The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are (22 page)

Then there was the question of honesty,
since fashion allowed you to change the shape of your body, usually within reason. The
long
points on shoes, actually a notion
imported from Poland, were said to be the invention of an Anjou count with appalling
bunions.
²⁸
Women, right into the fifteenth century, allowed themselves to be
tailored to show high, firm and perfectly round breasts, ample haunches but tiny feet
and a belly so prominent that in the late thirteenth century the poet Jehan de Meun
thought: ‘You often can’t tell if they’re pregnant or not.
They’re large about the hips however thin they are.’
²⁹
It became chic in
his time to be blonde, saffron blonde, ‘the most beautiful and commonplace colour,
that pleases both women and men’, according to the surgeon Henri de Mondeville;
naturally there were dyes, as there were simple depilatories involving opium, vinegar
and henbane or else the oil in which a hedgehog has been cooked, and a kind of primitive
hair transplant. Looks were work. A woman might bind her bosom to avoid the
‘disgrace’ of breasts that were too large. An older woman might take off the
top layer of her skin with a razor so new and younger skin would grow.
³⁰

Anyone subject to fits of morality would
clearly have to disapprove. There is an anonymous poem written around 1400,
Richard
the Redeless
, in which Wisdom in person wanders about a royal household dressed
in old-fashioned ‘wholesome’ clothes, ‘not overlong’, and for
that offence he is reproached, often rebuked, scorned, hooted at, sent packing and kept
outside the doors, subject to the disapproval of ‘the beardless boys’ whose
fashionably long sleeves become ‘sleeves that slide upon the earth’.
³¹

St Birgitta of Sweden went to extremes and
announced that clothes were the cause of the plague, especially when fitted, cut,
slashed and pieced together; as though the boats that brought ideas and styles had also
brought disease, which would have been a more plausible argument. Multi-coloured cloth
and stripes came to stand for such evil that on the walls of one Danish church the
murderer Cain wears red stripy socks while his innocent victim, Abel, wears plain ones,
and everyone knew which was which; and the pair in another church are obviously illicit
lovers because they wear clothes in two colours. That would be clear even to anyone who
does not understand the word ‘luxuria’ painted behind them.
³²

Jehan de Meun already worried that husbands
would go to hell
because the cost of
dressing their wives would drive them to usury ‘or worse’; and he was left
piously hoping that ‘women do all this with good intentions, to keep their
husbands away from fornication’.
³³
An English proclamation of 1562
worried about followers of fashion, ‘such as be of the meaner sort, and be least
able with their livings to maintain the same’. To make things worse, the whole
process of change seemed to be speeding up. In the 1390s Christine de Pizan complained
of the changes every day, making women’s clothes and men’s clothes always
more elaborate and ruining many people; ‘just as sheep follow each other, if
people see anyone do some extravagant or inappropriate thing in the matter of dress,
they immediately follow him and say that they must do what everybody else
does.’
³⁴
In 1577 William Harrison denounced ‘the phantastical folly
of our nation (even from the courtier to the carter) … such that no form of
apparel liketh us longer than the first garment is in the wearing, if it continue so
long’.
³⁵

Dress was politics because it showed the
cracks and changes in society. It was a moral issue because it was a sign of pride,
greed and waste. It was also an unstoppable economic issue because it involved the vast
industry around wool and cloth as well as all the silk and dyestuffs that were traded
over the seas. The Duke of Burgundy maintained among many others a team of shoemakers,
tailors, cutters, furriers, embroiderers, and a tailor as head of his wardrobe who
worked for nobody else. All the other craftsmen could supply anyone who aspired to look
ducal or even regal, and had the money. The merchant drapers, unsurprisingly, were
always the richest men in town; the goods they sold were the basis
³⁶
of how people
defined themselves in public.

