Oswald's Garments.

You might or might not be familiar with St Oswald, also King of Northumbria - I am currently definitely getting to know him a little better.

I have the pleasure to work on a 3D reconstruction of Oswald as he's portrayed in a Garden of Paradise dating to the early 15th century, and like these projects often are, there's a lot to discover and at least as many questions.

The digitised version of the painting can be found at the Städel Museum website, and the guy in question is the one to the right, hugging the tree. There's quite a lot of things going on in the image, but if I only sort of concentrate on Oswald, the primary problems are: What kind of fabrics were used? Especially the red-gold hood is rather unusual; this time saw quite a fancy for hoods with a long, dagged liripipe, and there's a number of illustrations where the liripipe is drawn through a sleeve, but Oswald... has two. That's a new one to me, definitely. (Should you have seen anything like it, please do let me know!)

The cloak could be silk or wool, but I'd lean towards some nice, fulled wool as a practical coat. Then the hose, which I would assume to be joined already, have some gold decor at the shins; the fabric could be either silk or wool. Gold ornaments re more something that makes me think silk, however, wool would be the easier and more budget-friendly choice. In addition, modern silks tend to be quite different from medieval silk fabrics, so I am not sure where I'd be closer to the mark regarding the fabric. (Modern wool is also different from historical wool fabrics. We're basically going for the looks here, trying to get as closely as possible without going for a full fabric reconstruction, as that would not be in the budget in any way, so it's compromises in each case.)

For the whatever he's wearing on his upper body, I'm planning to use some relatively heavy modern silk. Unfortunately, there's not much visible apart from the right sleeve, which looks rather baggy. As there's a teeny tiny bit of mail armour visible on the top of his leg, it can also be supposed that the garment was rather short.

So here we are. Timeframe is in the 1410-20s, so the dagged hood is definitely very nicely fashionable. There's no surviving man's garment from that time exactly, though we have two complete (with a little damage) from mid-14th century (Charles de Blois and Chartres); there's also the garment of the Black Prince, so at least there's some basis to put conjectures on. 

Still, this leaves quite a bit of guesswork, or of interpretative decisions. Which, by the way, is something that is going on so much and all the time with these reconstruction projects. (One of them is also what to start with - the upper garment? The hose? The hood? Hmm...)