DRESSING THE CHILDREN by H.M. Castor

Portrait of Lord Arundel or Portrait of a Child with a Rattle, 1611
- attributed to Paul van Somer (1576/1578–1622)
[Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Back in August 2011, I wrote a post on this site about Tudor dress, and most particularly about my own experience of wearing an outfit made by renowned costume experts Jane Malcolm-Davies and Ninya Mikhaila. I was – and am – a great admirer of their book The Tudor Tailor: Reconstructing Sixteenth-Century Dress, which is a fantastic resource for writers, reconstruction enthusiasts or indeed for anyone interested in the sartorial side of this fascinating period.

For the last few years I have been concentrating my research on the childhoods and teenage years of various members of the Tudor royal family. You can imagine, then, my absolute joy when I discovered this spring that Jane and Ninya, along with their colleague Jane Huggett, have produced a new book called The Tudor Child: Clothing and Culture 1485 to 1625. For me, this book is a dream come true. And I wanted to blog about it today because I think it’s also a fantastic achievement.

Exactly as with The Tudor Tailor, The Tudor Child contains thorough, carefully researched text, plus beautiful reproductions of relevant paintings, effigies, stained glass and surviving original garments (rare, but there are some – and they are absolutely fascinating).

The authors provide detailed analysis of how children’s clothing demonstrated their rank as well as their level of maturity. Although inevitably there are more written and pictorial sources for ‘elite’ clothing, they have taken care to use every bit of information they can about clothing right across the social scale, including the labouring classes, the poor, and children who were reliant on charity. They have studied period childcare manuals, too, to gain an insight into contemporary attitudes to children, their development, their education and their play.

Children’s Games (1560)
by Pieter Brueghel the Elder (1526/1530–1569) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Marvellous nuggets of historical information abound, as you might imagine. Here, for example, is a passage about the colour red:

Infants may have worn red bearing cloths [a large cloth used as an outer wrapping] for superstitious reasons. From ancient times, red, as the colour of blood, was considered a protection against evil. Red was thought to bring healthy properties too. Andrew Boorde advised men to wear nightcaps of scarlet cloth in bed, petticoats (waistcoats) of the same in winter, and of stammel or scarlet linsey-woolsey in the summer. One childcare manual reported that some people placed a piece of scarlet (red cloth) on a newborn’s head.
[The Tudor Child – Chapter 2: Infants, Babies and Toddlers, pp.17-18]

I was very interested to learn, too, that the word bib was not recorded before 1580 – and that in the medieval period a bib was known by the wonderfully vivid term slavering clout. Similarly, tailclout and pissclout were satisfyingly straightforward terms for nappies. And I am also particularly fond of the muckinder, a large hanky or small towel that would be attached to the girdle round a toddler’s waist (it served as an alternative to an apron).

As for what nappies were made of, here is evidence from Elizabeth I’s reign:

In 1573, Anne Bacon wrote to her stepmother asking for some old linen “to make cloutes for myself & the childe. Your Ladyship knoweth how good old linen is [for] such uses, yea better than new.” Used linen was suitable because it was softened and became more absorbent with repeated washing. The linen clout may have been doubled and lined with a layer of soft rags or with an absorbent material, such as sphagnum moss, and was usually fastened with pins.
[The Tudor Child – Chapter 2, p.15.]

To a modern eye, boys of this period often seem indistinguishable from girls up to the age of about seven or so, because they had not yet been ‘breeched’, and instead of hose wore skirts (see, for example, the painting at the beginning of this post). However, The Tudor Child explains how gender was often indicated in other ways – by the style of hat worn, for example, or by the shape and fit of the collar, or shoulder rolls or wings.

If you click here you will see a (rather glorious) painting of a family group in which the boys are clearly distinguished from the girls, even though all the children are in skirts. Notice, also, that the youngest girl has her gloves on strings: as I did when I was little, and my daughters too... some things don't change!

In addition to its wealth of historical information, the book contains patterns for a whole variety of outfits, for those skilled enough to make their own replica costumes. Even for someone like me whose sewing skills are not up to the job, the step-by-step photos and drawings add so much to my understanding of how these garments actually worked. And it is, I think, key to the authors' command of their subject that they've had years of experience of making these clothes themselves, using the original techniques. 

Finally, there's an added bonus: the photos are absolutely charming!

I can't recommend this book highly enough. Many congratulations to the authors, the illustrator, and all involved.

(And for anyone interested in seeing more paintings of mothers and children from the 16th & 17th centuries, there's a rather nice little collection here.)

The Tudor Child, The Tudor Tailor, and other books by the same team are available to buy from The Tudor Tailor website here.

H.M. Castor's novel VIII - a new look at the life of Henry VIII for teenage and adult readers - is published by Templar in the UK, by Penguin in Australia, and will be published by Simon and Schuster in the US this summer. 

H.M. Castor's website is here.

More Cross Dressing by Marie-Louise Jensen

Taking up Caroline Lawrence's theme again, I'd like to look at the reasons behind cross dressing in historical fiction. I think this will at least partly answer the point that's come up in the comments; why do we have plenty of girls dressing up as boys but so few boys dressing as girls?

