A WOMAN OF THE TIME OF HENRY VII. (1485-1509)
Notice the diamond-shaped head-dress, the wide, fur-edged gown with its full sleeves.
The illustrations given with this chapter show very completely the costume of this time, and, except in cases of royal persons or very gorgeously apparelled ladies, they are complete enough to need no description.
The shoes, it will be seen, are very broad at the toes, with thick soles, sometimes made much in the manner of sandals—that is, with only a toecap, the rest flat, to be tied on by strings.
As this work is entirely for use, it may be said, that artists who have costumes made for them, and costumiers who make for the stage, hardly ever allow enough material for the gowns worn by men and women in this and other reigns, where the heaviness and richness of the folds was the great keynote. To make a gown, of such a kind as these good ladies wore, one needs, at least, twelve yards of material, fifty-two inches wide, to give the right appearance. It is possible to acquire at many of the best shops nowadays actual copies of embroidered stuffs, velvets, and damask silks of this time, and of stuffs up to Early Victorian patterns, and this makes it easy for painters to procure what, in other days, they were forced to invent.
Many artists have their costumes made of Bolton sheeting, on to which they stencil the patterns they wish to use—this is not a bad thing to do, as sheeting is not dear and it falls into beautiful folds.
The older ladies and widows of this time nearly all dressed in very simple, almost conventual garments, many of them wearing the ‘barbe’ of pleated linen, which covered the lower part of the face and the chin—a sort of linen beard—it reached to the breast, and is still worn by some religious orders of women.
Badges were still much in use, and the servants always wore some form of badge on their left sleeve—either merely the colours of their masters, or a small silver, or other metal, shield. Thus, the badge worn by the servants of Henry VII. would be either a greyhound, a crowned hawthorn bush, a red dragon, a portcullis, or the red and white roses joined together. The last two were used by all the Tudors, and the red rose and the portcullis are still used. From these badges we get the signs of many of our inns, either started by servants, who used their master’s badge for a device, or because the inn lay on a certain property the lord of which carried chequers, or a red dragon, or a tiger’s head.
I mentioned the silks of Bruges and her velvets without giving enough prominence to the fine velvets of Florence, a sample of which, a cope, once used in Westminster Abbey, is preserved at Stonyhurst College; it was left by Henry VII. to ‘Our Monastery of Westminster,’ and is of beautiful design—a gold ground, covered with boughs and leaves raised in soft velvet pile of ruby colour, through which little loops of gold thread appear.