The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century (17 page)

Service in someone else’s household pays badly in comparison. Not even the royal household can be said to pay well. Although Edward II’s chief officers do receive between 8 marks and £20 per year, and the next rank down—the king’s sergeants—receive 7½d per day, plus food and clothes, the third rank are on just 4½d per day. Valets receive only 1½ per day, one meal in hall, and the right to share a bed with another man of the same rank.
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And this is the best establishment in which to be a servant. Pages and grooms in other lords’ households are lucky if they receive more than 1d a day. A live-in manservant in a yeoman’s household might be paid as little as 4d per week. A live-in woman servant can expect little more than half this, about 2½ per week, and she is often paid annually, in arrears. The same goes for women and girls in laboring and harvest work: normally they are paid half the wages of their male counterparts.
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When the ostentation of the wealthy is so great, and the wages of those who labor so low, it is not surprising that a great many people turn to crime.

Hollywood has given us the impression that medieval people dress in stereotypical uniforms. Kings wander around their palaces in erminetrimmed robes, knights always wear armor, ladies flounce wistfully in long flowing gowns, and court jesters prance in red-and-yellow jangling jumpsuits. Similarly, the association of haute couture with glamorous modernity suggests that fashion in the modern sense cannot possibly have existed by 1400. These impressions are all wrong. The fourteenth century sees greater changes in clothing styles than any previous period of a hundred years. And men’s fashion changes more than in any century since.

In 1300 clothes are straightforward and practical, appropriate to rank, adding distinction through color and fabric quality rather than cut and tailoring. Then about 1330 things begin to change. The essential difference lies in the way a sleeve is cut. The advent of tailored sleeves allows clothing to reflect the shape of the body. Clothes no longer just hang from the shoulders like tunics: they reveal the natural curves of men’s and women’s forms. As a result, there is greater differentiation in cut between male and female clothing. Around 1400 fashion reaches the pinnacle of design eccentricity, with trailing dresses, tunics cut so short that they allow men to show off their legs up to the hips, long-hanging sleeves, and ridiculously pointed shoes.

Despite this new figure-hugging sexiness, some important moral and social dimensions continue to limit what people may wear. At no level of society does clothing become a free-for-all. Women are never at liberty to show their naked legs or arms in public—the only female arms and legs you will see are those of washerwomen. Clothing remains a key means of preserving the social order. Prostitutes are tolerated in London as long as they wear the yellow hood of their trade
and abide by the city regulations. To have prostitutes wearing normal clothes would be a threat to the respectability of the wives and daughters of the townsmen. Likewise lepers are expected to wear cloaks and bells; it forms part of the social contract under which they are tolerated. Friars and monks similarly are expected to wear the clothing appropriate to their status and order. Aristocrats wear expensive furs, lesser men and women cheaper furs, townswomen rabbit furs, and so on. In medieval society, what you wear denotes what you are.

In some respects your clothing also establishes who protects you and where your loyalties lie. The men who serve in lordly households are normally expected to wear the livery of that household: a sort of uniform which accords with the heraldic colors of the lord himself. Alternatively, a servant of a great lord might wear his lord’s livery collar, notifying everyone that he has that lord’s protection. This is a serious use of clothing: a symbolic threat. To attack a man who is wearing a great lord’s livery is tantamount to attacking the lord himself. Conversely, if a man thus dressed starts attacking you, you had better beware. If his lord decides he will protect his man from the law—a practice known as “maintenance”—then the chances are that you will not see justice done. Men banded together wearing an identical livery are not above the law in theory, but in practice they are almost untouchable.

Obviously changes in fashion and the social functions of clothing are not wholly compatible. You cannot have a society in which clothing is both a conservative moral benchmark and yet changes with the season. Can you imagine the gossips of medieval London remarking on how the prostitutes are wearing their yellow hoods so much higher this year? No more so than you can imagine nuns wearing scarlet habits. As a result there is a fundamental tension between the agents of change and those who have a vested interest in the status quo. Hence the sumptuary laws are passed. These are restrictions preventing certain people from dressing to a standard above their station. In London, at the start of the century, it is the rule that

no common woman should go to market or out of her house with a hood furred with anything other than lambskin or rabbit fur, on pain of losing her hood to the sheriffs, with the exception of those ladies who wear furred capes . . . because shopgirls, wetnurses and other
servants, and loose women bedizen themselves with hoods furred with ermine and minever, like ladies of quality.
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Sumptuary laws based on those of London are added to the statute books in 1337. From that year on, only those with an annual income of £100 per year are allowed to wear furs. This legislation is widely flouted, and plenty of merchants’ and esquires’ wives continue to wear their ermine and miniver with pride. So in 1363 the sumptuary laws are extended, on account of the “outrageous and excessive apparel of many people above their estate and degree, and to the great destruction of all the land.”

