‘Saide Monstrous Hose’: Compliance, Transgression and English Sumptuary Law to 1533

Abstract

Sumptuary law in early modern England has been described as unenforced, subject to systematic non-compliance, and ultimately legally inconsequential. A return to the original texts of the Acts to examine the language and form of the legal preambles suggests that another explanation might be available. Studies of surviving artefacts and information from wills and inventories suggest that the trend among the populace was toward compliance, rather than unprosecuted violation. Through to the mid-sixteenth century, when petition-driven statutes were replaced by royal proclamation, the Acts were continually refined and made more precise, closing legal loopholes that were being exploited. Records of ownership, in the form of wills and probate inventories, show minimal signs of violation of the sumptuary laws, although more do appear the higher one looks in the ranks of the nobility. When the sumptuary laws were violated, some prosecutions and fines were levied, and records from the Star Chamber, Chancery Court and Hall’s Chronicle all detail instances of punishment for violators. While the small numbers and limited descriptions in wills and inventories make it problematic to frame too sweeping a statement regarding the ownership of offending items, the combination of signs of enforcement, material evidence matching the legal requirements and the boilerplate nature of the wording of the petitions and statutes give new reason to re-evaluate our understanding of sumptuary law in England.

Acknowledgements

I owe an immense debt of gratitude to Dr K. J. Kesselring and Dr C. J. Neville for comments and critique of previous iterations of this article.

Notes

1 W. Hooper, ‘The Tudor sumptuary laws’, The English Historical Review, xxx, no. 119 (1915), p. 435; F. Baldwin, Sumptuary Legislation and Personal Regulation in England, Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science, xliv, no. 1 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1926), p. 10.

2 M. Jaster, ‘“Clothing themselves in acres”: apparel and impoverishment in medieval and early modern England’, in R. Netherton and G. R. Owen-Crocker eds, Medieval Clothing and Textiles, ii (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2006), pp. 91–100; C. Sponsler, ‘Narrating the social order: medieval clothing laws’, Clio, xxi, no. 3 (1992), pp. 265–83.

3 The ruling was delivered at the Westminster synod, restricting ‘abbesses and nuns’ to clothing of lesser value than lamb skin (‘agninis vel cattinis’). D. Wilkins, Concilia Magnae Britanniae et Hiberniae a Synodo Verolamiensi A.D. CCCC XLVI. Ad Londinensem A.D. M DCCXVII. Accedunt Constitutiones et alia ad Historiam Ecclesiae Anglicanae Spectantia: A Davide Wilkins (London: Sumptibus R. Gosling, 1737), p. 411.

4 For price fixing of wheat, beer and ale, see O. Ruffhead, The Statutes at Large from Magna Charta, to the End of the Last Parliament, 1761. In Eight Volumes, i (London: Printed by Mark Basket, and by the assigns of Robert Basket; and by Henry Woodfall and William Strahan, 1763), p. 34; 51 Henry III, st. 1 (1266–1267). John Ashton describes regulations against dicing passed in 1190 (restricting the amounts soldiers were allowed to wager) and 1240 (prohibiting clergy from playing cards and dice, discussed at the Synod of Worcester), but no primary sources are cited. See J. Ashton, The History of Gambling in England (London: Duckworth and Co., 1898), pp. 12–13. Mumming was forbidden in 1334 by royal proclamation. See H. T. Riley ed., Memorials of London and London Life in the 13th, 14th and 15th Centuries: Being a Series of Extracts from the Early Archives of the City of London, A.D. 1276–1419 (London: Corporation of London, 1868), Letter-Book E, fol. 2, note 19. In 1363, Edward III issued an order forbidding the playing of many outdoor sports, replacing them with an injunction for the practice of archery. See Calendar of the Close Rolls Preserved in the Public Record Office, Vol. XI (Edward III, 1360–1364) (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1893), pp. 534–45.

5 A. Hunt, Governance of the Consuming Passions: A History of Sumptuary Law (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1996), pp. 310–11.

6 11 Edw. III, c. 4 (1337); 37 Edw. III, cc. 8–14 (1363); 3 Edw. IV, c. 5 (1463); 22 Edw. IV, c. 1 (1483); 1 Hen. VIII, c. 14 (1510); 6 Hen. VIII, c. 1 (1514); 7 Hen. VIII, c. 6 (1515), 24 Hen. VIII, c. 13 (1533).

