Extract from “Medieval London”, Written by Timothy Baker. Cassell & Company Ltd, London:1970.

Amazon eBay: The scarlet was to medieval Europe what the imperial purple had been to the Roman Empire. The latter contained an exceptionally expensive dyestuff extracted at enormous cost from various Mediterranean molluscs (Murex brandaris, Purpura haemastoma). Indeed, after the Roman Empire had imposed a strict monopoly on imperial purple, from the reign of Alexander Severus (225–235 CE), one that was maintained by the succeeding Byzantine Empire (from the fifth century), the closest and really the only alternative dyestuff available in the medieval West for indicating such regal status was scarlet: a colour obtained from the desiccated eggs of various pregnant shield lice or scale insects of the Coccidae family (genus Coccus) that fed upon various species of Mediterranean oaks. The most important was the Kermococcus vermilio (sometimes referred to incorrectly as Coccus ilicis). These insects, in medieval Europe and the Islamic world, were cultivated in the Iberian peninsula (especially Portugal, Andalusia, and Valencia), Provence, Languedoc, Morocco, the Maghreb, Tunisia, and Asia Minor. From the Caucasus region—i.e., present-day Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan—and adjacent regions of Iran, scarlet dyestuffs were also extracted from a related insect: Porphyrophora hameli. From the Spanish conquests of the sixteenth century, the New World provided a new and more powerful form of scarlet dyes: Mexican cochineal, which the Spanish called Grana cochinilla and whose modern scientific name is Coccus cacti, or more properly Dactylopius coccus. The term scarlet itself is one of the most problematic issues in textile history, for the word has no known roots in Graeco-Roman civilization.5 Obviously, its true meaning for textiles in medieval society is very important for this study. Coccina was the original Roman Latin term for the scarlet textile, and the related coccum was the term for the dye; but both terms had disappeared in early medieval (Merovingian and Carolingian) Europe. When scarlet-dyed woollens first achieved some prominence, in but not before the mid-eleventh century, the dyestuff came to be most commonly called, in all West European languages, “grain” (granum, grana, grano, graine, grein), simply because these desiccated Coccid eggs resembled fine grains (e.g., of wheat or other plant seeds, of salt, or of sand). Much earlier, about 390, St. Jerome, in compiling the Vulgate Bible, used the Latin term vermiculus to describe the scarlet fabrics appearing in Exodus 35:6 and 35:25. That term, from which we derive the colour term vermilion, had meant “a little worm.” That was precisely the term used in the medieval Islamic world to describe the insect-dyestuff itself: kirmiz (from the Armenian karmir and Sanskrit kirmir). Indeed, the technical term for this scarlet dyestuff in all West European languages is kermes (in English, German, Portuguese, and Dutch; kermès in French; chermes in Italian; carmes in Spanish). From this term is, of course, derived the English term crimson. None of these terms, however, has any obvious relationship with any of the subsequent European words for scarlet: scarlata or scarlatum in medieval Latin; scarlatto in Italian; escarlat in Portuguese and Spanish; écarlate in French (escarlate, escarlet, etc., in medieval French); scharlaken in Dutch; Scharlach in German; scharlakan in Swedish. Many historians have been quick to point out that the medieval terms for and descriptions of the scarlet textiles indicate that their colours were not only vivid red, but a wide variety of others, including even white and green. Because the medieval Flemish word was so commonly written as scaerlaken—seemingly related to the Flemish verb scheren, meaning “to shear,” and the noun laken, meaning a woollen cloth—the majority of historians, inspired by the writings of Jean-Baptiste Weckerlin, who was, in turn, very much influenced by the eminent Henri Pirenne, still believe that the term originally meant a highly shorn luxurious woollen cloth: in particular, one made from the very finest English wools, subjected to multiple shearings whose supposedly high cost explains both the nature and value (price) of this peculiar textile. In their view, this term came to be associated with the colour scarlet only later, when economic rationality determined that such a very expensive textile should be dyed only in the costliest and most regal of all Western dyestuffs.6 This still widely accepted theory has, however, no basis in factual evidence. As I have sought to demonstrate in other publications, woollen textiles called “scarlets” were subjected to shearing processes that did not differ in quality, skill, or frequency from those used for any other fine woollen textile.7 Furthermore, clear evidence demonstrates that rarely did the shearing costs themselves account for more than 2.5 percent of the wholesale price. For example, at Ghent in 1350–51, the costs of shearing scaerlakenen, zadblauwen lakenen (deep blue cloth), and moreiten lakenen (murreycoloured cloth) were precisely the same: 2.92s (or £0.146 groot Flemish)8 per cloth of 35 ells (24.5 metres).9 When one considers that a Ghent-made scaerlaken purchased in Bruges in 1351 cost £8.75 groot Flemish, such a minuscule cost for shearing—1.67 percent—can hardly explain the value or significance of the medieval scaerlaken. The high value of medieval Flemish scarlets (scaerlakenen) is explained principally by the costs of the dyestuff itself, and secondarily by the costs of the highest grades of English wools used in weaving these cloths: the so-called March wools (Welsh Marches) of Herefordshire and Shropshire; the Cotswolds wools of Gloucestershire, Worcestershire, and Oxfordshire; and, as the least costly, the Lincolnshire wools of the Kesteven and Lindsey districts.10 In Mechelen, from 1361 to 1415, as may be seen in more detail in table 4.2, the quantities of kermes used in dyeing the best woollens ranged from 10.58 kg to 18.15 kg for cloths of this size (40 ells = 27.56 metres long), and in value from a low of 32.81 percent of the final purchase price (50.76 percent of the cost of the unfinished cloth) to a high of 51.39 percent (112.8 percent of the cost of the unfinished cloth). But the total finishing costs, in the labour for both dyeing and shearing (with napping), ranged from a low of only 2.18 percent to a high of 3.46 percent of the final price.11 In fifteenth-century Ypres, the costs of the grain itself (ranging from 9.28 kg to 16.24 kg per cloth) varied from a low of 29.6 percent of the final price to a high of 51.5 percent (or 118.79 percent of the cost of the unfinished woollen). Again, the combined total of finishing costs, in dyeing, napping, and shearing, ranged from a low of 0.9 percent to one single example of 2.9 percent; otherwise, the average was just 1.3 percent.