In the 15th century the middle ages run out. Fashions in this period become, if not more fantastic, more various. Its earlier years see men of rank still inclined to the rich modes of the last age: Harry of Monmouth, drawn 15th century. about 1410 by an artist who shows him as Occleve’s patron, wears a blue gown which might have passed muster at the court of Richard II. for its trailing skirts and its long sleeves, their slittered edges turned back (fig. 32). A strange fancy at this time was the hanging of silver bells on the dress. One William Staunton, in 1409, seeing in a vision at St Patrick’s Purgatory the fate of earth’s proud ones, is exact to note that in the place of torment the jags in men’s clothes turn to adders, that women’s trailing skirts are burnt over their heads, and that those men whose garments are overset with silver gingles and bells have burning nails of fire driven through each gingle. As for the chaplets of gold, of pearls and precious stones, they turn into nails of iron on which the fiends hammer.

Fig. 33.—The Squire. (Fromthe
Ellesmere MS. of the CanterburyTales.		Fig. 34.—An English Squireand his
Wife. (From a brassof 1409.)
Fig. 35.—English Dress, c. 1433. (From Harl. MS. 2278.)

The common habit of a well-clad man in the first half of this century is a loose tunic, lined with fur, or edged with fur at neck, wrist and skirt. At first the sleeves are long and bag-like, like to the Richard II. sleeve but drawn in to the wrist, where early examples are fastened with a button. A shorter tunic is worn below, whose tight sleeves are seen beyond the furred edge of the upper garment, mittens being sometimes attached to them. Over the shoulders the hood is thrown, or, in foul weather, a hood and cloak. The gown is girdled at the waist with a girdle from which hangs the anelace or baselard (fig. 34). Shoes are pointed. Hats and caps are seen in many shapes, but the most remarkable is the developed form of that head-dress which the 14th-century man seems to have achieved by putting his pate into the face-hole of his hood and twisting its liripipe round his brows. In the 15th century the effect is produced with a thick, turban-like roll of stuff from the top of which hung down on one side folds of cloth coming nigh to the shoulder, and on the other the liripipe broadened and lengthened to 4 or 5 ft. of a narrower folded cloth. As the century advances the bagpipe sleeves shrink in size and the tunic skirts are shortened (fig. 35). The old habit of going armed with anelace or baselard dies away in spite of troublous times. In the middle of the century the tunic is often no longer than a modern frock-coat, its sleeves little wider than those of a modern overcoat. Dress, indeed, becomes at this time convenient and attractive to our modern eyes. The last quarter of the century sees a new and important change. The tunic or gown, which was the garment of ceremony answering at once to our dress coats and frock coats, runs down to the feet. An act of 1463 ordered that coats should at least cover the buttocks, but fashion achieved suddenly what law failed to enforce. Men who had polled their hair short allowed it to grow and hang over the shoulders. The belt carries the purse or gipciere more commonly, although weapons are rarely seen, and it is notable that, as the Reformation approaches, the fashion of wearing a large “pair of beads” in the belt becomes a very common one. Last of all, the shoes change their shape. The reign of Edward IV. had seen the pointed toes as iniquitously long as ever the 14th century saw them. Even the long riding boot has the curving point, although otherwise much resembling the jack-boot of the 18th century. But after Bosworth Field the soles broaden, the point shrinks back and then disappears, and the footprint becomes shovel-shaped.

Fig. 36.—A Gentleman and his Wife. (From a brass of 1435.)
Fig. 37.—A Gentleman and his Wife. (From a brass of 1508.)
Drawn from a photo by Mansell.
Fig. 38.—The Earl of Surrey (late in reign of Henry VIII.).

Women’s dress in the 15th century often follows the man’s fashion of the furred gown, the skirts being lengthened for all difference. But the close-bodied and close-sleeved gown, with skirts broadening into many folds below the hips, is often seen with the long and plain cloak drawn with a cord at the breast, widows wearing this dress with the barbe, a crimped cloth of linen drawn up under the chin and ears and covering the collar-bone. With the barbe went the kerchief, draping head and shoulders. The bossed cauls of the earlier head-dress, drawn high on either side of the head until face and head-dress took the shape of a heart, are characteristic of the age (fig. 36). In some cases the cauls are drawn out at the sides to the form of a pair of bulls’ horns or of a mitre set sideways. In the time of Edward IV. we have a popular head-dress to which has been given the name of the butterfly. The hair in its caul is pulled backward, and wires set in it allow the ends of a cambric veil to float behind like the wings of a butterfly settled on a flower.

