Edited By Pauline Weston Thomas
For Fashion-Era.com
1327-1485 - Women's Hair & Headdresses As Shown In
'English Costume History by Dion Clayton Calthrop'
This costume history page is about hair fashion history. It consists of a
selection of women only
headdresses and hairstyle illustrations with original text from 1327 to 1485
and taken from Calthrop's
English Costume. They are as shown in individual Calthrop costume pages
for specific eras on 36 other pages in another section of this website. The partial text copy
is from the book ENGLISH
COSTUME PAINTED & DESCRIBED BY DION CLAYTON CALTHROP. Full
text is on the individual dated pages.
This page is about female headdresses and hairdressing styles for the
medieval era 1327 - 1485. Later eras of headdresses are shown on
other pages. For the Introduction to this book see this
introduction written by Dion Clayton Calthrop. My comments are in italics.
EDWARD THE THIRD 1327-1377.
Born 1312. Married, 1328, Philippa of Hainault.
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.
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 Hair Caul of Gold Net
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
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.
HAIR IN REIGN OF RICHARD THE SECOND - 1377-1399
Married, 1381 To Anne of Bohemia; 1395 To Isabella of France.
If ever women were led by the nose by the demon of fashion it was at
this time. Not only were their clothes ill-suited to them, but they
abused that crowning glory, their hair.
Calthrop continues to write:- No doubt a charming woman is always charming, be she dressed by woad or worth; but to be captivating with your eyebrows plucked out, and
with the hair that grows so prettily low on the back of the neck shaved
away - was it possible? I expect it was.
The days of high hennins was yet to come; the day of simple
hair-dressing was nearly dead, and in the interval were all the arts of
the cunning devoted to the guimpe, the gorgières, the mentonnières, the
voluminous escoffions.
At this time the lady wore her hair long and hanging freely over her
shoulders; her brows were encircled by a chaplet, or chapel of flowers,
real or artificial, or by a crown or plain circlet of gold; or she
tucked all her hair away under a tight caul, a bag of gold net enriched
with precious stones.
To dress hair in this manner it was first necessary to plait it in
tight plaits and bind them round the head, then to cover this with a
wimple, which fell over the back of the neck, and over this to place the caul, or, as it was sometimes called, the
dorelet. Now and again the caul was worn without the wimple, and this
left the back of the neck exposed; from this all the hair was plucked.
For outdoor exercises the lady would wear the chaperon (explained in
this page), and upon this the peaked hat.
It is almost impossible to describe clearly the head-dresses - the great
gold net bags which encased the hair - for they were ornamented in such
different ways, always, or nearly always, following some pattern in
diaper in contrast to the patterns which came later when the design
followed such lines as are formed by wire-netting, while later still the
connecting-thread of the patterns was done away with and the inside
decoration alone remained.
Her wimples of fine linen -
'I dorste swere they weyeden ten pound
That on a Sonday were upon hir heed.'
Her hose was of fine scarlet red; her shoes were moist and new. Her hat
was as broad as a buckler, and she wore a foot-mantle about her hips.
Calthrop
sates:- Certain it is that in this reign the close caul grew out of all decent
proportions, and swelled into every form of excrescence and
protuberance, until in the reign of Henry VI, it towered above the heads
of the ladies, and dwarfed the stature of the men.
This curious head-gear,
the caul, after a modest appearance, as a mere
close, gold-work cap, in the time of Edward III, grew into a
stiffer affair in the time of Richard II, but still was little more
than a stiff sponge-bag of gold wire and stuff and a little padding;
grew still more in the time of Henry IV, and took squarer shapes and
stiffer padding; and in the reign of Henry V, it became like a great
orange, with a hole cut in it for the face - an orange which covered the
ears, was cut straight across the forehead, and bound all round with a
stiff jewelled band.
Then came the idea of the horn.
We see the caul grow from its circular shape into two box forms on
either side of the head; the uppermost points of the boxes are arranged
in horns, whose points are of any length from 4 to 14 inches. The top of
this head-dress is covered with a wimple, which is sometimes stiffened
with wires.
Her surcoat is stiffened in front with fur and shaped with a band of
metal. Her belt is low on the hips of the under-dress. The horns on her
head carry the large linen wimple.
There is also a shape something like a fez or a flower-pot, over which a
heavy wimple is hung, attached to this shape; outside the wimple are two
horns of silk, linen, or stuff - that is, silk bags stuffed to the
likeness of horns.
Cathrop states that very few of
these very elaborate horn head-dresses were worn at this time with the mass of women
wearing the round caul.
Calthrop writes:- The heads of these ladies are
carried very erect, as are all heads bearing weights. The waists of
these ladies are apparently under their bosoms; their feet seem to be an
ell long.
An
assembly hour is, after the manner of Lydgate's poem, a dream of
delicious faces surmounted by minarets, towers, horns, excrescences of
every shape - enormous, fat, heart-shaped erections, covered with rich,
falling drapery, or snow-white linen, or gold tissue; gold-wire boxes
sewn with pearls and blazing with colours; round, flat-topped caps, from
under which girls' hair escapes in a river of colour; crown shapes,
circular shapes, mitre shapes, turbans, and shovel-shaped linen
erections, wired into place.
