Dressing A Tudor Lady from the Court of Henry VIII

gentlemen [Music] [Music] so my name is sarah morris and i'm the author of two books about aberdeen bianca a novel of ambulance viandra meaning in french the time will come a words written by anne's very own hand in her book of hours and you can still see that today in heath carlson and the second book is a non-fiction book it's a guidebook about all the places and artifacts associated with ambulance and this is my lady in waiting for the day this is a zarina bull a lady's arena ladies arena trained at the london college of fashion where she did theater costume and um as a result of her love of costume and all things stupid in fact everything you see here today is made with lady serena's very own hands all handstaged they are quite amazing and you'll have lots of chance to talk with zarina and i later about our relative passions and interests um so yes as a result of uh ladies arena's interest in tudor costume and tudors she set up her own business called tudor gowns about 18 months ago so she makes bespoke tudor clothing for all your tutoring needs as i say we'll both be around later to talk to you about books and about you to close should you wish to find out more but you might be thinking how on earth did we come here to be talking about what's going on under a lady skirts today well for me it started with the research of lethal bianca i'm not a professional historian so when i set out to write the book back in august 2010 i actually confess i knew very little about the tutors i had a lifelong passion for emblem but i needed what was really important for me from the beginning was historical accuracy i really wanted to make history real so i set about doing as much research as i could about all the different facets of anne's world so how the tudors would reverence one another how they would hawk hunt dance eat the great castles and palaces that they lived in but also of course how they dressed now i don't know some of you may be experts on tudor costume i don't know but certainly when i set out writing writing ltv i knew what a tudor lady looked like but it was a bit of an enigma of actually what happened and how it was all put together and what the different layers of the costume was about so i began to do some reenactments and this is where i met ladies arena who was also following her passion and as we promenaded around wonderful houses like this we were constantly stopped by people were asking us about our costume and going what was going on under all these layers so we thought we'd put together what i hope will be for you will be about 40 to 45 minutes of a very visual very entertaining talk i hope where you get a chance to be a fly on the wall in a lady's rain chamber ringing chamber is the tudor name for a a dressing chamber essentially and you'll be able to see exactly how a tuna costume is put together and sculpted into place um so that's a little bit about us um what i wanted to say first of all though it's a slight disclaimer we're not professional costumiers historical costumers we're just very passionate amateurs and we're going to share that with you today the other thing that muddies the water a little bit with tudor costume in being able to say you know this is exactly how they dressed at this time is that tuna fashion of course was changing all the time just like fashion today so you can see for example very different great very significant differences between tudor fashion at the beginning of the 16th century and the end of the 16th century but exactly when a farthing gale changed its shape or a petticoat was cast aside in favor of a different garment it's a little bit more difficult to pinpoint the other thing that tends to complicate things is a little like today i mean we have jumpers sweaters pullovers there is essentially three words for all the same thing well tudor the tudors have the same thing going on and so if you try to look back at the royal the wardrobe accounts you might often see for example a gown being called a curtail or a kernel being called a petticoat so when you look at the primary sources and try to work out exactly what a tudor lady would be wearing you have to try and unfathom all this and make the most of all the different sources so just just so we cover all the ground when we're trying to make sense of tudor clothing we're looking of course at extant portraits items of chew the clothing which still survive from the 16th century two methods are also a good source of information and then of course you have the royal wardrobe accounts as well so this is where we tend to draw all our bits and pieces from so we're about to start but let's create a little bit of ambiance uh here we are this wonderful house the vine um it is actually serena and i were just feeling quite touched by this it is 478 years ago to this very day that amberlynn arrived at the vine at the side of henry viii they were on progress the world progress in 1535 it had been one of the longest and most politically significant progresses of henry's reign it's big jolly really for two and a half months they've been hunting and hawking daily being um entertained by all the sun ability and gentry around oxfordshire gloucestershire they traveled through much of hampshire and they arrived here on friday uh friday the 15th of may um on in 1535. of course so there were guests of lord william sandys who was very important man at the tuna court he was henry's lord chamberlain um and lord chamberlain was the chewed and noble woman the tudor noble man women didn't have such important roles who was responsible for all the goings-on in the king's privy chamber as opposed to the public chambers and the vine a beautiful house today but much bigger in 1535 so it's a big courtyarded house much of it on the lawn just outside there so the foundations to a lot of the house of course are now lost it would