Welcome till our first Yule Calendar.
Here I want to describe Viking age garment, one per day.
24 days is just enough for most of the known garments. I will describe how the garments looked, as far as we know, and how we know what we know.

We start today with the close-fitting trousers. We know them from several fragments of square back pieces from Hedeby and from three relatively complete pairs of trouser with similar square back pieces from what in Sweden is called the Roman Iron age, around the years 0 to 400. Two of them are from Thorsbjerg and one from Damendorf. In addition to these you can see on depictions of men that they wore something close-fitting on their legs.
If that was trousers or hose is impossible to see, but together with the textile finds trousers is a plausible interpretation.

So the trouser in the Scandinavian Iron age, including the Viking age, seem to have been cut differently compared to modern trousers, with a square piece of fabric behind and legs which are straight towards that piece but with a curve in the front.
On the most well-known of the trousers from Thorsbjerg there is also a narrow gore at the front, but that is missing on the other two.
The trousers with the front gore also has one foot left. On the trousers from Damendorf there are smaller gores on the inside of the thighs.
So there is a possiblity for variation.

What is interesting about all the remains of close-fitting trousers, both the older ones and the ones from the Viking age, are that they are made of wool in broken diamond twill.
They are the only male garments made in broken diamond twill from teh Viking age (except for one or two puttees) so it should mean something.
One possiblity is that broken diamond twill gives exactly the right flexibility.

The photo is taken by Iduna Pertoft Sundarp.

You can buy our patterns for close-fitting trouser here: Trousers