russet

Russet derives from Old French rousset (reddish), diminutive of roux (red-haired, reddish), which comes from Latin russus (red). The Latin russus is related to ruber (red) and to the Germanic root that gives English the name 'rust.' The color family is old: reddish-brown, the color of oxidizing iron, of autumn leaves, of certain soils and certain animals. In its earliest English use, from the 13th century onward, russet named not primarily a color but a fabric: a coarse homespun woolen cloth of reddish-brown or grey-brown that was among the cheapest available in medieval England, worn by peasants, agricultural workers, and those who could not afford dyed cloth.

The social history of russet cloth is the social history of medieval textile economics. Dyeing was expensive; undyed or naturally colored wool was cheap. Russet cloth, made from wool that retained its natural brownish coloring or was given a minimal reddish tint from cheap plant dyes, was the clothing of the laboring class. Sumptuary laws in medieval and early modern England restricted certain colors — scarlet, purple — to those of appropriate social rank. Russet was below such laws; it was too humble to regulate. Plowmen wore russet; shepherds wore russet; the common people wore russet. The color was a uniform of poverty and manual work, and the word carried that register through the medieval and early modern period.

The shift from fabric to color as the word's primary meaning happened gradually between the 16th and 18th centuries, as the specific homespun russet cloth declined and was replaced by other cheap materials. What remained was the color itself: the reddish-brown of that cloth, generalized to any reddish-brown in the same zone. Apples were called russet — the Roxbury Russet is one of the oldest apple varieties native to North America, named for its rough, brownish-gold skin. Autumn landscapes were described as russet. The word moved from a specific manufactured object to a color quality, and in doing so it gained a new set of associations: no longer poverty and peasant labor but the natural world's warm browns and reds.

In literary English, russet became the color of autumn, of the countryside in October, of the honest and unadorned. It shed the class stigma of the homespun and retained the warmth. Shakespeare uses russet repeatedly — 'But look, the morn in russet mantle clad / Walks o'er the dew of yon high eastern hill' (Hamlet) — in contexts where the humble origin of the color adds a note of plain dignity rather than poverty. The russet of dawn and the russet of autumn leaves and the russet of potatoes and old apples are all in the same register: the honest, unembellished, slightly rough warmth of things that have not been made more than they are.