Reigned fifty years: 1327-1377.
Born 1312. Married, 1328, Philippa of Hainault.
This costume history information consists of Pages
102-121 of the chapter on the 14th century dress in the 50 YEAR REIGN era of
Edward The Third 1327-1377 and taken from English Costume by Dion Clayton Calthrop.
The 36 page section consists of a text copy of the book ENGLISH
COSTUME PAINTED & DESCRIBED BY DION CLAYTON CALTHROP. Visuals,
drawings and painted fashion plates in the book have a charm of their own and are
shown amid the text. The book covers both male and female dress history of
over 700 years spanning the era 1066-1830.
This page is about dress in
the 50 year reign of King Edward The Third 1327-1377. The images
and details are a good resource for how-to costume designs for
Shakespeare's stage plays of the Plantagenet era.
For the Introduction to this book see this
introduction written by Dion Clayton Calthrop. I have adjusted
the images so they are mostly 400 pixels high and can be used for colouring
worksheets where pupils add some costume/society facts. My comments are in italics.
Kings were Kings in those days; they managed England as a nobleman
managed his estates.
Edward I, during the year 1299, changed his abode on an average three
times a fortnight, visiting in one year seventy-five towns and castles.
Edward II increased his travelling retinue until, in the fourth year of
the reign of Edward III, the crowd who accompanied that King had grown
to such proportions that he was forced to introduce a law forbidding
knights and soldiers to bring their wives and families with them.
Edward III, with his gay company, would not be stopped as he rode out
of one of the gates of London to pay toll of a penny a cart and a
farthing a horse, nor would any of his train.
This toll, which included threepence a week on gravel and sand
carts going in or out of the City, was raised to help pay for street
repairs, the streets and roads of that time being in a continual state
of slush, mud, and pits of water.
Let us imagine Edward III and his retinue passing over Wakefield Bridge
before he reduced his enormous company.
The two priests, William Kaye and William Bull, stand waiting for the
King outside the new Saint Mary's Chapel. First come the guard of
four-and-twenty archers in the King's livery;
then a Marshal and his
servants (the other King's Marshal has ridden by some twenty-four hours
ago);
then comes the Chancellor and his clerks, and with them a good
horse carrying the Rolls (this was stopped in the fourth year of
Edward's reign);
then they see the Chamberlain, who will look to it that
the King's rooms are decent and in order, furnished with benches and
carpets;
next comes the Wardrobe Master, who keeps the King's accounts;
and, riding beside the King, the first personal officer of the kingdom,
the Seneschal; after that a gay company of knights and their ladies,
merchants, monks dressed as ordinary laymen for travelling,
soldiers of fortune, women, beggars, minstrels - a motley gang of
brightly-clothed people, splashed with the mud and dust of the
cavalcade.
Remembering the condition of the day, the rough travelling, the
estates far apart, the dirty inns, one must not imagine this company
spick and span.
The ladies are riding astride, the gentlemen are in civil garments or
half armour.
Let us suppose that it is summer, and but an hour or so after a heavy
shower. The heat is oppressive: the men have slung their hats at their
belts, and have pushed their hoods from their heads; their heavy cloaks,
which they donned hastily against the rain, are off now, and hanging
across their saddles.
These cloaks vary considerably in shape. Here we may see a circular
cloak, split down the right side from the neck, it buttons on the
shoulder. Here is another circular cloak, jagged at the edge; this
buttons at the neck. One man is riding in a cloak, parti-coloured, which
is more like a gown, as it has a hood attached to it, and reaches down
to his feet.
Most men wear the cotehardie, the well-fitting garment buttoned down
the front, and ending over the hips. There is every variety of
cotehardie - the long one, coming nearly to the knees; the short one,
half-way up the thigh. Some are buttoned all the way down the front, and
others only with two or three buttons at the neck.
Round the hips of every man is a leather belt, from which hangs a pouch
or purse.
Some of these purses are beautiful with stitched arabesque
designs; some have silver and enamel clasps; some are plain black cloth
or natural-coloured leather; nearly all, however, are black.
