12TH CENTURY.
14TH CENTURY.
The tight forms of dress now in common use among women were an incentive to tight lacing, an injurious practice, from which their descendants suffer. A lady is described
"Clad in purple pall,
With gentyll body and middle small,"
and another damsel, whose splendid girdle of beaten gold was embellished with emeralds and rubies, evidently, from the description, had a waist which was not the size intended by Nature.
During the Wars of the Roses both trade and costume made little progress, and after the union of the Houses of York and Lancaster by the marriage of Henry VII. with his Queen, Elizabeth, their attention was chiefly concerned in filling their impoverished coffers, which left them little opportunity for promoting new fashions in dress. Henry VIII. afforded ample facilities for the revival of the trade in dress goods, and there is little difficulty in tracing female costume of the sixteenth century when we remember that in the course of thirty-eight years he married six wives, besides having them painted times without number by all the popular artists of the day.
16TH CENTURY. From Portrait of Mary Queen of Scots.
J. R. Planché in his "History of British Costume," says: "The gowns of the nobility were magnificent, and at this period were open in front to the waist, showing the kirtle, or inner garment, as what we should call the petticoat was then termed." Anne of Cleves, who found so little favour in Henry's eyes, is said to have worn at their first interview "a rich gowne of cloth of gold made round, without any train, after the Dutch fashion;" and in a wardrobe account of the eighth year of this Bluebeard's reign appears the following item: "Seven yards of purple cloth of damask gold for a kirtle for Queen Catherine of Arragon." The dress of Catherine Parr is thus described by Pedro de Gante, secretary to the Spanish Duke de Najera, who visited Henry VIII. in 1543-1544: "She was robed in cloth of gold, with a 'saya' (petticoat) of brocade, the sleeves lined with crimson satin and trimmed with three-piled crimson velvet. Her train was more than two yards long." Articles of dress were often bequeathed by will. In one made on the 14th of August, 1540, William Cherington, yeoman, of Waterbeche, leaves "To my mother my holyday gowne." Nicholas, Dyer of Feversham, 29th October, 1540, "To my sister, Alice Bichendyke, thirteen shillings and ninepence which she owed me, and two kerchiefs of holland." John Holder, rector of Gamlingay, in 1544 leaves to Jane Greene "my clothe frock lined with satin cypress." These entries are from wills in the Ely Registry.