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Saint Brigid's Hearth Online Guild Handbook
Style before substance!
Well, at least in the order of chapters for this little treatise on rennies and thier wiles. How do we look the part and what is acceptable for our guild?
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Peasant Clothe Thyself!
The peasant look is back!
Unlike many renaissance guilds which require all visible handsewing and 100% period fabrics, for the time being, we are going to focus more on the overall “feel” and the correct “look” of a costume. In my opinion that’s a Good Thing. I believe that it’s more important to get the look right than it is to be 100% period correct in terms of construction techniques and materials. A thousand “Garb Nazis” just began gnashing their teeth as I wrote that, but it’s how I truly feel. There are five essential truths that I adhere to when creating garb for faire.
Good garb feels natural when you’re wearing it.
Good garb won’t kill you to wear in the August heat.
Good garb is garb you won’t hate putting on in the morning.
Good garb is just as durable as the other clothes in your closet (if not more so).
Good garb weighs style against wearability and strikes a healthy balance.
Oh, and one last thing about those pesky garb nazis. When the snobs lash you with their period-correct cat o’ nine because you’re not wearing something copied out of Janet Arnold… remind them that no two items of clothing found on the Mary Rose were constructed the same. Seamstresses and tailors in period were given a look to attain and no guidelines on how to attain it. If they don't like it... well, let them argue with the archeologists. And, may I say, telling them that gives one a certain amount of satisfaction. As to fabric complaints, mentioning a strained budget typical shuts them up or at least makes them go away.
All costumers have a little bit of the garb-fascist in them if they’re big enough to admit it. I certainly do. The best are willing to admit it and fight it. Restrictions on garb are necessary in order to keep our show consistent. The restrictions aren’t too strict though compared to many other renaissance guilds out there. Refer back to Garb rules 1-5 and then dive into the rest of this section!
Fabric
Every website, every book, every manifesto on creating garb to wear at faire will tell you the same thing (or should): Always use 100% natural fibers! First and foremost, it’s a matter of how wearable the stuff is. Cotton breathes, linen breathes, wool breathes, most synthetics don’t (except polar fleece which is another ballgame altogether). Much though I would love to say that linen and wool are the order of the day, it just isn’t feasible in our climate and on a limited budget. I guarantee you one thing, though - barring allergies - you would be more comfortable in a wider variety of weather if you wore only linen and wool. Don’t just take my word for it, try it out if you can. I’d rather be dressed in wool than polyester on a hot day anyday. Wool will help regulate your body temperature. Polyester or rayon will help raise your body temperature and may induce heat exhaustion.
Not all synthetics are bad, not all of them look bad, but they all look synthetic and I can tell one from the other 98% of the time by looking at how they drape. They just don’t look right, so avoid them. Some folks go with cotton/synthetic blends, that’s their decision, I’m against it. Cotton’s so cheap most of the time anyway, what’s the reason for opting for synthetics again? Watch the sales and do linen if you can, you won’t regret it.
In terms of color, you should look at every color and ask yourself if it could be attained through vegetable or basic mineral dying techniques. Pure white was very hard to attain and even harder to maintain, use the off-whites and naturals for your shirts and chemises. Avoid vivid colors, no purple, no crimson, no bright yellow, no black. Yes, they were attainable colours, just expensive to maintain. Villagers should be wearing earth tones and muted colors, no metallic trims, and if you’re not a well-off merchant or artisan, no trim at all except bias tape or grossgrain ribbon at most. Ochre, burnt orange, mustard yellow, burgundy (sparingly), brown, grey, various greens, all of those are fine. Prints are not period and may not be worn. Patterns in fabric must be achieved by the loom, not the printing press. Damasks and the like are far too rich for poor village folk and if you have a silky damasked item you better have a damn good story how you got it! (Gig seed?)
Incidentally, the whole thing about green skirts is a faire-ism right up there with the rumors about girls who wear fox tails. Sometimes a green skirt is just a green skirt.
Approved fabrics:
The following are considered appropriate for guild activities. Keep in mind the aforementioned color restrictions (earthtones, earthtones, earthtones)
Linen
Linen-Cotton blends
“Linen-Look” fabric (as long as it really does look like linen! See notes on synthetics and wear at your own peril)
Cotton / Muslin
Wool
Wool Blends
Silk is too rich for our blood, but some raw silks look delightfully peasanty, so silk can be used on approval.
Leather - within reason. We’re Peasants, not Dominatrices.
Construction:
Costume creation should adhere to a certain level of accuracy and certain obviously modern touches should be avoided. Do some research, listen to those who have done theirs, get advice from the successful. Garb creation is best when you follow the scientific process, and peer review is often the best way to see how well you did or how far you have yet to go.
And if at first you don’t succeed… well, you know.
