4 - Re-clothing the Inhabitants of Tenth-century Dublin based on Archaeological Evidence

Summary

The style of dress worn by Viking settlers in the North Atlantic and Irish Sea zone has received considerable attention from scholars. The evidence for this has been based mainly on pagan burials around the coast of Scotland and in England from Cumbria southwards to Wales. The clothing has often been likened to the attire of Scandinavians, especially in western Norway, a region from which some of the early marauders actually came. However, there is a need for more nuanced regional and chronological differences to be established, as the Viking world was not a unified empire and people of diverse ethnicity lived in many places, not least in Dublin. By the tenth century the influence of native Irish dress is also likely to have been assimilated to some degree.

Interpreting textiles recovered from the Wood Quay/Fishamble Street series of excavations in Dublin directed by Patrick F. Wallace from 1974 to 1981 for the National Museum of Ireland forms the core of this chapter. However, as the textiles derive from rubbish deposits within the town, close to the banks of the river Liffey, they provide a less coherent indication of the garments worn by the inhabitants than if they had come from furnished graves, where it is often possible to reconstruct much of the burial clothing, although even this can give a false impression of dress worn in everyday life as opposed to death, where ritualistic elements need to be taken into account. Matters of status and occupation are also easier to deduce from grave-goods. Nevertheless, the difficulty of interpreting burial clothing has recently been highlighted by the project ‘Fashioning the Viking Age’, a collaboration between the National Museum of Denmark, the Centre for Textile Research at the Saxo Institute, University of Copenhagen, and the Land of Legends Centre for Historical-Archaeological Research and Communication in Lejre. This has involved a re-examination and re-interpretation of the textile fragments recovered from two burials in Jutland dating to the second half of the tenth century that were excavated in 1868–69 and 1880, with the garments worn for burial by the chieftain at Bjerringhoj, Mammen now taking on a very different appearance from those suggested by an interdisciplinary study undertaken only twenty-five years previously.