Local laws required Jews, “Saracens,” and sometimes even Christian deviants to wear distinctive clothing, or markers on their clothing, so they could be readily identified. Again, the details varied from community to community. For Jews, the markers most often consisted of a round patch, usually yellow, about the size of a human palm, to be displayed prominently upon the front of the garment. They could sometimes get out of wearing it—for a fee, of course. Muslims were marked with a yellow crescent. In fact, visible religious identification may have begun in Islamic countries as a means of identifying those who were exempt from heeding the call to prayer. In Christian Europe, however, lawmakers were more interested in segregation, in preventing intermarriage, and in increasing the revenues brought in by tolls and taxes levied exclusively on non-Christians.
The clothing worn by prostitutes was also heavily regulated. Their required markers were sometimes extremely visible: striped hoods or cloaks, black and white pointed hats, and yellow dresses are just a few variations. These later evolved into armbands of a certain color, or a hood cut in a distinctive shape. Fur, jewelry, and even embroidery were generally forbidden to prostitutes, although the reasons for this are ambiguous. It may have been because such finery was only considered appropriate for respectable women, but it may also have been for the protection of the prostitutes themselves. Such visible wealth could have made them targets for robbery, and with no male guardians, they wouldn’t have had much legal recourse.
Last Thoughts
What fascinates me most about medieval clothing is how little we know. That seems to contradict what I said in the very first paragraph, I realize, but it underscores an important point—medieval clothing is largely a matter of interpretation. Very little fabric remains from that era, thanks to Europe’s climate. Writings contain references to articles of clothing that sometimes can’t be identified precisely. Artwork depicts men much more frequently than women, or depicts farmhands laboring in their Sunday best, or gives us representations that are hard to understand. A painting of a woman with a butterfly veil, for example, raises more questions than it answers: if the veil is presumably held up by wires, how thick were they? Were they visible? Could you have put your eye out with one? Was the veil stiffly starched, or do the wires hold all the weight? No one knows for sure. The information has to be interpreted, and interpretations differ. This is part of why the costumes in Camelot look like they’re from the 60s, and those from A Knight’s Tale, when we watch it years from now, will look so very turn-of-the-millennium. We see the Middle Ages, ultimately, through the prism of our own experiences.
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Rachel Hartman gave up a million-dollar career in Comparative Literature to make comic books. Her work has appeared in the anthologies Rampage, Brainbomb, and SPX99, and her regular series, Amy Unbounded, has won two awards. When not obsessing over her storylines, she’s reading about medieval economics or imagining she can dance. Her previous publications in Strange Horizons can be found in our Archive.
Further Reading
Fernand Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life
Madeline Pelner Cosman, Medieval Wordbook
Francis M. Kelly and Randolph Schwabe, A Short History of Costume, 1066-1800
John Peacock, Costume 1066-1990s
Pepin Press Design Books, A Pictorial History of Costume
Marie Piponnier and Perrine Mane, Dress in the Middle Ages
Lynn Schnurnberger, Let There Be Clothes
Tom Tierney, Medieval Fashions
Interview: Joan Aiken
By Gavin J. Grant
10/29/01
Photograph by Beth Gwinn Joan Aiken is the author of over sixty books for adults and children, perhaps the best known of which are The Wolves of Willoughby Chase series. Her latest book, Shadows and Moonshine, is a collection of short stories soon to be published by David Godine, while editions of The Cuckoo Tree, The Stolen Lake, and A Necklace of Raindrops have all been recently reissued. She comes from a literary family; her father was the well-known poet Conrad Aiken, and her brother, John Aiken, was also a published writer. She still types all her novels on a typewriter, never having moved onto a computer, therefore this interview was conducted by mail. Aiken lives in Sussex, England, with her husband.
Gavin Grant: When did you begin writing? What were your influences?
Joan Aiken: I began writing on my 5th birthday, when I bought a writing pad with birthday money and began filling it with poems and stories. The stories were very short. One, “Her Husband was a Demon,” based on a dream, was longer. When I went to school at age 12, two books in the school library, John Masefield’s The Midnight Folk and The Box of Delights, influenced me very much in my first full-length novel, written at age 16 or 17. But other influences were multifarious, since I read so much as a child—E. E. Nesbit, Francis Hodgson Burnett, Charles Dickens, Saki, James Thurber, and Edgar Allan Poe.
GG: I have read that, when writing a book, you used to read it to your children, as they were the best critics. While writing, do you still read your books to children?
JA: I have read my books to my grandchildren, who seemed to enjoy them and were not as critical as my children—but perhaps a grandmother is thought to be above criticism.
GG: What do you feel is the difference between writing for adults and writing for children? Do you plan the piece or work differently?
JA: As far as I am concerned an autopilot takes over to change the mode between writing for adults and writing for children. There are many differences—the vocabulary is simpler, the style more direct. The pace is faster when writing for children, who soon become bored by descriptions of thought-processes, flashbacks, overlong descriptions. There is no great difference in the structure of plots. Characters in children’s books are simpler and more strongly defined, like those in Morality plays—personified abstractions.
GG: For many people (in the U.S.), the Wolves of Willoughby Chase and its follow-up books are deeply associated with illustrator Edward Gorey, who died last year. Do you feel similarly about the relation of Gorey’s pictures to the books? Does losing his art affect how you think about writing the series?
JA: In fact, Edward Gorey did not illustrate the Wolves series—in England they were illustrated by Pat Marriott, in the U.S. by Robin Jacques, Susan Obrant, and others. Latterly, Gorey did the jackets. I loved those, and am sad and grieved at his loss, but his work was not associated in my mind with the writing of these stories.
GG: One of the interesting things about that series is the lack of a fixed main character. The Wolves of Willoughby Chase focused on Bonnie and Sylvie. Dido Twite then became the main character, but the last three books have centered on Is. What makes you decide to shift main characters in a given book?
JA: Lack of a main character: Of course when I wrote Wolves I had no idea that the book would take off in the way that it did. Its success encouraged me to write a sequel, and I intended Dido Twite to die at the end. But a heartbreaking letter from an American child—”Why did she have to die? She was such a good character.” (with no address on the letter so I was unable to reply) obliged me to rescue her from the sea in Nightbirds on Nantucket. From then on I had become addicted to her. Letters from readers asking if she was going to marry Simon alerted me to the fact that she was becoming too much of an adult, so I introduced Is. Another book, unfinished at this time, returns to Dido. A slight supernatural element may be introduced.
GG: Which illustrators have you enjoyed working with the most?
JA: I have been blessed with my illustrators. Pat Marriott produced exactly the type of pictures I had envisaged for the Wolves chronicles. Jan Pienkowski did wonderful eye-catching illustrations for the younger children’s stories. And Quentin Blake was absolutely perfect for Arabel and Mortimer.
GG: In recent years you’ve been writing novels connected to Jane Austen’s novels. Are these as much fun to write as they are to read? What inspired you to write these continuations?
JA: I had written a series of plays for the BBC Schools programmes. Each episode was discussed by a committee and the process was slow. Hung up on this, I had the idea one night lying in bed to write a sequel to Mansfield Park about the heroine’s sister who replaces her as Lady Bertram’s dame de campagne—it was great fun to write, just slipped off the typewriter and nicely filled in the BBC gaps. So that got me started…
GG: Are there any other authors whose works you would like to continue?
JA: No, there are plenty of other writers whose work I greatly admire, but not to the point of writing sequels.