Home > Warderobe Accounts > Irish Bard's Leine and Ionar > Woodcuts

Please note that I will use the terms leine & shirt interchangably, and same for ionar & jacket.

The Woodcuts

The woodcuts themselves were found in two modern books ^{1, 2}, and I have shown those woodcuts we focused on to your right. They are originally from John Derricke's The Image of Irelande with a Discouerie of Woodkarne, which was written in 1578, with the woodcuts created between then and 1581, apparantly from memory (or possibly sketches taken while he was in Ireland.) Unlike the images from Lucas de Heere, it is documented that Derricke was in Ireland, and saw the Irish and their clothing styles himself.

We chose two woodcuts to focus on. One was an outdoor dinner party of MacSwiney. There are many activities in this image, from preparing and cooking the meal, to a couple of Irishmen warming their bums near the fire, to showing a bard and harper entertaining the party. As my friend Liam is a modern Irish Poet, he wanted to look like the bard standing in the woodcut.

The other woodcut chosen is an Irish messenger receiving a letter from an English knight, Sir Henry Sidney. There are a number of Englishmen in this image, but the focus is clearly on the messenger and Sir Henry.

Since these are woodcuts, it is difficult sometimes to tell what is going on with the different articles of clothing. Unlike a painting, there is no clear color distinction between say the shirt and the jacket. Thankfully, Derricke describes the wool jackets, which clarified that the skirtings shown on top are part of the jacket, and not a part of the shirt. However, both jacket and shirt do have pleats.

He describes wool jackets:
which fancy first did heed
His skirts be very short
with pleats set thick about

and

their shirts be very strange
not reaching past the thigh
with pleats on pleats they pleated are
as thick as pleats may lie
whose sleeves hang trailing down
almost onto the shoe.
      ~ Dress in Ireland¹, pg 56

There is an extant wool jacket shown in Dress in Ireland (pg 56 & 57) whose skirting is heavily pleated but flat. Liam and I preferred to base our garment design on the woodcuts themselves. The difference is mainly the way the upper jacket skirting seemed to radiate out from the body, almost like a tutu in its stiffness in the dinner party woodcut. However, in the messenger woodcut, the skirting appeared more relaxed in its drape, so we chose to use that as our model.

The rest of the garment was fairly well defined in the woodcuts, from the cowl necked collar of the jacket, to the long, full sleeves of the leine, and hanging oversleeves of the ionar, very peculiar to the Irish.

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Bibliography and Internet Sources:

1. Dunlevy, Mairead: Dress in Ireland, 1989 Holmes & Meier Publishers, Inc. ISBN 0-8419-1269-8
2. McClintock, H.F.: Old Irish & Highland Dress, and that of the Isle of Man, 1950 Dundalgan Press Ltd.
3. Reconstructing History, http://www.reconstructinghistory.com. Especially under the Irish subsection.
4. The Image of Irelande, by John Derrick (London, 1581) - Plates. http://www.lib.ed.ac.uk/about/bgallery/Gallery/researchcoll/ireland.html.
   This is a new site, that I didn't have access to when creating the garments. However, several of the plates here were reproduced in the two books mentioned above, including the ones I show above.

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