The business could be accused of somehow
unbalancing the nation: it was alien, war by other and silken means. Thomas Smith in his
Discourse of the Common Weal of this Realm of England
in 1549 objected to
the sudden glut of haberdashers in London selling ‘French or Milan caps, glasses,
daggers, swords, girdles’, all of them suddenly arrived in the past twenty years.
He saw good English wool sent out of the country to be dyed and made into caps or
broadcloths and then brought back to be sold. ‘What grossness be we of that we see
it and
suffer such a continual spoil to be
made of our goods and treasure by such means?’
³⁷
London, meanwhile,
was doing rather well out of exactly the same process. Every nation in Europe was
perfectly capable of making stockings, but London made them of a very fine worsted that
everyone wanted because it was in style; the stockings went to France, Holland, Germany.
They weren’t cheap; the perpetually furious Philip Stubbes wrote that ‘the
time had been when one might have clothed all his body well from top to toe for less
than a pair of these netherstocks will cost’.
³⁸

The Pastons were a family of Norfolk
squires who, like most of their kind, worried more about clothing themselves than
following fashion. They did, however, travel.

John Paston went to Burgundy in the middle
of the fifteenth century and was dazzled. ‘I heard never of none like to it, save
King Arthur’s court,’ he wrote home to his mother.
³⁹
He was astonished
by the rich gear at a jousting tournament, the ‘gold, and silk and silver’
and the ‘gold, and pearl, and stones’. The complexity of the court impressed
him, all the ranks and social distinctions, and the women. Seven years later his estate
manager, John Pympe, said he’d heard that ‘the
fraus
of Bruges,
with their high caps, have given some of you great claps’ and that the women went
to war with their own tactics: ‘they smite all at the mouth and at the great end
of the thigh’.
⁴⁰

The Pastons, muddled in the English dynastic
wars, lawyers whose lands were under legal siege and never rich, wrote each other
letters full of practical worries: Margaret thinks her husband has sent caps too small
for the children; young John says he needs a second gown for a Christmas in Wales
because ‘we must wear them every day for the more part, and one gown without
change will soon be done’ and he needs two pair of hose ‘ready made for me
at the hosiers with the crooked back’ because ‘I have not a whole hose for
to don.’ He also needs a hat to go riding; he wants the man delivering the hat to
‘bring the hat upon his head for fear of misfashioning of it’.

Margaret, heavily pregnant, needs a new
girdle ‘for I am waxed so fetis’ (which means neat and elegant; she is being
ironic) ‘that I may
not be girt in no
bar of no girdle that I have but of one’. She wants not a London gown but
gowncloth from London to make a dress locally – cloth still matters to her more than cut
– but see how the family looks to London for what they want, since, as Margaret
complained, ‘I have done all the drapers’ shops in this town and here is
right feeble choice.’ Style, as much as a person could afford, came from somewhere
else.

Occasionally a Paston asks for clothes to be
decorated, a gown of ‘puke’ – which is the devil’s colour of mourning
black – to be ‘furred with white lamb’, but that is all; the family does not
seem eager to imitate the grandees, even if they know all about what they have. John
Paston makes a list of what his master, Sir John Howard, gave to his wife in the single
month of January 1467. There was gold, in the form of rings and necklaces, chains and
girdles, set with rubies, pearls, diamonds not to mention an emerald and a sapphire and
an amethyst; there was Holland cloth, green velvet and black velvet when velvet was
still hugely expensive, and damask and cloth of gold; and five silver spoons. There was
fur, the expensive marten, the squirrel skins known as miniver, and gowns trimmed with
ermine. There was a bed of crimson damask and assorted hangings, tapestry from Arras.
The list goes on and on, but the Pastons seem to be largely indifferent when
they’re not at court; they have other worries in the country, how to keep their
land, how to survive the wars.
⁴¹

Town was different; in town you had to get
things right. The old man lecturing his much younger wife in
Le Ménagier de
Paris
, that wonderfully fussy manual on household management from 1393,
won’t tolerate sloppiness, and he points out that people who say they don’t
care about appearances or about themselves are all hypocrites; they care about
themselves quite enough when it comes to demanding respect. He says his new wife must be
‘honestly clad, without new devices and too much frippery, or too little’.
So a wife could underdo things, and that would be as bad as being too showy; she must
follow rules. The old man’s concerns go right down to his wife’s new-fangled
underwear, even if it ought usually to be hidden: ‘see you first that the collar
of your shift and your blanchet, your robe or your surcoat do not straggle out one upon
the other’.
⁴²
The etiquette
of
knickers was a work in progress; the Dominican Jean de Baume said men who didn’t
go to confession were like bad children who slept in their dirty shirts, while good
children changed their underthings ‘at least once a fortnight’.
⁴³

In the sixteenth century the first printed
books of fashion arrived, full of pictures of what people wore in other times or other
places. They helped define the notion of fashion as a long desire to be someone or
somewhere else.