The hoods over the men's heads vary in a number of ways: some are very
full in the cape, which is jagged at the hem; some are close about the
neck and are plain; some have long liripipes falling from the peak of
the hood, and others have a liripipe of medium length.
There are two or three kinds of hat worn, and felt and fur caps of the
usual shape - round, with a rolled-up brim and a little peak on the top.
Some of the hats are tall-crowned, round hats with a close, thick
brim - these have strings through the brim so that the hat may be strung
on the belt when it is not in use; other hats are of the long, peaked
shape, and now and again one may see a feather stuck into them; a third
variety shows the brim of a high-crowned hat, castellated.
Among the knights you will notice the general tendency to parti-coloured
clothes, not only divided completely into halves of two colours, but
striped diagonally, vertically, and horizontally, so giving a very
diverse appearance to the mass of colour.
Here and there a man is riding in his silk surcoat, which is
embroidered with his coat of arms or powdered with his badge.
Here are cloth, velvet, silk, and woollen stuffs, all of fine dyes, and
here is some fine silk cotehardie with patterns upon it gilt in gold
leaf, and there is a magnificent piece of stuff, rich in design, from
the looms of Palermo.
Among the merchants we shall see some more sober colours and quieter cut
of clothes; the archers in front are in leather tunics, and these quiet
colours in front, and the respectable merchants behind, enclose the
brilliant blaze of colour round the King.
Behind all come the peasants, minstrels, mummers, and wandering troupes
of acrobats; here is a bearward in worn leather cloak and hood, his legs
strapped at the ankle, his shoes tied on with thongs; here is a woman in
a hood, open at the neck and short at the back: she wears a smocked
apron; here is a beggar with a hood of black stuff over his head - a hood
with two peaks, one on either side of his head; and again, here is a
minstrel with a patched round cloak, and a mummer with a two-peaked
hood, the peaks stuffed out stiff, with bells jangling on the points of
them.
Again, among this last group, we must notice the old-fashioned
loose tunics, the coif over the head, tied under the chin, wooden-soled
shoes and pouch-gloves.
There are some Norfolk merchants and some merchants from Flanders
among the crowd, and they talk as best they can in a sort of
French-Latin-English jargon among themselves; they speak of England as
the great wool-producing country, the tax on which produced £30,000 in
one year; they talk of the tax, its uses and abuses, and how
Norfolk was proved the richest county in wool by the tax of 1341.
The people of England little thought to hear artillery used in a field
of battle so soon as 1346, when on August 26 it was used for the first
time, nor did they realize the horrors that were to come in 1349, when
the Great Plague was to sweep over England and kill half the population.
There is one man in this crowd who has been marked by everybody. He
is a courtier, dressed in the height of fashion. His cotehardie fits him
very well: the sleeves are tight from elbow to wrist, as are the sleeves
of most of his fellows - some, however, still wear the hanging sleeve and
show an under-sleeve - and his sleeve is buttoned from wrist to elbow. He
wears the newest fashion upon his arm, the tippet, a piece of silk which
is made like a detachable cuff with a long streamer hanging from it; his cotehardie is of medium length, jagged at the bottom, and it is of the
finest Sicilian silk, figured with a fine pattern; round his hips he
wears a jewelled belt.
His hood is parti-coloured and jagged at
the edge and round his face, and his liripipe is very long. His tights
are parti-coloured, and his shoes, buttoned up the front, are long-toed
and are made of red-and-white chequered leather.
By him rides a knight,
also in the height of fashion, but less noticeable: he has his cotehardie skirt split up in front and turned back; he has not any
buttons on his sleeves, and his belt about his waist holds a large
square pouch; his shoes are a little above his ankles, and are buckled
over the instep. His hair is shorter than is usual, and it is not
curled.
As we observe these knights, a party of armed knights come riding
down the road towards the cavalcade; they have come to greet the King.
These men have ridden through the rain, and now, as they come
closer, one can see that their armour is already red with rust.
