costume.
