A brief history of leather tanning.

The uses of leather and animal skins have come a long way. Long gone are the days where an animal skin was the preferred method of keeping out the cold or to line chariot wheels by Sumerians 2500 BC. Nowadays leather is a status of style and luxury with thousands of dollars spent on handbags and accessories. So how did we get here? Lets take a look at how leather was tanned "way back when".

The tanners of old were considered a dirty smelly lot, where they were most often relegated to the outskirts of towns amongst the poor. In fact older methods of tanning, still in use today, are so foul smelling that they are still isolated from towns and cities. Considered a poor mans profession, tanners were unlikely to ever elevate themselves in the social hierarchy, passing on their "lot" from one generation to the next. Not much of a reward for producing leathers for waterskins, bags, harnesses, quivers, scabbards, boats, armor, boots and sandals is it?

A typical day for our tanner, skins would arrive dried stiff, dirty and smelly, often covered in blood and gore. Skins would then be soaked in water, sometimes for days, to clean and soften them. Once softened, tanners would scrape, scour and pound the skins to remove any remaining gristle, fat, flesh and gore. A tanner’s next job is to remove the hair fibers. For this we have several options. It could be coated in an alkaline lime mixture or simply left to putrefy for several months before dipping it in a salt solution. Once the hair fibers were loosened by any of these methods, the tanners simply scraped them off. Another common method of loosening the hair fibers was to soak the skin in urine. Off course large quantities of urine were sometimes required and it was not uncommon to see "piss pots" on street corners to be collected by locals for use by our esteemed tanners.

The next step, after having removed the hair, saw our tanner pounding dung into the skin or soaking the skin in mixture of animal brains. Sometimes the dung was mixed with water in a large vat, and the prepared skins were kneaded in the dung water until they became supple. The tanner would then knead the entire batch with his feet, sometimes for hours. Children were often employed to collect dog or pigeon dung for use in this process. With a combination of urine, putrefying flesh, dung and brains as tools of the trade, it’s understandable our tanners profession was held in such low regard.

Lastly, scraps of hide leftover from the leathers a tanner supplies would be placed in a vat with water and left to rot for months. This putrefied mess would then be boiled down to reduce the water content to make glue!