7 E. Hall, Hall’s Chronicle: Containing the History of England, during the Reign of Henry the Fourth, and the Succeeding Monarchs ... Carefully Collated with the Editions of 1548 and 1550 (London: printed for J. Johnson et al., 1809), p. 583.

8 Hunt, Governance of the Consuming Passions, p. 342.

9 Hooper, ‘The Tudor sumptuary laws’, p. 438.

10 F. A. Youngs, The Proclamations of the Tudor Queens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), p. 163.

11 Court of Chancery Pleadings, 1518–1529, Warcop v Franke, Actions of debt and trespass, and wrongful imprisonment of complainant, who has pledged the specialty for defendant’s debt to him for cloth ..., C 1/598/31, The National Archives, London.

12 7 Hen. VIII, c. 6 (1515).

13 J. Reeves and W. F. Finlason, Reeves’ History of the English Law from the Time of the Romans, to the End of the Reign of Elizabeth [1603] (London: Reeves & Turner, 1869), p. 801.

14 Hooper, ‘The Tudor sumptuary laws’, pp. 433–49; Baldwin, Sumptuary Legislation, p. 24.

15 C. R. Bell and E. Ruse, ‘Sumptuary legislation and English costume: an attempt to assess the effect of an Act of 1337’, Costume, vi (1972), pp. 22–31; N. B. Harte, ‘Silk and sumptuary legislation in England’, in S. Cavaciocchi ed., La Seta in Europa (Florence: Le Monner, 1993), pp. 801–16.

16 N. B. Harte and F. J. Fisher, State Control of Dress and Social Change in Pre-Industrial England (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1976), pp. 137–38.

17 F. J. Shaw, ‘Sumptuary legislation in Scotland’, Juridicial Review, xxiv, no. 1 (1979), p. 102.

18 Sponsler, ‘Narrating the social order’.

19 Jaster, ‘“Clothing themselves in acres”’.

20 R. C. Palmer, English Law in the Age of the Black Death, 1348–1381: A Transformation of Governance and Law (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1993), p. 22; Hunt, Governance of the Consuming Passions, p. 5.

21 The first major discussion of gender in sumptuary legislation was by Diane Owen Hughes in 1992. She described the Italian sumptuary laws as stemming from fraught gender relations, enacted and enforced in order to ensure the availability of women and the maintenance of familial wealth. D. Owen Hughes, ‘Regulating women’s fashion’, in C. Klapisch-Zuber ed., A History of Women: Silences of the Middle Ages (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 136–58.

22 K. M. Phillips, ‘Masculinities and the medieval English sumptuary laws’, Gender & History, ixx, no. 1 (2007), pp. 22–42.

23 M. Hayward, Rich Apparel: Clothing and the Law in Henry VIII’s England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 1, 145, 325.

24 Ibid., p. 1.

25 C. Sponsler, Drama and Resistance: Bodies, Goods, and Theatricality in Late Medieval England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); A. Denny-Brown, Fashioning Change: The Trope of Clothing in High and Late-Medieval England (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2012), p. 14; A. R. Jones and P. Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 2.

26 Late medieval and early modern authors also played with these concepts of dress and identity. See especially the story of Griselda, from Giovanni Boccaccio’s fourteenth-century collection of stories the Decameron, Chrétien de Troyes’s twelfth-century poem Erec and Enide or William Shakespeare’s plays Hamlet (c. 1600) and Henry IV part 1 and part 2 (c. 1596–1599). See Jones and Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing. See also Sponsler, Drama and Resistance and S. Smith, ‘Materializing resistant identities among the medieval peasantry: an examination of dress accessories from English rural settlement sites’, Journal of Material Culture, xiv, no. 3 (2009), pp. 309–32.

27 C. D’Evelyn, Peter Idley’s Instructions to his Son, The Modern Language Association of America (Boston: Heath and Co., 1935), p. 160.

28 Ibid.

29 Harte and Fisher, State Control of Dress, p. 141.

30 11 Edw. III, c. 4 (1337).

