The Armour Archive

From J. Arnold's QE Wardrobe Unlock'd, we have this quote from a 1576 warrant for William Whittell's

"making of a Dublett of perfumed fustian of our stored layed with lase of venice golde & grene silke lyned with grene taphata saceonett canvas bumbaste hookes and eyes: for Making of a dublett of grene perfumed fustian layed with silver lase lyned with white taphata sarceonett with bumbaste hookes & eyes: for making of xiij Cases of fustian for xiij dublettes: for making of a Case of yellow Cotten for a Dou[t]che Cloake."

Arnold comments that this was probably high quality fustian (these are courtier outfits) and was either made of flax/cotten or flax/wool, so silky looking it resembled velvet.

I've got a chunk of translated material that is quoted in its original French in the Adrien Harmand book Jean D'Arc: See costumes, son armure... on my page talking about grande assiette construction and it says:

"For the style and material of two pourpoints on the occasion of MdS's departure from his town of Bruges for Hollande ordered to be finished in black fustian, one of four quarters and lined in five layers, and the other with large, plate-like arm holes lined in three layers, for each one, 60s. do IIII

And similarly, for the style and material of two pourpoints of black fustian that this one, S., ordered to be made in his town of Dijon for clothing to wear before Avalon, one in four quarters lined in five layers and the other with large plate-like arm holes lined in three layers, each 60s. do IIII"

(bolding mine).

So... Where the heck can I find some reasonably correct Fustian?

yeesh. Just when I though I had a handle on things.


Ah, well, it is good to know things.

Thanks!

Z

Ziad wrote:So... Where the heck can I find some reasonably correct Fustian? ...Z

http://www.ghostforge.com/fabric_fustian.htm

Maria A.S.

I believe that the *warp* would be linen and the *weft* cotton as cotton is the "weaker" material. (Just like it the early days of machine spinning there were regulattions that all warp had to be hand spun and the weft could be machine spun because the machine made stuff wasn't as well done as the hand spun stuff!)

Thomas

... Where the heck can I find some reasonably correct Fustian?

Try carolinacalicoes.com. They had a very good selection last Pennsic.

Klaus

Would the wool/flax version be anything like Linsey-Woolsey?

There's a late 14th c pouch in the Cluny museum, Cl. 21860. The face fabric is silk with a design of eagles and vines, the back is a plain-weave dusty pink linen and the lining is white fustian. The fustian is in 3/1 twill and has a cotton warp and a linen weft. In addition the fustian is patterned with narrow weft stripes of cotton in sets of three. The pouch is in good shape except for some fading of the silk, and the fabrics and assembly are identified as being all late 14th c. The silk is Italian (probably from Lucca) and the linen and fustian are Italian or south German. Point of assembly for the pouch is unknown. It was conserved in 1994 by Isabelle Bédat, who appears to be the go-to person for conservation of medieval textiles in France.

This information is from: Soieries et Autres Textiles de l'Antiquité au XVIe Siècle by Sophie Desrosiers (2004) ISBN 2-7118-4570-2


Regards, Clare

How very odd, any other examples? It's easy to get the two confused---look at Elizabety Barber's work on textiles where she mentions the problems she had with a piece until she understood that it was rotated 90 deg. (20,000 Years of Woment's Work, The Mummies of Uremchi (sp?)...)

Thomas

There are a small number of weavers who still produce hand-made fabrics such as Humphries Weavers (http://freespace.virgin.net/humphries.weaving/index.htm) in England. Their stuff is, necessarily, very expensive, but they do sell remnents.

Since the southern German towns got their cotton from Italy in the 14th century to produce the fustian which they were quite famous for at that stage (Stadtgeschichte Ulm), it could well be both....

However, I am also not sure that the warp and weft could not have been confused, cotton is the weaker material, the fibres are much shorter than flax fibres and they cound't be aligned and spun to stronger threads pretty much before the invention of the spinnng-jenny. The chronicles of southern German weaver's towns all mention the weft being cotton in their fustian production, too.

There was a confusion about the warp and weft direction in an Anglo-Scandinavian linen find in Yorvic (which is of course much earlier, but as an example), a basket weave, which would have used 5 sheds on a warp-weighted loom the way it was first set up, something very uncommon. The other way round it used only 4 sheds, which was in turn used very often. (if you're interested, see here).

Does she say anything about why she believes it to be the warp and not the weft? The stripes could be warp stripes, too, since in combination with a strong linen warp, the cotton wouldn't have to bear the strain as much..... but I haven't read the article and it might well be absolutely out of the question that it was the weft and not the warp.... there might have been exceptions to the rule, as always.

Looking forward to more.....

Caithlinn