The Edge of the Empire by Bronwen Riley

Author:Bronwen Riley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus

CHANGING FASHIONS

The fullers will have been hard at work in the run-up to Julius Severus’s appearance in town, as local dignitaries prepare their outfits for the visit. The British upper classes, it seems, took up wearing the toga enthusiastically decades ago.20 A Roman gentleman is judged on his creases—and a white toga, worn on formal occasions, needs to be super-clean and pressed with sharp folds. Election candidates need to scrub up particularly well, and their togas are rubbed with a special type of fuller’s earth to make them shine.21 The work done by the fullers must meet these high expectations. They treat the cloth by treading it in tubs containing a solution of water and urine (or fuller’s earth) and then rinse it in running water. Some whites are also bleached with sulphur. The clothing is then pressed in large screw presses.22

It is not clear how much store the majority of Cornovii lay by such matters as dress and personal appearance. Elsewhere in the empire, fashion-conscious men sport beards like the emperor; women who have the chance to spy the Empress Sabina, either in the flesh on her travels or on a bust or coin, might (if they have a competent maidservant) attempt to copy her hairstyle with its elaborately piled braids. But most men and women in Britannia lack the means or the inclination to follow the empire’s fashion. Women like Vedica, a Cornovian who went to live at Verbeia (Ilkley in Yorkshire), stick to a more traditional form of native dress.†† Vedica wears her hair down in two long thick plaits, every inch the down-to-earth cowgirl and looking impossibly primitive, no doubt, to the sophisticated ladies of Alexandria, Athens or Marseilles.23 Country dwellers are unlikely to adopt Roman dress, the men continuing instead to wear the traditional costume of checked trousers, tunic and a short cloak. Romans still view trousers with suspicion—in the first century, Martial referred disparagingly to Lydias backside being as broad as the old breeches of a pauper Briton.24

Indeed, anyone coming from the Mediterranean, and especially from places like Egypt and Syria in the east, will be struck by the plainness of British clothes. It is true that cloth is dyed—red with imported madder (rubia tinctorum) or bedstraw, purple with local lichens, blue with woad (glastum or Isatis tinctoria), yellow with weld (Reseda luteola) and red-purple from whelks found along the Atlantic coast of Gaul.25 But there are none of the fancy weaves, brocades or elaborate tapestries to be found further east. In these damp islands people adopt, instead, eminently sensible—and excellent-quality—medium-weight diamond, herringbone and plain 2/2 twill cloths. In the streets, men and women wear variants on loose-fitting woollen tunics, with or without short wide sleeves, which men wear at calf length and women down to their ankles. Over this, men wear a hooded cape, the caracalla or birrus, which is fastened down the front. Women sport a less voluminous rectangular cloak draped in various ways, according to fashion.

While there are those, of course,

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