A couple of anachronisms that crop up a lot in faire garb deserve special mention…
Grommets must either be covered by thread or replaced by buttonholes or hand-sewn eyelets.
Bells. If you decide to use bells on your costume for some reason (as I often do) avoid the shiny Christmas jingle bells, there are a number of better-looking options available. And yes, bells are period as costume decoration… annoying, but period for the correct character.
Overall, appropriate costuming for our period is so badly skewered by most faires that I had some trouble narrowing this down and looked at a lot of costuming web sites to try to distill my thoughts into some sort of a coherent thesis. Ultimately, I dumped every costuming site and went back to the books. I cracked some spines, looked up primary source material, talked to friends who are archeologists and historians. Here’s what I came up with: most of the garb you see “peasants” wearing at faire is – in fact – wrong! For some reason, this has been typified the most by so-called “wenchwear” which bears a much stronger resemblence to 17th and 18th century colonial clothing than anything else. How this came to be acceptable renaissance faire clothing is a mystery to me, so instead of focusing on what’s wrong with wenchwear I’ll just layout appropriate attire and fabric choices for the Average Jack/Jill circa 1560 (ish). Some general guidelines for the average Jack & Jill going from head to toe…
“Jack”
Head:
A hat, always have a hat. You don’t have to wear it all the time, but have one on hand! Muffin caps, flat caps, wool and wool felt hats (not cavalier hats, I must make clear!). Faires tend to happen in sunny places and since we can’t wear sunglasses and parasols aren’t very peasanty looking, a wide-brimmed hat is your best friend.
To be truly period we should probably all be wearing what is called a “biggin cap” Essentially it’s a white or natural cap like an aviator’s cap (think Snoopy). They were often worn with the earflaps tied back so that it looks like a skullcap and quite often were worn with another hat on top of them when out of doors. The biggin cap was as essential a part of the Elizabethan wardrobe as underwear is for us today for men and women.
As you can see, they do look a little silly and we don’t require them, but they’re nice on cool mornings or when it rains.
Torso:
Shirt: A long-sleeved, full-bodied shirt with or without a collar. The higher up the societal foodchain you are, the whiter the fabric can be. Bleaching fabric was not done by a controlled chemical process as it is today, fabric was laid out on the grass to bleach naturally in the sun, hence the term “lawn” which was the name for such fabric. Whether the lawn lent its name to the fabric or the fabric to the grass is somewhat muddy but the effect is the same, the more trouble the manufacturer goes to, the more expensive the item, so lower classes should be wearing natural-colored shirts. The sleeves should be a little billowy without attaining piratical dimensions and frills are best left to the upper echelons of society. A small amount of “blackwork” edging (essentially a buttonhole stitch along the edges of the cuff or collar or frill) is a great look but a high-falutin’ one so keep your character’s means in mind.
Jerkin or doublet (or both): Contrary to what a costume-vendor may tell you, in period, “jerkin” and “doublet” were used interchangeably to refer to the item of men’s clothing we would call a jacket. Remember that the shirt was on par with a Hanes undershirt in the Elizabethan times. Rarely did one go about without something over it, no matter what the weather, unless one is seeking to attain a certain uncouth look. Dandies often wore a doublet with sleeves worn over a jerkin or “singlet” without sleeves for a “three-piece suit” effect. The underlying jerkin often had a contrasting color. Often this was reversed with an outer sleeveless item worn over a lighter-material doublet with contrasting colors. There seems to be little rhyme or reason to this trend.
For a villager, avoid the more fashionable cuts and fancy styles, we’re portraying the working masses here. Unless you’re the mayor or the sheriff, you’ll be wearing something that can get dirty without being ruined. Trim, ric-rack, and assorted fancy bric-a-brac is for nobles, avoid it. Try to differentiate your social class with material and tailoring. That’s how they did it in period in the classes we’re trying to portray in our village. The more leisure time your profession would provide you, the more tailored and decorated your clothing.
Lower Body:
Hosen/tights: Don’t wear tights. They’re not period and they’re too hot anyway. Men should wear knit, solid-colored hosen that come up over the knee and are tied in place or “gartered” with strips of cloth or leather. And shoes or low boots (I’ll get to those in a moment). Stripes are fun but really something of a late-period pirate thing, so use your stripy socks sparingly.
Kilts: Sorry, Prince Charlie, 99% of the kilts you see at faires and movies like Braveheart are not period. Not our period anyway. I love my kilt, I even wear it to faire once in awhile, but I do so with full knowledge of my anachronism, and so should you. The pro-kilt lobby can argue until they are blue in the face, the historians are on my side. I refer you to the this wonderfully informative artivle on the website of the Scottish Tartans Museum by Matthew Newsome: http://www.scottishtartans.org/kilt.html. I never accept a single source as definitive, but this one is the clearest I can find for the layman.
