---
title: "Scarlet Was a Cloth Before It Was a Color"
description: "Before scarlet was a red, it was a costly cloth: medieval scarlets were fine woolens dyed in kermes, and the dye, not the weaving, set the price."
type: Find
url: https://teazle.art/finds/why-is-it-called-scarlet-cloth-before-color
published: 2026-10-19
updated: 2026-10-19
author: "The Teazle editors"
image: https://cdn.sanity.io/images/jvxyxtrt/production/4ad326cbc38836e5cd57078624711f408f47f45a-1181x641.jpg?w=1600&fit=max&q=78&auto=format
image_license: PD
---

# Scarlet Was a Cloth Before It Was a Color

*Why is it called scarlet? In the Middle Ages the word named a luxury woolen cloth dyed with kermes insects, and only later the red. What the town accounts show, and what is still disputed.*

![A semicircular red mantle laid flat against a dark ground. Two gold lions, embroidered in profile, face each other across a slender central tree, and a narrow border of small motifs runs along the curved lower edge.](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/jvxyxtrt/production/4ad326cbc38836e5cd57078624711f408f47f45a-1181x641.jpg?w=1280&fit=max&q=78&auto=format)
*Coronation mantle of Roger II of Sicily, Royal Workshop, Palermo, 1133–34. Patterned samite dyed with kermes, gold and silk embroidery, pearls, enamel and gems. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Imperial Treasury, Vienna, WS XIII 14. Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, Weltliche Schatzkammer (Imperial Treasury). PD*

Scarlet was a cloth before it was a color. In medieval Europe the word named a luxury woolen broadcloth dyed in kermes, a costly insect dye, and the red came to stand for the whole thing only later. Where the word itself comes from is still argued, and so is how many colors "scarlet" ever really came in.

## Was scarlet a fabric before it was a color?

Yes. Merriam-Webster still lists "scarlet cloth or clothes" as the first sense of the noun, with a first known use in the 13th century, and "any of various bright reds" second. The economic historian John Munro, who read the cloth purchases of Flemish towns, puts it flatly: "all medieval scarlets, without exception, were luxury-quality woollens that were dyed, wholly or partially, 'in grain'—in kermes."

The old reference books noticed the shift. The 1911 *Encyclopaedia Britannica* says the cloth "was frequently scarlet in colour, and hence its name became applied to the colour." The change is visible in English texts. In the General Prologue of Chaucer's *Canterbury Tales*, the Wife of Bath wears hosen "of fyn scarlet reed": fine scarlet, red. A modern reader hears a repeat. The Flemish accounts Munro read name "roode scaerlakenen," red scarlets, so color could still be stated separately. One line of verse proves nothing alone, but it fits. By 1533 an English Act "for Reformation of Excess in Apparel" barred lower-ranked men with less than £5 a year in lands or rents from wearing "cloth of the colour of scarlet crimson or violet engrained." In law, at least, scarlet was by then a color. In his edition of the Act, Noel Cox glosses the dye term: ingrained red on wool is always scarlet, and on silk always crimson.

![A semicircular red mantle laid flat against a dark ground. Two gold lions, embroidered in profile, face each other across a slender central tree, and a narrow border of small motifs runs along the curved lower edge.](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/jvxyxtrt/production/4ad326cbc38836e5cd57078624711f408f47f45a-1181x641.jpg?w=1280&fit=max&q=78&auto=format)
*Coronation mantle of Roger II of Sicily, Royal Workshop, Palermo, 1133–34. Patterned samite dyed with kermes, gold and silk embroidery, pearls, enamel and gems. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Imperial Treasury, Vienna, WS XIII 14. Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, Weltliche Schatzkammer (Imperial Treasury). PD*

## Why was scarlet so expensive?

The dye cost more than the weaving. Kermes comes from dried insects that, according to Munro, were called "grain" (*granum*) because they looked like grains. At Mechelen between 1361 and 1415 a cloth of 40 ells, about 27.6 meters, took between 10.6 and 18.2 kilograms of kermes. In five-year averages that was roughly a third to a half of the price the town paid. Dyeing and shearing labor together came to about 2 to 3.5 percent.

Shearing, the finishing that cuts the fuzzy [nap](https://teazle.art/glossary/nap.md) from the cloth, was not the cost either. At Ghent in 1350–51 shearing a scarlet, a deep blue and a murrey cloth cost exactly the same, 2.92 shillings per cloth of 35 ells (24.5 meters). A scarlet bought at Bruges in 1351 cost £8.75 groot Flemish, so shearing was under 2 percent of that.

The other expense was the wool, the best English fleeces. After the Spanish conquests of the 1500s, Munro adds, Mexican [cochineal](https://teazle.art/glossary/cochineal.md) offered a stronger scarlet dye. [Madder](https://teazle.art/glossary/madder.md), a plant root, was the common red, but Cox notes that kermes and cochineal gave a much richer color. Color as a marker of rank did not end with scarlet: see the [arsenic green](/stories/arsenic-green-victorian-dress-poison) of Victorian ballrooms, or the strict grammar of [Victorian mourning dress](/techniques/victorian-mourning-dress-crape-and-stages).

