This and the following four posts present short stories written by Ebba Strutzenbladh. Ebba has developed them over the course of her recent SGSAH internship with the Aberdeen City & Aberdeenshire Archives. These stories are inspired by entries in the Aberdeen Registers Online which offer insight into the lives of medieval women.
The Green Belt, 1465
The belt is linen, embroidered with fine green thread in a vine-like pattern. Green, a mischievous colour. Is it the shade of grass stains on the back of an errant lady’s dress? Or is it the colour of modesty, Adam and Eve’s hands nervously gathering pieces of green to cover themselves as their nudity strikes them? Embroidering the belt was a shared endeavour, mother and daughter sitting together night after night to complete it in time for the May Festival. They never thought to find out what the other was seeing in her mind as they worked.
Janet, the mother, believes in the rich tradition of green. Everlasting life and prosperity – the vitality an aging man likes to dream about. But the colour also speaks of home and heritage: their wooden house is in the midst of the flourishing quarters called the Green Gate, where they built a business as luxury tailors clothing the very finest merchants and lairds. When the Aberdonian men dressed up in green that spring, playing Robin Hood and Little John with their bows at the May Festival, Janet’s husband Robert had something the others didn’t: a matching belt with his aspirations and values, as well as his legacy, stitched onto it.
Daughter Isabell thinks of pleasure-seeking when she thinks of green. The fairies dancing in the woods at dawn are a greyish green, or so people say. A group of young girls she knows stole urine from one of their pregnant mothers and boiled it with verdigris to dye their wimples green. Giggling, they imagined people in the street watching them as they walked to the market, the girls appearing from within the layers of cloth draped around their faces and necks as though framed by fresh sage leaves. Isabell enjoyed watching the men, her father among them, dressed in that pregnant colour as they shot their arrows at painted barrels during the Festival. They seemed to her like fairies who’d left their lush woods and appeared for everyone to see in the fair May sun.
Now, with Robert’s coffin in the hard January ground, the belt has become detached from meaning. The vitality of its threads seems an impotent joke, the pleasure is forgotten. Robin Hood, the fairies in the forest – they would never grow pale and waste away in fever as Robert has done.
‘Father would have wanted me to have it, ’ says Isabell. ‘It was my last gift to him and so it ties him to me.’
‘You know what ties him to you?’ Janet’s face is half-hidden behind a kerchief wet with tears. ‘Your poor widowed mother, his wife of twenty-three years. And what did I do when you complained the needle was hurting your fingers? I let you go to sleep, Isabell, and finished it myself.’
‘The idea was all mine!’ the daughter claims. ‘It was my thinking that we decorate Father like a creature from the woods.’
‘We did no such thing. The belt was for his prosperity and honour.’
They continue to speak like this, day after day, sometimes their impatience turning to shouts, until the neighbours come and take them to court where the bailies scratch their heads, confused.
‘What’s the value of this belt, then?’ they ask mother and daughter. ‘And why did your late husband and father not bequeath it in his will to the appropriate party?’
‘His will only include household items and such, ’ Janet explains. ‘This is something else entirely, goodmen. It’s a labour of love.’
The bailies, who dislike seeing green in January, believe it’s primarily the colour of confusion: it can mean too many things; it’s seen everywhere in the world, in eyes, forests, and food; it’s not nearer to white than it is to black; its meaning is open, its implications eternal.
‘Who has the belt now?’ the bailies demand.
Learning it’s Isabell, they make a quick ruling to end the green chaos: the daughter will keep the belt. In exchange, she must make Janet a new one, using the same green thread, as well as pay her mother twenty shillings that she owes her, and two bolls of barley for the trouble. Mother and daughter return home to begin a new project: under Janet’s supervision, Isabell makes the first belt she’s ever produced without her mother’s hands next to hers. This time, they both think it’s green like fresh new shoots in the spring.
aberdeen registers 