Period plant dyeing - it all depends on your period!

Man is a vain animal ... so we have dyed our clothes for a long, long time.

For many years, archaeologists in Northern Europe were sure most textile finds were limited to the natural colours of the wool used. Looking over our human shoulders at ancient civilizations in the Mediterranean and further East, they should have realized different ... the Phoenicians were named after their method of dyeing purple with the gall bladder of dog whelks as early as 1200 BC, the Egyptians used a riot of colour - and so did the Scandinavians as it turned out, when we started analysing fabric finds in the 70s.

The colour samples in the picture above were produced at the National Museum in Copenhagen, using results from analyzing late Iron age and early Viking finds. The only colour not reproduced here is blue, since it takes both more time and different methods than other plant dyes. Both plants, lichen and fungi were used, and yarns and/or fabrics were mordanted prior to dyeing. Trace elements of alum were found, consistent with a solution of certain clay types, where the alum was extracted by boiling and then using the resultant clear liquid after letting the sediment settle. When the fibre thus mordanted was dyed in copper or iron pots, ions from the metal combined with the alum traces to produce variations in colour.
In Viking and early Medieval times, foreign trade brought in both knowledge and materials for more permanent dyes, mainly metal salts for mordanting such as tin salt, sodium dichromate, ferrous sulfate, and cream of tartar or tartaric acid. Another newcomer was rhubarb, where both leaves and roots yielded oxalic acid for mordanting.

Blue was another chapter entirely. The only true blues came from woad and indigo, and their active dyestuff, indigotin, is not water soluble. Whoever discovered that you can produce colourfast blue dye by fermenting finely chopped woad in large amounts of fermenting urine must have been hell-bent on experimenting! It happened as early as 300 BC ...

The earliest dyer's guilds were formed in Italy in the mid-1200s, and quickly became financially powerful organisations as well as the sources of new methods and knowledge. A journeyman was not just someone working towards a mastership - it was someone who journeyed, learnt new things, and returned home to teach before becoming a master.