English Costume Part 19

THE WOMEN

[Ill.u.s.tration: {Six types of head-dress for women}]

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 ill.u.s.trious 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 bra.s.s 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 d.u.c.h.ess out of 'Alice in Wonderland.'

[Ill.u.s.tration: {A head-dress for a woman}]

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 a.s.sembly 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?

[Ill.u.s.tration: {Two types of head-dress for women}]

And the moralists, among whom Heaven forbid that I should be found, painted lurid pictures for you of h.e.l.l 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 b.u.t.tress, the magnet-shaped roll in adequate language, but I can draw them for you.

[Ill.u.s.tration: {Two women of the time of Henry VI.}]

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 V 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 s.p.a.ces 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 U 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 bra.s.s wire and knot it at neat intervals, and then st.i.tch 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A WOMAN OF THE TIME OF HENRY VI. (1422-1461)

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.'

[Ill.u.s.tration: {A woman of the time of Henry VI.}]

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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: {A woman of the time of Henry VI.}]

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.

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 b.u.t.tons.

[Ill.u.s.tration: {A woman of the time of Henry VI.}]

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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: {A woman of the time of Henry VI.}]

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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: {A woman of the time of Henry VI.}]

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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: {A woman of the time of Henry VI.}]

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 ap.r.o.n, with heads in hoods, or twisted wimples of coa.r.s.e 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.

EDWARD THE FOURTH

Reigned twenty-two years: 1461-1483.

Born 1441. Married, 1464, Elizabeth Woodville.

THE MEN

[Ill.u.s.tration: {A man of the time of Edward IV.}]

I invite you to call up this reign by a picture of Caxton's shop: you may imagine yourself in the almonry at Westminster, where, in a small enclosure by the west front of the church, there is a chapel and some almshouses. You will be able to see the rich come to look at Mr.

Caxton's wares and the poor slinking in to receive alms.

'If it please any man, spiritual or temporal, to buy any pyes of two or three commemorations of Salisbury use emprynted after the form of this present letter, which be well and truly correct, let him come to Westminster into the Almonry at the red pale, and he shall have them good cheap.'

This was Caxton's advertis.e.m.e.nt.

As you watch the people going and coming about the small enclosure, you will notice that the tonsured hair has gone out of fashion, and that whereas the merchants, citizens, and such people wear the roundlet hat, the n.o.bles and fine gentlemen are in black velvet caps, or tall hats with long-peaked brims, or in round high hats with fur brim close to the crown of the hat, or in caps with little rolled brims with a b.u.t.ton at the top, over which two laces pa.s.s from back to front, and from under the brim there falls the last sign, the dying gasp of the liripipe, now jagged and now with ta.s.selled ends.

We have arrived at the generally accepted vague idea of 'medieval costume,' which means really a hazy notion of the dress of this date: a steeple head-dress for ladies, a short waist, and a train; a tall, sugar-loaf hat with a flat top for the men, long hair, very short and very long tunics, long-pointed shoes, and wide sleeves--this, I think, is the amateur's idea of 'costume in the Middle Ages.'

You will notice that all, or nearly all, the pa.s.sers-by Caxton's have long hair; that the dandies have extra-long hair brushed out in a cloud at the back; that the older men wear long, very simple gowns, which they belt in at the waist with a stuff or leather belt, on which is hung a bag-purse; that these plain gowns are laced across the front to the waist over a vest of some coloured stuff other than the gown.

[Ill.u.s.tration: {Two men of the time of Edward IV.}]

You will see that the poor are in very simple tunics--just a loose, stuff shirt with sleeves about 8 inches wide, and with the skirts reaching to the knees, a belt about their middle--rough, shapeless leather shoes, and woollen tights.

You will remember in the early part of the reign, before the heraldic shield with the red pale, Caxton's sign, caught your eye, that the fashionable wore very wide sleeves, great swollen bags fitting only at shoulder and wrist, and you may recall the fact that a tailor was fined twenty shillings in 1463 for making such wide sleeves.

Poulaines, the very long shoes, are now forbidden, except that an esquire and anyone over that rank might wear them 2 inches beyond the toes; but I think the dandies wore the shoes and paid the fine if it were enforced.