a courtyard house was very typical of the tudor era and the king and queen would have occupied their respective sides whilst they were here and i think it's believed that ladies from the vine will confirm it to me but i think the long gallery is thought to have connected potentially the king and the queen's side that still survives with us today so let the 21st century just dissolve away for a moment and take yourself back to 1530 side 1535 on the queen side ambulance is getting ready for a day at court so you're going to see how a typical tudor noble woman at the pinnacle of tudor society would be would be dressed on an everyday basis we're in her writing chamber she's attended by her lady in waiting probably more than one and the ladies in waiting were usually married women who were also wives of the nobility and close personal friends of the queen so they attended her at her most intimate tasks and you finally here in my tudor night gown so i suppose you would call you know this is sort of similar to a modern day dressing gown essentially this gown would have been worn very informally usually within the privy chambers it's very comfortable to wear believe me when you're wearing one of these all day and you've been laced into it all day to get into a lovely flowing gown like this is just sheer relief um this beautiful gown as you can see is made of it it's black lady black it's black satin on the outside and then black taffeta and fur lined around the collar now most of us wouldn't dream of being painted for our portrait in our dressing gown i imagine is that that the greatest painter in the world in the in the land turns up at your door and you decide to be painted and progressing again this is exactly what we see with uh amberlynn here a holbein sketch of anne she's wearing i hope you see not a dissimilar piece of clothing do you see me wearing here she has her koi upon her head you see her smock which we'll come to in a moment fastened at the base of her neck and then you see this lovely full voluminous garment that she's wearing which is trimmed with fur around the collar much as you see me i have heard it said that um the reason amberlynn would have sat in something like that was that the garment was a very prized piece of clothing for her perhaps it would have been a gift maybe a gift from henry himself and in fact if you read the wardrobe accounts that are there is an account of amberlynn receiving material of black silk and taffeta to be made into a nightgown when she was at elven palace with henry in 1532 just prior to their monumental trip to calais so yes so here we have our our night garment thank you oh yes please okay could you collect could in the room could you collect my hood it's in a box ah oh that's cooler i hope i'm looking reasonably modest here i have to say if you see a peak of underwear that's because i'm just doing it for modesty of course tudor ladies didn't have any underwear as far as we know uh no knickers um and so so this would be the the you know the clothes they're basically the closest layer next to their skin their underwear and it's made of linen and um it is said that in the 16th century everybody came into the world dressed in linen and everybody went out of the world dressed in linen which basically means that babies were swaddled in linen for the first few months of their life quite a long time actually and the dead were always wrapped in linen before they were buried um so in between whether you were a man or a woman whether you were a peasant working in the field or whether you were the king or queen themselves you would wear copious amounts of linen but what marked out your status was how much linen you owned how often you could change that your like your chimneys i should say your smock your chinese or your shift which all the same name for this particular item of clothing that you see me here and as queen i would be wearing a very fine soft linen against the skin obviously i'd be able to change my linen on a daily basis not so of course if you were a peasant working in the field now um a smock could be plain as you see me wearing here today or it could be beautifully embroidered so these are actually still survivors from the 16th centuries and that's just wonderful and they're in the museum of bath and you can see that they're completely embroidered over the summer good health waiting for you over the bodice around the collar and on the cuffs uh with what's called black work so that means it's it's embroidery with black thread you get that fantastic close i love the little b in the corner it's fantastic um equally popular would be embroidery with red thread and that would be called red work but there's accounts of all sorts of coloured silks being used and if you were amber lynn then certainly you would be most familiar with having your smocks embroidered with gold or silver thread in fact we see this here i just got forward in catherine parna this is actually from the 1540s but if you look at her cuffs look very carefully you can see some golden embroidery and undoubtedly that's golden thread used to avoid at her smock so in fact you can see here a different type of neckline as you can see i've got a square cup neckline here in the 1540s it's a good example of how garments have evolved this is this is a slightly different style of dress which wasn't really available in the hadn't kind of come into being in the 1540s 1530s i should say this kind of raised collar and we can see the raised collar of the smock which is complementing the gown if we go back you'll see again the little collar here and that would be quite often worn for example with an english gown which i'll come and tell you all about as we go on through the talk and then of course i have this square cut neckline and that's very much determined by the type of outer gown that i'm going to wear so as you see with ladies arena here you can