czwartek, 1 listopada 2012

Little black dress for beggars

I have found another source, quite interesting one, telling about prices and dyes of clothes.

In 1578, Bartolomeus Wittich from Naumburg (living Cieszyn) gave 100 guldens (sic!) to the poorhouse to enable buying a black cloth for its residents. There is no information how much of it has been bought but it is known that there was about 7 ells per man and 5 ells per women.

I think that fact of buying black textile for those poor shows low price of it.

3 komentarze:

  1. Black Cloth - do You mean dyed cloth, or natural "black-gray" cloth, wich was undayed (the color was naturaly from the sheep)?

    If black and gray - ok, I am plased to hera it,
    but, if you mean dyed in black, i am confused and thrilled.

    In my opinion, there is no such cheap dye-stuff, to make a cheap, dyed cloth (even though, you could just dye gray cloth by kork of oak or alder, but it will still be something like "black" - brown-black, gray-black and so on).

    My opionion - natural, gray-black wool :)

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    1. It depends on source. One tells that black dye is very expensive. But another one shows it as much cheaper than I thought.

      I don't think it was black sheep wool, however, maybe the price was dependent on color-saturation. There is no way to find it out for sure.

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  2. That's surely true - every colour (maybe except royal purple) was available for every social class, but the intensity, strength and fastness of colours varied - the most expensive ones were bright and durable, the cheapest faded very quickly.
    I think this mentioned black may have been a dark brownish-grey from mixed dyes.

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