Abstract – SELIM Conference

“’What is this, a betell, or a batowe, or a buskin lacyd?:’1 Lexicological Confusion Medieval Clothing Culture” by Mark Chambers

In Skelton’s late-medieval morality play Magnyfycence, Cloked Colusyon’s joking question to Courtly Abusyon points to the mayhem created by the vices of the play, who continuously jostle meaning away from naming, using deception and disguise to create a gap between word and image. By querying the proper terminology for Courtly Abusion’s absurd footwear, moreover, the question reminds us of the gap that still exists in our understanding of the materials of medieval cloth and clothing and the names used to describe those materials. All too often, those investigating cloth and clothing take definitions in the major dictionaries at face value, which tend to ignore unpublished or non-literary material and can give a misleading picture. Similarly, some of the generally accepted studies of medieval fashion have perpetuated inaccuracies and compounded misconceptions about many of the details of medieval cloth and clothing.

In her article, “The Tippet: Accessory After the Fact?,”2 Robin Netherton discusses our general understanding of a popular fourteenth-century fashion practice. Using evidence from medieval art and artifact, she demonstrates how important sources have regularly ‘got it wrong’ with regard to tippets, and, she posits, our current understanding of this medieval fashion is neither historically accurate nor practical. She concludes by attempting to address this misunderstanding with evidence drawn from a wide variety of sources. Likewise, in my article on “Weapons of Conversion: Mankind and Medieval Stage Properties,”3 I demonstrate how editors and directors, following the standard dictionaries and earlier editions of the text, have been misled by an assumed stage property; one that does not stand up to lexicological scrutiny alongside contemporary material.

In instances such as these, certain commonly assumed interpretations of medieval clothing have turned out to be inaccurate hand-me-downs, compounding misconceptions about medieval textiles, manufacture and fashion. The major dictionaries regularly pass on these misconceptions by relying too heavily on the literary material, often at the expense of non- literary, visual and archaeological evidence. In such cases, we might inadvertently dismiss a word from its original semantic valence, leading to inaccurate research and, subsequently, to a mistaken general understanding.

By presenting some of the ongoing research of the five-year, AHRC-funded project, “Lexis of Cloth and Clothing in Britain, 1100-1450,” this paper proposes to address a number of such cloth and clothing misnomers. Based jointly at the University of Manchester and the University of Central England in Birmingham, the Project aims to produce an analytical corpus of medieval dress and textiles terminology of the British Isles in the form of a searchable, innovatively illustrated database. Using the instances above as a starting point, the paper intends to examine a few commonly-held, yet inaccurate assumptions about late-medieval cloth and clothing in the British Isles, and to correct such assumptions – in essence, to begin to redress medieval dress.

1 John Skelton, Magnyfycence [c. 1519], Four Morality Plays, ed. Peter Happé (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1979), p. 244, l.755. 2 Robin Netherton, “The Tippet: Accessory after the Fact?,” Medieval Clothing and Textiles I (2005), 115-132. 3 Mark Chambers, “Weapons of Conversion: Mankind and Medieval Stage Properties,” Philological Quarterly, 83:1 (2004 Winter), pp. 1-11. Combining the strengths of UMIST and The Victoria University of Manchester