A Beginner's Guide to Girdles: Basic Leatherworking

Yale Center for British Art,
Paul Mellon Collection

I've been to many renaissance faires and acted in quite a few, so I don't walk around with a clipboard, taking note of the inaccuracies. That would be boring and boorish. Nonetheless, I think the one I find the most vexing for me (because it would be the easiest one to fix) has to be the Big Errol Flynn Pirate Belts I see walking around with people attached to them.

Belts in the 16th century just were not that wide. And the buckles are almost always all wrong to boot. I look at a lot of old artwork, delving into the sketchbooks of the artists when they're available, and nowhere do I see those big belts. And the metal-detector finds back me up on this one. The buckles we find just simply aren't that big. On average, buckles of the period seem made to fit a 1/2 - 3/4 inch strap.

I can't help noticing these things. It's a curse.

It's important to note that in this time period, belts weren't for holding your pants up. That's a relatively recent development, actually. Belts were there to hold your knife, sword, and/or purse and not much else.  (The "I have everything I own tied to my belt" thing at renaissance faires also bugs the crap out of me, but I digress.) In the 16th century, your pants were tied either to the waistcoat or doublet with cords, called "points". In order to take your pants down, you had to take off your doublet or untie your points. 

And before you ask: Yes, methods for disrobing and going to the bathroom are a common topic of conversation for male reenactors.

A properly-sized belt worn above a row of bows where the man's lower garments are joined to his upper garments.

Take a good look at Robert Dudley at the top of this post. He was Queen Elizabeth's favorite throughout most of his life. The very image of mid-reign manliness at the height of Elizabethan fashion. See his sword belt? It's maybe 3/4 inch wide at best. Probably less.

I only bring this up because it's a pet peeve (and you thought I only had pet cats) and because when we do these projects, it's important that we're replicating items as they actually were, not as Hollywood (and your local renaissance faire) depicts them.

Of Buckles & Leather

The straps I use are generally 5/8 inch. Even this might be a bit wide. These original Tudor buckles from metal detector finds that are being made available for sale from UK website Crossman Crafts are affixed to 12 mm (1/2 inch) straps: http://www.crossmancrafts.co.uk/salvage/  

Yes those are real Tudor artifacts. Buckles are so abundant in the finds and so often made of base metals that they're rarely rated as "treasure" in the legal sense, so they can be and often are sold and exported. Aside from the obvious auction sites you can buy original pieces several places online. I like Crossman mostly because the site owner is a craftsman after my own heart and quite generous with his advice to other craftspeople. There's also Gaukler Medieval, which offers a small and ever-changing trove of original items, including artifacts of various periods: http://medievalwares.com/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=65&zenid=2mo9kdrnt8333hk2una5ghv6p1

Of course you can't ever really own a piece of history, but you sure can rent one for awhile.

Note that the real buckles don't look like most of the ones you see at the stores or in movies. The most prevalent in our period are what's known as a 'spectacle' buckle. Meaning they look like a wee pair of glasses. They were made by casting in bronze and brass and/or various precious metals as suited the man or woman that ordered it.

At some point, we have to do some casting. The Goldsmiths, Pewterers and Founders companies lie ahead, of course, and that's what the soapstone in this picture is destined for. Casting projects will likely include buckles because they're an item that one always seems to need, as well as buttons and maybe some silly oddments like pilgrim's badges.

All that lies ahead of us, though, because the Girdler would have probably bought them or had them made special to his specifications by someone from one of those other specialties, then assembled them in his shop. If nothing else, the simple brass ones we're working with here wouldn't have been made much fuss over because they were for the more common folk such as your this humble craftsman whose hands you see here.

I think that I have a burr about belts because they're a very simple project. My first ever leather working project was a belt. I think I was ten. Even before that, my exposure to leatherworking was mostly limited to my dad or grandpa punching extra holes in my belt to keep my blue jeans from slipping over my scrawny hips.

The Girdler's company did more than make average leather belts like these. They made fine girdles for ladies and sword belts for gentlemen. This sort of thing would be relegated to an apprentice, I should think. All the same, it's an important piece of kit.

For a simple, leather belt, there's only two pieces: A belt and a buckle.

It goes like this: 

1. Order your buckle and cut an appropriately-sized strap or buy one at a leather working supplier like I usually do. Unless you buy your leather wholesale, the savings of cutting your own straps just doesn't pan out like you'd think it should.
2. Cut a slot near one end of your strap to accommodate the tongue of the buckle. Leave an inch or two of leather at the end to wrap back and sew.
3. The buckle slips on, with the tongue passing through the slot and given enough room to travel by adjusting the length of your slot. You might have to fiddle with it a bit. 
4. Sew the buckle in place. I like sewing a little triangle as you can see, but there are plenty of other methods.

NOTE: Don't use pop rivets. They're convenient and I confess to having used them a lot before I learned better. Pop rivets are never really necessary and never look quite right. If you want rivets, go to your local hardware store and buy some proper ones and learn how to peen them properly.  