## Did scarlet come in other colors?

Sometimes, but less often than the usual claim says. Records do mention white, green and brown scarlets, and for a long time historians took that to mean the cloth came in every color. Munro argues the colors describe the cloth before it reached the dye pot. A "white" scarlet was undyed broadcloth ordered to be dyed in grain, to become a red one.

Browns and purples did exist. Wool was often dyed blue with [woad](https://teazle.art/glossary/woad.md) before weaving, because woad needs no [mordant](https://teazle.art/glossary/mordant.md) and the alum used for other dyes made wool harder to comb, card and spin. Redyed in kermes, those blue cloths came out brown, a gray-purple called perse, or murrey, a mulberry shade. Munro finds green scarlets only rarely, and no black ones. Prices did not vary by color: the real divide was between scarlets and everything else. He also says the shades of the brown, perse and murrey scarlets are unknown.

## Where does the word scarlet come from?

Nobody is sure. English took it from Old French *escarlate*, which came from Medieval Latin *scarlatum*. Merriam-Webster and the 1911 *Britannica* trace it to a Persian word for a rich cloth. Munro, in a hypothesis he sets out as one, derives it from the Arabic *siklat*, a kermes-dyed silk first known from the ninth or tenth century, probably a descendant of the Late Roman *sigillatus*, cloth with seal-like patterns. On that account the first scarlets were silk, and the word moved to woolen cloth dyed with the same dye. He dates the Latin word to about 1050.

A rival theory, floated by the historian Henri Pirenne and set out by Jean-Baptiste Weckerlin in 1905, held that the name meant highly sheared cloth, from Flemish words for shearing and cloth. The Ghent figures above are Munro's answer: scarlet was not sheared more than other fine cloth. He accepts that the Germanic words for scarlet, such as *scharlaken*, come from an Old High German *scarlachen*, which appears in an early 11th-century text as a gloss for a shaved or smoothed cloth. The origin of the word is open; the dye behind it is not.

## Where can you see it?

The Imperial Treasury in Vienna shows the coronation mantle of Roger II of Sicily. The Kunsthistorisches Museum dates it to 1133–34, the year given in the Arabic inscription on its hem, and describes it as patterned samite dyed with kermes, embroidered in gold with pearls and enamel. It is silk, not wool, and the museum does not call it scarlet. It is a textile of the kind Munro describes.

Also in Vienna, the Wien Museum's *True Colors: Viennese Fashion across Four Centuries* runs until 28 March 2027. Its listings describe about 350 garments, with color treated as a marker of status and power. Nothing there is said to be medieval scarlet, but the question it asks is the one scarlet raised first: who was allowed to wear which color, and who could afford it.


## Sources

1. [John H. Munro, "The Anti-Red Shift – to the 'Dark Side': Colour Changes in Flemish Luxury Woollens, 1300–1550"](https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/10876/1/MPRA_paper_10876.pdf). University of Toronto / Medieval Clothing and Textiles 3 (Boydell, 2007); MPRA preprint
2. [Der Krönungsmantel (Coronation Mantle of Roger II), WS XIII 14](https://khm.at/en/object/100435). Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien
3. [scarlet (noun, adjective)](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/scarlet). Merriam-Webster
4. [Scarlet](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica/Scarlet). Wikisource (1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica, vol. 24)
5. [Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, General Prologue, line 456 (Wife of Bath)](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Canterbury_Tales_(ed._Skeat)/Prologue). Wikisource (Skeat edition)
6. [Noel Cox, "Tudor Sumptuary Laws and Academical Dress: An Act against Wearing of Costly Apparel 1509 and An Act for Reformation of Excess in Apparel 1533"](https://journals.newprairiepress.org/burgonsociety/article/13341/galley/13195/download/). Transactions of the Burgon Society 6 (2006)
7. [True Colors – Viennese Fashion across Four Centuries (Farbenspiel)](https://www.wienmuseum.at/event/3289). Wien Museum / WienTourismus / ORF
8. [File:Weltliche_Schatzkammer_Wienc.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Weltliche_Schatzkammer_Wienc.jpg). Wikimedia Commons

## Glossary

- [Cochineal](https://teazle.art/glossary/cochineal.md): Cochineal is a crimson dye made from dried scale insects that live on prickly-pear cacti, native to the Americas.
- [Madder](https://teazle.art/glossary/madder.md): Madder is a red dye made from the roots of Rubia plants, used for millennia to dye textiles in reds, pinks and browns with a mordant.
- [Woad](https://teazle.art/glossary/woad.md): Woad is a European plant, Isatis tinctoria, and the blue dye made from its leaves, chemically the same colourant as indigo.
- [Mordant](https://teazle.art/glossary/mordant.md): A mordant is a substance, usually a metal salt such as alum, that fixes a dye to fibre and can change its colour.
- [Nap](https://teazle.art/glossary/nap.md): Nap is the raised surface of fibres on a fabric, brushed or lying in one direction, which changes how the cloth looks from different angles.

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