Harry, this is a fantastic resource and you are to be commended for your work. A post like this is precisely why myArmoury is just a superior forum and format. Excellent.

FYI

The colors that you see here are entirely dependent on how you have calibrated the color spectrum of your computer's monitor.

To calibrate the colors of your monitor, go to:

control panel > display

Excellent results Harry. What do the original texts refer to where you've used Brazilwood, as Brazilwood is a New World species?

Also, have you tried any of the recipes for dyeing hides listed in the Mappae Clavicula? I've had some good yellow-greens from using home grown weld cooked in urine and a nice purple from oak-galls and cinnabar.

Weld can yield a good colour, but the preparation instructions are quite specific and more complex than the process required when dyeing textiles.

The Mappae is the only early medieval source book for leather dyeing recipes. I've got a copy in Latin which I translated into English but the leather dye recipes are collected here:-

http://www.elizabethancostume.net/dyes/mappae.html

I've looked into reproducing Murex purple but the snail extract is running at about $2.4 million per pound these days

http://shop.kremerpigments.com/en/pigments/kr...le-genuine

Harry,

Could it be at all feasible to try to farm the Pupura Lapillus on a large scale to produce your own die? It strikes me that the initial outlay could be expensive, but once the operation was up and running, it would probably be much more affordable in the long term than purchasing the dye from a store. Even better would be if someone could selectively breed the snails for dye output or else modify the snail in some other way to increase the amount of dye per snail.

I have been able to obtain some more blue leather dyes from the medieval manuscripts; the base ingredient is indigo.

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And here is a ranges of purple leather dyes that were produced from a variety of ingredients such as brazilwood, buckthorn berries, and lac insects.

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I think I understand why there are so few brown leather dyes in medieval dyer's manuscripts.

During the Middle Ages, the ancient tripartite color scheme of red, white, and black was replaced by a new order that added three more colors: blue, green, and yellow.

White and yellow were associated with one-another on one side of the color spectrum, with all of the other colors on the opposite side. Blue was considered to be very closely aligned with black and green. Red was considered the opposite of blue as well as the opposite of white and yellow. Purple was considered to be a red, and was closer to black than to blue.

According Eraclius (10th century), the primary colors were black and white, and then there were the intermediate colors of red, green, yellow, purple, prasinus (leek green), azure, and Incicus (indigo).

All of the other colors (such as brown, orange, pink, and grey) were generally ignored, at least in hierarchy of color, and had little symbolic meanings. Brown, orange, and russet were described as being the ugliest colors of them all.

Brown was not really a color in the medieval hierarchy of colors. Rather, brown was the color of things that were not colored. Brown was the color of natural undyed clothing that was worn by the lowest ranks for manual labor. Formal religious proclamations of the early Middle Ages that defined color symbolism did not even mention the color brown. However, after the Protestant Reformation in the 1500s, brown became an important symbol of modesty, and brown clothing was worn by monks and the pious.

So.... Brown was an unpopular color. One did not dye things brown. Brown was the color of things that were not dyed.

I am also started to produce green leather dyes, although they are pretty unimpressive. It is very difficult to produce a green leather dye. But I am still working on it.

Both of these olive green dyes were produced with ripe buckthorn berries soaked in potash. The leather on the right was overdyed with a minute amount of indigo.

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I am especially interested in the green leather dyes, as green is a predominant color for scabbards in Ottonian and some late Carolingian or late 10th/early 11th century English manuscripts. The green is always a strong, rather vibrant green. Does green ink take to leather the same way it takes to scrapped velum, as opposed to a soaked dye?

It's also possible that the scabbard coverings are fabric--how do the listed green dyes take to cloth?

Thank you for this, Harry. This has been very informative. I actually have mostly black and brown scabbards and hilts, and always saw brightly decorated scabbards as gaudy. But, logically looking at reconstructions the medieval sense of style is much different than our modern sensibilities would dictate. And your reasoning for "brown" being synonymous with basic is completely logical.
The fact that dyes were mostly brushed on makes sense with the labor involved in producing a modicum of color and mordent. Drum dying would be more thorough, but wasteful of the more valuable colorants (you'd not only be dying both the flesh and grain sides, but also wasting color on the trimmings and waste.) And if you drum died an entire hide it limits what projects you might want use it on.

I always wanted a bright blue scabbarded sword, and this thread has motivated me toward meeting that end goal. I have been planning on buying a Prince with bronze pommel and think a royal blue scabbard would be a great compliment to it.
-Terry

I just completed a 4-year research project into medieval European leather dyes. During this time, I completed the following:

-Reviewed 16 medieval dyer’s manuscripts from the 8th to 16th centuries
-Deciphered all known (about 130) medieval leather dye manuscript recipes
-Obtained or manufactured about 60 medieval substrates and reagents
-Re-created 65 ancient medieval leather dyes from ancient dye recipes
-Wrote a 500-page treatise on medieval European leather dyes and the associated chemistry

During the past 4 years I performed about 300 leather dye experiments while trying to decipher and re-create medieval leather dyes. The recipes in the manuscripts often do not offer step-by-step instructions. Rather, the recipes provide only a general overview of the procedures. Many critical steps are often omitted from the recipes, which is why the dyes are so difficult to re-create. The medieval terminology in the recipes is also rather obscure, allegorical, and metaphorical.

I think that I am now one of the world's top experts on medieval leather dyes.

Anyway, forget about everything else that I’ve said previously. This is my final and definite word on medieval leather dye colors.

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RED

These are the colors that can be achieved with medieval leather dyes, made from brazilwood, cochineal, and madder root

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