They were a show of clothes but also of how
people lived, an intelligence report in pretty colours; and a moral lesson, how to tell
bad people and good people by their style. The very first is attributed to François
Deserps and it was published in Paris by the court book-binder in 1562 with a dedication
to the eight-year-old future Henry IV of France. The boy may or may not have seen it. It
tells about the enormous trousers worn by Scotsmen, the clean refinement of the Dutch,
the way the women of Brabant wear their hair ‘like starched linen’ and the
long skirts of Zeeland; and to keep the boy’s interest, some sea monsters, a
cyclops with a single gross eye and some upright standing apes all dressed in
rattan.

The pictures are based on drawings by a
captain who was a pioneer in French Canada, a military man who knows about foreigners,
and ‘a certain Portuguese who has visited many and various countries’,
someone in business.
⁴⁴
This is serious information,
guaranteed by a soldier and a merchant. The compiler does not quite approve of fashion,
although he knows that the lack of it matters – in Lübeck, for example, the men are
natural hunters, falcons on their wrists, and neither men nor women are ‘much
bothered by fashionable clothes’. The book explains that all this variety came
about in part because of different religions, which was a natural concern in the middle
of bloody religious wars; but also because of people’s curiosity about other
peoples and far-away countries.
⁴⁵

Cesare Vecellio, who once worked in the
studio of his cousin Titian, produced his account of ‘all the world’ in
Venice in 1589. As well as Englishwomen ‘showing their magnificence’ and the
women of Antwerp ‘of whatever adult age going out on their own, with a
fine straw hat on their heads’, he
was fascinated by the Northern women who lit their way with burning sticks carried in
the mouth (‘for convenience, and maybe safety’) and put out rotten bits of
oak along the path so light from tiny funghi would show the way home. He notes that even
the grandest Dutch women ‘do business in trade’. Clothes seem like one more
piece of ethnographic evidence, a fact about foreign places and people, except that he
also complains that it is hard to be certain about the clothes foreigners wear
‘for they are varied at will and the
capriccio
of others’.
⁴⁶

The sheer wilfulness of fashion was about to
become a scandal.

Nobody was more alarmed than Philip
Stubbes, a professional moralist who went in fear of the judgement of God on almost
everyone for almost anything. He published in 1583 a whole
Anatomie of Abuses
,
a fluent and remarkably observant warning to the English nation. He disapproved of:
music as ‘the pathway to all Bawdry and filthiness’, actors as
‘painted Sepulchres … double-dealing Ambodexters’, lawyers and
usury because they could take away a man’s home, strong ale even when brewed by
churches on feast days, football as a ‘bloody and murdering practice’ and
dancing for all the ‘smouching and slabbering one of another’. In general he
reckoned ‘there are three cankers which in process of time will eat up the whole
Commonwealth of England, if speedy reformation be not had: namely dainty fare, gorgeous
buildings, and sumptuous apparel’.

‘The inhabitants of England go bravely
in apparel changing fashions for every day for no cause so much as to delight the eyes
of their whorish mates withall, and to inamour the minds of their fleshly
paramours.’ He singled out women who put flowers at their breasts ‘whereby I
doubt not but they get many a slabbering kiss, and peradventure more friendship besides,
they know what I mean’. He sensed sensuality, ‘an example of evil before our
eyes and a provocation to sin’. He resented the dizzy changes. ‘For were I
never so expert an Arithmetician I were never able to recompt [count] the one half of
them, the Devil broacheth so many new fashions every day.’