By Touch

Houppelande ... 27 s.p. for woollen garment.

A medieval outer garment that ceased to be popular after the 15th century, consisting of a loose floor-length robe reaching to the wearer’s ankles. The neckline could vary, from a high collar to a wide front opening that extended from neck to the waist; in both cases the garment was typically closed with laces or toggles. The sleeves were extravagant, wide and hanging straight, or fitted to the upper arm. The garment was worn under armour and was favoured for its freedom of movement and warmth, especially by older combatants whose waist tended to spread. Beginning in 1300, fancy-dress styles emerged with flared sleeves and dagged edges, as the article became fashionable at court. Requires 10 yd. Wt. 60½ oz.

 — Streetvendor's Guide

After 44 years of playing D&D and researching medieval history, I was surprised at the term above, as I'd never heard it.  Digging up any proper detail about it proved devilishly difficult, especially since I had sources that, though lacking pictures, disagreed with this page from wikipedia.  It's valuable to remember that wikipedia is also an unreliable source, as is much of the internet.

From the description above, the reader might recognise the garment being described from a hundred Hollywood medieval films.  In the scene shown, from 1938's The Adventures of Robin Hood, Basil Rathbone is wearing the garment.  While dressy, and of course it could be embellished, as plain, ordinary cloth, it's excellent for wearing under armour in cool weather, as was common in northern Europe.

But, fashions change.  And a simple garment in one century can become ridiculous fluffery the next.  We wear "pants" today that are quite unlike the pants of a two centuries ago, but we go on calling them pants because it would seem silly to give them another name, given the slow progression of fashion through time.

Scholarship of fashion is simply abysmal.  The whole field is mis-managed and rife with emotionality, so that individuals in the present stress those garments they find most interesting, while failing to recognise that few examples of these have survived through the centuries in part because clothing doesn't hold up well to time ... and in part because beginning in the 17th century, it was found that old clothing could be used to make paper, so virtually every scrap of historical evidence was collected together and reprocessed into materials for keeping records, printing newspapers and making books.  Thus, researching any specific type of clothing usually dredges up three or four examples of garments that can easily be "mixed up" with something else, or multiple garments that are the same but all have different names.

I've seen arguments that the subject lacks clear research objectives, which makes the subject matter difficult to peer review.  There aren't enough experts; there isn't enough funding.  No standardisation exists because there are multiple communities, hailing from multiple regions around the world, that don't agree for cultural reasons.  The whole field is a mess.

And here I am, trying to create a practical description for specific garments for a D&D campaign, where actual correctness doesn't matter, so long as the reader can piece together, in their mind, what the garment actually looks like ... and hopefully, to some extent, what it feels like to wear in battle or while travelling.  This, because I believe there's a great respect for tactile elements within the game, for those who want more than to see their characters as stick figures.  Even if we don't actually dress up in medieval garb while playing (and, for the record, ech), it still invokes a strong emotional feeling to imagine the one's house emblazoned on an article of embroidered clothing, dyed forest green, as we slip it over our shoulders while breaking an imaginary camp on an imaginary morning.

Indeed, much of the Streetvendor's Guide strives to grant this invocation.  What we eat, what animal we ride, what wood our quarterstaff is made of, how soft the leather of our saddle feels, right down to the smell of the perfume we store in our pack, are heightened if we have a description of these things, to stoke our imagination.  Somehow, for probably human reasons, there's satisfaction in knowing how the things we carry and wear appear and work; and how they infuse our consciousness with a desire for more things, and to protect the things we have.

Those players who lack this sort of imagination will ever find they can't really engage with the campaign.  They can roll the die when they're told, they may vaguely understand they're swinging a sword or making magic happen somehow, but they can't feel what it's like to be in the clothes or eat the food they find.  Which is a pity — which is all the pity, because so much of the setting depends on what our five senses tell us.

No doubt, inventing a background and a character motivation helps fill up this gap ... but they fail to acquire a proper understanding of the game's setting as we do "by touch."

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