This costume history information consists of Pages
176-197 of the chapter on the 15th century dress in the 39 YEAR REIGN era of
Henry The Sixth 1422-1461 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 Sixth 1422-1461. 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 SIXTH
Reigned thirty-nine years: 1422-1461.
Born 1421. Dethroned 1461. Died 1471. Married, 1446, Margaret of Anjou.
THE MEN
What a reign! Was history ever better dressed?
I never waver between the cardboard figures of the great Elizabethan
time and this reign as a monument to lavish display, but if any time
should beat this for quaintness, colour, and variety, it is the time of
Henry VIII.
Look at the scenes and characters to be dressed: John, Duke of Bedford,
the Protector, Joan of Arc, Jack Cade, a hundred other people; Crevant,
Verneuil, Orleans, London Bridge, Ludlow, St. Albans, and a
hundred other historical backgrounds.
Yet, in spite of all this, in spite of the fact that Joan of Arc is one
of the world's personalities, it is difficult to pick our people out of
the tapestries.
Now, you may have noticed that in trying to recreate a period in your
mind certain things immediately swing into your vision: it is difficult
to think of the Conquest without the Bayeux tapestry; it is difficult to
think of the dawn of the sixteenth century without the dreamy, romantic
landscapes which back the figures of Giorgione; and it is not easy to
think of these people of the Henry VI period without placing them
against conventional tapestry trees, yellow-white castles with red,
pepper-pot roofs, grass luxuriant with needlework flowers, and all the
other accessories of the art.
The early times are easily imagined in rough surroundings or in open
air; knights in armour ride quite comfortably down modern English lanes.
Alfred may burn his cakes realistically, and Canute rebuke his courtiers
on the beach - these one may see in the round. Elizabeth rides to
Tilbury, Charles II casts his horoscope, and George rings the bell,
each in their proper atmosphere, but the Dark Ages are dark, not only in
modes of thought, but in being ages of grotesque, of ornamentation, of
anything but realism.
One has, I think, a conventional mind's eye for the times from
Edward I
to Richard III, from 1272 to 1485, and it is really more easy for a
Chinaman to call up a vision of 604 A.D., when Laot-sen, the Chinese
philosopher, was born. Laot-sen, the child-old man, he who was born with
white hair, lived till he was eighty-one, and, having had five million
followers, went up to heaven on a black buffalo. In China things have
changed very little: the costume is much the same, the customs are the
same, the attitude towards life has not changed. But here the
semicivilized, superstitious, rather dirty, fourteenth and fifteenth
century person has gone. Scratch a Russian, they say, and you will see a
Tartar; do the same office by an Englishman, and you may find a hint of
the Renaissance under his skin, but no more. The Middle Ages are dead
and dust.
We will proceed with that congenial paradox which states that the seat
of learning lies in the head, and so discuss the most distinctive costumery of this time, the roundlet.
Now, the roundlet is one of those things which delight the
clothes-hunter or the costume expert. It is the natural result of a long
series of fashions for the head, and its pedigree is free from any
impediment or hindrance; it is the great-grandson of the hood, which is
derived from a fold in a cloak, which is the beginning of all things.
I am about to run the risk of displeasure in repeating to some extent
what I have already written about the
chaperon, the hood, and the other
ancestors and descendants of the roundlet.
A fashion is born, not made. Necessity is the mother of Art, and Art is
the father of Invention. A man must cover his head, and if he has a
cloak, it is an easy thing in rain or sunshine to pull the folds of the
cloak over his head.
An ingenious fellow in the East has an idea: he
takes his 8 feet - or more - of material; he folds it in half, and at
about a foot and a half, or some such convenient length, he puts several
neat and strong stitches joining one point of the folded material.
When
he wraps this garment about him, leaving the sewn point in the centre of
his neck at the back, he finds that he has directed the folds of his
coat in such a manner as to form a hood, which he may place on or off
his head more conveniently than the plain unsewn length of stuff. The
morning sun rises on the sands of Sahara and lights upon the first
burnoose.
By a simple process in tailoring, some man, who did not care
that the peak of his hood should be attached to his cloak, cut his cloth
so that the cloak had a hood, the peak of which was separate and so
looser, and yet more easy to pull on or off. Now comes a man who was
taken by the shape of the hood, but did not require to wear a cloak, so
he cut his cloth in such a way that he had a hood and shoulder-cape
only.
