The Year after the Armada, and Other Historical Studies

by Martin A. S. Hume

Headpiece

A FIGHT AGAINST FINERY.

(A HISTORY OF THE SUMPTUARY LAWS IN SPAIN.)

It is a curious reflection that whilst all the serious acts and surroundings of civilised life have been rendered amenable to the law, whilst the very instincts inherent in the nature of mankind have been dominated and regulated by authority, utter failure has attended the persistent efforts of rulers to cope with the trivial follies of fashion, or to limit the vanity and extravagance of personal adornment. For long ages men, and particularly women, have insisted upon making themselves absurd and uncomfortable, at great cost and in an infinite variety of ways, in obedience to dictates or impulses springing from nobody knows where, and have only consented to forego each succeeding caprice when the taste for it has worn itself out and has given place to another, perhaps still more preposterous than its predecessor.

It has been from no fault of the rulers that they have been beaten in their fight with fashion, for they have tried their hardest for centuries. Our Plantagenet and Tudor sovereigns made many attempts to regulate the dress and adornment of their subjects, but the motive which mainly prompted them was the desire to differentiate the classes and prevent the humbler citizens from emulating, in appearance at least, their social superiors. In a state of society which depended upon the subjection of the majority by the privileged classes, this motive was perfectly reasonable; as was also the alternative one of protecting a particular national industry, which, in Tudor times especially, often furnished a reason for the imposition of sumptuary enactments; but both of these motives, from their very nature, were necessarily more or less ephemeral and artificial, because, on the one hand, the continual social development, the growing wealth of the traders and the emancipation of the labourers made the classes interdependent; and, on the other, the extended seaboard of England and the maritime enterprise of the inhabitants made the protection of a particular industry by prohibiting foreign competition impossible for any great length of time. The attempted interference, therefore, of English sovereigns with the dress of their lieges was intermittent and spasmodic, and was, at a comparatively early period, admitted to be useless.

Such, however, from various reasons was not the case in Spain. There the fight against finery was kept up persistently for nearly six centuries, and hardly a decade passed during that time without one or more petty and ridiculous attempts being made to interfere with the dress, food, personal habits, and surroundings of the people. The ostensible motives were usually different from those which operated in England. The separation of the classes has never been so complete in Spain as elsewhere in Europe, owing to the fact that from a very early period in the history of the country all Christians were banded together and dependent upon one another for protection against the common enemy, the infidel. Manual industry, moreover, was never a strong point with Spanish Christians, and the main reason for the various attempts to exclude foreign goods was the dread that Spanish gold would be sent out to pay for them. Nothing is more striking, indeed, than the absolutely murderous effect upon Spanish industry exerted by most of the paternal attempts at interference with trade, but political economy was even more of a dead letter amongst that nation of warriors than with our own ancestors. The earliest object of the great mass of sumptuary laws in Spain was to restrict the dreaded taste for luxury and splendour which was felt to be a characteristic of the hated Moor, who had been conquered bit by bit by people who were content to live roughly, feed frugally, and dress plainly. But with victory came wealth, with peace came intermixture, and the subtle, refined, Oriental blood, with its love of pomp and brilliancy, gradually permeated the rough Gothic-Iberians, until its manifestations alarmed rulers whose power still largely depended upon the self-sacrificing frugality and hardy endurance of their subjects. Thus it was that the attempt was made to keep people frugal and homely whilst they were growing rich, and the tendency continued during all the centuries that the struggle against Spanish luxury went on, although during the last three centuries of the period the original motive had disappeared, and the usual excuse for the interference of the King with the dress of his subjects was the desire to prevent them from spending so much money upon themselves, in order that they might spend more upon him.

But, whatever the motives may have been, the fight against extravagance was carried on as persistently as fruitlessly until quite recent times, and there exists a mass of information with regard to the dress and manners of the people in the Spanish sumptuary enactments unequalled elsewhere. The decrees usually took the form of a representation from the Cortes to the sovereign, setting forth in a preamble the particular abuses to be remedied, and then proposing a remedy which the sovereign usually confirmed by what was called his "pragmatic sanction," and the decree was then proclaimed and had the force of law. A large number of these decrees or "pragmatics" of the highest interest will be found in the British Museum manuscripts (MSS. Add. 9933 and 9934), and many more are set forth in Sempere's "Historia de las leyes suntuarias" (Madrid, 1788), whilst the familiar and festive traditions of old Madrid teem with quaint stories of ingenious evasions and jovial defiance of the laws under the very noses of the sable-clad Acaldes and Alguaciles, whose grave and solemn duty it was to clip lovelocks and measure frills and furbelows.

The first vicious extravagance which seizes upon a hardy, simple people who find themselves safe after a period of struggle is naturally that of gluttony; and the earliest sumptuary decrees of the Castilian kings were directed against this particular excess.