Sir James Forrester II, baron of Corstorphine, died intestate on 4 June 1589, killed in a brawl or ambush. On 12 August 1589 nine men were accused in the Justiciary Court of being accessories to his slaughter, but the case was adjourned. Mr Samuel Cockburn of Temple, though not named in the case, applied to the Dalkeith Presbytery on 15 March 1590 to be received as a penitent, ‘together with his servants that were participant of the Laird of Corstorphine's slaughter’. He later told them that he had received a royal pardon, and ‘the party was almost satisfied’ – probably a reference to compensating Sir James's heir. Forrester's estate of Clerkington was adjacent to Cockburn's barony of Temple, and although local issues may have been involved, it is more than likely that the main conflict between the two lairds was political. Forrester had helped Mary Queen of Scots escape from Lochleven Castle and fought for her at Langside, while Cockburn was a supporter of the king's party. Where and why the killing took place remains a mystery. Forrester's principal legacy to historians is not in the field of political history, however: it is the testament dative drawn up for the Edinburgh Commissary Court under the supervision of his sister Isobel, wife of James Baillie younger of Carfin, who was appointed his sole executrix.

The heir to Sir James's heritable estate – land, houses, and their appurtenances – was his younger brother Henry, since the deceased and his wife Jean Lauder had no surviving children. Heritable properties were not subject to testamentary disposition in Scotland, and the heir's share in the moveable goods – referred to as the ‘heirship’ – was also excluded from testaments. A testament dative was therefore a balance sheet of the deceased person's remaining assets and liabilities, including debts owing to and owed by them. Sir James's inventory includes an impressive array of household goods, plate, clothing and jewellery with a total value of £666 13s. 4d. (1,000 merks).

The genesis of this volume was a conference strand that took place at the IONA: Early Medieval Studies on the Islands of the North Atlantic conference, held at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada, in 2019. ‘From Fibres to Decorated Textiles in the Early North Atlantic: Making, Methods, Meanings’ brought together scholars, practitioners and other professionals specialising in different aspects of textile study and production from the Viking North Atlantic (800–1000 CE). The aim of the interdisciplinary strand was to explore how scholars and makers interpret and understand early medieval textiles and, as a result, the people and cultures that inhabited the early North Atlantic region.

The strand combined taster workshops and seminars that ran across the three days of the conference. The workshops gave attendees opportunities to experience weaving on a warp-weighted loom, tablet weaving, sprang, nalbinding and preparing fish skin for use as leather. The first seminar focused on theoretical approaches to studying surviving textiles and their meaning and use within society. The final session brought together both practical and theoretical strands with presentations demonstrating how both approaches can work together to give people who would not normally consider themselves interested in history opportunities to explore and enjoy both craft and the distant past. The success of these sessions could be measured by the buzz and positive atmosphere that pervaded them and it was through the resulting discussions that the idea for an edited volume was first conceived.

This book is the culmination of that project. Many of the original contributors to the conference strand have written chapters for the book. These have been supplemented with chapters by other emerging and leading scholars and practitioners of research on textiles from the early North Atlantic. The editors hope that the work it contains will enthuse those who already work in the field and engage others who are new to it: that it will show that many different approaches can be used to generate knowledge and understanding of the people and cultures that inhabited the North Atlantic lands in the Viking period and that by engaging in interdisciplinary approaches to the study of textiles, we can develop a more nuanced and holistic knowledge and understanding not only of these now-fragile objects but also of the worlds in which they were made, used, treasured, buried and discarded.

The style of dress worn by Viking settlers in the North Atlantic and Irish Sea zone has received considerable attention from scholars. The evidence for this has been based mainly on pagan burials around the coast of Scotland and in England from Cumbria southwards to Wales. The clothing has often been likened to the attire of Scandinavians, especially in western Norway, a region from which some of the early marauders actually came. However, there is a need for more nuanced regional and chronological differences to be established, as the Viking world was not a unified empire and people of diverse ethnicity lived in many places, not least in Dublin. By the tenth century the influence of native Irish dress is also likely to have been assimilated to some degree.

Interpreting textiles recovered from the Wood Quay/Fishamble Street series of excavations in Dublin directed by Patrick F. Wallace from 1974 to 1981 for the National Museum of Ireland forms the core of this chapter. However, as the textiles derive from rubbish deposits within the town, close to the banks of the river Liffey, they provide a less coherent indication of the garments worn by the inhabitants than if they had come from furnished graves, where it is often possible to reconstruct much of the burial clothing, although even this can give a false impression of dress worn in everyday life as opposed to death, where ritualistic elements need to be taken into account. Matters of status and occupation are also easier to deduce from grave-goods. Nevertheless, the difficulty of interpreting burial clothing has recently been highlighted by the project ‘Fashioning the Viking Age’, a collaboration between the National Museum of Denmark, the Centre for Textile Research at the Saxo Institute, University of Copenhagen, and the Land of Legends Centre for Historical-Archaeological Research and Communication in Lejre. This has involved a re-examination and re-interpretation of the textile fragments recovered from two burials in Jutland dating to the second half of the tenth century that were excavated in 1868–69 and 1880, with the garments worn for burial by the chieftain at Bjerringhoj, Mammen now taking on a very different appearance from those suggested by an interdisciplinary study undertaken only twenty-five years previously.