Much has been made of the uniqueness of the Shroud’s distinctive 3/1 ‘herringbone’ weave, with rather bold and unjustified claims that it is ‘typical’ of various times and places, from Ancient Egypt to Medieval Denmark, which can hardly be justified by the evidence. Nevertheless, a close study of some of the errors in the weave can give us a good clue as to the type of loom it was woven on, which in turn leads to a medieval date.
Let us clear up some common misunderstandings before we start. Firstly, although it is almost invariably called ‘herringbone’, it is in fact ‘chevron’ weave, where the two sets of ‘ribs’ attached to each ‘spine’ are exactly symmetrical. In true ‘herringbone’ the ribs are slightly off-set. In the diagram below, the vertical white strips are the warp threads, that run longitudinally along the length of the cloth, and the grey dots are the weft threads, running (mostly) under three warp threads, then over one, under three, over one, and so on, the rhythm breaking across the ‘spine’ where the diagonals change direction.
Herringbone……………………………………………………………………………………….Chevron (the Shroud)
Secondly, although the Shroud presents the image above to the observer, it was most unliklely to have been woven this face forward, as lifting three-quarters of the warp threads at a time is awkward, heavy, and prone to tangling. We are in fact looking at the ‘back’ of the cloth. The original ‘front’ looked like this:
Back (image face)………………………………………………………………………………Front (as seen while weaving)
he weaver could thus describe the passage of his shuttle not as “under three, over one, under three, over one”, which we see on the image side, but “over three, under one, over three, under one”, which is much easier to execute.
The diagrams above illustrate an important feature of twill weave. Three quarters of one side consists of only warp threads, and three quarters of the other only of weft. If the two threads are different in some way, this can lead to differences in colour. This may be shown in a photograph taken during the 2002 restoration showing the shroud folded over.
The darker area to the left is the back of the Shroud, normally hidden from view. Another effect of the weave is that paint on one side mostly affects only one direction of thread, which, however visible on one side can be almost unnoticeable on the other.
One other feature of twill should be mentioned. It has to be said that the rectiliniarity of the diagrams above does not truly reflect the appearance of the Shroud. Because of the tension of the cloth, in ordinary twill there is a tendency for the whole cloth to become skewed in shape. In 2012, Barrie Schwortz, who was the original documentary photographer for the STuRP team in 1978, was asked to take some ‘official’ pictures of the tiny pieces of material that had been retained by the Arizona laboaratory in 1988. His photos of the piece of Shroud material (about 10mm x 6mm) demonstrate this distortion.
Back (image face)………………………………………………………………………………Front (as seen while weaving)
NB. In each photo, the same warp and weft threads have been highlighted to show the angle between the two. They need to be looked at carefully, as the actual path of each thread is slightly counter-intuitive.
However a herringbone design, with the weft skewing in the opposite direction with each change of ‘rib’, corrects this, so no distortion of the cloth occurs, although the weft threads take on a slight zig-zag from one side to the other.
Whether the Shroud could have been woven in the first century Middle East has been a topic of discussion for many years. In 1973, Prof. Gilbert Raes, a Belgian expert from the University of Ghent, said:
The weave used for this fabric does not present any particular characteristics and does not allow a determination of the period of manufacture. In view of these observations, one can say that we have no precise indication permitting us to affirm with certainty that the fabric does not date from the time of Christ. It is, however, equally true that there is nothing that would permit us to state that the manufacture of this fabric was effected in that period. (Raes, Gilbert, ‘The Textile Study of 1973-1974’, Shroud Spectrum International, Issue 38/39, 1991)
It is important to note that Raes only worked from his tiny sample, and did not thoroughly examine the whole cloth.
In 1988, on the occasion of the extraction of the radiocarbon sample, the whole Shroud was subject to detailed examination by Gabriel Vial, Technical General Secretary of the Centre International d’Étude des Textiles Anciens (CIETA). He was certain that the Shroud had been woven on a four-shaft treadle loom, and slightly dismissive of those who had claimed to have found similar textiles from ancient times.
So far every example studied – and these have come from Pompeii, Antinoe, Palmyra, Cologne, Dura-Europos – has been radically different from the shroud, both from the point of view of the structure (2/2 twill as opposed to 3/1) and the materials used (wool and silk rather than linen). We have to look to the 16th century to find the first example of linen chevron weaving with a 3/1 twill structure, found in the canvas of a painting in Herentals (Belgium).
Taking into account the constituent elements of any textile (material, structure, warp and weft density, the textile of which the shroud is composed is unlike anything presently known to date prior to the 16th century. (Vial, Gabriel, ‘Shrouded in Mystery’, HALI (The International Magazine of Fine Carpets and Textiles), Issue 49, 1990)
In fact we don’t have to wait until the 16th century (Vial was referring to The Last Supper, by Maerten de Vos, now in the Japanese Museum of Western Art). An immediate response to the implicit challenge came from Donald King, who mentioned a fragment of printed cloth from the 14th century in the Victoria and Albert museum (Acquisition No. 8615-1863), thought originally to be German, but now compared to contemporary Italian designs. Then in her book ‘Conservation of Easel Paintings’, Joyce Hill Stoner writes:
During the Late Middle Ages, the four-shaft treadle loom had become established. It could be used to weave small repeat patterns (controlled by the loom) as fast as plain weave and thus twill weave linen emerged. […] The use of plain and herringbone twill as painting supports was also a pragmatic choice as wider loom widths could be obtained. Thus, for example, Titian’s Vendramin Family has no seams in the herringbone/damask canvas despite being over two metres wide. […] The scale of many of Tintoretto’s works necessitated using multiple loom widths. In some cases he was abstemious with his canvas using fabric with different weaves (twill and herringbone) stitched together, sometimes in different directions, to obtain the desired size of canvas. (Stoner, Joyce Hill, Conservation of Easel Paintings, Routledge, 2012)
Titian, in particular, frequently painted on herringbone or diapered canvas, in works such as St Margaret and Titian’s Mistress, as well as the Vendramin Family, but he was followed by numerous others such as El Greco and Rembrandt.