see her smock above the neckline and and then the square cut neckline to complement that so so you know you had a different design now why did you wear um an item such as this well first and foremost it protected the skin against the outermost layers of your clothing but as lady serena and i are well aware from our days doing reenactment during hot summer english sunshine is that you do tend to perspire quite a lot and the beauty about being able to wear a smock like this is that the perspiration is absorbed and so you can wash it basically and of course you it's very difficult in fact impossible to wash some of these fine materials that made up the outer gown without damaging them so the way tudors tended to deal with their outermost clothing is they brushed them down they'd scent them but you'd never think to wash this but you could wash your your linen so so that's the smock or the shift and just see that underneath that you can see i've got my tudor stockings or my hose on with my where's my little artist and we know that they did wear garters um i don't have a picture of that but eleanor of toledo's coffin she was the duchess of florence in the mid 16th century and when her coffin was opened by the english the italian authorities they found her wearing red stockings with little silk red garters with them so um most of the stockings i believe um certainly in the early 16th century were woolen but although i think there's accounts of elizabeth the first later on instead of having silk stockings obviously the height of fashion and opulence and then on my little feet here i've got my tudor shoes slippers as they were called in the tudor period so um there's actually not much information about tudor shoes and slippers if you look in the wardrobe accounts i've seen it said that henry viii had velvet slippers silk slippers but what we do know is that they did in england where their slippers flat whereas on the continent you would more often have a heel associated with your shoe so um so that's my undergarments now the next layer i'm actually not going to physically put on today because we've got three layers of lacing to do we'll be here all day if we put on every single layer but i am going to tell you all about it so the next layer is if i just move on oh that's amberlynn just modelling the square cut neckline and as you can see hers is embroidered with that black work again that i was talking to you about oops and then we have also the tudor slippers so this is a whole sketch by hold on it beautifully demonstrates the front and the rear of a tudor french again and then you can just see the little slipper poking through the bottom there that typical square sort of rounded end that we so associated with tuna footwear and hopefully that will take us onto our bodies so the next layer that a tudor lady would wear would be her pair of bodies also known as bodies also known as stays so again we have this complication of three different words describing exactly the same article and the the purpose of this pair of bodies or stage is basically to provide definition to the bodice now in the early 16th century it's not like the corsets we've come to know associated with the tudor period not the victorian period that were highly boned and meant to clinch in the waste of the smallest waste possible that's really not what tudor stays were about they were just about providing definition particularly to the decolletage so once you're laced in and here is an example of a stain that serena has made once you're laced in you get this lovely flat front and the intention is that the breast is pushed up so you get that rather raised decolletage that we might associate i was going to get serena tomorrow you see what i mean um now this particular pair is backlash let's turn it around so you can see the back lacing on it this particular pair has been backlaced but as you can see over here on the slide on the left-hand picture you have a stays from the funeral effigy of elizabeth the first it's a bit later on in the period but front placed in this instance both of them have tacits which are these sort of moldings that allow the the space to just sort of skim across the hip providing greater comfort for the wearer and then we have over on the right there another example of a back lacing pair of bodies or stays again these were taken from the coffin of eleanor of toledo they're made of red velvet in this instance that reminds me to talk to you about red just briefly red was an incredibly popular color for tudor ladies undergarments so they they had stockings in red they had stays in red they have petticoats in red i have heard it said that that was it was because red was thought to have a highly beneficial health effect so there you go get wearing red ladies we'll all be fine um so yes i think that's all i need to say about the stays except that what would commonly be the case is around the waistline they might might have had loops from which they would attach a petticoat so the other function of the stays was to hold a petticoat up and again very often a red petticoat so there are my so those are the stays and i think with that i'm probably ready for the next layer so this would be um do you have to imagine in my stays on my petticoat and now i'm going to step into my fathering area a lady always allows her her ladies to dress her so um i thought the history of the father being gale i don't know how many of you know that it came into england in 1501 with catherine of aragon when she came across to marry prince arthur her and her ladies came across with their spanish farthing gales got here and realized nobody was wearing them so they ditched them straight away to begin with in favor of the long flowing skirts that kind of hugged and skimmed the body which were the fashion of the time however at some point clearly catherine decided she wanted her fathering girl back before