And the moralists, among whom Heaven forbid that I should be
found, painted lurid pictures for you of hell and purgatory, in which
such head-dresses turned into instruments of torture; you lifted your
long-fingered, medieval hand and shook the finger with the toad-stone
upon it, as if to dispel the poison of their words.
I think it is beyond me to describe in understandable terms the proper
contortions of your towered heads, for I have little use for archaic
words, for crespine, henk, and jacque, for herygouds with honginde
sleeves, for all the blank cartridges of antiquarianism. I cannot convey
the triple-curved crown, the ear buttress, the magnet-shaped roll in
adequate language, but I can draw them for you.
Take a roll, stuffed with hemp or tow,
of some rich material and twist it into the form of a heart in front and
a shape behind, where join the ends, or, better, make a circle or hoop
of your rolled stuff and bend it in this way.
Then make a cap that will
fit the head and come over the ears, and make it so that this cap
shall join the heart-shaped roll at all points and cause it to appear
without any open spaces between the head and the roll; the point of the
heart in front will be round, and will come over the centre of the face.
By joining cap and roll you will have one complete affair; over this you
may brooch a linen wimple or a fine piece of jagged silk. In fact, you
may twist your circle of stuff in any manner, providing you keep a vague
shape in front and completely cover the hair behind.
For the box pattern it is necessary to make a box, let us say of
octagonal shape, flat before and behind, or slightly curved; cut away
the side under the face, or leave but a thin strip of it to go under the
chin.
Now stuff your box on either side of the face and cut away the
central square, except for 3 inches at the top, on the forehead; here,
in this cut-away piece, the face shows.
You will have made your box of
buckram and stuffed the wings of it with tow; now you must fit your box
to a head and sew linen between the sides of the head and the tow to
hold it firm and make it good to wear.
You have now finished the rough
shape, and you must ornament it.
Take a piece of thin gold web and
cover your box, then get some gold braid and make a diaper or
criss-cross pattern all over the box, leaving fair sized lozenges; in
these put, at regular intervals as a plain check, small squares of
crimson silk so that they fit across the lozenge and so make a double
pattern.
Now take some gold wire or brass wire and knot it at neat
intervals, and then stitch it on to the edges of the gold braid, after
which pearl beads may be arranged on the crimson squares and at the
cross of the braid; then you will have your box-patterned head-dress
complete.
Calthrop suggests improvements on this for more ornate versions.
It remains for you to enlarge upon this, if you wish, in the following
manner: take a stiff piece of wire and curve it into the segment of a
circle, so that you may bend the horns as much or as little as you will,
fasten the centre of this to the band across the forehead, or on to the
side-boxes, and over it place a large wimple with the front edge cut.
Again, for further enhancement of this delectable piece of goods, you
may fix a low gold crown above all - a crown of an elliptical shape - and
there you will have as much magnificence as ever graced lady of the
fifteenth century.
Her head-dress is very high, and over it is a coloured and jagged silk
wimple, a new innovation, being a change from the centuries of white
linen wimples. Her waist is high, after a long period of low waists.
In September 28, 1443, Margaret Paston writes to her husband in
London.
There is
a gleam of truth in the representation, and you may see the real Jane
Shore in a high steeple head-dress, with a thin veil thrown over it,
with a frontlet or little loop of black velvet over her forehead; in a
high-waisted dress, open in a V shape from shoulder to waist, the opening
laced over the square-cut under-gown, the upper gown having a collar of
fur or silk, a long train, broad cuffs, perhaps 7 inches long from the
base of her fingers, with a broad, coloured band about her waist, a
broader trimming of the same colour round the hem of her shirt, and in
long peaked shoes. In person of mean stature, her hair dark yellow, her
face round and full, her eyes gray, and her countenance as cheerful as
herself.
There are many ways of making the steeple head-dress. For the
most part they are long, black-covered steeples, resting at an angle of
forty-five degrees to the head, the broad end having a deep velvet band
round it, with hanging sides, which come to the level of the chin; the
point end has a long veil attached to it, which floats lightly down, or
is carried on to one shoulder.
Sometimes this steeple hat is worn over a
hood, the cape of which is tucked into the dress. Some of these hats
have a jutting, upturned piece in front, and they are also covered with
all manner of coloured stuffs, but not commonly so.
All persons having
an income of £10 a year and over will have that black velvet loop, the
frontlet, sewn into their hats.
There is another new shape for hats,
varying in height from 8 to 18 inches. It is a cylinder, broader at the
top than the bottom, the crown sometimes flat and sometimes rounded into
the hat itself; this hat is generally jewelled, and covered with rich
material.
The veils are attached to these hats in several ways; either
they float down behind from the centre of the crown of the hat, or they are sewn on to the base of the hat, and are supported on wires, so
as to shade the face, making a roof over it, pointed in front and
behind, or flat across the front and bent into a point behind, or
circular.
Take two circles of wire, one the size of the base of your hat
and the other larger, and dress your linen or thin silk upon them; then
you may pinch the wire into any variations of squares and circles you
please.