So the picture should remain on your mind, as I have imagined it for
you: the knights in armour and surcoats covered with their heraldic
device; the archers; the gay crowd of knights in parti-coloured clothes;
the King, in his cotehardie of plain black velvet and his black beaver
hat, just as he looked after Calais in later years; the merchants; the
servants in parti-coloured liveries of their masters' colours; the
tattered crowd behind; and, with the aid of the drawings, you should be
able to visualize the picture.
Meanwhile Edward will arrive at his destination, and to soothe him
before sleep, he will read out of the book of romances, illustrated by
Isabella, the nun of Aumbresbury, for which he had paid £66 13s. 4d.,
which sum was heavy for those days, when £6 would buy twenty-four swans.
£66 13s. 4d. is about £800 of our money to-day. (Book version 1907).
'I looked on my left half as the lady taught me,
And was aware of a woman worthily clothed,
Trimmed with fur, the finest on earth,
Crowned with a crown, the King had none better.
Handsomely her fingers were fretted with gold wire,
And thereon red rubies, as red as any hot coal,
And diamonds of dearest price, and double manner of sapphires,
Orientals and green beryls....
Her robe was full rich, of red scarlet fast dyed,
With bands of red gold and of rich stones;
Her array ravished me, such richness saw I never.' Piers the Plowman.
Like the coloured plate of the woman further
below the man in this costume plate also wears the sleeve tippet
around his arms and you can just see the tips of the jagged ends of which
hang down. The tippet at this time was simply the last remains of the
former pendant sleeves. His shoes are
buttoned in front.
There are two manuscripts in existence the illuminations in which give
the most wonderfully pictorial idea of this time; they are the
manuscript marked MS. Bodl., Misc. 264, in the Bodleian Library at
Oxford, and the Loutrell Psalter in the British Museum.
The Loutrell Psalter is, indeed, one of the most notable books in the
world; it is an example of illumination at the height of that art; it
has for illustrator a person, not only of a high order of intelligence,
but a person possessed of the very spirit of Gothic humour, who
saw rural England, not only with the eyes of an artist, but with the
eyes of a gossiping philosopher.
Both this book and the book in the Bodleian Library were illustrated by
persons who were charged to the brim with the spirit of their age; they
were Chaucerian in their gay good-humour and in their quaint
observation, and they have that moral knowledge and outspoken manner
which characterize William Langland, whose 'Piers the Plowman' I have
quoted above.
With Chaucer, Langland, and these illuminators we have a complete
exhibition of English life of these times. The pulse of rural England is
felt by them in a most remarkable way; the religion, language, thought,
politics, the whole trend of rural, provincial, and Court life may be
gathered from their books.
The drawings in the Loutrell Psalter were completed before the year
1340, and they give us all that wonderful charm, that intimate
knowledge, which we enjoy in the 'Canterbury Pilgrims' and the 'Vision
of Piers Plowman.'
There seems to be something in road-travelling which levels all
humanity; there is no road in England which does not throb with
history; there is no poem or story written about roads in England which
does not in some way move the Englishness in us. Chaucer and Langland
make comrades of us as they move along the highway, and with them we
meet, on terms of intimacy, all the characters of the fourteenth
century. With these illuminators of the Loutrell Psalter and the
Bodleian MS. we see actually the stream of English life along a crowded
thoroughfare.
In these books we may see drawings of every form of agricultural life
and manorial existence: we see the country sports, the bear-baiting, and
the cock-fighting; we see the harvesters with straw hats, scythes, and
reaping-hooks; we see carters, carriers, and great carriages, all
depicted in a manner which we can only compare, in later years, to the
broad humour of Hogarth; and, as we turn the priceless pages over, the
whole fourteenth-century world passes before our eyes - japers and
jugglers; disours and jesters; monk, priest, pilgrim, and pardoner;
spendthrift and wench; hermits, good and evil; lords, ladies, and Kings.
I have written of the men and their dress - how they were often - very
often - dirty, dusty, and travel-stained - of the red-rusted armour
and the striped and chequered clothes, and now I must write of the women
and the manner of their dress.