she re-adopted it and started to wear it again and of course the queen was wearing that so it became fashionable and uh so the spanish farthing gale came into uh in came into english costume clearly its main role is to provide definition and shape to the skirts when it was first adopted it was perhaps more modest in size than this so the skirts still remained relatively a narrow sort of cone shape and then as the decades progressed the farthing gale became more voluminous and therefore the definition of the ladies skirts became more voluminous and here we see um the shape of the skirt of this is princess elizabeth from the mid mid 1540s and by this time the farthing gale was was quite stiff and it gave these lovely sort of stiff conical skirt um the train which uh we'll also talk about when we get to talk about the gown which was popular in the 1530s had disappeared by that time so the skirts were just this sort of cone shape and in terms of materials because what you're seeing here is quite commonly appears in the wardrobe account so you hear of sort of silks and you hear of red velvet again red comes up quite a lot um so i'm i think i'm probably ready for my next layer the next layer is a very confusing layer of clothing i think to the uninitiated it took me quite a long time to figure out how this fitted into the wardrobe of cheaper noble lady but this is the curtain i'll just step into it for a moment and then i'll start telling you all about it so the reason i think that it's a bit confusing as again this is as you can see it's front fascinating so i'm just going to have to try and try but all of you can see me and talk to all of you while serena starts lacing up so and the reason i think that the curtail is a little bit confusing as an item of clothing um is because in the 15th century the curtail was actually the outermost gown worn by a lady and i'm just going to have to lean across so if you see the picture there on the right hand side we could just move back to those ladies um if you look at the picture on the right hand side you'll see a lady she's clearly not a noble lady she's working she looks like she's making event to me um but she's wearing a sort of the curtail of the 15th century was a typical type of gown of that era it was close fitting around the shoulders and the bodice there was a seam around the waist and then the skirts fell away in quite a natural fold um and that's i believe how it was through most of the 15th century then at some point during the 16th century the tudor nobility thought no no no we're not having that we need another layer of opulence and so the curtail became the second most outer gown and the either the english or french gown which i'll be talking to you about in a moment superseded it and became the outermost external layer of clothing so the curtail which in the 15th century was very often called a gown very much became a curtail and the french and english gown became the game i'm not making any sense it can be a little bit confusing um so you can see here i'm actually um being laced up at the front and indeed turtles could be laced up in the front and in fact if i was a peasant working on the land it would be absolutely essential because i need to be able to do up my own clothing one of the things that becomes very apparent as soon as you start wearing tudor noble ladies clothing is you can't get into it yourself you actually absolutely need somebody to lace you in and hence that was all a matter of wealth and status of course um so yes i'm being and then normally at this point we tend to heal our bosoms into place so that we get the appropriate decolletage but i'm going to save you that spectacle and just keep going as i am so i was saying that um the uh curtail evolved and became again the curtail evolved as the as the 16th century dawned and here we see mary tudor over on the right now on the altimas layer she's wearing something called an english gown which i'll talk to you about in a moment but underneath that and you can see it from her elbows to her cuffs and in the front of her skirt you that that's that would be her curdle her second most outer layer well done thank you very much now i'm wearing this um lovely sort of um crimson uh satin which is beautiful and a really rich fabric and certainly wouldn't be available to me every day choose a noble person a shooter person um but it actually for a curdle it's not embellished and you'll see the reason for that in a minute because when i put on my outer gown this layer in this instance is not going to be visible so it doesn't have to be a rich and ornate fabric that we see here that must be probably some kind of cloth of black gold that mary's wearing which would be incredibly expensive but was all part of the show so um so yes so all of this is going to be covered up in a moment and because um because of that because when you see my friend if you see serena ladies arena here she has this deep v slit in her gown um this would either be a curdle or in this case i'm going to wear my four-part because i need that part of my skirt it's going to be visible so it needs to be beautiful rich material that's going to be on display so this is a lady's four part you can see it's just a simple this triangular piece of material but always as rich and as opulent as you could afford it so um this is a kind of a silk damask late last night silver cage um so um and we see here again i just clicked onto it before we've got another close-up from a portrait of mary tudor again and here you can see um the four part of her skirt and critically the four part always matched the material of the fault sleeve so you can see her falsely peeking out from the elbow to the cuff and as i continue to get dressed you'll see me actually put on my false sleeves and you'll see how the two pieces of material actually tally up so having put my uh floor part in place i'm now