Early Medieval Cottes, Cotes, Gownes & Tunics
SHAPING - CLOSURES - FABRIC & DECORATION

The very early medieval woman's dress was often called a cote, although many modern people call it a tunic.

Cunnington and Beard's A Dictionary of English Costume 900 - 1900 defines the garment as:

cote from 13th century. Everyday loose tunic being the main garment of both sexes. A woman's gown- long, close-fitting with long sleeves which is often referred to as a gown, kirtle or kyrtle.

To avoid confusion, I will continue to use the term kirtle on this website to describe the later gown which was laced or buttoned down the front to the waist.

Shown at right is a detail from the 14th century German manuscript, the Manesse Codex showing a woman in a cote with bands at the neck and sleeves.

Sometimes a woman's garment in this early 13th and 14th centuries might be called a gowne.

Shaping

The basic shape of the early medieval dress has a couple of distinguishing features.

It is quite long, in a basic A line- that is, narrower at the top and wider at the hem. The neckline is quite high, and is sometimes cut with a small vertical slit at the neck to aid dressing.

In other cases, it looks like the opening for the head is only as large as it needs to be to get the head through and no bigger.

The shoulders do not have a sleeve hole cut in or set in at the usual armhole. Sleeves are added at the edge of the rectangular body of the tunic, giving a slight batwing shape to the underarms.

This gives the dress a basic T-shape. The sleeves are very tapered at the lower arm and tight at the wrist but do not go over the hand. Some images show two or three buttons, but an enormous amount show none.

We can see this basic shape extremely well in the image, at left, from the Luttrell Psalter, held in the British Library. It is an English manuscript from the early 14th century.

Early cotes are cut quite loosely and is drawn in with a belt, creating an overhang of fabric at the waist.

Even in many late medieval artworks, this style of hitching up a longer train over the belt so it doesn't drag on the ground can be seen.

It was very common for this style of cote to be worn both as an undergown or with another contrasting coloured one over the top, or with a sleeveless surcote or which has a high neckline also.

Closures

The garment just pulls on over the woman's head.

It had either a plain, round neckline or had a little vertical slit at the neck.

This was closed with a brooch, or sometimes, a couple of tiny buttons. We can faintly make out a set of tiny buttons in the Manesse Codex image at the top of the page.

There are no buttons or lacings down the front of this style of early medieval dress.

Shown, at left, are two women wearing cotes from the 13th century French manuscript, the Maciejowski Bible. You can see how the belt creates lovely folds of fabric at the waist which would otherwise hang like a sack.

Fabrics and decoration

Wool was the overwhelming choice for medieval clothing.

Distinctions in class were made by the quality of fabric used and the richness of the dyes used.

Not many of this style of gown was decorated; a huge number of them are shown in solid colours, but we can find a few images if we really try.

In cases like the image to the left,, Jean Pucelle. Enlumineur of Auteur Maître du Cérémonial de Gand from between 1323 and 1326, wide bands of patterns repeat on the body and on the sleeves.

The decoration on the sleeves and across the body of the dress might be woven or embroidered onto the fabric. We simply can not tell from a picture.

In images like the Holkham Bible, at right, we can see decorated bands on both mens and woman's clothing- always the cote, never the surcote, which are more geometric and are potentially woven into the fabric.

Other pages of the manuscript also show clothing of both sexes to have similar decoration. Not all clothes, but certainly a few. The pattern on the cotes matches the pattern on to top of some of the aprons in the Luttrell Psalter.

The Holkham Bible is written in Anglo-Norman French and English, British Library Add. MS 47682. Both are early 14th century English manuscripts.

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