From this to the man who closed the front of the hood from the
neck to the edge of the cape is but a quick and quiet step. By now
necessity was satisfied and had given birth to art. Man, having admired
his face in the still waters of a pool, seeing how the oval framed in
the hood vastly became him, sought to tickle his vanity and win
the approbation of the other sex, so, taking some shears, cut the edge
of his cape in scallops and leaves. A more dandified fellow, distressed
at the success of his brother's plumage, caused the peak of his hood to
be made long.
Need one say more? The long peak grew and grew into the preposterous
liripipe which hung down the back from the head to the feet. The dandy
spirit of another age, seeing that the liripipe can grow no more, and
that the shape of the hood is common and not in the true dandiacal
spirit, whips off his hood, and, placing the top of his head where his
face was, he twists the liripipe about his head, imprisons part of the
cape, and, after a fixing twist, slips the liripipe through part of its
twined self and lets the end hang down on one side of his face, while
the jagged end of the hood rises or falls like a cockscomb on the other.
Cockscomb! there's food for discussion in that - fops, beaux, dandies,
coxcombs - surely.
I shall not go into the matter of the hood with two peaks, which was
not, I take it, a true child of fashion in the direct line, but a mere
cousin - a junior branch at that.
As to the dates on this family tree, the vague, mysterious
beginnings B.C. - goodness knows when - in a general way the Fall, the
Flood, and the First Crusade, until the time of the
First Edward; the
end of the thirteenth century, when the liripipe budded, the time of the
Second Edward; the first third of the fourteenth century, when the
liripipe was in full flower, the time of the
Third Edward; the middle of
the fourteenth century, when the liripipe as a liripipe was dying, the
time of the
Second Richard; the end of the century, when the chaperon
became the twisted cockscomb turban. Then, after that, until the
twenty-second year of the fifteenth century, when the roundlet was
born - those are the dates.
We have arrived by now, quite naturally, at the roundlet. I left you
interested at the last phase of the hood, the chaperon so called,
twisted up in a fantastical shape on man's head. You must see that the
mere process of tying and retying, twisting, coiling and arranging, was
tedious in the extreme, especially in stirring times with the Trumpets sounding in England and France.
Now what more likely for the
artist of the tied hood than to puzzle his brains in order to reach a
means by which he could get at the effect without so much labour! Enter
invention - enter invention and exit art.
With invention, the made-up
chaperon sewn so as to look as if it had been tied.
There was the twist
round the head, the cockscomb, the hanging piece of liripipe. Again this
was to be simplified: the twist made into a smooth roll, the skull to be
covered by an ordinary cap attached to the roll, the cockscomb converted
into a plain piece of cloth or silk, the liripipe to become broader. And
the end of this, a little round hat with a heavily-rolled and stuffed
brim, pleated drapery hanging over one side and streamer of broad stuff
over the other; just such a hat did these people wear, on their heads or
slung over their shoulder, being held in the left hand by means of the
streamer.
There the honourable family of hood came to a green old age,
and was, at the end of the fifteenth century, allowed to retire from the
world of fashion, and was given a pension and a home, in which home you
may still see it - on the shoulders of the Garter robe. Also it has two more places of honourable distinction - the roundlet is on the
Garter robe; the chaperon, with the cut edge, rests as a cockade in the
hats of liveried servants, and the minutest member of the family remains
in the foreign buttons of honourable Orders.
We have the roundlet, then, for principal head-gear in this reign,
but we must not forget that the hood is not dead; it is out of the
strict realms of fashion, but it is now a practical country garment, or
is used for riding in towns.
There are also other forms of
head-wear - tall, conical hats with tall brims of fur, some brims cut or
scooped out in places; again, the hood may have a furred edge showing
round the face opening; then we see a cap which fits the head, has a
long, loose back falling over the neck, and over this is worn a roll or
hoop of twisted stuff. Then there is the sugar-loaf hat, like a circus
clown's, and there is a broad, flat-brimmed hat with a round top, like
Noah's hat in the popular representations of the Ark.
Besides these, we have the jester's three-peaked hood and one-peaked
hood, the cape of which came, divided into points, to the knees, and had
arms with bell sleeves.