ready for the gown this is a bit of a monster to dive into so i'm going to have to leave you for a second while i disappear now this is um this is quite a heavy gown because it's autumn outside it's a little bit more chilly so as the queen i'm going to be wanting to pick something that's going to keep me warm throughout the day so this is made out of a beautiful velvet and the sleeves are trimmed with fur there we [Music] there we go good so once my lady sets about lacing me in hello sorry you missed the first few layers i should just do a quick recap um so let me talk to you about gowns a tudor noble lady had two basic styles of gown to choose from the first was the english gown and i must admit when i came to learn about the tudors i didn't really re i always thought of the french gown but i didn't really have the picture of the english gown in my mind so this was a bit of a revelation for me at the time so the english gown um as you can see we've got christina of denmark on the left-hand side it's only about 16. it's a portrait commissioned by henry viii when he was casting around europe looking for his new bride and it's christina such a spirited girl who was said who said yes i'd gladly give the king of england my hand in marriage if only i had two heads so uh yeah she certainly had her head literally screwed on the correct way um so here we see christina of denmark in an english the night gown that you saw me wear at the beginning of the talk the point about the english gown is it's close fitting around the shoulders and then it falls away in just one swathe of fabric to the ground and sort of fairly in this instance quite loose folds um as you can see like like the night gown i was wearing um christina's gown is trimmed with fur it is just possible it was lined with fur if it was winter and you really did need obviously that extra warmth and you have these beautiful voluminous sleeves which are caught in at the cup as the century wore on the english gown evolved in style so here on the right hand side you've got a picture of from about 1570 i think this is so it's again it's a contemporary drawing and draw your attention to the ladies particularly on the left the two ladies they're both wearing english gowns it's a bit different though they're obviously more fitted around the bodice but they're still falling away in one straight cut of fabric to the ground the english gown was always fastened at the front and the fastening was clear and obvious so it was fastened with a piece of ribbon as you see with christina of denmark or probably on the other one fastened with hooks and eyes the french gown as we may see as we come to one of the other slides was fastened normally at the back in the 1530s but could be fastened down the side or at the front but in that instance you'd always put an extra layer of fabric called a stomacher across the front to hide the lacing so you would never see the lacing on the front of a french gown just to say also you've got these different sleeve styles coming in with the english gown so they could be puffed as you see with christina of denmark or they could be just sort of long fitting all the way fairly close fitting to the arm right through to the cuff as you see with one of those ladies there or just this short puff that finishes at around the elbow and being it's another good picture that shows how the turtle could be visible beneath an english gown so you can see how particularly the second lady in from the left you can see that lovely there's some kind of damascus material showing through through the front slit of her gown so um there is no evidence that this game although it looks more comfortable than this gown there's no evidence that the english gown was used informally so i just told you through gasps so yeah it was it was very much a formal gown and so certainly would have been something that um you could have chosen to wear you know at court and be perfectly acceptable to do so and then we move on to the french gown [Music] which is perhaps the game we all associate i think most people associate with the shooter period it's certainly the gown that you're seeing me being laced into here and i don't know exactly when the french gown came to england but one imagines that mary tudor sister of henry viii who became the queen of france i know she's credited to have brought the french hood to england so i suspect she would manage to bring a gown with her as well and no doubt when amberlynn became henry viii um paramour and then consort she certainly popularized the french fashions and was very much known for her french ways and here we see two more of henry's queens i've got jane seymour of course if we're really fed up it's a great therapy it's exact revenge um so we've got jay seymour over on the left hand side there and of course catherine part on the right and they're both wearing very slightly different variations of the the french gown but essentially the same basic uh costume with the very tight fitting around the shoulders around the bodice you have a waist seam as you see here and then the skirts falling away with that deep centered v down the front and the floor part for the turtle visible i suppose the main difference perhaps between these two pictures is catherine the sleeves are starting to evolve and i'll talk to you a little bit about the evolution of the sleeve you might just notice just that catherine's past sleeves are just starting to get a little bit bigger and they became a little bit more voluminous through the 1540s and stiffened and as well i'll talk to you a little bit more about that as we go along um so here i am in my um chocolate brown velvet chocolate with my fur sleeves now of course what you wore in the 16th century was who you were essentially and vice versa so today you often you know people often try to dress as individuals so that they can be different well in tudor society