The sumptuary laws impose no restrictions on what the royal family can wear. The pressure on them is rather the opposite: to dress the part of majesty and thus to demonstrate their status through excessively rich clothing. For this reason, members of the royal family tend to be trailblazers for fashion. What they are wearing today, the nobility will be wearing in a few weeks’ time, and the burghers of the
provincial towns and cities will be wearing in the years to come, albeit in cheaper versions. Thus the king is at least partly responsible for the whole escalation in competitive fashion among the lower classes.

What do kings wear when not draped in ceremonial robes? Let us look at Edward III. In February 1333, aged twenty, you will find him at Berwick dressed in “an outfit of green velvet embroidered all over with pearls,” or perhaps “an aketon [padded jacket] covered in vermilion velvet and embroidered with images of parrots and other decorations.”
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Two years later you might find him wearing “a coat and mantle of scarlet cloth garnished with silk fowl, trimmed with gold throughout, and decorated with birds on branches, the breasts of the birds being embroidered with two angels studded with pearls holding a golden crossbow crafted with gilt-silver and a string of pearls.”
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Edward is not one to hide his light under a bushel.

Edward II and Richard II are hardly less extravagant in their clothing. The queens of medieval England are similarly resplendent. Just as the kings set the standards for male extravagance, so the queens set the standard for the women. Queen Margaret (second wife of Edward I) and Queen Isabella (wife of Edward II) both maintain strong links with their native France. Surrounded by French servants, they are aware of the new fabrics and styles from Rheims and Paris. Queen Anne, wife of Richard II, similarly brings fashions from her native Bohemia. Queen Philippa retains contacts with her native Hainault, and in Edward III has the benefit of a husband who dotes on her and supplies her with almost as many precious items and jewel-encrusted clothes as he orders for himself and his friends. If you should come across a lady wearing “a hood made of brown scarlet studded with 154 stars of pearls and trimmed with gold, each star being crafted out of seven large pearls with an especially large one at the top of each star,” or “a beaver-fur hat lined with velvet and adorned with white pearls and golden baboons,” have no doubt: she is a queen.
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As it is a common trait for men to ape their social superiors, it is instructive to begin by considering the clothing of the rich and powerful. Your average man-about-court in the first decade wears a suit of
robes: three or four garments selected to complement one another. The most important is the tunic: a sleeved dress-like garment reaching down almost to the ankles. This is cut in such a way that there is normally no seam between the sleeves and the body. Front and back—including the sleeves—are each cut together from a single piece of material and sewn together. The result is that both the sleeves and body are loose, to allow the arms to enter easily. If the garment has separate, tight-fitting sleeves, these will be sewn up around the arm every time the garment is worn.
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The body of the tunic remains loose; it hangs from the shoulders with as much grace as the wearer can give it. Sometimes it is worn with a belt but not always; a certain elegance lies in the folds in the rich fabric when it is allowed to hang loose. Normally a supertunic is worn draped over the top. This has short wide sleeves and is slightly shorter than the tunic itself, so the colors of the tunic may be seen. Contrasts are preferred; for example, a red tunic and green supertunic, or blue tunic and brown supertunic.

Most of the time you will add a third item, a hood, and a fourth, a mantle. The hood is made of soft fabric and hangs down the back when not pulled up to cover your head. The mantle will probably be square and made to hang around your shoulders (perhaps fastened across the front with a jeweled clasp). Alternatively it will be cut in a large circle, with a hole in the center for the head and two further holes for the arms. This long garment falls to the ground. Although its long sweeping folds make it look impressive, it is actually a little inconvenient, as it is very easy to trip over the hem. Convenience, you will soon realize, is not something to which aristocrats aspire. The more impractical the clothing, the higher the status of the wearer.

What should you be wearing beneath these robes? A linen shirt. The very best quality linen comes from Rheims; the second-best from Paris. Underwear on your lower half will consist of braies or “breeches”—not to be confused with the later outer garment of the same name. These also are made of linen and hang down the leg, sometimes being tied with small cords around the knees. The cord or belt of the braies at the waist will be threaded through the top of the garment, and the braies themselves will be drawn up and rolled around the cord, to stop it cutting uncomfortably into the skin. Braies at this period are very loose fitting: with long, flowing tunics and supertunics over the top, you do not need bottom-hugging linen.

From about 1330 you will notice variations appearing in the cut of the tunic. Men stop having their arms sewn into their sleeves and start using that great new invention: buttons.
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Hurrah! You might not realize how much the humble button has changed the way both men and women dress. For the real advance comes in the applications of these buttons. Using them you can have a tunic or “cote” which opens at the front and which does not need to go over the head and hang like a cassock. Thus it can fit the body snugly, with all the social, sensual, and stylistic consequences of figure-hugging elegance.
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Only the old, the fat, the prudish, and the clergy do not find this exciting. Hence the widespread disapproval among contemporary chroniclers.