John Tyrer, of the Textile Institute, came to the cautious conclusion that:
It seems very doubtful, therefore, that the Turin Shroud was a product of ancient Egypt but, mindful of the ferment of ideas that was taking place at the advent of the Christian era, and taking into account the high technology in the surrounding ancient world, it would be reasonable to conclude the linen textiles with `Z’ twist yarns and woven 3/1 reversing twill similar to the Turin Shroud could have been produced in first-century Syria or Palestine. They were, after all, at the crossroads of world trade routes where cultural ideas would have been mixing for centuries. (Tyrer, John, ‘Looking at the Shroud of Turin as a Textile’, Textile Horizons, 1981)
However, Tyrer admits that there is no evidence for either the linen or the type of loom it might have been made on. He was writing ten years before Gabriel Vial, and was prescient enough to observe that there were:
…faults in the weave because of incorrect drawing-in through the healds which could suggest a primitive loom. In fact a study of the spinning and weaving defects in the Shroud might throw light on the method of production. (op. cit.)
They do indeed, as Vial explained.
In general, the ‘herringbones’ of the Shroud can be described as V-shapes. From side to side, there are 53.5 of these Vs, and each V is made of about 80 warp-threads, 40 angling one way, and 40 angling the other. This can be achieved by attaching each thread sequentially to one of four shafts, in order 1-2-3-4 1-2-3-4 etc, 40 times, and then 3-2-1-4 3-2-1-4 etc, 40 times, and repeating this pattern across the whole width of the Shroud.
To do this with about 4300 threads, giving 53.5 complete “V”-shapes is no mean feat. Even a piece 1200 threads wide, made by Ruth Gilbert, one of the UK’s foremost historical weavers, especially for me to Gabriel Vial’s specifications, was “not just the finest thing I’ve ever woven, but ‘interesting’, too, requiring minor modifications to the loom and lots of hard work.” Having tied all the threads, one would be very unlikely to change them, and if one made a mistake – one of the connections being, say 1-3-2-4 instead of 1-2-3-4, or miscounting the number of threads in a rib – one would be most unlikely to fiddle through the ties to correct it. The error, a small kink in one of the’ ribs’ of the herring, would be transcribed throughout the entire length of the cloth. On the other hand, if each pass of the shuttle required a new arrangement of the shed, then one might expect more errors, but they would each be a one-off, and not continued all through the cloth.
The Shroud shows several errors of the first kind, repeated continuously throughout the length of the sheet.
correct…………………….correct…………………….correct…………………….error…………………….correct…………………….error
Furthermore, Gabriel Vial established that where the thread-count for each ‘rib’ was wrong, it was always wrong by a multiple of four threads (typically 36 or 44 threads per rib). This can be accounted for by assuming a miscount of the number of 1-2-3-4s or 3-2-1-4s. These two errors are unequivocal evidence in favour of a four-shaft loom.
In order to weave the cloth, having set up the shafts, all the weaver had to do was to raise them in order 1-2-3-4-1-2-3-4 continuously for the chevron pattern to appear as the shuttle passes from one side to the other. Possible mistakes include occasionally lifting in the wrong order, 1-3-4-2 say, missing one out altogether (e.g. 1-2-4), or duplicating a shed (e.g. 1-2-2-3-4). I have not found the first two, but there are a few of the last. These are mostly simply places where replacement weft thread was laid alongside the old as one shuttle-full ran out and a new one took over, but occasionally they run the full width of the cloth, suggesting that after manually adjusting the selvage, the weaver simply forgot to change the shaft. Again, this is not a mistake typical of a less mechanical loom, where the weaver can easily correct his mistake as he goes along.
The treadle-loom seems to have appeared in Europe as a simple two-shaft machine, which nevertheless made it much quicker to weave tabby, as the weaver had his hands free for the rapid passing of the shuttle. This illustration, with two pedals, is from the mid 13th century:
From the Romance of Alexander, Trinity College Cambridge
And this one, with four pedals, is from the 15th century:
From the Mendel Foundation Housebook, Nuremberg
Something similar to the above is the kind of loom on which the Shroud was almost certainly woven.
Archaeological evidence suggests that these illustrations very much post-date the origin of the apparatus they depict. A paper entitled “When did weaving become a male profession” suggests:
Altogether, pulley blocks, and especially wheels, probably belonging to the pulley, heddle horses and remains of heddle rods, sometimes with preserved threads attached, are among the most frequent finds from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. But as a whole, the direct traces of the horizontal loom are few and date from the eleventh century into the Late Middle Ages. The oldest finds from the eleventh century come from York furthest west to Gdansk in the east, but are more solidly represented in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. They reveal different types of looms from a simple horizontal loom with two pedals to a more advanced loom with four treadles in the early thirteenth century. (Øye, Ingvild, ‘When did weaving become a male profession?’, Danish Journal of Archaeology, Vol 5, 2016)
The conclusion to all this is clear, and difficult to obfuscate. The Shroud was inescapably woven on a four-shaft loom, and most probably one operated by heddles. Nothing of the kind is found, illustrated or mentioned around the 1st century Middle East, and silk production involving such a loom was restricted to China. The Shroud, however, was made in Northern Europe, in the late 13th century, by which time the appropriate apparatus was established.