Fleeting Fashions: clothing fads of the Middles Ages

For many centuries in the Middle Ages, the basics of fashion for men and women remained the same - a gown for women and a long or short robe or tunic for men. Fashions for sleeves, hats and shoes could be more fleeting or even extreme and it's those I'm looking at today, particularly in Britain.

The sleeveless tunic, based on a knight's surcoat, was a popular clothing choice for medieval men. Then in the middle of the 13th century there was a brief fashion which added wide sleeves to the tunic and sometimes a hood, turning it into a garment called a gardecorps. This was intended to replace the surcoat and cloak, combining both into a single item, however it never really caught on. Still with sleeves and male fashion, the bag-sleeve for men, a wide, baggy sleeve snug at the wrist and shoulder, was popular for about twenty years around 1400, but again never really caught on.

For medieval women, hair and headdresses tended to be 'the thing'. Between 1130-50 there was a fashion for noble women to wear their hair long in plaits and for them to sheath these plaits in silk, usually white with red circular stripes. These sheaths were called fouriaux. However it was with headdresses that medieval noble-women especially indulged and which set the medieval clerics scolding about excess and vanity. A brief fashion, lasting roughly thirty years, was the heart-shaped head-dress, a headgear designed with two 'horns' on either side of the woman's head. Sometimes these headdresses became even wider, which caused a cleric of the time to remark: "She is hornyd like a kowe... for syn." At Ludlow, within the church of St Laurence, there is a misericord carved with a woman portrayed as a scold - and wearing a horned headdress. Women in later years wore the steeple headdress or hennin, a tall cone arrayed with long, flowing veils, although this tended to be a European than British fashion. This was also railed against by clerics, particularly in France.

All classes craved fashion, as can be seen by the various sumptuary laws passed in 1363 and 1463 which tried to stop 'lower' classes dressing in furs and certain fabrics and aping their 'betters'. Such acts made no difference as people loved to dress up.

Men's vanity was often shown in shoes. Piked shoes - shoes with points - were popular with men in the Middle Ages, although the length of the points varied through the years. The truly exaggerated points were a short fashion. The idea that men wore the long points with chains attached to their knees to stop them tripping up may simply have been a mistake or a later urban myth. However, such cramped shoes did cause medieval people to have real problems with their feet, similar to those found in women of the 1950s who wore pinching, pointed-toed stilettos. An archaeologist working in Ipswich found evidence in a medieval cemetery of people with painful feet as a result of their shoes.

I have Swein and Alfwen dressed to impress in my novel "The Master Cook and the Maiden", as you can read from this excerpt.

Alfwen leaned over the outdoor table to look into the shallow, white-glazed bowl filled with clean water. As a mirror it worked well and her reflection stared back.

She was a girl again, her feminity no longer in doubt. She was disquieted to discover that she felt more vulnerable as a woman than she had as a spit-boy, or perhaps that unwelcome feeling was simply because she had become more visible.

“Pretty as apple-blossom.” Swein’s reflection filled the bowl. Still gazing into the water, she tried to pat his arm and missed.

“You dress up very fine, yourself,” she told him, wondering for an instant if he also felt vulnerable, then dismissed that idea as foolish. “The long robe suits you.” It moved like a supple wave as he walked and showed glimpses of his shapely long legs. His legs entwine nicely with mine at night as well. Remembering, Alfwen prayed that the widow who was lately aiding them would not ask after her sudden flush of colour.

“I feel like a dressed and stuffed goose, or a peacock at a banquet,” Swein was meanwhile complaining. He turned to Mistress Glover, who had remained in the house doorway until now. “Must I wear this?”

“You must,” came the crisp response, echoed, it seemed, by the shouts of wherry men on the Thames, and masons and builders on the narrow streets—everywhere in London there were new palaces or dwellings going up or being added to. “It is part of the show of rank. As a master cook you should already understand this.”

 

Everyone, it seems, suffers for fashion, no matter how short-lived that fashion may be!

Lindsay Townsend