The costume plate shows a lady wearing a steeple headdress - the high hennin from which hangs a wisp of linen.
On her
forehead is the velvet frontlet a veil stretched on wires across her
forehead.
The veil was sometimes worn all over the steeple hat, coming down over
the face, but stiff enough to stand away from it. Towards the end of the
reign the hats were not so high or so erect.
Remember, also, that the
horned head-dress of the previous reign is not
by any means extinct.
There remain two more forms of making the human face hideous: one is
the head-dress closely resembling an enormous sponge bag, which for some
unknown reason lasted well into the reign of Henry VII as a variety to
the fashionable head-gear of that time, and the other is very simple,
being a wimple kept on the head by a circular stuffed hoop of
material, which showed, plain and severe across the forehead. The simple
folk wore a hood of linen, with a liripipe and wide ear-flaps.
No doubt ladies were just human in those days, and fussed and frittered
over an inch or so of hennin, or a yard or two of train. One cut her
dress too low to please the others, and another wore her horned
head-dress despite the dictates of Fashion, which said, 'Away with
horns, and into steeples.'
No doubt the tall hennins, with their
floating veils, looked like black masts with silken sails, and the
ladies like a crowd of shipping, with velvet trains for waves about
their feet; no doubt the steeples swayed and the silks rustled when the
heads turned to look at the fine men in the days when hump-shouldered
Richard was a dandy.
THE WOMEN
The River of Time runs
under many bridges, and it would seem that the arches were low to the
Bridge of Fashion in 1483, and the steeple hat was lowered to prevent
contact with them.
The correct angle of forty-five degrees changed into
a right angle, the steeple hat, the hennin, came toppling down, and an
embroidered bonnet, perched right on the back of the head, came into
vogue. It is this bonnet which gives, from our point of view,
distinction to the reign. It was a definite fashion, a distinct halt.
It had travelled along the years of the fourteenth century, from
the wimple and the horns, and the stiff turbans, and the boxes of
stiffened cloth of gold; it had languished in the caul and blossomed in
the huge wimple-covered horns; it had shot up in the hennin; and now it
gave, as its last transformation, this bonnet at the back of the head,
with the stiff wimple stretched upon wires. Soon was to come the
diamond-shaped head-dress, and after that the birth of hair as a beauty.
In this case the hair was drawn as tightly as possible away from the
forehead, and at the forehead the smaller hairs were plucked away; even
eyebrows were a little out of fashion. Then this cylindrical bonnet was
placed at the back of the head, with its wings of thin linen stiffly
sewn or propped on wires. These wires were generally of a shape, the
point at the forehead.
The costume plate shows the lower steeple headdress which is made of thin linen stretched upon
wires; through this her jewelled cap and the embellishment is visible.
On some occasions two straight wires came out on
either side of the face and so made two wings on
either side of the face and two wings over the back of the head. It is
more easy to describe through means of the drawings, and the reader will
soon see what bend to give to the wires in order that the wings
may be properly held out.
Beyond this head-dress there was very little alteration in the lady's
dress since the previous reign. The skirts were full; the waist was
high, but not absurdly so; the band round the dress was broad; the
sleeves were tight; and the cuffs, often of fur, were folded back to a
good depth.
The neck opening of the dress varied, as did that of the previous reign,
but whereas the most fashionable opening was then from neck to waist,
this reign gave more liking to a higher corsage, over the top of which a
narrow piece of stuff showed, often of black velvet.
We may safely
assume that the ladies followed the men in the matter of broad shoes.
For a time the old fashion of the long-tongued belt came in, and we see
instances of such belts being worn with the tongue reaching nearly to
the feet, tipped with a metal ornament.
THE WOMEN
Take up a pack of cards and look at the queen.
You may see the
extraordinary head-gear as worn by ladies at the end of the fifteenth
century and in the first years of the sixteenth, worn in a modified form
all through the next reign, after which that description of head-dress
vanished for ever, its place to be taken by caps, hats, and bonnets.
This is a sumptuous gown in rich elaborate material - good stuff -
not any old fabric. Notice the diamond-shaped head-dress, the wide, fur-edged gown with its
full sleeves. This is the start of new era - the Age of the Tudors.
This costume history page is about hair fashion history. It consists of a
selection of women only
headdresses and hairstyle illustrations with original text from 1327 to 1485
and taken from Calthrop's
English Costume. They are as shown in individual Calthrop costume pages
for specific eras on 36 other pages in another section of this website. The partial text copy
is from the book ENGLISH
COSTUME PAINTED & DESCRIBED BY DION CLAYTON CALTHROP. Full
text is on the individual dated pages.
This page is about female headdresses and hairdressing styles for the
medieval era 1327 - 1485. Later eras of headdresses are shown on
other pages. For the Introduction to this book see this
introduction written by Dion Clayton Calthrop. My comments are in italics.
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Calthrop
sates:- Certain it is that in this reign the close caul grew out of all decent
proportions, and swelled into every form of excrescence and
protuberance, until in the reign of Henry VI, it towered above the heads
of the ladies, and dwarfed the stature of the men.