His hair is cropped over his ears and has a thick fringe on his
forehead. Upon the ground is his roundlet, a hat derived from the
twisted chaperon of Richard II's day. This hat is worn to-day, in
miniature, on the shoulder of the Garter robes.
Let us see what manner of man we have under such hats: almost without
exception among the gentlemen we have the priestly hair - that queer,
shaved, tonsure-like cut, but without the circular piece cut away from
the crown of the head.
The cut of the tunic in the body has little variation; it may be
longer or shorter, an inch above or an inch below the knee, but it is on
one main principle. It is a loose tunic with a wide neck open in front
about a couple or three inches; the skirt is full, and may be cut up on
one or both sides; it may be edged with fur or some stuff different to
the body of the garment, or it may be jagged, either in regular
small scoops or in long fringe-like jags. The tunic is always belted
very low, giving an odd appearance to the men of this time, as it made
them look very short in the leg.
Tunic Sleeves
The great desire for variety is displayed in the forms of sleeve for
this tunic: you may have the ordinary balloon sleeve ending in a stuff
roll or fur edge for cuff, or you may have a half-sleeve, very wide
indeed, like shoulder-capes, and terminated in the same manner as the
bottom of the tunics - that is, fur-edged tunic, fur-edged sleeve, and so
on, as described; under this shows the tight sleeve of an undergarment,
the collar of which shows above the tunic collar at the neck.
The length
of these shoulder-cape sleeves varies according to the owner's taste,
from small epaulettes to heavy capes below the elbow. There is also a
sleeve tight from wrist to below the elbow, and at that point very big
and wide, tapering gradually to the shoulder. You will still see one or
two high collars rolled over, and there is a distinct continuance of the
fashion for long-pointed shoes.
New Overcoat
There is an almost new form of overcoat which is really a tunic of the
time, unbelted, and with the sleeves cut out; also one with short, but
very full, sleeves, the body very loose; and besides the ordinary
forms of square, oblong, and round cloak, there is a circular cloak
split up the right side to the base of the biceps, with a round hole in
the centre, edged with fur, for the passage of the head.
Velvet was in common use for gowns, tunics, and even for bed-clothes,
in the place of blankets. It was made in all kinds of beautiful designs,
diapered, and raised over a ground of gold or silk, or double-piled, one
pile on another of the same colour making the pattern known by the
relief.
The massed effect of well-dressed crowds must have been fine and rich in
colour - here and there a very rich lady or a magnificent gentleman in
pall (the beautiful gold or crimson web, known also as bandekin), the
velvets, the silks of marvellous colours, and none too fresh or new.
I
think that such a gathering differed most strongly from a gathering of
to-day by the fact that one is impressed to-day with the new, almost
tinny newness, of the people's clothes, and that these other people were not so extravagant in the number of their dresses as in the
quality, so that then one would have seen many old and beautifully-faded
velvets and sun-licked silks and rain-improved cloths.
Among all this crowd would pass, in a plain tunic and short shoes,
Henry, the ascetic King.
One is almost disappointed to find nothing upon the curious subject
of horns in 'Sartor Resartus.' Such a flaunting, Jovian spirit, and
poetry of abuse as might have been expected from the illustrious and
iconoclastic author would have suited me, at this present date, most
admirably.
I feel the need of a few thundering German words, or a brass band at the
end of my pen, or purple ink in my inkwell, or some fantastic and wholly
arresting piece of sensationalism by which to convey to you that you
have now stepped into the same world as the Duchess out of 'Alice in
Wonderland.'
Look out of your window and see upon the flower-enamelled turf a
hundred bundles of vanity taking the air. The heads of these ladies are
carried very erect, as are all heads bearing weights. The waists of
these ladies are apparently under their bosoms; their feet seem to be an
ell long.
An
assembly hour is, after the manner of Lydgate's poem, a dream of
delicious faces surmounted by minarets, towers, horns, excrescences of
every shape - enormous, fat, heart-shaped erections, covered with rich,
falling drapery, or snow-white linen, or gold tissue; gold-wire boxes
sewn with pearls and blazing with colours; round, flat-topped caps, from
under which girls' hair escapes in a river of colour; crown shapes,
circular shapes, mitre shapes, turbans, and shovel-shaped linen
erections, wired into place.
Oh, my lady, my lady! how did you ever hear the soft speeches of
gallantry? How did the gentle whispers of love ever penetrate those
bosses of millinery?