Of the time, you must remember that it was the time of chivalry, when
there was a Round Table of Knights at Windsor, founded in 1345; when the
Order of the Garter was founded; when tiltings and all manner of
tournaments were at their height; and you listen to the minstrels of
King Edward's household playing upon the trumpet, the cytole, the pipe,
the taberet, the clarion, and the fiddle.
St. George, the Primate of Egypt in the fourth century, had now risen to
public esteem and notice, so that he became in this time not only the
patron saint of chivalry, but the tutelar saint of England.
Boys were taken from the care of the ladies of the household at the age
of seven, when they became pages to knights, and were sworn to devote
themselves to the graces and favours of some girl. At fourteen the boy
became a squire, and at twenty-one, if he were possessed of a rental of
£20 a year in land, he made his fast and vigil, and was afterward dubbed
knight and given his spurs.
The noteworthy point about a woman of this reign was her hair. The
Queen herself wore an elaborate mode of coiffure for that time; she wore
a metal fillet round her head, to which was attached two cases, circular
in shape, of gold fretwork, ornamented with precious stones. She wore
her hair unplaited, and brought in two parts from the back of her
head, and as far as one can see, pushed into the jewelled cases.
The most general form of hair-dressing was an excess on the mode of
the previous reign, a richness of jewel-work, an abundance of gold wire.
It was usual to divide the hair into two plaits, and arrange these on
either side of the face, holding them in their place by means of a
fillet; they might be worn folded straight up by the face, or at an
angle, but they were never left hanging; if hair was left loose it was
not plaited, but flowing.
See more
on women's hair in this era.
The gorget, or throat cloth, was still in general use, and it was
attached to the hair by very elaborate-headed pins. Sometimes the hair,
dressed with the gorget, was divided into four plaits, two on either
side of the face, and fastened horizontally.
The wimple of silk or linen was very generally worn. A caul of gold net
came into fashion, but not until the end of the reign. The ladies were
great upon hunting and hawking, and this must have been a
convenient fashion to keep the hair in order. Some wore a white silk or
linen cap, so shaped as to include and cover the two side-plaits and
combine a gorget and wimple in one. Pointed frontals of pearls were worn
across the forehead, and fillets of silk or linen were so tied that long
ends hung down the back.
Yellow hair was much esteemed, and ladies who were not favoured by
Nature, brought saffron to their aid, and by such efforts brought Nature
into line with Art.
There was the general custom of wearing the surcoat in imitation of the
men, a garment I have described frequently - a slightly-fitting
garment without sleeves - you will see how this grew later into a gorgeous
affair. These surcoats were sometimes of fine cloth of gold covered with
an intricate, delicate pattern in which beasts, birds, and foliage
mingled in arabesque.
Under this surcoat was a plainer, better-fitting
garment, made sometimes of the barred and rayed material so common to
the men, or of velvet, cloth, or silk, in plain colours, green and red
being then very favourite; ermines and many other furs were used to
border these gowns.
Sometimes you may see that this gown had sleeves
short at the elbow, exposing a different coloured under-sleeve, buttoned
from elbow to wrist; at other times - in fact, among all fashionable
persons - the curious fashion of the tippet, or long streamer, was worn. I
have carefully described this fashion in
the previous chapter
- (Edward the Second).
The plain gown with tight sleeves was most in use, and the skirts of
this gown were very voluminous, and had either pockets or holes in the
front of them; the holes enabled the wearer to reach the purse hanging
from a girdle which encircled the waist of the under-dress. These
gowns were generally buttoned in front, from neck to waist, or they were
laced.
They also wore a heavier gown which reached just below the knee, showing
the skirts of the under-gown; the heavy gowns were often fur-lined, and
had loose wide sleeves to the elbow.
Note the tippet (fourth sleeve down) shown above in the line
drawing. The woman in the coloured plate also wears the tippet on her arm.
Her throat neck
gorget is set very high and totally encases her neck. Her gorget is held
in shape by attaching it with pins to her plaited
hair. This sleeve tippet is different from the
scarf like boa tippet of the
1800s.
