MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1yr ago·Edited 1yr ago
Great post - it is far too easy for us moderns to underestimate the cost and importance of textiles pre-Industrial revolution. Textile production (fibre preparation, spinning, weaving, and sewing, but mostly spinning) was the main work of pre-modern women and was far more labour-intensive than what we now see as housewifery. I first learnt about this from Lisa Jardine's Worldly Goods which spends about half the book talking about how increased Mediterranean trade during the Renaissance gave the urban middle class access to dyes (including the most brilliant colours, and also the fast colours which could survive washing) which had previously only been affordable to the aristocracy - thinking about this in the context of your article makes me wonder if kings and lords losing the uniqueness of their vivid colours could cause social change all by itself.
One quibble - you say that a peasant girl might get a new outfit every several years. I don't know if that was intended as a creative exaggeration, but Brett Devereaux (a Roman historian in his day job, but primarily famous for blogging about the historical accuracy of Paradox games) says in this series of posts that a single full-time semi-skilled textile worker could produce 5-6 outfits a year with Roman technology (spinning wheels, which reach Europe around 1300, double this) with most of the work being spinning, which is easy to multitask with childcare or basic animal husbandry. So one outfit a year per family member was a perfectly attainable goal for an ordinary peasant family (unless they were poor enough that they needed to sell the spun yarn to commercial weavers for additional food, or oppressed enough that they needed to sell it to pay taxes), and a family with an unmarried teenage daughter would be doing better than that - if she did ruin her first date dress she would be able to make another one.
[Raw wool/flax and basic vegetable dyes were cheap - unless you were after Worldly Goods level colour the cost of clothes was dominated by the labour involved in the production process]
His ‘how do they make it’ post serieses heavily imply and sometimes outright state that an average family would be selling some portion of the yarn produced by its female members, up to the majority if there was a bad harvest.
So the analogy I used elsewhere was to just adjust it for purchasing power.
A skilled worker made 6-8d a day according to a redditor... which I analogized to 60-75k a year. A linen shirt required 3 els of linen at 12d each, and 2d worth of labour from a tailor... so it'd take a week or week and a half's labour from the skilled worker to buy a linen shirt... if he deadicated 100% of his income to it.
So it comes out to 1000-2000 dollars for a linen shirt, which admittedly is high end, kings would wear linen.
But you multiply that out and a full outfit pants, boots, socks, sweater, jacket, hat ( and you need all these you're walking everywhere in all weather) comes to 10-30 thousand dollars depending on quality.... and user you can buy used or skip and get it down to 5k or maybe even 2k at the bare minimum... maybe cloth a child for 1k with used babyclothes...
But a full outfit for an adult to actually go out and do things in the world is looking like the investment we make for a car or vehicle.
I bought a motorcycle for 5k a few years back, believe me I wanted it to last 5-10 years. I consider its loss a personal tragedy.
And you example likewise points to this: A team of mother and daughters working year round in a more leisurely cottage industry, with other responsibilities, we'd expect to kick out 15-30k a year... maybe 40-60 if they were in the top 5-10% ... so divide that out and those low end homemade outfits destined for women and children are 2k to 5k each.
.
Then you get into MILITARY outfits that have to survive a ton, do all the work you might possibly do on campaign, have armour, maybe have heraldry...
that's like a 40-60k investment for a low end footsoldier, and getting up into the hundreds of thousands for knights and a king's custom armour and everything might be into the millions ppp.
You just really aren't going to have multiples or if you do you aren't going to take your spare set on campaign with you and leave it with some squire-boy who could easily be beaten up and have it stolen from him
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Notes -
Great post - it is far too easy for us moderns to underestimate the cost and importance of textiles pre-Industrial revolution. Textile production (fibre preparation, spinning, weaving, and sewing, but mostly spinning) was the main work of pre-modern women and was far more labour-intensive than what we now see as housewifery. I first learnt about this from Lisa Jardine's Worldly Goods which spends about half the book talking about how increased Mediterranean trade during the Renaissance gave the urban middle class access to dyes (including the most brilliant colours, and also the fast colours which could survive washing) which had previously only been affordable to the aristocracy - thinking about this in the context of your article makes me wonder if kings and lords losing the uniqueness of their vivid colours could cause social change all by itself.
One quibble - you say that a peasant girl might get a new outfit every several years. I don't know if that was intended as a creative exaggeration, but Brett Devereaux (a Roman historian in his day job, but primarily famous for blogging about the historical accuracy of Paradox games) says in this series of posts that a single full-time semi-skilled textile worker could produce 5-6 outfits a year with Roman technology (spinning wheels, which reach Europe around 1300, double this) with most of the work being spinning, which is easy to multitask with childcare or basic animal husbandry. So one outfit a year per family member was a perfectly attainable goal for an ordinary peasant family (unless they were poor enough that they needed to sell the spun yarn to commercial weavers for additional food, or oppressed enough that they needed to sell it to pay taxes), and a family with an unmarried teenage daughter would be doing better than that - if she did ruin her first date dress she would be able to make another one.
[Raw wool/flax and basic vegetable dyes were cheap - unless you were after Worldly Goods level colour the cost of clothes was dominated by the labour involved in the production process]
His ‘how do they make it’ post serieses heavily imply and sometimes outright state that an average family would be selling some portion of the yarn produced by its female members, up to the majority if there was a bad harvest.
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So the analogy I used elsewhere was to just adjust it for purchasing power.
A skilled worker made 6-8d a day according to a redditor... which I analogized to 60-75k a year. A linen shirt required 3 els of linen at 12d each, and 2d worth of labour from a tailor... so it'd take a week or week and a half's labour from the skilled worker to buy a linen shirt... if he deadicated 100% of his income to it.
So it comes out to 1000-2000 dollars for a linen shirt, which admittedly is high end, kings would wear linen.
But you multiply that out and a full outfit pants, boots, socks, sweater, jacket, hat ( and you need all these you're walking everywhere in all weather) comes to 10-30 thousand dollars depending on quality.... and user you can buy used or skip and get it down to 5k or maybe even 2k at the bare minimum... maybe cloth a child for 1k with used babyclothes...
But a full outfit for an adult to actually go out and do things in the world is looking like the investment we make for a car or vehicle.
I bought a motorcycle for 5k a few years back, believe me I wanted it to last 5-10 years. I consider its loss a personal tragedy.
And you example likewise points to this: A team of mother and daughters working year round in a more leisurely cottage industry, with other responsibilities, we'd expect to kick out 15-30k a year... maybe 40-60 if they were in the top 5-10% ... so divide that out and those low end homemade outfits destined for women and children are 2k to 5k each.
.
Then you get into MILITARY outfits that have to survive a ton, do all the work you might possibly do on campaign, have armour, maybe have heraldry...
that's like a 40-60k investment for a low end footsoldier, and getting up into the hundreds of thousands for knights and a king's custom armour and everything might be into the millions ppp.
You just really aren't going to have multiples or if you do you aren't going to take your spare set on campaign with you and leave it with some squire-boy who could easily be beaten up and have it stolen from him
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