Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The clothing and textiles of Roman Britain, not surprisingly, reflect the province's climate and physical environment. The clothing needs of the individual, however, could be adequately met by exploitation of the fibre resources, animal and plant, which were immediately to hand. Sheep's wool was the principal fibre of Britain, followed by flax and, to a lesser extent, hemp and animal hair ( Wild 1970 : 4–21, 2002). The processes of conversion-fibre preparation, spinning and weaving-had reached a high level of sophistication long before the Roman invasion. There is no space to discuss them here, but it is important to emphasize one point: the concept of a bolt of cloth cut and tailored into garments was alien to the western world in antiquity. The weaver (and often the spinner) set to work with a specific garment in mind and it came from the loom in a recognizable form ( Granger-Taylor 1982 ). In principle therefore, the study of clothing or furnishing textiles and the methodology of their production should be a single field of enquiry: in practice, however, the disparate nature of the scattered sources of evidence makes this a difficult exercise. Knowledge of the clothing of Roman Britain rests on three sources: funerary art, written documents and preserved textiles ( Wild 1968, 1985 ). Each has its limitations, but the most serious obstacle is the difficulty of combining them into ... log in or subscribe to read full text