A Brief History of the Tudor Age (20 page)

The Acts contained a term which was found in nearly every Tudor statute which imposed fines and forfeiture as a penalty. Half the fine and half the value of the forfeited garment was to go to
the King; the other half was to go to any informer who brought a private prosecution and sued for his share before the local JPs.

A more severe statute was passed by Philip and Mary’s Parliament in 1554. No one under the rank of a knight’s son,
unless he owned land worth £20 a year or
goods worth £200, was to wear any silk in his hat, bonnet, nightcap, girdle, hose, shoes, scabbard or spurs, on pain of three months’ imprisonment and a fine of £10 for every day
on which the garment was worn; and any master who found his servant wearing such a garment was to be fined £100 if he did not discharge the servant within fourteen days.

Servants were often dressed in livery, with their master’s crest on their left sleeve. This was right and proper, but problems arose when a master gave a loyal servant his cast-off
clothes. The Act of 1533 specified in precise detail how far this was permissible. The servant of a master who was a lord, knight, squire or gentleman and owned land worth £40 a year could
wear any garment given him by his master, unless it was crimson, purple, scarlet or blue, and any fur of an animal which was to be found in the realm, except the fur of martens or black rabbits.
Despite this ban on the colour blue for servants, it became the practice later in the sixteenth century for servants’ livery to be blue; and blue became so well established in people’s
minds as the colour of servants’ clothes that most gentlemen would not wear blue.

Although the Sumptuary Laws were so precise about the fabrics, colour and cost of the clothes of the various classes, they were rather ambiguous about their application to women. The Act of 1483
stated that it did not apply ‘for any woman, excepted the wives and servants of labourers’; and the Act of 1510 exempted all women from the provisions of the Act. The Act of 1554
expressly referred to women, but enacted that it was not to apply to anyone over the rank of a knight’s son or daughter ‘or being wife to any of them’, or to anything that
‘women may wear on their caps, hats, girdles or heads’. A woman who dressed above her station might excite ridicule and disapproval; but it was only when a man did so that the social
order was seriously threatened, and the Acts were aimed at men far more than at women.

Elizabeth’s Parliament in 1563 dealt with the problem by prohibiting the sale of any clothes on credit. Nothing ‘appertaining
or tending to the apparelling,
clothing, docking, garnishing or adorning of the body’ was to be sold unless the whole of the purchase price was paid in money at the time of the sale or within twenty-eight days afterwards.
The Act did not apply if the purchaser buying the garment had an income of £3,000 a year or more from land, fees or any other source.

If men and women in the Tudor Age had their choice of clothes restricted and prescribed in such detail by the State, they had the benefit of legislation for consumer protection which was not to
be enjoyed by later generations until the twentieth century. Laws and regulations imposed price controls and ensured that minimum standards of quality were complied with. Some of the legislation
was passed as a result of pressure by influential lobbies and counter-lobbies. The craft guilds in the cities and boroughs persuaded Parliament that the poor quality of clothes, of which the people
complained, was caused by unskilled persons who were not members of their guild and made shoddy goods; while the independent producers outside the guilds argued that it was the monopoly enjoyed by
the guilds which kept prices too high for the poorer people to afford.

In 1489 the MPs were persuaded that drapers, tailors, hatmakers and capmakers were charging ‘excessive price having unreasonable lucre, to the great hurt and impoverishment of the
King’s liege people, buyers of the same’; they were selling hats and caps for three or four times what it had cost to make them. So Parliament fixed the maximum price for various kinds
of cloth, and enacted that no hat could be sold for more than twenty pence or cap for more than 2s.8d. An Act of 1495 dealt with the problem of the poor quality of the cheaper fustian doublets that
were worn by the common people. A good fustian doublet ought to have lasted for at least two years; but many people were finding that their doublets began to disintegrate after only four months.
This was because they were not ‘truly wrought and shorn with the broad shear’ only, but were deceitfully made with iron instruments which ruined the material, by dishonest people, who
made the doublets ‘in the most highest
and secret places of their houses’. These malefactors evidently did the work in their attics, where they would not be seen by
their neighbours or by the passers-by in the street; and they did it so skilfully that the purchasers did not know whether the doublets which they bought were properly made or not. So the Act made
it an offence, punishable on each occasion by a fine of twenty shillings, to make fustian doublets with irons or any instrument except a broad shear; and it authorized the Lord Mayor of London and
the Wardens of the Shearmen’s Company to search any premises where doublets were made to ensure that the Act was being complied with.

The consumer-protection legislation reached its height under Edward VI. An Act was passed in 1549 to protect consumers who suffered from woollen clothes which shrank in the wash. It specified
the maximum amount by which any woollen garment which was offered for sale was allowed to shrink when wet. The sellers of cloth were required to state the length of the cloth sold, in a document
which was to be sealed and attached to the cloth. The JPs in every town and village where cloth was made were to appoint overseers, who were granted powers to enter the house of any clothier to
make sure that he was complying with the Act. Another Act in 1552 prescribed in greater detail the exact length and breadth of the various kinds of coloured and white cloths – of Long
Worcesters and Short Worcesters made in Worcester and Coventry, of friezes made in Cardigan, Carmarthen and Pembroke, and of Manchester Cottons, which were not what we call cottons, but were a kind
of woollen cloth. No one was to put any hair, flocks or yarn made of lamb’s wool into any cloth; if he did, he was to repay to the buyer of the cloth twice the sum which the buyer had paid
for it. An official ‘Searcher of Cloth’ was to be appointed in every district, and no cloth could be sold unless the seal of the Searcher of Cloth was attached to it; if the Searcher of
Cloth found that the cloth was badly made, he was to mark the cloth with the letter F to show that it was faulty.

