[113] BnF Ms. Fr. 640, fol. 38v: “Escarlates/ Pource que laulne couste a taindre sept ou huict lb/
Ils y employent des draps de sept ou huict frans laulne/ Mays qui en veult avoir de belle se la quil achepte du/
drap blanc de quinze frans laulne & la face taindre/ avecq pastel pur descarlatte & un peu de cochenille Le/
drap noir se trouve fort fin pource que la taincture est/ a bon marche.” See the transcription in dual pane view in Making and Knowing Project, Pamela H. Smith, Naomi Rosenkranz, Tianna Helena Uchacz, Tillmann Taape, Clément Godbarge, Sophie Pitman, Jenny Boulboullé, Joel Klein, Donna Bilak, Marc Smith, and Terry Catapano, eds., Secrets of Craft and Nature in Renaissance France. A Digital Critical Edition and English Translation of BnF Ms. Fr. 640 (New York: Making and Knowing Project, 2020): https://edition640.makingandknowing.org/#/folios/38v/tc, last accessed 3 January 2021.
The translation from the critical edition (https://edition640.makingandknowing.org/#/folios/38v/f/38v/tl) has been slightly revised here. The dye procedure requires that the white cloth is first dyed blue and then overdyed with a red dye. This must have been well known to the author, who lists first the pastel woad, then the scarlet, and then the addition of cochineal. It is not clear if Escarlates refers the colour name scarlet red, or to the costly red Kermes dye, derived from an insect and used in the Middle Ages for red textiles of the highest quality, in Middle Dutch called scaerlaken. Verhecken reports on Flemish statutes of textile guilds in the city of Diest in Brabant, dating from the fourteenth century, that prescribe the use of pure graines, another term for kermes (“wat met greyne maect sal puer sijn,” manuscript nr. 786/3, fol. 21v, art. 34, 1333), André Verhecken, “Technische Aspecten van de Middeleeuwse Wolververij in Diest, Volgens 14-e En 15-e Eeuwse Lakenkeuren.,” Bulletin Vlaamse Vereniging Voor Oud En Hedendaags Textiel, 1992, 90. The term ‘pur’ in the French recipe could perhaps also pertain to the woad, alluding to a pure woad vat with no addition of indigo pigment for a blue groundcolour (‘pied de guesde‘), while Mayerne specifies in the Noir de Flandres recipes a blue ground made with ‘pastel & indico’. The term ‘pied de guesde is mentioned in seventeenth-century legislation on wool dyeing, see e.g., the French statutes of 1679 mentioned in Jacques Savary Des Bruslons, Dictionnaire Universel de Commerce, vol. 2 (Philémon-Louis Savary, 1726), 1737.