you dressed so that everybody would know exactly who you were in tudor society so of course there were the suntree laws which were reinforced by the tudors quite or tried to anyway i think mostly flamey ignored them but um this this um determined what you were able to wear according to your rank so you could only wear silk for example if you were an earl or above so nerla marquez or the duke or king or the queen the royal family were the only people permitted to wear crimson scarlet purple so if you're a tudor you would ignore exactly somebody's status when they walked through the door by what they were wearing the other thing that determines what i might wear during the day as the queen is of course the climax of what the season is and i alluded to that earlier so i am wearing a heavier gown um of velvet and fur but in the summer as lazarina and i know it's much more comfortable if you're wearing your silks and your satins and your taffetas with maybe your velvet sleeves folded back and of course the tudors were in the midst of a mini ice age as well the temperatures were sort of two to three degrees cooler than they are today and they lived outdoors you know we spend so much time indoors from telling on the computer or whatever we do of course in researching he's kidding me i need some breath left to talk about this job thank you so um yeah in researching in the footsteps of amberlynn we we've done a whole section on the 1535 progress and it's fascinating to see the accounts of what they did but essentially almost every single day they seem to be out hunting and hawking from from morning till after the sun had gone down some wonderful accounts that survived from their time in gloucester on this very same progress 1535 progress where they went out they spent all the day in hinting around the gloucestershire countryside stopping at local gentry along the way and then when they got back to the city gates of gloucester it was after dark and they were met by torchbearers and taken back to their launching so they were out for hours and hours so you need to dress appropriately certainly i'm just making sure i haven't missed anything here oh i just wanted to talk to you about the train yes that's absolutely right so i mentioned that um at the beginning of the 16th century certainly up until the 1530s it was quite common for a lady to have a train i've got the tiniest but not really on this one but as you can see here this is um again i'm going back to eleanor of toledo richness came out when they opened her coffin this was the dress that she was dressed in it's thought to be her wedding dress actually and you there is actually a picture in the element of toledo in this very dress which is why they've managed to marry the two up but we can see here beautifully this is this little train but in england certainly the train had disappeared by the end of the 1530s and there we go and so i suppose the last thing i wanted to talk to you about on on the gown is is just to go back and talk about the different layers and about the type of material so this slide shows beautifully all the different layers we've been talking about so if you look carefully you can see a very thin transparent sort of chemise just scooping around the base of her necks that's another kind of style if you like of neckline and then the red layer that you see there i'm i'm interpreting that of probably being her stays her red velvet stays and then the black being the curtail fastened up the front and then you have this final layer of the grey damask and if you look really carefully you'll see um fur coming up from the neckline can you see the little threads of fur and this tells us that it seems that the bodices of these gowns could be fur lined for extra warmth we certainly know the trains were so when they did have trains you you could have if you were very wealthy you're trained lined with fur and you're able to they seem to be able to hitch it up probably for practicality's sake you know you don't want your train one of the things we find is that when you get home after a day walking around your skirts are filthy so it was very practical to do that but also it showed everybody that if you could afford to have your skirt of your train lined you were somebody to be reckoned with uh so yeah so we see the bodice lined with fur here which um must be very snuggly indeed i think we're probably onto sleeves so i'm ready to have my sleeves so again this was a bit of a revelation to me i didn't realize that you just had false sleeves so the french down here this is the main sleeve that you see here and what's happening is that my fault sleeve is being laced into place now just for pure practicality's purpose my cuff is actually sewn into this but as you've seen on the previous pictures actually you know it was the cuff of the smock that tended to be seen beneath beneath the shoes there is a huge amount of debate as to whether this was actually smock poking through or whether they actually did sew in bits of material because i know quite a lot of re-enactors who've tried to wear this type of sleeve with the smog what happens is the smoke just disappears all the time and you don't get these lovely sort of puffs of fabric i'll just see if it shows better a little bit like you can see a princess elizabeth there it just sinks in and you're losing it and you're forever sort of pulling it out and it's highly irritating and i can imagine that you know maybe maybe they did i have like a a false smock that the peeps sorry i just need to go back exactly so um a little bit on the evolution of the sleeve so in the 1520s we see a typical sleeve mated pleated material but what was common was always this slashing along the underside and that was caught together with egglets and if i can just show you a little bit we move on to this picture of james seymour we've got a very similar sleeve it's quite as close