25 Medieval Weaving Secrets Village Women Never Wrote Down

From Medieval Way

Medieval Way explores the historical textile techniques used in early households, from processing raw flax and fleece to weaving on various looms. By analysing archaeological findings and regulations, the narrative uncovers the practical skills passed down through generations, often contrasting oral traditions with the incomplete records left by historical texts.

In nineteen fifty-three, Basil Brown found a loom with no loom left. Fourteen years earlier, the same self-taught Suffolk digger had uncovered the Sutton Hoo ship burial. This time he was digging a sixth-century village at Pakenham. Out of one floor came more than sixty rings of unfired clay, in two straight rows, their tops blackened by fire. The wooden frame had burned away. The weights had dropped where they hung, and they still kept the shape of the loom. But the museum's curator read them wrong. He decided somebody had laid them out for firing. It took a Norwegian textile historian, Marta Hoffmann, to see what any village woman would have seen at a glance. Nobody had ever written down how that loom worked, because every woman already knew. And the knowing was enormous. Experimental archaeologists estimate that the wool sail of one Viking ship took about 5,000 hours of work. Tonight we follow that knowledge through twenty-five secrets, in the order a household used them: the field and the fleece, the thread, the loom, and the finishing.