Pairs of Stockings: Materials, Craft Methods, and Usefulness in Pre-Modern Burial Legwear

Abstract

Between the 17th and 19th centuries, Finnish burial clothing can be divided into two categories: (1) re-purposed items used in life then used as burial clothes, and (2) re-made items crafted from second-hand materials specifically for burial. Despite ostensibly serving the same purpose, re-purposed items remain functional, while re-made items are often hastily assembled from less-suitable materials, raising questions about providing for the dead on practical and symbolic levels. Some items, like burial robes, are constantly re-made, while other categories, such as the stockings, contain both re-made and re-purposed items; the focus here will be on the stockings. This paper addresses stockings identified through excavations at Hailuoto church and Oulu Cathedral, and inventories at the Haukipudas church “from the ground up,” starting with the materials selected, through the crafting methods, and stockings’ resulting performance characteristics. The materials range from knit silks and wools to woven bast fibers; some are clearly hand-crafted, while others tell very different tales about the impacts of industrialization and handcrafting professionalism on textile materials; in contrast, several re-made stockings are stitched from woven bast fibers. These differences highlight the malleability of textile use, reuse and remaking in the past, offering a window into the lifecycle of archaeological textiles, and introduces questions about the experience of creating, using, re-using, and finally interring these materials, and what it means to provide for the dead on symbolic and practical levels.