The legs of Viking Age trousers were often bound from ankle to knee in wide, woven wool bands of fabric, known variously (depending on the culture) as puttees or winingas. It is believed that the leg wrappings served a number of purposes, including increased warmth, and were secured either by tucking in the end or fastening it with a Winingas Hook. Based on surviving remnants found at Birka and Bernuthsfeld Germany, pictured on the Bayeux Tapastry and mentioned in Laxdaela Sagaand by the Franks De Carlo Magno and Vita Karoli, our leg wraps are made of woven wool cloth, cut in bands 3 yards long by 4 inches wide.
About our Viking Age / Early Medieval Line
“AD. 793. This year came dreadful fore-warnings over the land of the Northumbrians, terrifying the people most woefully: these were immense sheets of light rushing through the air, and whirlwinds, and fiery dragons flying across the firmament. These tremendous tokens were soon followed by a great famine: and not long after, on the sixth day before the ides of January in the same year, the harrowing inroads of heathen men made lamentable havoc in the church of God in Holy-island (Lindisfarne), by rapine and slaughter.” – The Anglo Saxon Chronicle
In the late 8th century, Scandinavian sea-pirates sacked the island monastery of Lindisfarne, heralding in the so-called Viking Age, a term applied to the eighth through eleventh centuries, in which Norsemen traders and raiders, explored Europe, and settled in Normandy, Iceland, Greenland, Newfoundland, and Vinland. To the east, they set themselves up as the rulers of Russian Kiev, pressed into Anatolia and took service as the famed Varangian Guard of the Byzantine Emperors.
Our new Viking Age product line will be continuously growing with representations of the fashions of the Norse, Anglo-Saxons and Normans civilizations of this period. Regardless of which of these cultures one portrays, there are a number of common truths for Northern European fashion in this period. Linen was the most fabric for clothing, followed by a variety of different weight wools used for overtunics, cloaks and overdresses. Silk, as an extremely rare, luxury fabric, was only used for small trim or accents.
The period leading to the Viking Age was a conservative one, with localized cultures and limited trade. Consequently, many similarities of cut and fit exist between late Roman era Germanic dress and Viking era, Scandinavian clothes, until very late in the period.
Read more about Viking culture in our From the Pen of History article: The Gift of a Shirt
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