Honestly, sewing is much easier. Just punch the holes ahead of time and wax your thread like we did with the leather jack we made the other day.

Now, you might be saying "This article is incomplete" and you would be correct. The simple leather belt was the least of the Girdler's wares. Sword belts and fancy adornments for Milady's waist were the heights of their trade, but we're working on the lives of the commonfolk here at the School of the Renaissance Artisan.

Not that I wouldn't like to see input from some of the great craftspeople I know who specialize in those other areas.

Much like the pins we began this journey contemplating, what this simple leather belt gives us is a jumping off point for further explorations into the craft of those who cast the bronze and brass buckles, the craftspeople who tanned and sold the hides, and so on. This humble belt, assembled by a Girdler's apprentice, sits at the end of a long chain of suppliers, all of whom stand between us and the culmination of this project come December.

For the moment, though, revel in your perfectly period Elizabethan leather belt to gird you against a chaotic world.

~ Scott

Wired: The Worshipful Company of Pinners & Wiredrawers

So... why am I focusing on a group of people who weren't able to foot the bills necessary to remain an independent livery company all by themselves? Because the plight of the pinners epitomizes to me all of the highs and lows of trade in the Renaissance. It is a tale fraught with foreign competition driving down prices and wages, trade wars, protectionism and nationalism, and the dependency that one trade has on another.

The pinners were in many ways under the thumb of the Worshipful Company of Wiredrawers. That is to say, the makers of pins were more or less taken over by their main suppliers.  It was an alliance that ultimately failed, but it was an important one in the history of the guilds.

Stadtbibliothek Nuernberg 

Wire drawing by hand was obviously a laborious process, dragging yard after yard of flat metal strips through a tiny cone-shaped hole. Early on, this was done by hand without so much as a pair of vice grips to ease the load. I honestly did not realize how this worked until I read Chris Caple's book "Objects: Reluctant Witnesses to the Past" and he only went into it to explain why so many pins have a faint groove down the side. It's the seam.

Some of the most interesting stuff in books like this are the asides.

This process (along with a higher zinc content) made the brass used by Elizabethan pinners significantly stiffer than what I can find on the shelf at my local hardware store. The technical term is "work hardened"  which is difficult to repeat with modern softer brass.

So, yes, they started with flat strips of brass, and dragged them through ever smaller holes in large plates of iron as the chap above is doing. Was it always done by hand? Thankfully, for his sake, no. Sometimes they used a water wheel or similar apparatus to gain some measure of automation, or at least mechanical advantage.

Maggie Secara sent me this image of a goldsmith's shop that she used for a scene in her book The Dragon Ring (which I admittedly designed the cover for). The kid at the left of frame is operating a wire drawing windlass, though I imagine that drawing gold would require less force, it being a softer metal. (Any jewelers out there please correct me if I'm wrong about that.)

The goldsmith obviously drew his own wire in his own shoppe, even though there was a guild devoted to drawing gold and silver wire as well as brass and copper. The implication I draw from this is that the wiredrawers lacked the power to stop him from breaking their monopoly just as the pinners lacked the funds to enforce their crown monopoly by hiring inspectors to police the ports.

And ultimately, just as they absorbed the pinners, so too were they absorbed by the Worshipful Company of Girdlers. So this too became an all but defunct entity subservient to the greater company of belt makers.


That's what wiredrawing is. What it's not is something I'm going to demonstrate. I might get around to making my own draw plates and accumulating enough brass to make it worthwhile, but if so I will do it at the end of the year... if I can find the time.

It is time to return to the Big List and especially The Worshipful Company of the Haberdashers. Because the Haberdashers sold small homegoods like pins and combs and thimbles and whatnot, we will do a couple of quick projects on this one and talk a bit about Tudor economics.

See you this weekend!

~ Scott

Special Thanks to:
Rachel Jardine, The Elizabethan Costuming Bees on Facebook, and Maggie Secara (King's Raven, her new novel from Crooked Cat Books came out last month and it's excellent. I especially like the cover!)  A writer's only as good as his sources and his sources should never be blamed for his mistakes.

Before Pinterest: The curious history of the Pinners

Just before Christmas, I received an email back the Museum of London in response to an enquiry I sent them about a list of 111 crafts that existed before the Livery Companies properly got going. I kept hearing about this list and seeing it referenced in books without anyone I could find actually presenting the entire list.

My question was answered patiently and thorough (more than!) by John Clark, retired Senior Curator of the museum's medieval collection, who sent me the list and links to a couple of books available online (archived as out of copyright) as well as some newer ones, which I have added to the "Library" tab above under a heading for general histories of the guilds.

From Mr. Clark's email:

"The list was compiled by the Clerk of the Brewers' Company and included in the company's records. It is headed (in English - the Brewers were one of the first companies to record their business in English rather than Latin or French):  'A list of the names of all the crafts exercised in London from of old, and still continuing in this ninth year of King Henry V [ie 21 March 1421 to 20 March 1422], and here set down in case it may in any wise profit the hall and Company of Brewers.'"

