Clothing was a long-lived investment
Cloth was expensive in the Middle Ages, because spinning, weaving and finishing were all done with a great deal of hand labor. A garment was therefore something to maintain, alter, hand down or sell, not something to replace each season. Clothes were patched, turned inside out, re-cut for a child, and left in wills. Even modest households often counted a good gown or cloak among their most valuable possessions.
That context explains much of what follows. Medieval dress changed over roughly a thousand years and varied by region, so the picture below is a general one, not a description of a single time or place.
The basic layers
Most people dressed in layers, which allowed them to adjust to weather and work without owning many different garments.
- Underlayer: Both men and women commonly wore a linen shirt or chemise next to the skin. Linen could be washed more easily than wool, so it protected the outer garments from sweat. Men often wore loose linen drawers, usually called braies.
- Middle layer: A tunic, or in later centuries a kirtle or cotehardie, formed the main garment. Men’s tunics ranged from knee length to longer robes, and women’s were generally ankle length.
- Outer layer: A cloak, mantle, or later a long gown or short jacket (sometimes called a doublet in the later period) added warmth. Hoods were extremely common, and often had a short cape over the shoulders.
- Legs and feet: Men wore hose that covered each leg, fastened to a belt or later to a doublet. Shoes were usually leather, and wooden or leather overshoes protected them from mud.
Women’s heads were typically covered once they were married, with veils, wimples, linen coifs or, among the wealthy in the later period, elaborate headdresses. Men wore hoods, caps and hats.
Fabrics and their meanings
Wool was the great everyday cloth of northern and western Europe. It came in coarse, rough grades for laborers and fine, closely woven grades for the rich. The business of wool, from sheep to finished bolt, was central to many regional economies, and the wool trade shaped whole towns. Linen, made from flax, was used for underclothes, headcloths and summer garments. Hemp provided a coarser cloth, and in places was used for working clothes and sacking.
Silk was a luxury import for centuries, first arriving mostly from the East and later also woven in Italy and elsewhere. Furs such as squirrel, ermine and marten were used as linings and trim, and they were expensive enough that rules about who could wear which fur appear in several kingdoms. Poorer people more often used sheepskin or lambskin for warmth.
Color was part of the cost. Dyes were made from plants, insects and minerals, and the process of dyeing cloth is described under natural dyes such as woad (blue), madder (red) and weld (yellow). A deep, even color generally cost more than an undyed or lightly tinted cloth, so bright and saturated clothing tended to signal means.
Work clothes
Peasants and laborers needed clothes that let them move. Men often wore shorter tunics, belted at the waist, with hose or leggings tied up out of the way. Women wore simple gowns, sometimes with sleeves rolled or removable, plus aprons, and headcloths to keep hair out of the way. Rural clothing was usually undyed or dyed in muted tones, in russet, brown, gray, or the colors of undyed wool, though this should not be overstated, since illustrations of the period show workers in a range of colors.
Crafts had their own protective garments, such as leather aprons for smiths or tanners. Monks and nuns wore habits whose cut and color distinguished their orders, and clerics generally wore long garments to mark their status. Students and members of a craft guild might wear a common livery for processions and feasts, which marked them as part of a group.
Dress as a signal of status
In a society that thought of itself in terms of ranks, such as the three estates of those who pray, fight and work, clothing gave a quick, visible clue about a person’s place. Length, fullness, fabric quality, fur trim, jewelry and headwear all communicated something. Long, full robes used more cloth and left less freedom to move, so they hinted at a life without manual labor. Women’s dress marked age and marital status, and some groups, such as widows, had recognizable styles.
Rulers and towns sometimes tried to formalize this in law, and the matter of sumptuary laws is a topic of its own. What matters here is that dress was understood as communication. It could also be deceptive, since prosperous townspeople sometimes dressed above what authorities thought appropriate.
Change over time
Early medieval clothing across Europe was fairly simple, with tunics, cloaks and leggings drawing on both Roman and local traditions. From about the twelfth century, there was more tailoring, and in the fourteenth century there was a notable shift. Garments, especially men’s, became more closely fitted through cutting and lacing or buttoning, and hemlines for men rose noticeably. Historians have linked these changes to better cutting skills, growing urban wealth and court fashion, but the exact causes are debated.
Footwear, headdresses and sleeves became more extravagant in the fifteenth century among the wealthy, and they often attracted complaints from moralists. These trends, though, are best documented for courts and cities. Most people, for most of the period, wore plain and practical clothes.
What we actually know
Evidence is uneven. Surviving clothing is rare, because worn cloth rarely lasts, so historians depend on manuscript illuminations, sculpture, tomb effigies, wills, inventories and archaeological finds such as textile fragments and shoes. Images can be idealized or conventional, and wills and inventories mostly list the property of people who had something to leave. For poor people, much of the picture is inferred.