Hello Vikings!
Here’s the latest devlog! This time we'll tell you a bit about Viking clothing and how they obtained materials for them. Curious? We invite you to read it!
Contrary to popular belief, Vikings were not clad in leather and furs from head to toe. That said, it still was used to produce some parts of their wardrobe - mostly outer garments like shoes, belts, poaches, caps and cloaks. However, they mostly used linen and wool to make their shirts, trousers and dresses.
Those two materials were obtained by processing flax and fleece respectively. In our game, the players can make a choice which of the two they will use to spin yarn. This interchangeable production allows them to take into account external conditions like infertile soil to optimize the whole production process, which takes place in the Spinning Mill. After harvest, flax had to be retted then threshed into fiber. Fleece, after sheep shearing, was boiled and cleaned. Both of those smelled horribly, so it would be wise to distance them from any living space. After that, fibers had to be combed before spinning using a spindle with attached whorl - disc with a hole in it. All of this hard work just to produce yarn.
That's where Tailor comes in. Here fabric was woven on a vertical loom going from top towards the ground. Warp threads were weighted down by stones and could be rearranged using heddle rods to create a variety of patterns. New weft was pushed towards the fabric above with a beater that was usually made of wood. While the job was both demanding and tedious this method allowed them to weave cloth with required width (typical size of the loom from the period was about 200x165 cm) to reduce waste of material through cutting. Pieces were then sewn together using needles made from bone or wood to produce clothes and sails.
Finished product could be further improved. Either by embroidery or by dyes, which could be applied at almost any part of production. While limited in number, many of them were bright, which again is in contrast with the popular image of Vikings. Such improvements obviously involved additional costs and time. As such it was easy to differentiate the status of a person by judging their clothes, even if the method used to produce them was the same both for Karl and a Thrall. The latter probably had garments made of coarser and undyed fabric. Rich Jarls would distinguish them further with clothes embroidered with precious metals like silver or gold or even silk trims(often a grave good for high status deceased).
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