This costume history information consists of Pages
161-175 of the chapter on 15th century dress in the 9 year reign of
King Henry The Fifth 1413-1422 and taken from English Costume by Dion Clayton Calthrop.
The 36 page section consists of a text copy of the book ENGLISH
COSTUME PAINTED & DESCRIBED BY DION CLAYTON CALTHROP. Visuals,
drawings and painted fashion plates in the book have a charm of their own and are
shown amid the text. The book covers both male and female dress history of
over 700 years spanning the era 1066-1830.
This page is about dress in
the reign of King Henry The Fifth 1413-1422. The images and details
are a good resource for costuming Shakespeare's stage plays of the
Plantagenet era.
For the Introduction to this book see this
introduction written by Dion Clayton Calthrop. I have adjusted
the images so they can be used for colouring
worksheets where pupils add some costume/society facts. My comments are in italics.
HENRY THE FIFTH
Reigned nine years: 1413-1422.
Born 1388. Married, 1420, Katherine of France.
THE MEN
I think I may call this a transitional period of clothes, for it
contains the ragged ends of the time of
Richard II, and the old clothes
of the time of Henry IV, and it contains the germs of a definite
fashion, a marked change which came out of the chrysalis stage, and
showed itself in the prosperous butterflies of the sixth Henry's time.
We retain the
houppelande, its curtailments, its exaggerations, its high
and low collar, its plain or jagged sleeves. We retain the long hair,
which 'busheth pleasauntlie,' and the short hair of the previous
reign. Also we see the new ideas for the priest-cropped hair and the roundlet hat.
I speak of the men only.
It was as if, in the press of French affairs, man had but time to
ransack his grandfather's and his father's chests, and from thence to
pull out a garment or two at a venture. If the garment was a little worn
in the upper part of the sleeve, he had a slash made there, and
embroidered it round.
Priest Cropped Hair & A Baldrick - A Belt with Bells
If the baldrick hung with bells was worn out in
parts, he cut those pieces away and turned the baldrick into a belt.
If
the skirts of the houppelande were sadly frayed at the edge, enter
Scissors again to cut them off short; perhaps the sleeves were
good - well, leave them on; perhaps the skirts were good and the sleeves
soiled - well, cut out the sleeves and pop in some of his father's bag
sleeves.
Harfleur - Agincourt
Mind you, my honest gentleman had trouble brewing: no sooner
had he left the wars in Normandy and Guienne than the siege of Harfleur
loomed to his vision, and after that Agincourt - Agincourt, where
unarmoured men prevailed over mailed knights at the odds of six to one;
Agincourt, where archers beat the great knights of France on open
ground! Hear them hammer on the French armour with their steel mallets,
while the Frenchmen, weighed down with their armour, sank knee-deep in
the mud - where we lost 100 men, against the French loss of 10,000!
Henry V at Le Havre
See the port of Le Havre, with the English army landed there - Henry in
his full-sleeved gown, his hair cropped close and shaven round his head
from his neck to an inch above his ears, buskins on his feet, for he
wore buskins in preference to long boots or pointed shoes. The ships in
the harbour are painted in gay colours - red, blue, in stripes, in
squares; the sails are sewn with armorial bearings or some device.
Some
of our gentlemen are wearing open houppelandes over their armour; some
wear the stuffed turban on their heads, with a jewelled brooch stuck in
it; some wear the sugar-bag cap, which falls to one side; some are
hooded, others wear peaked hats. One hears, 'By halidom!' I wonder if
all the many, many people who have hastily written historical
novels of this age, and have peppered them with 'By halidoms,' knew that
'By halidom' means 'By the relics of the saints,' and that an 'harlote'
means a man who was a buffoon who told ribald stories?
Right
- The man - a 'dandy' of the Henry V era wears a short skirted
houppelande with long flowing sleeves. His legs are covered with two
coloured hose and his shorts are also of two different colours. Notice the
sugar-bag cap with a jewel stuck in it. Heraldic surface decoration
enriches the material which in medieval times was always known as stuff
- good stuff being the best fabric available.
Still, among all these gentlemen, clothed, as it were, second-hand, we
have the fine fellow, the dandy - he to whom dress is a religion, to whom
stuffs are sonnets, cuts are lyrical, and tailors are the poets of their
age.
Such a man will have his tunic neatly pleated, rejecting the chance
folds of the easy-fitting houppelande, the folds of which were
determined by the buckling of the belt.
His folds will be regular and
precise, his collar will be very stiff, with a rolled top; his hose will
be of two colours, one to each leg, or parti-coloured. His shoes will
match his hose, and be of two colours; his turban hat will be cocked at
a jaunty angle; his sleeves will be of a monstrous length and width.
