1. Animal breeds were generally smaller. They have gotten bigger over time due to selective breeding. This may only apply to domesticated animals.
2. Back then, they used different and sometimes unconventional animal leathers: dog, cat (per unpublished research by The Tudor Tailors), unborn calf (aka chicken skin), etc. These were often much finer than commercial stock (pig, cow, sheep).
- Grad Student article on evidence of skin use in history
- When chicken skin wasn't
- https://www.geriwalton.com/chicken-skin-gloves-or-limericks/
- https://www.museumofleathercraft.org/chicken-skin-glove/
- https://www.dentsgloves.com/us/charming-limerick-gloves/
"Doe leathers were made from
the skins of female fallow deer; these gave a thinner and
finer product than the bucks which tended to be used
more especially for gloves and lighter garments."
3. We use what's easily available and affordable, which often isn't the good stuff.
4. And, finally, when you look at the construction details of doublets and jerkins from the 16th and 17th centuries, we can make out details like how tightly the seams were turned or the edges turned under. After looking at several such pictures, you start to see a trend toward a fine, light leather being used.
Let's add some color to the discussion. Here's a pretty chart showing modern guidelines for leather weight / thickness. Borrowed from the leather buying guide.
It's been surprisingly difficult to find documentation of leather thickness of extant leather items from the 16th/17th century. There are any number of leather purses, pouches, belts, straps, and even full garments that still exist, but museums tend to not provide the thickness of the leather in the descriptions.
Here's my best approximation of the typical leather thicknesses used in leather garments in the 16th/17th centuries. I've included the sample size for reference. Some of these are based on single example because that's all I could find. The scale is in oz.
For straps and belts, we often see layering of multiple pieces in 16th/17th century leather items. This is shown in detail for the belt and hanger in 17th C. Mens Dress Patterns and private photos from the Stibbert Collection.
I recognize that this isn't conclusive, but I'm certainly going to think about leather a bit differently the next time I'm looking to purchase some for a historical project.
Extra Tidbits:
Up until the 19th c, there were three main methods for curing skins to leather: vegetable tanning, oil tawing and alum tawing. Tanning and tawing were separate guilds by the middle of the 14th century. Tanning was limited to cow and calf skins, while tawing was restricted to sheep, goat, deer, horse and hound. (from CH Speirs)
Oil for tawing doesn't penetrate the hair side of the skin well, so it "became cus- tomary to scrape away, or 'frize', the grain of skins to be oil-dressed, so that these leathers usually have a velvety, or suede, surface and the absence of the grain with its characteristic pattern, makes identification of the raw material employed difficult." (from CH Spiers)
For straps and belts, we often see layering of multiple pieces. This is shown in detail for the belt and hanger in 17th C. Mens Dress Patterns and private photos from the Stibbert Collection.
Pig seems to be uncommon in the historical context for leather. It is barely mentioned in CH Spiers and from research I've been doing about extant leather doublets and jerkins, it is rate to non-existant.
This is odd to be coming from a location with a high proportion of pig.
A bit about splits:
There is some evidence of skiving or slicing leather to make it thinner in the 16th/17th century, but it had to be done by hand, which made it very difficult to do for large pieces. It's typically seen around edges or joins, etc.
Today, there are machines that can create splits to make thinner pieces. Even with this, the thinnest splits or skins commercially available tend to be approximately 1.5 oz (per selection at Zack White's Leather)