As Newsome notes, the earliest mention of a kilt in any recognizable (by us) form is 1594, at the very far end of our acceptable time period. When I first started this, I tried like hell to come up with a good line of reasoning to argue my beloved kilts into being, but it was for naught. They simply weren’t widely worn as we understand them until the next century. The best minds of Scotland have been put to the task of nailing down the origins of the kilt and they tend to agree that it is by & large a seventeenth century fashion and later. I will concede that no fashion statement springs whole-cloth (forgive the pun) from the void without going through several intermediary phases first as the people experiment in ways that will one day lead to pumpkin pants or kilts or bellbottoms or whatever. So, it is logically arguable - as Mr. Newsome was so kind as to point out - that there is a primitive bodywrap in use in Scotland as early as the mid sixteenth century that would, in truth, more closely resemble a tartan toga than a so-called “Great Kilt“. Wear all the tartan you want, but kilts aren’t really… well, real , in our time period. Sorry.
Slops/Pantaloons/Trews: Being in Scotland, tartan trews are fine and even period. Keep in mind the tartan is meaningless at this point, except that the more colors you have, the wealthier you tend to be (see kilts, above). Trews were essentially leggings secured at the tops to your doublet or jerkin with points, leaving the unmentionables either exposed (to be covered by the trailing hem of your tunic - unacceptable for us, I fear) or covered by undergarments and/or a codpiece. We’re mostly portraying lowland Scots, so wear baggy pants and allow me to move on to less uncomfortable territory.
Shoes: Don’t wear cavalier boots. Unless you’re a horse soldier (in which case you’re in the wrong guild) or a groom, or maybe the sheriff or something, they don’t fit your character. Wear low, soft boots (not engineer boots, please) or shoes that give a period appearance. Lace-up boots are period but use leather instead of shoelace and skip the wingtips for heaven’s sake. The best thing for peasant/lower class costumes continues to be moccasins with the fringe removed. They’re cheap, fairly durable and look period(ish) once you get that fringe cut off. Comfort is good too, go with it.
“Jill”
Head:
A common phrase heard at ren faire is “Cover thy head, woman.” While this is obnoxious, it bears an essential truth. A scarf, a caul, anything is better than nothing. Leaving your tresses dangling may be sexy as hell, but it’s about as period as bellbottoms... unless you’re a certain kind of lady (ahem). And I – for one – grow weary of the number of girls at faire who decide to classify themselves as soiled doves just to get out of covering their heads. It’s a cop out, and the shire appears overrun with harlots. As a 21st century male, I'm all for it. As the director of a family show... well it becomes a less aesthetically pleasing notion.
Flat Caps, Straw Hats, bag hats, muffin caps, felt hats, wool hats, floppy hats, wreaths. As I have already mentioned, to be truly period we should all be wearing what is called a “biggin cap” Essentially it’s a white or natural cap like an aviator’s cap (think Snoopy). They were often worn with the earflaps tied back so that it looks like a skullcap and quite often were worn with another hat on top of them when out of doors. The biggin cap was as essential a part of the Elizabethan wardrobe as underwear is for us today for men and women.
The middle bits:
Chemise: A long-sleeved shirt with or without a collar. Just like the men, except usually long enough to reach at least the knees and split all the way down the front. The higher up the societal food chain you are, the whiter the fabric should be. Bleaching fabric was not done by a controlled chemical process as it is today, fabric was laid out on the grass to bleach naturally in the sun, hence the term “lawn” which was the name for such fabric. Whether the lawn lent its name to the fabric or the fabric to the grass is somewhat muddy but the effect is the same, the more trouble the manufacturer goes to, the more expensive the item, so lower classes should be wearing natural-colored shirts. The sleeves should be a little billowy without attaining piratical dimensions and frills are best left to the upper echelons of society. . A small amount of “blackwork” edging (essentially a black buttonhole stitch along the edges of the cuff or collar or frill) is a great look but a high-falutin’ one so keep your character’s means in mind.
Corsetry: Rejoice, for if you are not attempting haute fashion for our period (and you should not be or you're in the wrong guild), a corset is not necessary for the good women of our shire! The average milkmaid and housefrau kept her assets in check just fine with a properly-made bodice thank you. And the more wanton wenchy types preferred a bit of freedom, if you catch my drift dearie. The highest end of our social strata, the merchant wife might wear one of these if she is the frilly sort, but on her… um, head be it (ahem).
Bodice: Wear one, make it fit, bone it with broom straw, metal, plastic or whatever works for you. Boning isn’t visible so I’m not going to legislate it for now. Find a good pattern and follow it (see the 'acceptable list' and links for pattern info) Same rules for fit as a man’s jerkin/doublet, the better the fit and more colors and trim and whatnot, the higher the class. Make the ends meet where it laces with a minimum of shirt or skin visible between the two ends. The top of the bodice must come up over the breast and cover the nipple. Do not show up in a bodice with a neckline that swoops underneath. Yes, the underneath-the-breast bodice is period after a fashion, but inappropriate for a family-friendly faire.