The new England of the 16th century breaks with the past in most of its fashions. Never again does an Englishman return to the piked shoes. High fashion under Henry VIII. is all for broad toes, so broad that the sumptuary laws, from The 16th century. banning long toes, swing about to condemn excess in the new guise. Under Henry VII. the medieval influence is still strong in the body-clothing. A bravely dressed man will go in long hose, cut close to the body, and a short vest under which the shirt is seen at waist and wrist. Over this he will wear the open gown, lined with fur, and cut short as a jacket but having the sleeves hanging below the knee. Such sleeves are commonly slashed open at the sides to allow the forearm to pass through. Shorter false sleeves of this pattern had become popular in the age of Edward IV. Graver men will wear, in place of this short gown, a long one dropping to the broad shoe-toes, the sleeves wide-mouthed (fig. 37). Sometimes it hangs loosely; sometimes it has the girdle with purse and beads. Notaries and scriveners add to the girdle a penner, or pen-case, and a stoppered ink-bottle. Wide hats are found, crowned with huge plumes of feathers, but the characteristic headgear is that made familiar by portraits of Henry VII., a low-crowned cap whose upturned brim is nicked at one side. A few sober men wear coats differing little from the short gown of forty years before. Among ladies the butterfly head-dress and the steeple cap passed out of fashion, and a grave headgear comes in which has been compared with a dog-kennel, a hood-cap thrown over head and shoulders, the front being edged with a broad band which was often enriched with needlework, the ends falling in lappets to the breast. This band is stiffened until the face looks out as from the open gable-end of a house. The gown is simple in form, close-fitting to the body, the cuffs turned up with fur and the skirts long. A girdle is worn loosely drawn below the waist, its long strap letting the metal pendant fall nearly to the feet. Long cloaks, plainly cut, are gathered at the neck with a pair of long cords, like tasselled bell-pulls. While Henry VIII. is spending his father’s hoards we have a splendid court, gallantly dressed in new fashions. His own broad figure, in cloth of gold, velvet and damask, plaits, puffs and slashes, stiff with jewels, is well known through scores of portraits, and may stand for the high-water mark of the modes of his age. The Hampton Court picture of the earl of Surrey is characteristic of a great lord’s dress of a somewhat soberer style (see fig. 38). The king, proud of his own broad shoulders, set the fashion to accent this breadth, and it will be seen that the earl’s figure, leaving out the head and hose, all but fills a perfect square. Such men have the air of playing-card knaves. Surrey’s cap is flat, with a rich brooch and a small side-feather. His short doublet of the new style is open in front to show a white shirt covered with black embroidery whose ruffles cover his wrists. His over-garment or jerkin has vast sleeves, rounded, puffed and slashed. Under the doublet are seen wide trunk-breeches. He goes all in scarlet, even to the shoes, which are of moderate size. The girdle carries a sword with the new guard and a dagger of the Renascence art, graced with a vast tassel. All is in the new fashion, nothing recalling the earlier century save the hose and the immodest braguette which, seen in the latter half of the fourteen-hundreds, is defiantly displayed in the dress and armour of this age of Henry VIII. Even the hair follows the new French mode and is cropped close. Other fashionable suits of the time give us the tight doublets, loose upper sleeves and trunk hose as a mass of small slashes and puffs, a fashion which came in from the Germans and Switzers whom Henry saw in the imperial service. Such clothing goes with the shoes whose broad toes are slashed with silk, and the wide and flat caps with slashed edges, bushed with feathers, which headgear was often allowed to hang upon the shoulders by a pair of knotted bonnet-strings, while a skull-cap covered the head. With all this fantasy the dress of simpler folk has little concern, and a man in a plain, short-skirted doublet, with a flat cap, trunk breeches, long hose and plain shoes, has nothing grotesque or unserviceable in his attire. The new sumptuary laws, which were not allowed to become a dead letter, had their influence in restraining middle-class extravagance. No man under a knight’s degree was to wear a neck-chain of gold or gilded, or a “garded or pinched shirte.” Brooches of goldsmith’s work were for none below a gentleman. Women whose husbands could not afford to maintain a light horse for the king’s service had no business with gowns or petticoats of silk, chains of gold, French hoods, or bonnets of velvet. This French hood is the small bonnet, two of whose many forms may be seen in the best-known portraits of Mary of England and Mary, queen of Scots—a cap stiffened with wires. With its introduction the fashionable skirt began to lose its graceful folds and to spread stiffly outward in straight lines from the tight-laced waist, the front being open to show a petticoat as stiff and enriched as the skirt. The neck of the gown, cut low and square, showed the partlet of fine linen pleated to the neck. In the days of Edward VI. and Queen Mary the dress of most men and women loses the fantastic detail of the earlier Tudor age. In the dress of both sexes the joining of the sleeve to the shoulder has, as a rule, that large puff which stage dressmakers bestow so lavishly upon all old English costumes, but otherwise the woman’s gown and hood and the man’s doublet, jerkin and trunk hose are plain enough, even the shoes losing all the fanciful width. Mary, indeed, added to the statute book more stringent laws against display of rich apparel, laws that would fine even a gentleman of under £20 a year if silk were found in his cap or shoe. Small ruffs, however, begin to appear at the neck, and most wrists are ruffled. The ruff, which began simply enough in the first half of this century as a little cambric collar with a goffered edge, is for all of us the distinguishing note of Elizabethan dress. It grew wide and flapping, therefore it was stiffened upon wires and spread from a concealed frame, row on row of ruffs being added one above the other until the wearer, man or woman, seemed to carry the head in a cambric charger. Starch, cursed as a devilish liquor by the new Puritan, gave it help, and English dress acquired a deformity which can only be compared with the great farthingale or with the last follies of the wig. The skirt of a woman of fashion, which had already begun to jut from the waist, was drawn out before the end of Elizabeth’s reign at right angles from the waist until the dame had that air of standing within a great drum which Sir Roger de Coverley remarked in the portrait of an ancestress. Elizabeth herself, long-waisted and of meagre body, set the fashions of her court, other women pinching their waists into the long and straight stomacher ending in a peak before. She herself followed her father’s taste in ornament, and on great days was set about like the Madonna of a popular shrine with decorations of all kinds, patterns in pearl, quiltings, slashings, puffings and broidery, tassels and rich buttons. Among men the important change is the disappearance of the last of the long hose, all men taking to trunk-hose and nether-stocks or stockings, while their doublets tend to follow the same long-waisted fashion as the bodices of the women, whose doublets and jerkins, buttoned up the breast, bring the Puritan satirists against them. Of these satirists Philip Stubbes is the best-known, his Anatomie of Abuses, published in 1583, being a very wardrobe of Elizabethan fashions, although false or dyed hair, the ruff and its starch, and the ear-rings worn by some women and many men draw his hottest anger. William Harrison sings on a like note about the same time, declaiming especially against the mutability of fashion, declaring that the imported Spanish, French and German guises made it easier to inveigh against such enormities than to describe the English attire with any certainty. For him women were become men, and men transformed into monsters. “Neither was it ever merrier with England than when an Englishman was known abroad by his own cloth and contented himself at home with his fine carsey hosen and a mean slop; his coat, gown and cloak of brown, blue or puke, with some pretty furniture of velvet or fur and a doublet of sad tawny or black velvet or other comely silk, without such cuts and garish colours as are worn in these days, and never brought in but by the consent of the French, who think themselves the gayest men when they have most diversities of jags and change of colours about them.” He adds that “certes of all estates our merchants do least alter their attire ... for albeit that which they wear be very fine and costly, yet in form and colour it representeth a great piece of the ancient gravity appertaining to citizens and burgesses.” But as for the “younger sort” of citizens’ wives, Harrison finds in their attire “all kind of curiosity ... in far greater measure than in women of a higher calling.”

