It is no wonder that fashions so very extreme and absurd should call forth animadversion from various quarters. Thus wrote Petrarch in 1366:—
“Who can see with patience the monstrous, fantastical inventions which the people of our times have invented to deform, rather than adorn, their persons? Who can behold without indignation their long pointed shoes; their caps with feathers; their hair twisted and hanging down like tails; the foreheads of young men, as well as women, formed into a kind of furrows with ivory-headed pins; their bellies so cruelly squeezed with cords, that they suffer as much pain from vanity as the martyrs suffered for religion? Our ancestors would not have believed, and I know not if posterity will believe, that it was possible for the wit of this vain generation of ours to invent so many base, barbarous, horrid, ridiculous fashions (besides those already mentioned) to disfigure and disgrace itself, as we have the mortification to see every day.”
And thus Chaucer, a few years later:—
“Alass! may not a man see as in our daies the sinnefull costlew array of clothing, and namely in too much superfluite, or else in too disordinate scantinese: as to the first, not only the cost of embraudering, the disguysed indenting, or barring, ounding, playting, wynding, or bending, and semblable waste of clothe in vanitie.” The common people also “were besotted in excesse of apparell, in wide surcoats reaching to their loines, some in a garment reaching to their heels, close before and strowting out on the sides, so that on the back they make men seem women, and this they called by a ridiculous name, gowne,” &c. &c.
Before this time the legislature had interfered, though with little success: they passed laws at Westminster, which were said to be made “to prevent that destruction and poverty with which the whole kingdom was threatened, by the outrageous, excessive expenses of many persons in their apparel, above their ranks and fortunes.”
Sumptuary edicts, however, are of little avail, if not supported in “influential quarters.” King Richard II. affected the utmost splendour of attire, and he had one coat alone which was valued at 30,000 marks: it was richly embroidered and inwrought with gold and precious stones. It is not in human nature, at least in human nature of the “more honourable” gender, to be outdone, even by a king. Gorgeous and glittering was the raiment adopted by the satellites of the court, and, heedless of “that destruction and poverty with which the whole kingdom was threatened,” they revelled in magnificence. Of one alone, Sir John Arundel, it is recorded, that he had at one time fifty-two suits of cloth of gold tissue. At this time, says the old Chronicle,
“Cut werke was great bothe in court and tounes,
Bothe in mens hoddes, and also in their gounes,
Brouder and furres, and gold smith werke ay newe,
In many a wyse, eche day they did renewe.”
Unaccountable as it may seem, this rage of expense and show in apparel reached even the (then) poverty-stricken sister country Scotland; and in 1457 laws were enacted to suppress it.
It is told of William Rufus, that one morning while putting on his new boots he asked his chamberlain what they cost; and when he replied “three shillings,” indignantly and in a rage he cried out, “you—how long has the king worn boots of so paltry a price? Go, and bring me a pair worth a mark of silver.” He went, and bringing him a much cheaper pair, told him falsely that they cost as much as he had ordered: “Ay,” said the king, “these are suitable to royal majesty.”
This is merely a specimen of the monarch’s shallow-headed extravagance; but the costume of his time and that immediately preceding it was infinitely superior in grace and dignity to that of the fantastical period we have been describing. The English at this period were admired by all other nations, and especially by the French, from whom in subsequent periods we have copied so servilely, for the richness and elegance of their attire. With a tunic simply confined at the waist, over this, when occasion required, a full and flowing mantle, with a veil confined to the back of the head with a golden circlet, her dark hair simply braided over her beautiful and intelligent brow and waving on her fair throat, the wife of the Conqueror looked every inch a queen, and what was more, she looked a modest, a dignified, and a beautiful woman.