Incidentally, by our period, most bodices had sleeves at all levels of society, contrary to what you typically see at faires. I'm not mandating sleeves, as they tend to make you look middle-class whether you intend to or not.
So-called “Irish Dresses” are acceptable as well. Same rules for fit and color and material apply. They are less restrictive and wenchy than the bodice and layered skirt look. This is the choice for our lasses who are in a family way.
Lower Body:
Skirts: Layer your skirts, usually the lower skirt is the older one with the newer one tucked up to expose it. A pleasing effect can be gained by contrasting the colors. I have no idea if this is period but I cannot find anything that says otherwise despite constant sniping about it from SCA types. Leaving the chemise intact below the waist (rather than splitting it) so it can appear as the inner skirt can attain good effect and a lighter garb. Again, the chronicles were mostly written by men so anyone who says it isn’t period should be asked the basis for their argument and ignored if they can’t prove it. Woodcuts be damned, I’ve seen them go both ways.
See above for mention of other dresses.
Pantaloons: One hopes these will be rarely seen, but most women of the guild report the most success with muslin pantaloons that end just above the knee. It is not uncommon for a lady gone commando embarrass herself by tripping on uneven ground and I’ll refer you back to the family-friendly comments made in the section on bodices. Underwear is good. Renaissance underwear is better.
Reason #194 to wear undergarments at faire:
You never know when a hunky barbary pirate might
want to toss you over his shoulder and carry you
back to his ship!
Hosen/tights: Don’t wear tights. They’re not period and they’re too hot anyway. Wear knee-highs and garter them with strips of cloth or leather. Stripes are fun and have become something of a uniform for our guild, though they are not (for the record) required wear for inclusion in guild activities.
Shoes: Wear low shoes that give a period appearance. So-called “Mary Janes” are very period. “Kung Fu shoes are okay but don’t look as good as moccasins. The best thing for peasant/lower class costumes continues to be moccasins with the fringe removed. They’re cheap, durable and look period once you get that fringe off. Comfort is good, go with it.
ACCESSORIES
Where would Jack & Jill be without a pail of water? (Answer: Safe at the bottom of the hill) Anyway, accessories will help you sell your occupation, seal the deal on your gigs, and give you a crutch (perhaps literally in some cases) for your interactions with patrons!
Here are a small sampling of ideas on stuff and where to find it…
Belts - Thrift stores (stick with leather)
Keys - craft stores
Wine Bottles - for holding water, root beer, cider and … wine (after hours)
Pails - The buckets from old ice cream freezers, or wooden planters that have been sealed all make excellent period-looking buckets.
Pouches for your stuff - you can never have too many.
Eating knife - I use a funky non-serrated steak knife I found a thrift store with an antler handle. Every thrift store has buckets of knives on the shelf. Find one you can eat with without killing yourself (or anyone else) and make a quick sheath for it.
A Tankard or Mug - Every tankard I’ve ever purchased came from the thrift store. They’re almost disconcertingly easy to find sometimes. Stoneware ones work, as do leather or wood (sealed with human-friendly substances, of course) anything suitably peasanty-looking. Tie it to your belt. Drink lots of WATER, beer dehydrates you, it’s hot, don’t die on me!
Rope - In Lord of the Rings (the books) Sam Gamgee goes on for pages about the many uses for a good length of rope. Think of it as ye auld duct tape. Manila rope is fairly inexpensive ( $.51/ft at this writing) and readily available at most hardware stores. A coil of rope makes you look industrious if nothing else.
Walking staff or club - most villagers wouldn’t be able to afford a sword. A good thumping piece of tree? That’s free.
Scribe's desk - You can find unfinished ones at some craft stores. Also quills, papers, books, etcetera that will help you sell a scholarly character fallen on hard times.
A hunting implement (bow or crossbow) - Playing a poacher? A good-looking fake crossbow isn’t as expensive to buy as you might think. They’re even easier and cheaper to fake.
Baskets - Thrift shops are the least expensive but these can be found in craft stores, grocery store, yard sales, home stores. Just look around and find one that fits your needs.
Tools of your trade… Sewing baskets, embroidery hoops, extra garb to mend, toys, lanterns, quill pens, Inkwells, writing slopes, old books, easels, paints, palettes, brushes, jugs, melons, vegetables (use your imagination), thigh bones, dried herbs, fresh herbs, phials of colored liquid, small rocks, chisels, hammers, small furry creatures, farming implements, nets… the list is endless.
Page contents Copyright 2006, Scott W Perkins except where noted
If you wish to use images or text elsewhere, you must attain the permission of the author first
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