Louise Sylvester & Mark C Chambers 
Medieval Dress and Textiles in Britain 
A Multilingual Sourcebook

A vital sourcebook for information on clothing and textiles in the middle ages, containing many previously unprinted documents.


Texts (with modern English translation) offering insights into the place of cloth and clothing in everyday life are presented here. Covering a wide range of genres, they include documents from the royal wardrobe accounts and petitions to king and Parliament, previously available only in manuscript form. The accounts detail royal expenditure on fabrics and garments, while the petitions demand the restoration of livery, for example, or protest about the needfor winter clothing for children who are wards of the king. In addition, the volume includes extracts from wills, inventories and rolls of livery, sumptuary laws, moral and satirical works condemning contemporary fashions, an Old English epic, and English and French romances. The texts themselves are in Old and Middle English, Latin and Anglo-Norman French, with some of the documents switching between more than one of these languages. They are presented with introduction, glossary and detailed notes.


Louise M. Sylvester is Reader in English Language at the University of Westminster; Mark Chambers is a Post-Doctoral Research Associate at Durham University; Gale R. Owen-Crocker is Professor of Anglo-Saxon Culture at the University of Manchester.

Table of Content

Introduction

Wills

Accounts

Inventories and Rolls of Livery

Moral and Satirical Works

Sumptuary Regulation, Statutes and the Rolls of Parliament

Unpublished Petitions to King, Council and Parliament

Epic and Romance

Glossary

Bibliography

About the author

Gale R. Owen-Crocker is Professor Emerita of The University of Manchester, UK. She has published extensively on early medieval culture, especially dress and textiles.