clothing and footwear: introduction 239 ever lies there above three days: no man makes hay in the summer for winter’s provision, or builds stables for his beasts of burden No reptiles are found there, and no snake can live there; for, though often carried thither out of Britain, as soon as the ship comes near the shore, and the scent of the air reaches them, they die On the contrary, almost all things in the island are good against poison In short, we have known that when some persons have been bitten by serpents, the scrapings of leaves of books that were brought out of Ireland, being put into water, and given them to drink, have immediately expelled the spreading poison, and assuaged the swelling The island abounds in milk and further reading Peter Beaumont, Gerald H Blake, and J Malcolm Wagstaff, The Middle East: A Geographical Study, 2nd ed (New York: Halsted, 1988) George Brooks, Landlords and Strangers: Ecology, Society, and Trade in Western Africa, 1000–1630 (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1994) Neville Brown, History and Climate Change: A Eurocentric Perspective (London: Routledge, 2001) R A Butlin and R A Dodgshon, An Historical Geography of Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998) Stéphen Chauvet, Easter Island and Its Mysteries, trans Ann M Altman Available online URL: http://www.chauvet-translation.com/ Downloaded on May 26, 2007 Kent C Condie, Earth as an Evolving Planetary System, rev ed (Boston: Elsevier Academic Press, 2005) David Ditchburn and Angus Mackay, Atlas of Medieval Europe (New York: Routledge, 1997) Fekri A Hassan, ed., Droughts, Food, and Culture: Ecological Change and Food Security in Africa’s Later Prehistory (New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, 2002) Martin Rhys Jones and Michael Woods, An Introduction to Political Geography (London: Routledge, 2004) Hugh Kennedy, An Historical Atlas of Islam, 2nd ed (Leiden, Netherlands: E J Brill, 2002) David Nicolle, Historical Atlas of the Islamic World (New York: Checkmark Books, 2003) Donald Edgar Pitcher, An Historical Geography of the Ottoman Empire from the Earliest Times to the End of the Sixteenth Century (Leiden, Netherlands: E J Brill, 1972) E C Pyatt, The Passage of the Alps: From Hannibal to the Motorway (London: Robert Hale, 1984) Emily W B Russell, People and the Land through Time: Linking Ecology and History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997) Malise Ruthven, Historical Atlas of Islam (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004) honey, nor is there any want of vines, fish, or fowl; and it is remarkable for deer and goats It is properly the country of the Scots, who, migrating from thence, as has been said, added a third nation in Britain to the Britons and the Picts There is a very large gulf of the sea, which formerly divided the nation of the Picts from the Britons; which gulf runs from the west very far into the land, where, to this day, stands the strong city of the Britons, called Aicluith The Scots, arriving on the north side of this bay, settled themselves there From: Bede, The Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation (New York: E P Dutton, 1910) ▶ clothing and footwear introduction The wearing of clothing is a distinctively human trait It is not preordained by nature; it is not required by human genes Instead, it is an artificial custom that developed to help people cope with difficult climates and evolved over the ages into social customs for many but not all cultures Frequently, the wearing of clothing is a form of self-expression—a way for a person to show individuality by displaying his or her personal taste in cuts of garments, colors, and shoe styles In cultures in which powerful social groups fear or just resent individuality, the kind of garments worn sometimes has been fixed by government decrees or religious prohibitions There were a variety of reasons for not wearing clothing in some cultures One was the lack of suitable materials for making clothing Among those peoples who had no textiles, animal skins, tree bark, or leaves might be the only sources of material for garments, and a lack of any of these items could leave people with limited choices in clothing and footwear Another factor is climate A hot climate could account for why some medieval Australians, Africans, and Americans wore few clothes most of the time Among nomadic Australians, most clothing would have been too much of a burden to carry In warm, moist climates, such as tropical forests, clothing could be very uncomfortable when muddy or wet, and clothing could foster skin diseases such as those caused by fungi In many cultures scanty clothing could be a sign of poverty or misfortune The poverty could be deliberately chosen, as was the case with many Indian ascetics, but more often it was a sign of a society’s failure to care for its poor