And the moralists, among whom Heaven forbid that I should be
found, painted lurid pictures for you of hell and purgatory, in which
such head-dresses turned into instruments of torture; you lifted your
long-fingered, medieval hand and shook the finger with the toad-stone
upon it, as if to dispel the poison of their words.
I think it is beyond me to describe in understandable terms the proper
contortions of your towered heads, for I have little use for archaic
words, for crespine, henk, and jacque, for herygouds with honginde
sleeves, for all the blank cartridges of antiquarianism. I cannot convey
the triple-curved crown, the ear buttress, the magnet-shaped roll in
adequate language, but I can draw them for you.
I will attempt the most popular of the roll head-dresses and the
simpler of the stiff-wired box. Take a roll, stuffed with hemp or tow,
of some rich material and twist it into the form of a heart in front and
a shape behind, where join the ends, or, better, make a circle or hoop
of your rolled stuff and bend it in this way.
Then make a cap that will
fit the head and come over the ears, and make it so that this cap
shall join the heart-shaped roll at all points and cause it to appear
without any open spaces between the head and the roll; the point of the
heart in front will be round, and will come over the centre of the face.
By joining cap and roll you will have one complete affair; over this you
may brooch a linen wimple or a fine piece of jagged silk. In fact, you
may twist your circle of stuff in any manner, providing you keep a vague
shape in front and completely cover the hair behind.
For the box pattern it is necessary to make a box, let us say of
octagonal shape, flat before and behind, or slightly curved; cut away
the side under the face, or leave but a thin strip of it to go under the
chin.
Now stuff your box on either side of the face and cut away the
central square, except for 3 inches at the top, on the forehead; here,
in this cut-away piece, the face shows. You will have made your box of
buckram and stuffed the wings of it with tow; now you must fit your box
to a head and sew linen between the sides of the head and the tow to
hold it firm and make it good to wear. You have now finished the rough
shape, and you must ornament it.
Take a piece of thin gold web and
cover your box, then get some gold braid and make a diaper or
criss-cross pattern all over the box, leaving fair sized lozenges; in
these put, at regular intervals as a plain check, small squares of
crimson silk so that they fit across the lozenge and so make a double
pattern.
Now take some gold wire or brass wire and knot it at neat
intervals, and then stitch it on to the edges of the gold braid, after
which pearl beads may be arranged on the crimson squares and at the
cross of the braid; then you will have your box-patterned head-dress
complete.
It remains for you to enlarge upon this, if you wish, in the following
manner: take a stiff piece of wire and curve it into the segment of a
circle, so that you may bend the horns as much or as little as you will,
fasten the centre of this to the band across the forehead, or on to the
side-boxes, and over it place a large wimple with the front edge cut.
Again, for further enhancement of this delectable piece of goods, you
may fix a low gold crown above all - a crown of an elliptical shape - and
there you will have as much magnificence as ever graced lady of the
fifteenth century.
Her head-dress is very high, and over it is a coloured and jagged silk
wimple, a new innovation, being a change from the centuries of white
linen wimples. Her waist is high, after a long period of low waists.
September 28, 1443, Margaret Paston writes to her husband in
London
'I would ye were at home, if it were your ease, and your sore might be
as well looked to here as it is where ye be now, liefer than a gown
though it were of scarlet.'
My dear diplomatist, I have forgotten if you got both your husband
and the gown, or the gown only, but it was a sweetly pretty letter, and
worded in such a way as must have caused your good knight to smile,
despite his sore.
And what had you in your mind's eye when you wrote
'liefer than a gown though it were of scarlet'?
It was one of those new
gowns with the high waist and the bodice opening very low, the collar
quite over your shoulders, and the thick fur edge on your shoulders and
tapering into a point at your bosom.
You wanted sleeves like wings, and
a fur edge to the bottom of the gown, besides the fur upon the edges of
the sleeves - those quaint sleeves, thin to your elbows, and then great
and wide, like a foresail.
I suppose you had an under-gown of some
wonderful diapered silk which you thought would go well with scarlet,
because, as you knew, the under-gown would show at your neck, and its
long train would trail behind you, and its skirt would fall about your
feet and show very bravely when you bunched up the short upper gown - all
the mode - and so you hinted at scarlet.