In three of my books, the girls wouldn't dream of dressing up as boys. None of these main characters has any need to step outside her female role, though they might push at the boundaries of what that role allows. But in The Lady in the Tower, Eleanor dresses as a boy once in the story; to take part in a tournament.

This is a very practical necessity. Women weren't permitted to joust, so she needed to be in male disguise. And secondly, you needed to wear armour to do so. With the best will in the world, a Tudor dress wouldn't fit inside a suit of armour. Eleanor has no particular desire to be a man, but she wishes to do something that men do. It's been her dream. So cross dressing is born of a desire to take part in a forbidden acivity.

In my forthcoming novel, The Girl in the Mask, there is a lot more cross-dressing going on. Early Georgian costume for the wealthy (like Tudor dress) was a way of showing status. It proved you could afford a dressmaker, the latest fashions and the costliest of materials. BUT and it's an important but, above all, it proved that you were too weathly to need to work. Because women's gowns were utterly impractical. You were laced tightly so that breathing was difficult; any kind of exertion became problematic. The gown and petticoats were heavy and bulky, so it was difficult to move about. And the fabrics were often brocade silk, satins or velvet so they weren't easily washable. So you couldn't risk playing, climbing, running, sitting on the ground or a hundred other things you might want to do. You could decorate a drawing room or grace a ballroom, flirt with your fan, or if you were very daring, show off your gown at the promenade - which was paved so there was less risk of dirtying your hems.

How can any girl possibly have adventures that are exciting to the modern reader while confined in this way? My character Sophia wants to climb out of her window, roam the city at night, climb out over the city walls and commit highway robbery. She can do none of those things in a brocade silk gown, hoop and layers of petticoats.

Try reversing this. What was there in a woman's world, that a man might be desperate to try out? Um. Absolutely nothing. He could do all of it - more easily - as a man. Nothing was denied to men but fainting and the vapours and they were caused by costume and hardly enviable.

This perhaps explains the lack of cross dressing by men in historical fiction. I'll just mention two exceptions, both from the novels of Georgette Heyer. In The Talisman Ring, Ludovic Lavenham dresses as a French maid to avoid capture by the Bow Street Runners. And Robin Tremain in The Masqueraders becomes a lady to evade capture for his Jacobite past. The former is made comic, as several people have described. But the latter is serious; it is a life-and-death disguise. Even so, Robin is described as 'humilitated' when his disguise is seen through by a friend. But it is only the need for disguise for their own safety that makes this cross dressing even remotely acceptable.

It's not cool for boys to play at being girls. It's not aspirational. Wheras the other way around, cross dressing opens up a world of freedoms and opportunites. As the saying used to go; boys have all the fun. We can be glad that has changed.

DRESSING THE PART by H.M. Castor

It all started at a planning meeting for a bookshop event. I can't remember who suggested it, but someone said why didn't I dress up in Tudor costume? Was I willing?

Willing? Try and stop me...

After all, haven't I always been obsessed with the way the Tudors looked? As a child, I drew endless Tudor court ladies, and as an adult I've spent more time than I care to remember staring at their portraits. This one is, I think, my absolute favourite.

In many ways it's not the most beguiling portrait. The subject - Jane Seymour, Henry VIII's third wife - seems, if anything to be enduring the viewer's gaze, staring pointedly into the middle distance as if wishing she (or we) were elsewhere. But oh, how real, how tactilely present she looks - most particularly how tactilely present and detailed is her clothing. The painting was commissioned, of course, because of Jane's rank. However, since the painter was Holbein, this is no two-dimensional image trumpeting only status: this is a living, breathing woman inside clothes whose weight and texture we can almost feel.

When I look at this painting my eye is always caught by the row of dots that runs down the bodice near Jane's left arm (hardly visible perhaps here, but if you find a larger image of the painting you will be able to see them very clearly). These dots are the heads of tiny brass pins... pins inserted by the nimble fingers of her ladies that morning (or whenever she put the gown on). A team of ladies to help the queen dress was not a luxury, but an absolute necessity - she simply could not do it by herself.

The pins are a tantalising clue to the practicalities of Tudor dress. How did an outfit like this work? How did anyone (even with a team of attendants) get in and out of it? How did the hair sit under the hood? How on earth was the bodice made to be so incredibly close fitting? Exactly which bits of edging at the neckline were attached to which layers of under- or over-garments? And, most particularly, what did it feel like to wear?