He
will hang a chain about his neck, and load his fingers with rings. A fellow to him, one of his own kidney, will wear the skirt of his tunic
a little longer, and will cause it to be cut up the middle; his sleeves
will not be pendant, like drooping wings, but will be swollen like
full-blown bagpipes. An inner sleeve, very finely embroidered, will peep
under the upper cuff.
His collar is done away with, but he wears a
little hood with cut edges about his neck; his hair is cropped in the
new manner, like a priest's without a tonsure; his hat is of the queer
sugar-bag shape, and it flops in a drowsy elegance over the stuffed
brim.
As for his shoes, they are two fingers long beyond his toes.
We shall see the fashions of the two past reigns hopelessly garbled,
cobbled, and stitched together; a sleeve from one, a skirt from another.
Men-at-arms in short tunics of leather and quilted waistcoats to wear
under their half-armour; beggars in fashions dating from the eleventh
century; a great mass of people in undistinguishable attire, looking
mostly like voluminous cloaks on spindle legs, or mere bundles of
drapery; here and there a sober gentleman in a houppelande of the
simplest kind, with wide skirts reaching to his feet, and the belt
with the long tongue about his middle.
The patterns upon the dresses of these people are heraldry
contortions - heraldic beasts intertwined in screws and twists of
conventional foliage, griffins and black dogs held by floral chains to
architectural branches, martlets and salamanders struggling in grotesque
bushes, or very elaborate geometrical patterned stuffs.
There is a picture of the Middle Ages which was written by Langland in
'Piers the Plowman' - a picture of an alehouse, where Peronelle of
Flanders and Clarice of Cockeslane sit with the hangman of Tyburn and a
dozen others. It is a picture of the fourteenth century, but it holds
good until the time of Henry VIII, when Skelton, his tutor, describes
just such another tavern on the highroad, where some bring wedding-rings
to pay their scot of ale, and
'Some bryngeth her husband's hood
Because the ale is good.'
Both accounts are gems of description, both full of that rich, happy,
Gothic flavour, that sense of impressionist portraiture, of broad
humour, which distinguishes the
drawings in the Loutrell Psalter.
I feel now as if I might be accused of being interesting and of
overlaying my history with too much side comment, and I am well aware
that convention demands that such books as this shall be as dull as
possible; then shall the vulgar rejoice, because they have been trained
to believe that dullness and knowledge snore in each other's arms.
However wholeheartedly you may set about writing a list of clothes
attributable to certain dates, there will crop up spirits of the age,
who blur the edges of the dates, and give a lifelike semblance to them
which carries the facts into the sphere of fiction, and fiction was ever
on the side of truth. No story has ever been invented by man but it has
been beaten out of time by Nature and the police-courts; no romance has
been penned so intricate but fact will supply a more surprising twist to
life. But, whereas facts are of necessity bald and naked things,
fiction, which is the wardrobe of fact, will clothe truth in more
accustomed guise.
Cloaks
I put before you some true facts of the clothes of this time, clothed in
a little coat of facts put fictionally.
I write the word 'cloak';
describe to you that such people wore circular cloaks split at one or
both sides,
on one side to the neck, on the other below the shoulder;
of
semicircular cloaks,
of square cloaks,
of oblong cloaks,
all of which
were worn (I speak of these, and you may cut them out with some
thought); but I wish to do more than that - I wish to give you a gleam of
the spirit in which the cloaks were worn.
A cloak will partake of the
very soul and conscience of its owner; become draggle-tailed, flaunting,
effeminate, masterful, pompous, or dignified. Trousers, I think, of all
the garments of men, fail most to show the state of his soul; they
merely proclaim the qualities of his purse. Cloaks give most the true
man, and after that there is much in the cock of a hat and the conduct
of a cane.
In later days one might tell what manner of man had called to find you
away if he chanced to leave his snuff-box behind. This reasoning is not
finicky, but very profound; accept it in the right spirit.
Now, one more picture of the age.
The rich man at home, dressed, as I say, in his father's finery, with
some vague additions of his own, has acquired a sense of luxury. He
prefers to dine alone, in a room with a chimney and a fire in it. He can
see through a window in the wall by his side into the hall, where his
more patriarchal forebears loved to take their meals. The soiled rushes
are being swept away, and fresh herbs and rushes strewn in their place;
on these mattresses will in their turn be placed, on which his household
presently will lay them down to sleep.