Now I come to think of it, the sleeve must have been hard to arrive
at, the fashions were so many. To have had them tight would have
minimized the use of your undergarment; to have had them of the same
width from elbow to wrist would not have given you the newest of the new
ideas to show in Norfolk; then, for some reason, you rejected the bag
sleeve, which was also in the fashion.
A Cotehardie
No doubt you had a cotehardie with well-fitting sleeves and good full
skirts, and a surcoat with a wide fur edge, or perhaps, in the latest
fashion of these garments, with an entire fur bodice to it. You may have
had also one of those rather ugly little jackets, very full, with very
full sleeves which came tight at the wrist, long-waisted, with a
little skirt an inch or so below the belt.
A mantle, with cords to keep
it on, I know you had. Possibly - I have just thought of it - the sleeves of
your under-gown, the tight sleeves, were laced together from elbow to
wrist, in place of the old-fashioned buttons.
I wonder if you ever saw the great metal-worker, William Austin, one
of the first among English artists to leave a great name behind him - I
mean the Austin who modelled the effigy of Earl Richard Beauchamp, at
Warwick.
You must have heard the leper use his rattle to warn you of his
proximity. You, too, may have thought that Joan of Arc was a sorceress
and Friar Bungay a magician. You may have - I have not your wonderful
letter here for reference - heard all about Eleanor of Cobham, and how she
did penance in a shift in the London streets for magic against the
King's person.
Some ladies, I notice, wore the long-tongued belt - buckled it in
front, and then pushed it round until the buckle came into the centre of
the back and the tongue hung down like a tail; but these ladies were not
wearing the high-waisted gown, but a gown with a normal waist, and with
no train, but a skirt of even fulness and of the same length all the way
round.
There were striped stuffs, piled velvet, rich-patterned silks, and
homespun cloths and wool to choose from. Long-peaked shoes, of course,
and wooden clogs out of doors.
Everyone Else
The town and country maids, the merchants' wives, and the poor
generally, each and all according to purse and pride, dressed in humbler
imitation of the cut of the clothes of the high-born, in quite simple
dresses, with purse, girdle, and apron, with heads in hoods, or twisted
wimples of coarse linen.
Well, there you lie, ladies, on the tops of cold tombs, stiff and
sedate, your hands uplifted in prayer, your noses as often as not
knocked off by later-day schoolboys, crop-headed Puritans, or
Henry VIII's sacrilegious hirelings. Lie still in your huge head-dresses and
your neat-folded gowns - a moral, in marble or bronze, of the pomps and
vanities of this wicked world.
HENRY THE SIXTH
Reigned thirty-nine years: 1422-1461.
Born 1421. Dethroned 1461. Died 1471. Married, 1446, Margaret of Anjou.
This costume history information consists of Pages
176-197 of the chapter on the 15th century dress in the 39 YEAR REIGN era of
Henry The Sixth 1422-1461 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 Sixth 1422-1461. The images and details
are a good resource for costuming Shakespearean 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.
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This costume history information consists of Pages
176-197 of the chapter on the 15th century dress in the 39 YEAR REIGN era of
Henry The Sixth 1422-1461 and taken from English Costume by Dion Clayton Calthrop.
There the honourable family of hood came to a green old age,
and was, at the end of the fifteenth century, allowed to retire from the
world of fashion, and was given a pension and a home, in which home you
may still see it - on the shoulders of the Garter robe. Also it has two more places of honourable distinction - the roundlet is on the
Garter robe; the chaperon, with the cut edge, rests as a cockade in the
hats of liveried servants, and the minutest member of the family remains
in the foreign buttons of honourable Orders.
An
assembly hour is, after the manner of Lydgate's poem, a dream of
delicious faces surmounted by minarets, towers, horns, excrescences of
every shape - enormous, fat, heart-shaped erections, covered with rich,
falling drapery, or snow-white linen, or gold tissue; gold-wire boxes
sewn with pearls and blazing with colours; round, flat-topped caps, from
under which girls' hair escapes in a river of colour; crown shapes,
circular shapes, mitre shapes, turbans, and shovel-shaped linen
erections, wired into place.
You wanted sleeves like wings, and
a fur edge to the bottom of the gown, besides the fur upon the edges of
the sleeves - those quaint sleeves, thin to your elbows, and then great
and wide, like a foresail.