Parliament also tried to restrict the activities of persons who were called ‘regrators’ in the sixteenth century – those middlemen
who bought goods to
resell at a profit, thus raising the price which the consumer had ultimately to pay for them. An Act of 1552 enacted that no one was to buy wool unless he intended to use it to weave cloth, or for
use in his own household, or to ship it to the Staple at Calais. If anyone who gathered wool from his own sheep did not sell it within a year, he could be compelled to sell it to any clothier who
offered him the current market price in the neighbourhood. The Act caused hardship to the poor persons of Halifax; before the Act came into force, being too poor to own a horse, they walked three,
four, five or six miles carrying wool on their heads and backs, in order to make a living by buying and reselling the wool. Parliament remedied their grievances by an Act of 1555. In view of the
fact that the parish of Halifax was ‘planted in the great wastes and moors where the fertility of ground is not apt to bring forth any corn nor good grass, but in rare places’, and that
the ‘inhabitants altogether do live by clothmaking’, they were permitted to buy and resell wool, as long as they resold it only in Halifax.

A series of statutes tried to restrict the persons who could become weavers and the places where weaving could be carried on. An Act of 1552 which prevented anyone from weaving cloth unless he
had been apprenticed to a weaver for seven years was repealed two years later, because of the objections of weavers who had never been apprentices but had worked at the trade for five or six years
or had married weavers widows who had known how to make cloth for twenty years. The attempt to limit weaving to a few important towns in various parts of England was seriously weakened by a number
of Acts which granted exemption from the provisions to Wales, the North of England, Cornwall, Suffolk and Kent, and the towns of Godalming in Surrey and of Bocking, West Bergholt, Dedham,
Coggeshall, Boxstead and Leyton in Essex, and the villages along the River Stroud in Gloucestershire.

From time to time, the clothiers successfully complained to Parliament that the legal requirements as to the quality of their cloths were making it uneconomic for them to continue
production, and were leading to closure of businesses and unemployment in certain districts; but though Parliament thereupon reduced the standards a little, the principle of consumer
protection continued to be enforced. An exception was made in the case of garments which were manufactured only for export, because the MPs accepted the argument of the clothiers that there was
nothing wrong in selling shoddy goods to foreigners. Edward VI’s last Parliament in 1553 enacted that anyone who lived in Devon or Cornwall and made the cloths known as White Plain Straights
and Pinned White Straights for export to Brittany might fill the cloths with hair, flocks, and yarn made of lamb’s wool, which had been prohibited in the case of all other cloths by the Act
of 1552, as these goods were ‘but a base and coarse kind of clothes usually made for the use of poor people beyond the seas . . . for that in truth none of the same are worn or occupied
within this realm’. Freed from all restrictions, the weavers in Devon and Cornwall proceeded to make doublets for Brittany which were filled with flocks, chalk and flour; but some of them
reached more influential customers than the Brittany peasants. Elizabeth’s allies, the States of the Netherlands, complained, and so did some of her own subjects. So an Act was passed in 1601
which stated that as these doublets had been filled with ‘deceitful things’, and when put in water shrank ‘to the great dislike of foreign Princes’, the legal requirements
as to quality were to apply to Plain White Straights and Pinned White Straights as well as to all other woollen garments.

The restrictions imposed by law on the making and purchase of hats were chiefly designed to help the manufacturers of the woollen caps which were worn by men of the lower classes. An Act of
Mary’s Parliament of 1553 enacted that any hat which was imported into the kingdom had to be sold at the port where it arrived, and made it an offence for anyone to buy more than twelve hats
in any one transaction, thus discouraging foreign merchants from importing hats into England by forbidding sales in bulk. In 1556 an Act placed restrictions on the manufacture of felt hats in order
to help the woollen capmakers; and no
one under the rank of a knight or the son of a lord was allowed to wear a velvet hat or cap, or any hat or cap with a velvet covering.

In 1571 Parliament, on the petition of the Fellowship and Company of Cappers, passed an Act which went further in regulating dress than any other Tudor statute. After stating that the
manufacture of woollen caps gave employment to 8,000 people in London alone and to many workmen in twenty-six other towns,
⁶
Parliament enacted that everyone
over the age of six was to wear on their heads a woollen cap made in England with English wool, on every Sunday and holy day, except when they travelled out of the town or village where they lived,
on pain of a fine of 3s.4d. for every Sunday or holy day on which they did not wear the cap. Masters, parents and guardians were liable to pay the fine if the cap was not worn by every servant and
child who lived in their house. The Act did not apply to ‘noble personages’, to any lord, knight or gentleman who owned land worth twenty marks a year, and their heirs, to anyone who
had held office as a warden of one of the livery companies of London, or to ‘maidens, ladies and gentlewomen’.

It is unlikely that the average Englishman in the Tudor Age was either surprised or resentful at being compelled by law to wear a woollen cap on his head every Sunday.

T
HE GREAT ADVANCE
in housebuilding in England at the end of the fifteenth century was not accompanied by any change in the furniture inside the houses.
At the beginning of the Tudor Age Englishmen of all classes were still using the type of furniture which their ancestors had used throughout the Middle Ages. The poor man had a few simple wooden
stools, perhaps one or two wooden chairs, a wooden table, a simple wooden bed, and perhaps a wooden chest; the chairs and tables often had three legs, as these were firmer on the uneven floors than
those with four legs. The King, the nobility and the wealthy classes had many elaborately carved wooden chairs, tables, chests and beds, which were usually made of oak, but often of yew.