31 C. Kovesi Killerby, Sumptuary Law in Italy, 1200–1500 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), p. 41.

32 Hunt, Governance of the Consuming Passions, p. 308.

33 Palmer, English Law, p. 23. See also Harte and Fisher, State Control of Dress, pp. 139–40, on the expansion of distinct ‘stations in life’. Hayward concurs, describing Tudor sumptuary legislation as revealing a ‘growing concern with emphasizing the increasingly subtle definitions of rank within the nobility and gentry’. Hayward, Rich Apparel, p. 18.

34 Harte and Fisher, State Control of Dress, p. 140.

35 37 Edw. III, c. 25 (1363).

36 38 Edw. III, c. 11 (1365); W. M. Ormrod, ‘Edward III: Parliament of January 1365, text and translation’, in C. Given-Wilson et al. eds, The Parliament Rolls of Medieval England (Online). Available from: www.sd-editions.com/PROME [Accessed: 11 February 2014].

37 Ibid.

38 Richard II, April 1379; Henry IV, September 1402; Henry IV, March 1406, Part I, in Given- Wilson et al. eds, The Parliament Rolls.

39 Richard II, April 1379, in Given-Wilson et al. eds, The Parliament Rolls.

40 Henry IV, September 1402, in Given-Wilson et al. eds, The Parliament Rolls.

41 Henry IV, March 1406, Part I, in Given-Wilson et al. eds, The Parliament Rolls.

42 Ibid.

43 Harte and Fisher, State Control of Dress, p. 158; Hunt, Governance of the Consuming Passions, p. 305.

44 3–4 Edw. IV, c. 20 (1463).

45 18 Edw. IV, c. 30 (1478).

46 3 Edw. IV, c. 5 (1463).

47 Ibid.

48 38 Edw. III, c. 11 (1365).

49 G. Dodd, Justice and Grace: Private Petitioning and the English Parliament in the Late Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 297.

50 Ibid., p. 298.

51 22 Edw. IV, c. 2 (1478); 1 Ric. III, c. 8 (1483); 3 Hen. VIII, c. 3 (1512).

52 18 Edw. IV, c. 30 (1478).

53 22 Edw. IV, c. 1 (1483).

54 1 Hen. VIII, c. 14 (1510); 6 Hen. VIII, c. 1 (1514); 7 Hen. VIII, c. 6 (1515).

55 24 Hen. VIII, c. 13 (1533).

56 Dodd, Justice and Grace, especially chapter 9, for an in-depth look at the construction, reception and wider context of private and common petitions.

57 Ibid., p. 280.

58 Ibid., pp. 293–94.

59 11 Edward IV, October 1472, Roll 1, in Given-Wilson et al. eds, The Parliament Rolls.

60 Ibid., Roll 3.

61 5 Henry VII, January 1489, in Given-Wilson et al. eds, The Parliament Rolls.

62 7 Henry VII, October 1491, in Given-Wilson et al. eds, The Parliament Rolls.

63 Ibid.

64 22 Edw. IV, c. 1 (1483). Those granted exceptions were: Sir Thomas Montgomery, Sir Thomas Burgh, Sir Thomas Vaughan, Sir Jon Don, Sir William Parr, Sir Thomas St Leger, Sir Thomas Bourchier, Sir Thomas Grey, Master Olivier King (the King’s Secretary), Master John Gunthorpe (Dean of the King’s Chapel) and Sir John Elrington (Treasurer of the King’s Household).

65 For example, clergy while acting in divine service (1510, 1514, 1515 and 1533), local governmental officials such as Mayors, Aldermen and Sheriffs (1510, 1514 and 1515), minstrels and players (1510 and 1514), henchmen and swordbearers (1533), men wearing the King’s livery (1510, 1514 and 1515). See Hayward, Rich Apparel, pp. 29–39 for further detail.

66 1 Hen. VIII, c. 14 (1510).

67 Hayward, Rich Apparel, p. 24.

68 Ibid., p. 21.

69 Jaster, ‘“Clothing themselves in acres”’, pp. 94–95.

70 Harte and Fisher, State Control of Dress, p. 141.

71 Burkholder examined 550 wills dating between 1327 and 1487, while Hayward picked up where she left off, examining 1284 wills, as well as inventories and portraits, dated between 1485 and 1553. K. M. Burkholder, ‘Threads bared: dress and textiles in late medieval English wills’, Medieval Clothing and Textiles, i (2005), pp. 133–53; Hayward, Rich Apparel, pp. 153–224.

