During this livestream Q&A, Beatrix Nutz briefly presents a fragment of hose at around 1:07:00. The fragment is thought to be from a pair of hose, based on long matching fragments and an educated guess by the researchers.
The piece is a rectangle composed of a straight grain strip and a bias grain strip, sewn together. There are two layers of wool in two different colours, both worked as one layer with a backstitch, so that red seam allowance from the outer layer shows on the blue inside. The wool is slightly thinner than that used on the gowns. It is a fulled tabby woven broadcloth.
Both layers of the wool have been damaged by moths.
There is a strip of linen tape inside that runs along two sides.
There is a worked eyelet at the corner in undyed thread, possibly linen. The eyelet is worked in the wool behind the tape, not through the tape.
I believe this piece is the top back corner from separate hose made from a cutting pattern like so:
Because the pattern is bias cut, the strip that comes up the centre back is on the straight grain and the strip from the other side of the backseam is on the bias.
I realise that separate hose are a contentious topic for the 15th century, with the Lengberg garments thought to date ~1450-1485, but I am not aware of any hose pattern with straight grain strips running up the front opening, only the back.
It’s possible too that the back seam was finished for each leg and then stitched to form a pair of legs. In any case, I wanted to note for myself, and you, the construction details and my best estimate on where in a pair of hose the fragment could have come from.
The video is great, and it’s nice to get an opportunity to see fragments like these hose, which can add so much to our understanding of construction methods. 13 years went by between the initial discovery and this Q&A, and without it, I don’t believe this fragment would have been ‘published’ at all, or at least not for many many more years.
Edit: This fragment has been published by Beatrix Nutz, along with a few other interesting pieces, in The Hidden Colours of Lengberg Castle, Austria. In: NESAT XII. Archaeolingua 33. This article is available from the author if you search online. Thank you to Marcus Irgens for bringing this to my attention.
As a random postscript, this eyelet in the article is for a 3mm hole, is about 9mm across and stitched from 9 whip stitches of ~1.6mm yarn. That’s a huge yarn!
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