A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1068 entries
bast
The fibrous inner bark of a tree or the fiber layer in a plant stem — the tissue that carries sugars down from the leaves, and, when stripped and retted and beaten, the raw material of rope, matting, sacking, and cloth. Flax, hemp, jute, ramie, and nettle are bast fibers.
Etymology
Old English bæst, from Proto-Germanic bastaz, with relatives across the Germanic languages — German bast, Dutch and Norwegian the same. Beyond Germanic, the trail runs out, which is often the case with words for very old technologies: The thing is so much older than the record that no one can see past it. English also used bass for the same stuff, which is why a woven mat was a bass mat and a bass broom is still sold under that name.
Notes
Bast cordage turns up in the archaeological record wherever conditions preserve fiber, and the technique — soak, rot away the soft tissue, comb out what is left — is essentially unchanged. The Sámi, the Ainu, and the peoples of the Pacific Northwest all made clothing from tree bast. Lime bast rope was standard rigging in northern Europe for centuries.