Fig. 39.—An English Lady. From
a brass of 1605.		Fig. 40.—An English Lady of rank in
1643. After Hollar.
Fig. 41.—The English Countrywoman of 1643. After Hollar.

The coming of King James is not marked by any sudden change of attire, most of the Elizabethan fashions running on into his reign. The tight doublet has stiff wings at the shoulders, close sleeves and short skirt. The many fashions of breeches are still 17th century. popular, most of them padded or stuffed. There are trunk hose that have the air of petticoats rolled inward half way up the thigh. There is the “great round abominable breech,” pegtop shaped from below the knee to waist, as it appears in the well-known print of James himself with hawk on fist. Among women of fashion obtained a remarkable mode of exposing the breast, when the ruff and bodice were cut away; and the wheel fardingale was still worn, an order against it in 1613 rather increasing than diminishing its size. But simpler fashions were setting in, and with the reign of Charles I. the extravagances of padding and slashing disappear. The ruff gives place at last to the falling band, a wide collar of lace or plain linen. The belt or girdle ceases to be common wear, save for those who hang a sword from it. Parties in the state come to be known by their dress, and we have the Puritan, his crop head covered by a wide-brimmed, high-crowned felt, without hatband or feather, and his plain falling band over a staidly-cut coat. Beside him we set the cavalier, lace at his band edge, wrist and wide boot tops. His hat is feathered, his doublet lets the fine cambric of the shirt be seen at the waist, his short breeches are fringed with points or tags. His long hair has one lock brought over the left shoulder to be marked as a lovelock by a ribbon at the end. But the clothing of this age has been illustrated by Van Dyck and by a hundred other portrait painters, who as illustrators of costume take the place of the monumental sculptors, then less commonly called on for an effigy in the habit of life. And the time of the Commonwealth passes without notable change. Those who were in power favoured a sober habit, although we find General Harrison in scarlet and clinquant matching with Colonel Hutchinson in courtly apparel, and before the Restoration the tract-writers find matter of condemnation, especially in the items of patches, hair-powder and face paints.