72 Burkholder, ‘Threads bared’, p. 135.

73 The sites are Wharram Percy, Riplingham, Bolton, Boulby, Thrislington, Goltho and Riseholme. See Smith, ‘Materializing resistant identities’, pp. 319–20, 325.

74 Ibid.

75 3–4 Edw. IV, c. 20 (1463–1465).

76 Smith, ‘Materializing resistant identities’, p. 323.

77 Ibid., p. 322, and 3–4 Edw. IV, c. 20 (1463–1465); see also the specific exemption for gold rings in 24 Hen. VIII, c. 13 (1533): ‘excepte Ringes of Golde to be worne on their fingers with stones or without’.

78 Hayward, Rich Apparel, p. 52.

79 Ibid., p. 148.

80 G. Egan, Material Culture in London in an Age of Transition: Tudor and Stuart Period Finds c. 1450–c. 1700 from Excavations at Riverside Sites in Southwark, xix (London: Museum of London Archaeology Service, 2005), p. 1.

81 Ibid., pp. 18–21. The cloth linings have unfortunately not survived.

82 H. Kurath, Middle English Dictionary (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1956), p. 7.

83 3–4 Edw. IV, c. 20 (1463–1465).

84 Egan, Material Culture in London, pp. 18–21, 33.

85 Burkholder, ‘Threads bared’, p. 148.

86 Ibid., p. 149.

87 Ninety-one items out of 312 separate bequests from the 178 merchants’ wills include descriptions detailed enough to pass judgement. Of those, only a small handful were of illegal or borderline quality.

88 Hayward, Rich Apparel, p. 332.

89 Ibid., p. 328.

90 Ibid., p. 218.

91 Ibid., p. 217.

92 Burkholder, ‘Threads bared’, p. 136.

93 Hayward, Rich Apparel, p. 337.

94 Burkholder, ‘Threads bared’, p. 150.

95 Hayward, Rich Apparel, pp. 196–97.

96 Ibid., pp. 204, 208.

97 Ibid., p. 210; Burkholder, ‘Threads bared’, p. 150.

98 Burkholder, ‘Threads bared’, p. 150.

99 Hayward describes a cloth of gold doublet worn by John Bourchier, Lord Berners as a violation, but cloth of gold was permitted to Barons by the 1515 Act of Apparel. Bourchier became a Baron in 1474 and the specific portrait in which the doublet appears was painted c. 1520. J. P. Carley, ‘Bourchier, John, second Baron Berners (c. 1467–1533)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Online). Available from: http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/2990 [Accessed: 6 June 2014].

100 Baldwin, Sumptuary Legislation, p. 107; D. C. Calthrop, English Costume, ii (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1907), pp. 120–21.

101 J. S. Brewer, R. H. Brodie and A. C. Wood, Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, Part I, II (Burlington: TannerRitchie Publishing in collaboration with the Library and Information Services of the University of St Andrews, 2005), p. 321.

102 Hall, Hall’s Chronicle, p. 585.

103 Harte and Fisher, State Control of Dress, p. 147.

104 6 Hen. VIII, c. 1 (1514).

105 Shaw, ‘Sumptuary legislation in Scotland’, p. 99.

106 24 Hen. VIII, c. 13 (1533).

107 22 Edw. IV, c. 1 (1483).

108 1 Hen. VIII, c. 14 (1510).

109 Ibid.

110 6 Hen. VIII, c. 1 (1514). For more on furs, see E. M. Veale, The English Fur Trade in the later Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966).

111 24 Hen. VIII, c. 13 (1533). Luzernes are generally identified as the Eurasian Lynx.

112 1 Hen. VIII, c. 14 (1510).

113 6 Hen. VIII, c. 1 (1514).

114 1 Hen. VIII, c. 14 (1510).

115 6 Hen. VIII, c. 1 (1514).

116 24 Hen. VIII, c. 13 (1533).

117 Hayward, Rich Apparel, p. 96.

118 K. Ashley, ‘Material and symbolic gift-giving’, in E. J. Burns, ed. Medieval Fabrications: Dress, Textiles and other Cultural Imaginings (Basingstoke: Palgrave McMillan, 2004), pp. 140–41.

119 Hayward, Rich Apparel, p. 101.

120 Ibid., p. 348.

121 Harte and Fisher, State Control of Dress, pp. 135–37.

122 Kovesi Killerby, Sumptuary Law in Italy, p.7