Fig. 82.—Hood found in a Moss in St. Andrew’s Parish, Orkney.
(27 inches in length.)
Fig. 83.—Portion of the Fabric of the Hood.
The fact that a few examples from Scottish graves have shown the possibility of obtaining even from these perishable materials the tangible evidence of the form and fashion of the garments that clothed the men and women who made and wore these ornaments, gives room for hope that with increasing interest and greater care the products of future investigations may complete this evidence. In the meantime we have but one piece of dress which retains its form, and which may with some degree of probability be attributed to the mixed population of the Scandinavian colony. It is a hood of a coarse woollen fabric (Fig. [82]), woven with a peculiarly twilled texture, and decorated with a long fringe of pendent and knotted cords, formed by twisting the doubled end of a thread with two contiguous threads of the warp. It was dug up in a peat moss in the parish of St. Andrews, in the mainland of Orkney, many years ago, and came into the possession of the late Mr. George Petrie of Kirkwall, after whose death it was acquired for the National Museum, along with his general collection. It measures 32 inches in height and 17 inches in greatest width. The border to which the fringe is attached is 3 inches in width. The fringe itself is 15 inches in depth. The fabric of which the body of the hood is composed is worked in alternate stripes, presenting at their junction the appearance shown in the woodcut (Fig. [83][83]). The fringe of two-ply cords (Fig. [84]), which is its most peculiar feature, presents a striking similarity to the fringe (Fig. [85]) of a portion of the dress of a woman whose body was discovered in 1835 in digging peats in the Moss of
Fig. 83.—Portion of the Fabric of the Hood. Haraldskjaer, in Jutland. The body, which was stretched on its back, was pegged down in the moss by hooked branches of trees driven into the peat so as to fasten down the legs and arms at the knees and elbows, and further secured by other branches placed across the breast and abdomen, and staked down at the ends. The dress was well preserved when first discovered, but only a few fragments were saved, and among them is a portion with a fringe of two-ply cords (Fig. [85]), bearing a suggestive similarity to the fringe of the Orkney hood. This similarity, so far as it has any value as an indication of relationship, links the Orkney specimen with the Scandinavian, and thus gives apparent ground for the inference that the hood may belong to the period of the Scandinavian colonisation of the islands, and that, like the brooches, it may represent a typical variety of head-dress peculiar to the colony.
Fig. 84.—Part of the Border and Fringe of the Hood.
Fig. 85.—Woollen Fabric from the Moss of Haraldskjaer, Jutland.