In writing my book VIII, and now in researching my next one, which is about Henry VIII's daughters Mary and Elizabeth, I have spent a great deal of time poring over books about Tudor clothes in search of answers to these questions. Dress at the Court of King Henry VIII by Maria Hayward I have found to be essential reading, and Janet Arnold's superb Patterns of Fashion series is a goldmine of fascinating information. But another excellent book - The Tudor Tailor by Jane Malcolm-Davies and Ninya Mikhaila - particularly intrigues me because, along with splendid text and detailed reproductions of relevant paintings, carvings and effigies, it contains patterns for those skilled enough to make their own replica costumes and (even more fascinatingly for me, as I'm no seamstress) photographs of people wearing the various layers of these reconstructed outfits, giving the reader an opportunity to see so much more than portraits ever show. Jane and Ninya, along with their colleague Caroline Johnson, are hugely-respected experts in their field - they have undertaken many projects with historic houses and museums, and spent more than a decade working with Hampton Court Palace, training the guides there and making costumes for them to wear.

Even the very best books, however, cannot fully answer one of my questions: what did a Tudor outfit feel like to wear? That's why, when the suggestion came at that meeting that I should dress up for the bookshop event, I jumped at the chance. And began to wonder... what if I could wear, not a theatrical approximation of a Tudor costume, but one of Jane and Ninya's beautiful replicas?

A few weeks later I found myself driving to the home of Jane Malcolm-Davies, having been very kindly invited there to see some items from her impressive collection.

I can't tell you what a treat and privilege it was to meet Jane, whose work I admire so much, and to spend an afternoon talking with her and trying on a costume... which, miraculously, fitted perfectly!

Let me show you its layers:

First there is the smock, the layer

that would have been washed regularly.

Then the petticoat, which (as was common) is red, and which in this case has a bodice attached. The skirt is made from two layers of fabric with a thin layer of stuffing in between, so that it stands out slightly.

The lacing, as I hope you can make out from the photo, is done spiral-wise. It has been deduced from the placement of the lacing holes in surviving garments that this was the technique originally used. This spiral technique has the advantage that it allows the edges of the bodice to overlap if necessary.

After the petticoat, there is a kirtle to put on, in this case cream-coloured and with no bodice attached (i.e. it is just a skirt). This kirtle is the layer that will show in the triangular-shaped gap at the front of the gown's skirt once the full outfit is on.

Next comes the gown itself, which laces up the front like the petticoat.

This costume was used by Hampton Court Palace guides and Jane and Ninya have made some concessions to convenience: the sleeves - which are separate from the gown and come in two sections themselves - are already tied on; the jewels at the neckline are ready-attached; and the 'placard' - the front piece - has been sewn to the gown along one edge. It would originally have been a completely separate piece, which needed to be pinned on (see Jane Seymour's pins again!) along both side-edges.

For extra warmth - or for reasons of modesty - a black velvet partlet can be worn covering the neck. Single laces at the partlet's corners, front and back, are tied together under each arm.

And there are lovely velvet shoes too!

Again for convenience, the headdress has been made in one piece - originally it would have consisted of a linen coif, over which the separate pieces of the hood and veil would have been pinned, with the jewelled trim also pinned on separately.

So here I am in the full kit... feeling somewhat over-warm on a sunny day! I also feel very 'held' by the clothes, and I have no choice but to stand and move in stately fashion. My arms naturally take up the position of Jane Seymour's in the painting. The shape of the sleeves leads to this - it feels much more comfortable than letting my arms hang by my sides.

When I wore the costume for several hours I discovered just how tiring it is to have such a weight of fabric dragging behind you as you move (all those pleats at the back waist!). Hats off to the Hampton Court guides who manage full days. I also found that the hood restricted my hearing (a detail mentioned by Hilary Mantel in Wolf Hall - such an interesting point).

I bought the costume from Jane that day (it fitted me, for goodness' sake; how could I walk away?!), and the obvious question now is: when on earth will I wear it, other than at the book event for which that planning meeting was held?

The answer is that I will take every chance I get! In July I wore it on a visit to a school here in Bristol (hello, Westbury Park Primary School!) when I talked to Year 3 pupils about Henry VIII. Realising that I wouldn't be able to put it on alone in the staff loo, but that I couldn't drive in the full outfit either (it was turning round to reverse park that had me worried - but yes, there was the looking weird/mad consideration too), I hit upon the plan of arriving in the first two layers (with cloak thrown over the top) and then asking for volunteers to help me into kirtle and gown. It worked very well!

Jane Malcolm-Davies told me she was pleased I would be able to put this costume to educational use. Indeed, I would like to wear it on more school visits. I imagine, though, that it might go down better in junior schools than senior schools - might teenagers be liable just to laugh at this eccentric writer, sweeping into their school in full Tudor costume? I would be interested to know what you think!

I very much recommend an article by Jane Malcolm-Davies, Caroline Johnson & Ninya Mikhaila in 'Costume' (the journal of The Costume Society), Vol. 42 (2008) entitled: '"And her black satin gown must be new-bodied": the twenty-first-century body in pursuit of the Holbein look'. It discusses details of their continuing research into the methods used to stiffen the bodices of Tudor gowns.

I shall be wearing my costume for signing copies of VIII at Waterstone's in Bath on October 8th and at Waterstone's in The Galleries, Bristol on October 29th. Do please come along if you can - I am happy to be peered at, if anyone wants to see the costume in more detail!

H.M. Castor's website is here.

The Tudor Tailor's website is here.