Woad

DESCRIPTION: "What's the use of wearing braces, Vests and pants and boots with laces... What's the use of shirts of cotton, Studs that always get forgotten? These affairs are simply rotten; Better far is woad." One needs no clothes when one can wear woad
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1979 (Hopkins-SongsFromTheFrontAndRear)
KEYWORDS: clothes humorous derivative
FOUND IN: Canada
REFERENCES (3 citations):
Hopkins-SongsFromTheFrontAndRear, pp. 24-25, "The Woad Song" (1 text, 1 tune)
Zander/Klusmann-CampSongsNThings, p. 47, "Woad" (1 text, 1 tune)
DT, WOADWEAR*
Roud #24978
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "Men of Harlech" (tune)
NOTES [919 words]: Woad/Indigo is of course a dark blue color.
Woad, the plant, is Isatis tinctoria, which produces woad, the dye. Chemically, it is the same dye as indigo (Field, p. 121); indigo replaced woad as a dye source because the indigo plant produced more of it and it was easier to extract. Also, woad depleted the soil rapidly and so could not be intensively cultivated; dyers used up their sources very rapidly, whereas indigo was a nitrogen fixer and had benefits for the soil (St. Clair, p. 189). The Romans knew it, but from indigo plants, not woad; Pliny's Natural History refers to "the slime of India's rivers," which is believed to be indigo (Mayer, p. 18); there is also a record of the use of indigo from the Chaldean Empire of Babylon in the sixth century B.C.E. (St. Clair, p. 189), and there is a Viking site with woad seeds at Coppergate in northern England (St. Clair, p. 199).
The story behind this song is that, when Julius Caesar invaded Britain, the British inhabitants fought the Romans naked and coated in woad, expecting that their opponents would be frightened by the sight of blue men. There is no evidence that it worked -- and no one seems to cite the source of the legend, or at least evidence that the blue color was woad (Finaly, p. 321, says that Caesar's word was "vitrum," and there is argument about whether it was woad or some other color. "Vitrum" in Latin usually means "glass," althoughPliny used it for a blue dye-plant, FreundtAl, p. 2000. At least one edition considers the passage spurious anyway).
Whether Caesar's opponents, or Caratacus's and Boadicea's soldiers who fought against Claudius a century later, covered themselves with it or not, we know that woad was used as a dye for a very long time; the famous "Lincoln Green" was a mix of woad and a yellow dye. And Chaucer's short poem "The Former Age" (line 17) mentions woad:
No mader, welde or wood no listere
Ne knew...
(Chaucer/Benson, p. 651; the two manuscripts of the poem spell "lister(e)" differently ("litestere" or "lister"), but there is no doubt which word was meant. In any case, all editions seem to prefer the reading "listere," because the manuscript it is in is considered far the more authoritative; Chaucer/Pace/David, pp. 93-95).
Modernizing the spelling, this says that:
No madder, weld, or woad no lister
ne knew
Which we would amplify as "No red madder, yellow weld, or blue woad no dyer ever knew."
So knowledge of woad clearly predates this song, no matter what the pre-Roman Britons wore.
The Romans first encountered indigo from India, but "Even in classic times, however, a substitute for the imported Indian indigo was known in the native European weed called in Latin glastum or isatis, and in English, woad. The dark blue appearance of the British warriors whom the Romans met on these shores was probably not strictly a pigment effect, but merely a staining produced by the fresh juice of the woad plant. Woad is a shrubby herb with broad green leaves which contain the raw material of a blue dyestuff. To develop the blue colour special treatment is necessary; but simply gathering the leaves is enough to produce a deep and long-lasting blue-black stain upon the hands, and we may suppose that the early Britons simply carried the process farther" (Thompson, p. 135).
"The woad plant, Isatis tinctoria, grows native in many parts of Europe, and may easily be cultivated in any reasonably temperate climate. It was grown commercially in England until [c. 1930].... The Isatis is what gardeners call a 'gross feeder,' and it exhausts the land that it grows on unless the salts [i.e. potash] that it extracts for its growth are constantly replenished" (Thompson, p. 136).
"The medieval farmer did not know very much about fertilizing his lands to restore the heavy losses which such a plant as woad induced, and the result was that woad plantations had to move about, shifting their location every few year to fresh soil as the old soil became exhausted. Woad growing left a trail of agricultural desolation behind it, and the large profits that it yielded for a time in each new site tempted many landowners to their ruin; for these returns were actually not income but capital" (Thompson, p. 137). On p. 138 Thompson reports that laws were eventually passed about woad-growing -- but that they were widely evaded.
"Woad... [was] cultivated since the tenth century in Rurope, notably in Thuringia, Alsace, and Normandy. It is the base of blues. But woad is a cruciferous plant [related to mustard, according to St. Clair, p. 198], whose cultivation dramatically impoverishes the soil; the popularity of blue dyes thus threatened to starve entire populations. The process for making woad dye was fairly elaborate: the leaves and stems were washed, dried, and stored in balls or compacted lumps, then mill-ground. The resulting powder was made into a paste and fermented, which liberated the precursor of the dye. This substance, concentrated woad extract, was black and granular, and was called pastel. But it could only produce a washed-out blue, and was used for work clothes. At the close of the 12th century, however, a technique was found for making brighter blues from woad" (Delamere/Guineau, pp. 44-45); it was only then that woad really became a commercial dye and pigment. But even the new technique "was difficult, expensive, and uncertain" (Thompson, p. 138). The result was often mixed with other materials, such as ground eggshells, to produce lighter blues. - RBW
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