Arts, Crafts, and Clothes of a 5th/6th century Saxon?

by Ischaldirh

Suppose I'm a Saxon (or Angle, or Jute even) from around 500 AD. What sort of clothes do I wear? How do I decorate my house? (What sort of house do I live in, for that matter?) Who made my baskets, clothing, etc; and how did I get it? Also, how do these things change with my social class?

chocolatepot

Our main sources for very early Anglo-Saxon clothing are from burials. Men and women of status in the period were buried in full dress, with jewelry and other accessories; while the cloth itself rarely survives, we can draw conclusions based on the positioning of metal pieces that remain.

I'll start with women because we have a slightly better idea of what their clothing was like. Women wore what's known as a "peplos dress" similar to the ancient Greek peplos: a tube of fabric that encased the body and fastened over or at the shoulders with relatively similar (if not actually twinned) brooches or pins, and clasped around the waist or hips with a belt. While the belts do not survive, there is evidence of them through metal fittings remaining at the waist of the skeletons recovered through archaeology, and metal items around the thigh area that were evidently hung on a belt. This outfit was common to Germanic and Scandinavian women in Europe, and while some Roman accounts and renderings show it worn over the bare body, there is also plenty of evidence that it was worn over a sleeved gown - and graves without the paired brooches imply women (lower-status ones) wearing only the undergown.

Men tended to be buried with fewer dress-related goods, so it's difficult to reconstruct their clothing with as much specificity. They wore sleeved tunics and leggings/trousers, typically with a belt outside the tunic, as with women, and a cord, string, or secondary belt running through loops/slits on the trousers to hold them up. As with women, belts could be decorated with metal fittings and used to hold a number of accessories (for instance, knives, pouches).

As far as these things changing based on status, that really relates mostly to quantity and quality. A very poor person or slave might not be able to afford a linen undergarment, and their wool would be coarse; a very wealthy person's clothing could be of finer wool or possibly even silk, and embroidered.

Penelope Walton Roger's Cloth and Clothing in Early Anglo-Saxon England, AD 450-700 and Gail Owen-Crocker's Dress in Anglo-Saxon England are exactly what you want for more on this.