English Costume

by Dion Clayton Calthrop

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. 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. 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!

A Belt with Bells.

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?

The Turban.

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.

A MAN OF THE TIME OF HENRY V. (1413-1422)

Notice the bag cap with a jewel stuck in it.

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.

The Sugar-bag Cap.

A Hood.

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.

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.