Fabric and a button

[Oxgirl]

Littleboot has been telling us about a strap end she found that still had fabric wedged between the metal sheets. I’ve found leather in strap ends before but rarely find any evidence of cloth, unless it’s a few very poor bits of rotting stuff.

Co-incidentally though I found a button this week with quite a big bit still attached. I washed the fabric and left it to dry and it seems to be what was a white/ cream handwoven shirt type fabric. i’m suspecting this is a dandy button - so late 18th to early 19th century. - soo around 200 years old!

[Dave The Slave]

Interesting to see with the fabric attached.
Personally would have refrained from washing, however it has come up rather .nicely.
Kind of item, some Historical institution would like to examine.
Unusual find.
Dave.

[Ladybird66]

And a very nice Dandy button that would have been.
It is rare to find material still attached. I s’pose it’s much the same as metal, depends on the ground conditions.
Well done on the ‘big’ wash, it came up well

[Oxgirl]

Interesting to see with the fabric attached.
Personally would have refrained from washing, however it has come up rather .nicely.
Kind of item, some Historical institution would like to examine.
Unusual find.
Dave.

It only got washed in tap water. I thought it was mud on the back of the button till I rinsed it to soften the ‘mud’. Wasn’t mud though I’ll donate it to someone.

[figgis]

What a cracking and unusual bonus(the material, not the button, obvz)

A few years ago I was working on a house recorded as having been built in 1450 and during the work we had to remove an original wattle-and-daub panel and I have a piece of string from it which is as good today as the day it went in. It survived because of the anaerobic conditions and that's probably the case with your fabric, too.

[Littleboot]

Nice piece of fabric....mine is very much a narrow bit of rotted braid and if I washed it even gently it would disintegrate.
After posting my thing i had a look at fabric from the period and found some interesting sites showing examples.
Isn't it fascinating how a small scrap of fabric can produce a whole dialogue and avenue of research into a subject?

In my exploration i found this which may help you identify the fabric....It requires you to snip a tiny amount and burn it and observe how it ignites, flames and what residue it leaves behind.
https://www.fabricmartfabrics.com/Burn-Test-Chart.html
obviously this list includes manmade fibres which you can ignore.
It could be linen, silk, or wool....and at an outside bet cotton. and hemp. But all natural fibres.
(It could also be nettle cloth. Which was used quite extensively in garments and house linens as it was much stronger than flax. It was not confined to lower class garments but figured in inventories of the upper classes of the medieval period onwards.)

[Oxgirl]

Great tip Littleboot. I’ll give it a go later

[LenJ]

That’s a great find especially with fabric still attached. What part of oxfordshire do you detect? I am in west oxfordshire.

[Oxgirl]

North Oxfordshire, mainly between Bicester and Oxford although I do have permissions a bit west of Oxford too

[alloverover]

Had this 17th century mount a few years back, you could see the individual strands of the cloth, I always thought these were fixed to leather before that