Mr. Clark went on to caution me that the list of 111 was a list of crafts compiled by the Worshipful Company of Brewers for their own uses. There were many such lists of varying length and contrary to what it says in many books, shouldn't be taken to mean that every craft on the list was represented by an organized guild or that the informal groups were the same as those who were later rolled up into the great livery companies.

It is a mistake, he warned, to assume that craft = guild.

It's an excellent point. This is a problem that we will encounter more than once on this journey, I think. The histories of many of the great and even lesser companies are so convoluted even they cannot say for certain in many cases whence they came. The Founderers, for instance were founded by God, apparently. I assume the Fruiterers claim Adam (though they should probably claim Eve) and the Cutlers even have a song about how they came about because Eve wanted apple slices.

But we will get to all of those great and might folks later. First, I want to talk about the Pinners, the makers of metal pins for sewing and dressing.

It might seem odd to begin with pin making for this project. It's not glamorous, elegant, or even all that difficult.  The Pinners are not even one of the Livery Companies, or rather not one of the ones named on my list of 54 (they were a small part of the Girdler's for awhile). But we will begin with them nonetheless because the illustrate the mercurial nature of trade in the 16th century.

Pins seem simple enough. The bog standard Tudor pin could be cast, but they were more generally made by wrapping a small ball of thin brass wire around a long, hardened brass pin. The ball was crimped and/or soldered to one end to form the head and the other end was sharpened with a file. There were, as always, finer and lesser pins: Jeweled, enameled, and precious metal pins for the gentry, but most were basically variations of that relatively simple formula.

The pin makers were not wealthy. They were not powerful. And it was not because pins were not in demand. In a time before velcro, snaps, or zippers, pins were an absolute necessity. The term 'pin money' didn't mean idle spending cash, it meant the money set aside to buy hand-made pins. Some of them were quite beautiful and ornate.

The ascendancy of Elizabeth I was the ascendancy of ever more elaborate costume including the elaborate ruffs, and the demand for pins was all the greater as the 16th century advanced. The more elaborate the ruff, the more pins that were needed to keep it stable and pretty.

And yet, it seems that the fortunes of England's pinners fell rather than rose along with demand. You see, the marketplace was flooded with cheaper pins of better quality from France. Successive administrations from Henry VIII through Elizabeth I enacted protections against the dumping of foreign pins on English markets, but it was for naught.

"In 1543 Henry VIII made a move to control the quality of pins produced in England in hopes that English pins of high quality would prove more desirable than the imported items: 'No person shall put to sale any pinnes butonly such as shall be double headed and have the heads soldered fast to the shank of the pinnes, well smoothed, the shank well shapen, the point well and round filed, canted and sharpened.'" 

From: 'Findings: The Material Culture of Needlework & Sewing' by Mary C. Baudry

Pin makers most likely began as one of these not-quite-a-guild independent trade associations that sprang up in the early 15th century. In 1497 they officially combined forces with the Wiresellers upon whom they were dependent for materials anyway. This continued until 1511 when both were consumed by the Girdlers, becoming subordinate members of that society.

Royal interventions in the market like those mentioned in Caple's book, banning the import of foreign pins by Henry VIII and again by Elizabeth, were well-intentioned, but fell short of the glory. Henry's quality demands for soldered heads put the pin makers in daily contact with very toxic materials and slowed production. The consumers kept buying the contraband foreign pins and since the poor pinners had to pay for the enforcement of their monopoly (as was done with most guild monopolies) it failed to pull them out of their slump.

However, the price of pins plummeting, they already could not afford to enforce their monopoly until 1579 when the wire-drawers/girdlers cut them loose. Pinners should have been wealthy, but they never seemed to get their feet under them sufficiently to really parlay the need for their product into real success.

Tudor pinners had it bad enough that they were chosen by Tony Robinson for his television show "The Worst Jobs in History" for the Tudor era, which is pretty high up on the universal list of dubious distinctions.

It would not be until automation and mass production that the humble art of pin making could make enough pin money to make anyone truly wealthy. And when it came, that person wasn't a pinner at all, but the inventor of a machine.

They were the humblest of the humble and yet, they quite literally held the whole of Tudor society together. Something in my quixotic nature is drawn to that. And so it is with them that we will begin.

This project includes a firm grounding in:

• Tools (files and materials safety)
• Wire-drawing and brassworks,
• We will make a pinner's bone,
• We will approximate a cold forge for pinheads,
• And finally, we will make some pins!

A great and special thank you to John Clark, Curator Emeritus at the Museum of London, for his kind assistance and patience with the questions I tossed across the Atlantic in hopes of finding a kind and scholarly ear for them to land on. Thank you sir. You are too kind.

- Scott


Post Script:  Here is the list of 111 trades recorded by the Brewers Company from the appendices of George Unwin's book The Gilds and Companies of London (Published 1908 and out of copyright in the United States) provided my Mr. Clark.  You can read the full book at Archive.org.

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edited 8/16/2016 to correct quote attribution and provide a link to the Findings book. - Scott