Linen

Linen was the standard cloth for any medieval clothing not made of wool.  Linen is still in use today but has become far less popular, mostly because it wrinkles easily (unlike most cotton-polyester blends).   It's still found in handkerchiefs, bedding, and some shirts, but many people may own no linen clothing at all (interestingly, underwear, now universally made from cotton and maybe nylon, is often referred to collectively as "linen").

But when silk was extremely expensive, polyester and nylon and rayon were unknown, and cotton was rare (it really only reached western Europe in the thirteenth century), linen was the cloth you wanted next to your skin.  (It was also the cloth from which sails were made.)

Linen even now has advantages over a lot of other kinds of cloth.  It is never itchy, as wool can be if not processed properly.  It is strong, stronger than cotton, and is never munched on by clothes moths, as is wool. It is cool and thus good to wear in hot weather.  It also takes up dye readily. 

Linen is made from flax, a kind of grass that can, when treated, be spun as one spins wool and then woven.   It has been in use since ancient times; the semi-diaphanous outfits people were wearing in Egyptian wall paintings were made of linen.  Scraps of linen fabric have been found in central Asia that are believed to be tens of thousands of years old.  Below is an image of the flax plant's details; note that blue flowers.

 Going from the grass-like linen plant to fibers ready to be spun and woven into cloth was a complicated process.  First the plants were "retted," soaked in pond water, where both the water and the bacteria in it would loosen the fibers from each other (medieval people didn't know about bacteria eating pectin, but they knew soaking in the right water got rid of the sticky stuff holding the fibers together).  Then the plants were "scutched," crushed to break down the stalks so that the fibers were freed of them.  Then the fibers were "heckled," combed to get rid of short bits, leaving only the longer fibers, ready for spinning.

In the Middle Ages, linen production, like wool production, could take place anywhere but was especially common in northern Germany and what are now the Benelux countries.  One might call it an industry, but there were no factories, rather villages in which a number of the houses contained spinning and weaving operations.  Women especially produced the cloth on small-scale hand looms.

Linen's natural color is a creamy white, but medieval people liked it even whiter and would bleach it in the sun. A sign of refinement was to wear very lightweight, very white linen.  All the heroines in the stories wore white linen.  It would of course need to be ironed, with a flat iron heated up in the fire.

 

© C. Dale Brittain 2026

For more on clothing and other aspects of life in the Middle Ages, see my ebook, Positively Medieval, available from Amazon and other major ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback!