The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are

by Michael Pye

  And yet the technology of clothes began to allow all kinds of choice; tailoring, at least the cutting of cloth to create fitted clothing, goes back in London to the early thirteenth century,23 which is also when you start to find specialist cutters and sewers of clothing, the first tailors, in northern France and along the Rhine. Tailoring was usual at grand courts, so tailoring allowed anyone to imply that they were part of the court without saying so, and without breaking the law.

  In Italian cities, these laws were aimed at women for the most convoluted reason: their clothes cost so much that men couldn’t marry, which was leading to sodomy, so fashion was distracting everyone from the serious business of replenishing the population of cities like Florence.24 In the North, the aims were rather different. The English were much more concerned with men’s clothes than women’s (which was a quite general rule in the North).25 England wanted to maintain its solid system of class, of course, but also to protect English trades against foreign goods. All this was itself dressed up with a moral anxiousness, so the laws about fashion were meant to adjust people’s souls as well as their pockets and their wardrobes, and make them better persons. They would obviously be better if they knew their place.

  The laws kept coming to make sure the wrong people did not wear the right clothes. In England, no furs for anyone making less than £100 a year; in Hainault no ermine or silk for servants; in Scotland after 1430, no dyed clothes in bright colours for the working classes; in France in 1485, a means test for cloth of gold, which was restricted to nobles who lived nobly and had at least two thousand livres tournois a year to pay for it. These laws suggest that the wrong people had the cash, and they were looking much better than they were meant to be.26

  Fashion became something to talk about when you couldn’t quite discuss all the alarming social change that it made visible. It was becoming a moral issue.

  Mockery was the start. The sainted Bernard of Clairvaux in the twelfth century already had his doubts about the new generation of knights (‘not military but malicious’) because their hair got in their eyes, they were tripped and tangled by the length of their shirts and they buried their hands in wide sleeves; but at least they didn’t insist, like some aristos, on tunic sleeves so tight they had to be sewn into them every day.27 Clothes didn’t need to be practical, which was a statement in itself; men and women both needed handbags attached to the belt because they had no pockets.

  Then there was the question of honesty, since fashion allowed you to change the shape of your body, usually within reason. The long points on shoes, actually a notion imported from Poland, were said to be the invention of an Anjou count with appalling bunions.28 Women, right into the fifteenth century, allowed themselves to be tailored to show high, firm and perfectly round breasts, ample haunches but tiny feet and a belly so prominent that in the late thirteenth century the poet Jehan de Meun thought: ‘You often can’t tell if they’re pregnant or not. They’re large about the hips however thin they are.’29 It became chic in his time to be blonde, saffron blonde, ‘the most beautiful and commonplace colour, that pleases both women and men’, according to the surgeon Henri de Mondeville; naturally there were dyes, as there were simple depilatories involving opium, vinegar and henbane or else the oil in which a hedgehog has been cooked, and a kind of primitive hair transplant. Looks were work. A woman might bind her bosom to avoid the ‘disgrace’ of breasts that were too large. An older woman might take off the top layer of her skin with a razor so new and younger skin would grow.30

  Anyone subject to fits of morality would clearly have to disapprove. There is an anonymous poem written around 1400, Richard the Redeless, in which Wisdom in person wanders about a royal household dressed in old-fashioned ‘wholesome’ clothes, ‘not overlong’, and for that offence he is reproached, often rebuked, scorned, hooted at, sent packing and kept outside the doors, subject to the disapproval of ‘the beardless boys’ whose fashionably long sleeves become ‘sleeves that slide upon the earth’.31

  St Birgitta of Sweden went to extremes and announced that clothes were the cause of the plague, especially when fitted, cut, slashed and pieced together; as though the boats that brought ideas and styles had also brought disease, which would have been a more plausible argument. Multi-coloured cloth and stripes came to stand for such evil that on the walls of one Danish church the murderer Cain wears red stripy socks while his innocent victim, Abel, wears plain ones, and everyone knew which was which; and the pair in another church are obviously illicit lovers because they wear clothes in two colours. That would be clear even to anyone who does not understand the word ‘luxuria’ painted behind them.32

  Jehan de Meun already worried that husbands would go to hell because the cost of dressing their wives would drive them to usury ‘or worse’; and he was left piously hoping that ‘women do all this with good intentions, to keep their husbands away from fornication’.33 An English proclamation of 1562 worried about followers of fashion, ‘such as be of the meaner sort, and be least able with their livings to maintain the same’. To make things worse, the whole process of change seemed to be speeding up. In the 1390s Christine de Pizan complained of the changes every day, making women’s clothes and men’s clothes always more elaborate and ruining many people; ‘just as sheep follow each other, if people see anyone do some extravagant or inappropriate thing in the matter of dress, they immediately follow him and say that they must do what everybody else does.’34 In 1577 William Harrison denounced ‘the phantastical folly of our nation (even from the courtier to the carter) … such that no form of apparel liketh us longer than the first garment is in the wearing, if it continue so long’.35

  Dress was politics because it showed the cracks and changes in society. It was a moral issue because it was a sign of pride, greed and waste. It was also an unstoppable economic issue because it involved the vast industry around wool and cloth as well as all the silk and dyestuffs that were traded over the seas. The Duke of Burgundy maintained among many others a team of shoemakers, tailors, cutters, furriers, embroiderers, and a tailor as head of his wardrobe who worked for nobody else. All the other craftsmen could supply anyone who aspired to look ducal or even regal, and had the money. The merchant drapers, unsurprisingly, were always the richest men in town; the goods they sold were the basis36 of how people defined themselves in public.

  The business could be accused of somehow unbalancing the nation: it was alien, war by other and silken means. Thomas Smith in his Discourse of the Common Weal of this Realm of England in 1549 objected to the sudden glut of haberdashers in London selling ‘French or Milan caps, glasses, daggers, swords, girdles’, all of them suddenly arrived in the past twenty years. He saw good English wool sent out of the country to be dyed and made into caps or broadcloths and then brought back to be sold. ‘What grossness be we of that we see it and suffer such a continual spoil to be made of our goods and treasure by such means?’37 London, meanwhile, was doing rather well out of exactly the same process. Every nation in Europe was perfectly capable of making stockings, but London made them of a very fine worsted that everyone wanted because it was in style; the stockings went to France, Holland, Germany. They weren’t cheap; the perpetually furious Philip Stubbes wrote that ‘the time had been when one might have clothed all his body well from top to toe for less than a pair of these netherstocks will cost’.38

  The Pastons were a family of Norfolk squires who, like most of their kind, worried more about clothing themselves than following fashion. They did, however, travel.

  John Paston went to Burgundy in the middle of the fifteenth century and was dazzled. ‘I heard never of none like to it, save King Arthur’s court,’ he wrote home to his mother.39 He was astonished by the rich gear at a jousting tournament, the ‘gold, and silk and silver’ and the ‘gold, and pearl, and stones’. The complexity of the court impressed him, all the ranks and social distinctions, and the women. Seven years later his estate manager, John Pympe, said he’d heard that ‘the fraus of Bruges,
with their high caps, have given some of you great claps’ and that the women went to war with their own tactics: ‘they smite all at the mouth and at the great end of the thigh’.40

  The Pastons, muddled in the English dynastic wars, lawyers whose lands were under legal siege and never rich, wrote each other letters full of practical worries: Margaret thinks her husband has sent caps too small for the children; young John says he needs a second gown for a Christmas in Wales because ‘we must wear them every day for the more part, and one gown without change will soon be done’ and he needs two pair of hose ‘ready made for me at the hosiers with the crooked back’ because ‘I have not a whole hose for to don.’ He also needs a hat to go riding; he wants the man delivering the hat to ‘bring the hat upon his head for fear of misfashioning of it’.

  Margaret, heavily pregnant, needs a new girdle ‘for I am waxed so fetis’ (which means neat and elegant; she is being ironic) ‘that I may not be girt in no bar of no girdle that I have but of one’. She wants not a London gown but gowncloth from London to make a dress locally – cloth still matters to her more than cut – but see how the family looks to London for what they want, since, as Margaret complained, ‘I have done all the drapers’ shops in this town and here is right feeble choice.’ Style, as much as a person could afford, came from somewhere else.

  Occasionally a Paston asks for clothes to be decorated, a gown of ‘puke’ – which is the devil’s colour of mourning black – to be ‘furred with white lamb’, but that is all; the family does not seem eager to imitate the grandees, even if they know all about what they have. John Paston makes a list of what his master, Sir John Howard, gave to his wife in the single month of January 1467. There was gold, in the form of rings and necklaces, chains and girdles, set with rubies, pearls, diamonds not to mention an emerald and a sapphire and an amethyst; there was Holland cloth, green velvet and black velvet when velvet was still hugely expensive, and damask and cloth of gold; and five silver spoons. There was fur, the expensive marten, the squirrel skins known as miniver, and gowns trimmed with ermine. There was a bed of crimson damask and assorted hangings, tapestry from Arras. The list goes on and on, but the Pastons seem to be largely indifferent when they’re not at court; they have other worries in the country, how to keep their land, how to survive the wars.41

  Town was different; in town you had to get things right. The old man lecturing his much younger wife in Le Ménagier de Paris, that wonderfully fussy manual on household management from 1393, won’t tolerate sloppiness, and he points out that people who say they don’t care about appearances or about themselves are all hypocrites; they care about themselves quite enough when it comes to demanding respect. He says his new wife must be ‘honestly clad, without new devices and too much frippery, or too little’. So a wife could underdo things, and that would be as bad as being too showy; she must follow rules. The old man’s concerns go right down to his wife’s new-fangled underwear, even if it ought usually to be hidden: ‘see you first that the collar of your shift and your blanchet, your robe or your surcoat do not straggle out one upon the other’.42 The etiquette of knickers was a work in progress; the Dominican Jean de Baume said men who didn’t go to confession were like bad children who slept in their dirty shirts, while good children changed their underthings ‘at least once a fortnight’.43

  In the sixteenth century the first printed books of fashion arrived, full of pictures of what people wore in other times or other places. They helped define the notion of fashion as a long desire to be someone or somewhere else.

  They were a show of clothes but also of how people lived, an intelligence report in pretty colours; and a moral lesson, how to tell bad people and good people by their style. The very first is attributed to François Deserps and it was published in Paris by the court book-binder in 1562 with a dedication to the eight-year-old future Henry IV of France. The boy may or may not have seen it. It tells about the enormous trousers worn by Scotsmen, the clean refinement of the Dutch, the way the women of Brabant wear their hair ‘like starched linen’ and the long skirts of Zeeland; and to keep the boy’s interest, some sea monsters, a cyclops with a single gross eye and some upright standing apes all dressed in rattan.

  The pictures are based on drawings by a captain who was a pioneer in French Canada, a military man who knows about foreigners, and ‘a certain Portuguese who has visited many and various countries’, someone in business.44 This is serious information, guaranteed by a soldier and a merchant. The compiler does not quite approve of fashion, although he knows that the lack of it matters – in Lübeck, for example, the men are natural hunters, falcons on their wrists, and neither men nor women are ‘much bothered by fashionable clothes’. The book explains that all this variety came about in part because of different religions, which was a natural concern in the middle of bloody religious wars; but also because of people’s curiosity about other peoples and far-away countries.45

  Cesare Vecellio, who once worked in the studio of his cousin Titian, produced his account of ‘all the world’ in Venice in 1589. As well as Englishwomen ‘showing their magnificence’ and the women of Antwerp ‘of whatever adult age going out on their own, with a fine straw hat on their heads’, he was fascinated by the Northern women who lit their way with burning sticks carried in the mouth (‘for convenience, and maybe safety’) and put out rotten bits of oak along the path so light from tiny funghi would show the way home. He notes that even the grandest Dutch women ‘do business in trade’. Clothes seem like one more piece of ethnographic evidence, a fact about foreign places and people, except that he also complains that it is hard to be certain about the clothes foreigners wear ‘for they are varied at will and the capriccio of others’.46

  The sheer wilfulness of fashion was about to become a scandal.

  Nobody was more alarmed than Philip Stubbes, a professional moralist who went in fear of the judgement of God on almost everyone for almost anything. He published in 1583 a whole Anatomie of Abuses, a fluent and remarkably observant warning to the English nation. He disapproved of: music as ‘the pathway to all Bawdry and filthiness’, actors as ‘painted Sepulchres … double-dealing Ambodexters’, lawyers and usury because they could take away a man’s home, strong ale even when brewed by churches on feast days, football as a ‘bloody and murdering practice’ and dancing for all the ‘smouching and slabbering one of another’. In general he reckoned ‘there are three cankers which in process of time will eat up the whole Commonwealth of England, if speedy reformation be not had: namely dainty fare, gorgeous buildings, and sumptuous apparel’.

  ‘The inhabitants of England go bravely in apparel changing fashions for every day for no cause so much as to delight the eyes of their whorish mates withall, and to inamour the minds of their fleshly paramours.’ He singled out women who put flowers at their breasts ‘whereby I doubt not but they get many a slabbering kiss, and peradventure more friendship besides, they know what I mean’. He sensed sensuality, ‘an example of evil before our eyes and a provocation to sin’. He resented the dizzy changes. ‘For were I never so expert an Arithmetician I were never able to recompt [count] the one half of them, the Devil broacheth so many new fashions every day.’

  He mocked, of course. Those ‘great and monstrous Ruffs’ around Elizabethan necks were fine until the rain caught them; ‘then their great ruffes set sail and down they fall like dishcloths fluttering in the wind, like windmill sails’. People’s hats matched ‘the fantasies of their wavering minds’. A man in slippers went ‘slipping and sliding at every pace, ready to fall down … they go flip flop up and down in the dirt, casting mire to the knees of the wearer’. As for doublets, they were useless for work and useless for play because they were too stiff and too hot.

  Stubbes didn’t mean to be a satirist so much as a preacher. He was horrified by the sheer effort that went into all these absurdities: ‘millions of suits of apparel lying rotting by them,’ he wrote, not being a man to understate things, ‘when as the poor members
of Jesus Christ die at their doors for want of cloathing’. He hated the way women coloured their faces and frizzled and crisped their hair ‘like grim and stern monsters rather than chaste Christian matrons’; he told stories about the Devil himself being caught starching ruffs and frizzling hair. He told other stories about the fashion for fair hair, quite alarming ones: ‘if any children have fair hair, they will entice them into a secret place and for a penny or two they will cut off their hair.’

  His alarms were about a world that he was sure was being shaken off its foundations: a world where everyone’s daughters all want fine clothes ‘notwithstanding that their parents owe a brace of hundred pounds more than they are worth’. He saw the sin of Pride in ‘wearing … Apparel more gorgeous, sumptuous and precious than our state, calling or condition of life requireth’. He complained that it was ‘very hard to know who is noble, who is worshipful, who is a Gentleman and who is not’.47 The settled order of society was supposed to be reflected in dress, but it was wrecked when anyone could buy the look of privilege; and this was the time when even the mighty codpiece was sliding down the social scale, going from aristo crotches to the private parts of even quite unrich and ungrand men.48 An outraged Stubbes insisted that ‘all may not look to wear like apparel but everyone, according to his degree, as God has placed him’.