Every time I write the heading 'The Women' to such chapters as these, I
feel that such threadbare cloak of chivalry as I may pin about my
shoulders is in danger of slipping off.
Should I write 'The Ladies'? But although all ladies are women, not all
women are ladies, and as it is far finer to be a sweet woman than a
great dame, I will adhere to my original heading, 'The Women.'
However, in the remote ages of which I now write, the ladies were
dressed and the women wore clothes, which is a subtle distinction. I
dare not bring my reasoning up to the present day.
As I said in my last chapter, this was an age of medley - of this and that
wardrobe flung open, and old fashions renovated or carried on. Fashion,
that elusive goddess, changes her moods and modes with such a quiet
swiftness that she leaves us breathless and far behind, with a bundle of
silks and velvets in our arms.
How is a fashion born? Who mothers it? Who nurses it to fame, and in
whose arms does it die? High collar, low collar, short hair, long hair,
boot, buskin, shoe - who wore you first? Who last condemned you to the
World's Great Rag Market of Forgotten Fads?
Now this, I have said, was a transitional age, but I cannot begin to say
who was the first great dame to crown her head with horns, and who the
last to forsake the jewelled caul. It is only on rare occasions that the
decisive step can be traced to any one person or group of persons:
Charles II, and his frock-coat, Brummell and his starched stock, are
finger-posts on Fashion's highroad, but they are not quite true
guides. Charles was recommended to the coat, and I think the mist of
soap and warm water that enshrines Brummell as the Apostle of
Cleanliness blurs also the mirror of truth. It does not much matter.
No doubt - and here there will be readers the first to correct me and the
last to see my point - there are persons living full of curious knowledge
who, diving yet more deeply into the dusty crevices of history, could
point a finger at the man who first cut his hair in the early
fifteenth-century manner, and could write you the name and the dignities
of the lady who first crowned her fair head with horns. For myself, I begin with certainty at Adam and the fig-leaf, and after
that I plunge into the world's wardrobe in hopes.
Certain it is that in this reign the close caul grew out of all decent
proportions, and swelled into every form of excrescence and
protuberance, until in the reign of Henry VI, it towered above the heads
of the ladies, and dwarfed the stature of the men.
This curious head-gear,
the caul, after a modest appearance, as a mere
close, gold-work cap, in the time of Edward III, grew into a
stiffer affair in the time of Richard II, but still was little more
than a stiff sponge-bag of gold wire and stuff and a little padding;
grew still more in the time of Henry IV, and took squarer shapes and
stiffer padding; and in the reign of Henry V, it became like a great
orange, with a hole cut in it for the face - an orange which covered the
ears, was cut straight across the forehead, and bound all round with a
stiff jewelled band.
Then came the idea of the horn. Whether some superstitious lady thought
that the wearing of horns would keep away the evil eye, or whether it
was a mere frivol of some vain Duchess, I do not know.
As this fashion came most vividly into prominence in the following
reign, I shall leave a more detailed description of it until that time,
letting myself give but a short notice of its more simple forms.
We see the caul grow from its circular shape into two box forms on
either side of the head; the uppermost points of the boxes are arranged
in horns, whose points are of any length from 4 to 14 inches. The top of
this head-dress is covered with a wimple, which is sometimes stiffened
with wires.
Her surcoat is stiffened in front with fur and shaped with a band of
metal. Her belt is low on the hips of the under-dress. The horns on her
head carry the large linen wimple.
There is also a shape something like a fez or a flower-pot, over which a
heavy wimple is hung, attached to this shape; outside the wimple are two
horns of silk, linen, or stuff - that is, silk bags stuffed to the
likeness of horns.
I should say that a true picture of this time would give but few of
these very elaborate horn head-dresses, and the mass of women would be
wearing the round caul.
The surcoat over the cotehardie is the general wear, but it has more
fit about it than formerly; the form of the waist and bust are
accentuated by means of a band of heavy gold embroidery, shaped to the
figure. The edges of the surcoat are furred somewhat heavily, and the
skirt often has a deep border of fur. Sometimes a band of metal ornament
runs across the top of the breast and down the centre of the surcoat,
coming below the fur edging. The belt over the hips of the cotehardie
holds the purse, and often a ballade or a rondel.
You will see a few of the old houppelandes, with their varieties
of sleeve, and in particular that long, loose double sleeve, or, rather,
the very long under-sleeve, falling over the hand. This under-sleeve is
part of the houppelande.
All the dresses have trains, very full trains, which sweep the ground,
and those readers who wish to make such garments must remember to be
very generous over the material.
The women commonly wear the semicircular mantle, which they fasten
across them by cords running through ornamental brooches.