There was at this time a curious fur or cloth cape in use, longer behind
than in front - in fact, it varied with the taste of the owner. It was cut
in even scallops all round; I say even to show that they were
sewn-edged, not jagged and rough-edged. Any pair of these scallops might
be longer than any other pair. Ladies wore these capes for hunting, and
ornamented the ends with bells.
The shoes of the women were not very exaggerated in length, but, as a
rule, fitted well to the foot and came out in a slight point. You may
use for this reign shoes buckled across the instep, laced at the side,
or buttoned up the front.
For riding and sport the ladies wore the hood, and sometimes a broad
round hat over it, or the peaked hat. The countrywoman wore an
ill-fitting gown with tight sleeves, an apron, and an open hood.
Imagine London in the year of the third great pestilence, 1369. It is
October, and the worst of the pestilence is over; John Chichester,
the Mayor, is riding through the streets about some great affairs; many
knights and ladies pass by. It is raining hard after the long drought of
the summer, but, despite the rain, many citizens are abroad to see the
doings in the City, and one may see the bright parti-coloured clothes of
the lords and ladies, and here and there, as a cloak is blown back, a
glimpse of rich-patterned cloth of gold.
Perhaps Will Langland - Long Will - a gaunt man of thirty-seven, is brushing
past a young man of twenty-nine, Chaucer, going to his work.
Silk dresses and frieze gowns, velvet and homespun, hurry along as the
rain falls more heavily, and after a while the street becomes quite
deserted. Then nothing but the dreary monotony of the rain falling from
the gables will come to the room of the knight's lady as she lies sick
of small-pox. John de Gaddesden, the King's doctor, has prescribed for
her that she must lie clothed in scarlet red in a room of that colour,
with bed-hangings of that same colour, and so she must lie, without much
comfort, while the raindrops, falling down the wide chimney, drip on the
logs in the fire and make them hiss.
English Costume by Dion Clayton Calthrop
EDWARD THE THIRD
Reigned fifty years: 1327-1377.
Born 1312. Married, 1328, Philippa of Hainault.
This costume history information consists of Pages
102-121 of the chapter on the 14th century dress in the 50 YEAR REIGN era of
Edward The Third 1327-1377 and taken from English Costume by Dion Clayton Calthrop.
The 36 page section consists of a text copy of the book ENGLISH
COSTUME PAINTED & DESCRIBED BY DION CLAYTON CALTHROP. Visuals,
drawings and painted fashion plates in the book have a charm of their own and are
shown amid the text. The book covers both male and female dress history of
over 700 years spanning the era 1066-1830.
This page is about dress in
the 50 year reign of King Edward The Third 1327-1377. The images
and details are a good resource for how-to costume designs for
Shakespearean stage plays of the Plantagenet era.
For the Introduction to this book see this
introduction written by Dion Clayton Calthrop. I have adjusted
the images so they are mostly 400 pixels high and can be used for colouring
worksheets where pupils add some costume/society facts. My comments are in italics.
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This costume history information consists of Pages
102-121 of the chapter on the 14th century dress in the 50 YEAR REIGN era of
Edward The Third 1327-1377 and taken from English Costume by Dion Clayton Calthrop.
after that a gay company of knights and their ladies,
merchants, monks dressed as ordinary laymen for travelling,
soldiers of fortune, women, beggars, minstrels - a motley gang of
brightly-clothed people, splashed with the mud and dust of the
cavalcade.
There was the general custom of wearing the surcoat in imitation of the
men, a garment I have described frequently - a slightly-fitting
garment without sleeves - you will see how this grew later into a gorgeous
affair. These surcoats were sometimes of fine cloth of gold covered with
an intricate, delicate pattern in which beasts, birds, and foliage
mingled in arabesque.
This costume history information consists of Pages
102-121 of the chapter on the 14th century dress in the 50 YEAR REIGN era of
Edward The Third 1327-1377 and taken from English Costume by Dion Clayton Calthrop.
