Madder: A Dye-Plant of Early Medieval England

Madder is the principal English name for those species of the Rubia genus from which a red dye can be obtained. That madder was used in Anglo-Saxon England has been proved by the chemical investigation of surviving textiles and pottery containers, many of which have been examined by specialists like the late Penelope Walton Rogers of the Anglo-Saxon Laboratory. Further evidence emerged in the Anglo-Scandinavian city of York where a large dump of madder plants was found. My purpose in this lecture is to present a range of linguistic evidence from that early medieval period which should augment the scientific evidence and, perhaps, provide new insights. I will attempt to address the following questions, among others: what vocabulary survives from Old English (the language of the Anglo-Saxons) which denotes this dye, and do different terms indicate different species? What items of clothing and other textiles were dyed with madder? Which Latin and other terms did the Old English words translate and do they provide further information? Were madder dyed-textiles prestigious or commonplace? In searching for answers to these and other questions, I intend to provide a multidisciplinary survey of the use and value of madder dye in early England

Dr Carole P. Biggam is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow in English Language and Linguistics, University of Glasgow, UK. With a first degree in British archaeology and a doctorate in Old English (Anglo-Saxon) semantics, her research is principally concerned with the multidisciplinary investigation of problematic lexical semantic fields such as those denoting colour and plant-names in historical languages. Apart from several articles, she has written The Semantics of Colour (Cambridge University Press, 2012), co-edited the 6-volume Cultural History of Color with Kirsten Wolf (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021) and edited Magic and Medicine: Early Medieval Plant-Name Studies (University of Leeds, 2013). She was the Director of the Anglo-Saxon Plant-Name Survey, and of the Glasgow Colour Studies Group, as well as the co-founder of the Progress in Colour Studies conference series. She is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London and of the Royal Historical Society, and a Life Member of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge.