Lately there has been a lot of discussion, some rather heated, about exactly what colours were available for clothing at the time of the Civil War. The answer is variously given as "they could only get dull and flat colours with their technology" to "anything goes , including flourescant orange".

As is often the case with historical research, the truth lies somewhere in between the extremes. Most tints and shades were capable of being dyed, if not necessarily fixed permanently. By mixing basic dyes or by double dipping, i.e. dyeing cloth in one vat, drying it then dyeing it in another vat, an almost limitless number of results could be obtained, but expense and fashion often made anything other than the large scale dyeing of a basic colour impractical. However, when we talk of large scale commercial dyeing in a seventeenth century context, we are not discussing the production of huge bolts of quality controled deep dyed cloth such as we are used to seeing in our modern shops. We are dealing rather with a well developed small scale industry with independant representative factories in most large towns where water and cloth were available. Dye vats were large wooden tubs capable of dealing with twenty or thirty yards of cloth at one dipping, but the weight of such quantities of cloth when wet would mean that the quantity of cloth dipped would depend on drying space and manpower. When the newly dyed cloth was removed from the dyebath it had to be washed and rinsed over and over until the water ran clear, this obviously would take a large ammount of water and would also limit the number of colours that could be dealt with at any one time.

So where did the dyestuffs come from ? The sources were mainly vegetable with some animal and mineral sources. The plants used include woad (leaves for blue); saffron (crocus - yellow); sumach (leaves and bark - yellow / brown); madder (root - red); henna (root - red); walnut (shell and root - brown); tree galls (black); pomegranite (fruit - yellow); beetroot (root-blood red); onion (skins - yellow); blackberries (fruit - blue / mauve). Animal sources include mollusc purpura (Tyrean purple - comes out of the bath yellow, changes to crimson on exposure to sunlight); Kermes- (red); cochineal (red); lac (scarlet). Mineral sources include iron earth (red, yellow, brown); lime, gypsum and clay (cream); soot and coal (grey, black); arsenic (green); copper earth (green / blue). None of these colour agents were permanent so they were disolved in water with a chemical binding agent, called a mordant. Different mordants were needed for different dyestuffs and would alter the effect of the dye. For example tin used as a mordant for cochineal would give a very bright scarlet.

The colonial expansion of the seventeenth European powers aroused great interest in new dye sources and a great deal of research was carried out by the eminent chemists of the day. In France the chemists Dufay de Cisternay, Hellot, Bertollet, Chaptal and Golbert, who was Comtroller-General to Louis XIV, all worked on the project, and Colbert published a Code of Practise for the dyeing industry. In England Bancroft, Henry and Home were prominent chemists who worked to improve the performance of dyes.

The best fixative for wool dyes was human urine and wool dyers were recognised by their multi-coloured skin and pungent smell. The earliest referance to the "Welsh blood and earth" red and brown toothed check flannel is late sixteenth century and from then on places became famous for the high quality of one colour or another. Gloucester red, a rich red, was the first New Model Army colour, with Venice red, named after the point of origin of the dye not the dye house, being used later.

Linen and wool were bleached by being washed in lime or lemonjuice and spread to dry in bright sunlight.

Fashion dictated the colours to be duller than in previous years with blaick leading the field. Marmaduke Rawdon was advised to have good black clothes for his trip to London in the 1630's. The Earl of Northampton was one gentleman who wore the very popular combination of dove or sad greyish brown, and coral pink portraits show fashionable colours to have been red, salmon, brown, yellow and some blue, but the most popular colours were certainly on the restrained side with a few flashes of really bright colour. Dyed cloth, for reasons I have already outlined, could be very expensive, dyeing a parcel of wool could double or treble its price, so most lower class clothing and working clothes would have been made of undyed cloth or from the rare piece of badly dyed cloth that could not be redyed for some reason. After all, sheep came, and still come, in a great variety of hues, white, off white, cream, beige, stone, greige, grey, brown, chocolate and some black. Linen and cotton natural colours are off white, cream, beige, stone, greige, and some light brown.

To see the great number of dye factories and houses, try looking at place and street names in England (and to a lesser degree in Wales and Scotland). Two examples are Saffron Walden, associated with dye plant growing since Roman days and Scarletwell Street in Northampton where red flannel was dyed.

Despite the chemical improvements of the seventeenth century, the dyes were not easily repeatable or very fast so a great variety of tones would have occured all called by the same name, e.g. Coventry blue, a very popular colour for embroidery thread for linen, would vary greatly from navy to "Cambridge" blue from batch to batch.

The weather would have had an adverse effect on colours so working clothes that were dyed, such as the blue livery jumps, sleeveless coats and array uniform would have faded quite fast. Red fades to rust and yellow green to yellow, yellow to cream, blue to grey and black goes rusty. May I venture to suggest that some interesting results might be obtained by those interested in authenticity in "uniform" by dressing the men in cloth dyed by themselves with authentic materials. I am quite sure that several of those odd preconceptions voiced in "Beer Tent Meetings" about the perfectly dressed band box smart Civil War soldier would very quickly vanish!

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