They wear very rich metal and enamel belts round their hips, the exact
ornamentation of which cannot be described here; but it was the ornament
of the age, which can easily be discovered.
In the country, of course, simpler garments prevail, and plain surcoats
and cotehardies are wrapped in cloaks and mantles of homespun material.
The hood has not fallen out of use for women, and the peaked hat
surmounts it for riding or rough weather. Ladies wear wooden clogs or
sandals besides their shoes, and they have not yet taken to the horns
upon their heads; some few of them, the great dames of the counties
whose lords have been to London on King's business, or returned
from France with new ideas, have donned the elaborate business of
head-boxes and wires and great wimples.
As one of the ladies rides in the country lanes, she may pass that
Augustine convent where Dame Petronilla is spiritual Mother to so many,
and may see her in Agincourt year keeping her pig-tally with Nicholas
Swon, the swineherd. They may see some of the labourers she hires
dressed in the blood-red cloth she has given them, for the dyeing of
which she paid 7s. 8d. for 27 ells. The good dame's nuns are very neat;
they have an allowance of 6s. 8d. a year for dress.
This is in 1415. No doubt next year my lady, riding through the lanes,
will meet some sturdy beggar, who will whine for alms, pleading that he
is an old soldier lately from the field of Agincourt.
NOTE
As there is so little real change, for drawings of women's dress see the
numerous drawings in previous chapter.
HENRY THE FIFTH
Reigned nine years: 1413-1422.
Born 1388. Married, 1420, Katherine of France.
This costume history information consists of Pages
161-175 of the chapter on 15th century dress in the 9 year reign of
King Henry The Fifth 1413-1422 and taken from English Costume by Dion Clayton Calthrop.
The 36 page section consists of a text copy of the book ENGLISH
COSTUME PAINTED & DESCRIBED BY DION CLAYTON CALTHROP. Visuals,
drawings and painted fashion plates in the book have a charm of their own and are
shown amid the text. The book covers both male and female dress history of
over 700 years spanning the era 1066-1830.
This page is about dress in
the era of King Henry The Fifth 1413-1422. The images and details
are a good resource for costuming Shakespeare's stage plays of the
Plantagenet era.
For the Introduction to this book see this
introduction written by Dion Clayton Calthrop. I have adjusted
the images so they can be used for colouring
worksheets where pupils add some costume/society facts. My comments are in italics.
Fashion-Era.com looks at women's costume and fashion history and analyses the mood of an era. Changes in technology, leisure, work, cultural and moral values. Homelife and politics also
contribute to lifestyle trends, which in turn influence the clothes we wear. These are the changes that make any era of society special in relation to the study of the costume of a period.
Fashion-Era.com can take no responsibility for any information on the site which may cause you error, loss or costs incurred from use of the information and links either directly or
indirectly. This site is owned, designed, written and developed by author: Pauline Thomas and Guy Thomas. This site is designed to be viewed in 1024 X 768 or higher.
Before you write to me for costume/fashion help or information please, please consult the extensive sitemap which lists all our pages. If you still cannot find the answer after searching the site, then before you email me, please consider if you are prepared to make a donation to the website.
Donations Reader's donations help this site flourish, in particular donations encourage me to write more articles on fashion history as well as current trends. PayPal
allows anyone with a credit card to donate easily and securely. You may donate any sum you feel appropriate.
If you have any comments, or if you see any broken links, then please email with details of the page url or problem.
Find great anniversary gift ideas from Premier Gifts. Choose from our wide range of anniversary gifts to celebrate your special day in style.
Designer Inspired BagInc Fashion Bags and Cheap Handbags at Wholesale Rates.
This costume history information consists of Pages
161-175 of the chapter on 15th century dress in the 9 year reign of
King Henry The Fifth 1413-1422 and taken from English Costume by Dion Clayton Calthrop.
Right
- The man - a 'dandy' of the Henry V era wears a short skirted
houppelande with long flowing sleeves. His legs are covered with two
coloured hose and his shorts are also of two different colours. Notice the
sugar-bag cap with a jewel stuck in it. Heraldic surface decoration
enriches the material which in medieval times was always known as stuff
- good stuff being the best fabric available.
Certain it is that in this reign the close caul grew out of all decent
proportions, and swelled into every form of excrescence and
protuberance, until in the reign of Henry VI, it towered above the heads
of the ladies, and dwarfed the stature of the men.
Her surcoat is stiffened in front with fur and shaped with a band of
metal. Her belt is low on the hips of the under-dress. The horns on her
head carry the large linen wimple.
