DEER SKIN LEATHERS AND THEIR USE FOR FOR COSTUME

Abstract

This paper is a preliminary study of the use of deer skin leathers in costume in Europe and more especially England. The animals mainly concerned are the fallow and European red deer or American Elk, the European elk or American moose, the roe deer and the Scandinavian, Siberian, Greenland and North Canadian reindeer and the North American reindeer or caribou. From earliest times these have played important, and often dominant, roles in the lives of the peoples sharing their territories. Today this is still so with a few peoples, e.g. the Eskimos and Lapps, and in England the residual forests and numerous parks show traces of the influence of the deer. Because these roles have been so important and have so much bearing upon the supply and use of deer skins, they are briefly discussed. In pre-historic days the bones and antlers of deer were used for tools and implements, the flesh for food and the skins for clothing. Innumerable bone and antler artefacts have been unearthed. Paleolithic cave paintings at Alpera and elsewhere in Spain show the hunting of deer with bows and arrows. The overwhelming importance of reindeer and red deer for meat is shown by examination of the bones found at various paleolithic and early neolithic sites in Germany, .Russia and England.1 If, as these show, deer as a source of meat prevailed over oxen and other animals, they probably also were dominant as a source of skins for clothing. Survival of Stone Age clothing cannot be expected, but a paleolithic cave painting at Trois Freres in the French Pyrenees is said to depict a magician wearing a deer skin during a religious dance: Measurements of certain Bronze Age garments found in Denmark are said to correspond closely with those of a stag's hide.3 In an Early Iron Age grave, from the first millenium B.C., in th~ Bruchmoor bog, Damendorf, Schleswig, a cape, made of four deer .skins, has been found4 and in a peat bog, Kohlmoor, near Osterby, Schl~swig, a human head wrapped in a cape of roe deer skin,'from the first century A.D.s In historic times, and d<;?ubtlessearlier, ownership and control of territory have always been important in the organisation of society and its daily activities. The forests provided fuel and sheltered animals affording food and the sport so important in days of peace. Kings, prelates, nobles and lesser gentry came to be very zealous about their con~ .trol of forests. Various kinds of deer, especially the red and fallow deer, being the chief beasts of venery and chase in England and in many European countries, were the focus about which centred much soci?.1life.The royal passion for deer hunting can be traced from the times of the Saxon and Danish monarchs through to Prince Albert's era. The earliest kings took steps to preserve their game, but it was the Norman rplers who created vast forests here and, with their harsh Forest Laws, established the kind of control the