fitting to the arm again mated with pleated material but this time you can see the bejeweled aglets that are clipping the materials together and you can see our version of adlets here and these were part of a lady's jewellery and were you know extremely costly highly bejeweled and if we move on a little bit to the 15th or 40s if you recall i was talking to you about how the sleeve evolved and here you can really see this in the picture of princess elizabeth how the sleeve has is much more voluminous and it looks stiffened almost um and certainly it's increasingly obvious as part of the decoration of the gown and again always highly bejeweled and again you can see example of how material of fault sleeve is matching the material of the curtain or the four parts so i think i am hoodless we can go for the english i think we'll talk about the wardrobe era my hood has been left elsewhere never mind actually um zarina you can model your production so and the next layer of clothing would be the hood absolutely essential peaceable there i think there's a passage in the bible i think it's in corinthians which stated that a woman should not show her hair and that then had the profound effect of determining how the head gear that women wore throughout christendom during the medieval period a woman would have her hair long of course the only time she was permitted to wear it loose was if she was a child a girl on married woman basically or she was the queen of england on her coronation day so you would need no hood because obviously the crown would have been placed upon your head instead um other than that a married lady always wore her hair up and covered with headgear in the 1530s there are basically two different styles of headgear you've got the english hood here um this particular style of hood in one form or another had been around through the 15th century but tend to have those really long pieces that you might have seen in the portraits of elizabeth of york see that's gone now but you still get this um all the hair is clearly swept away it's not visible it's quite stark if you want to just can you just um we've got an english wood here so you can see how the hair is really swept up kept out of the way and i have to say i've tried these english hoods myself it tends to age me by about 10 years there's something quite severe as you can see here it's quite severe isn't it and so you can see when the french hood came in and and why it was so risque because you can actually see part of the hair as you can see with serena here you can see her hair under her french hood so yeah very very risque indeed and of course jay seymour after amblin's execution took back to the english hood because she wanted to wash her hands of anything and anything french and she wanted to be seen as absolutely english and absolutely proper so she really was known for wearing her english hoods um so i'm sorry i'm going to be homeless my apologies to you um but now we're on for the fight we're nearly there but i'm looking rather plain aren't i so i need a bit of bling i need a bit of bling to brighten up the costume now um a lady's uh parrour of jewels in the tudor period would have consisted of her binaments so this is this is the sort of the filament you can see it on the left hand side there you have a picture of mary tudor in her wedding portrait with charles brandon she's wearing the most amazing costume it's so beautiful but you can see the filaments around the edge of her hood and they would always match with her castaneda which is the tudor wood for a necklace so that typically would be two strands you'd have the choker one very close around the base of the neck as you can see here and then a longer necklace that would dip away beneath the beneath the neckline pendant of course was very popular and you can see also the jewelling around the edge of the gown itself now i have that sewn into this gown again i've i've actually uh there seems to be now to me that edging on mary tudor seems to be actually built into the gown itself but it looks slightly different in this portrait of jane seymour and i think it's it's it's widely held but the jewelry stitched in around the neckline was actually stitched into the curtain and not onto the gown itself so you can actually see where jane's red gown ends and then the jewels kind of sit above it so they must be sewn onto her curtain again you can see her chinese which is just lined with the black embroidery there and while we're here by the way i talked to you about the front lacing french gown and and if you had a front lacing french down you'd have to wear a stomacher to cover up the lacing and here you can see with jane if you see the little pins just down the side there i thought to be the stomacher that she's wearing in place um the other pieces of uh part of the proro of jewelry for a lady would be her girdle belt would you like to fix my girdle i'm feeling breath without my pearls i'll just hold it in place so a girdle belt which was a very expensive piece of jewelry again absolutely often highly bejeweled you could have a tassel on the end a crucifix a pendant a panda so you could keep away the smells if you so wish you could just sort of sit with your commander whenever it was getting a little bit too smelly um i've also heard that rings could also be have scent in them so you could just sort of delicately lift the ring to your nose if you wanted to keep any foul smells away this is a long piece of so excuse me a moment i just have to adjust my curls so so um and then the final thing would be the uh two bracelets if you can see mary tuna here has two bejeweled bracelets so very often they had a pair of bracelets that they would wear at the car and obviously a multitude of rings that goes without saying and i think we're probably yes getting to the end so i'm apart from my hood i am pretty much fully dressed and ready to go so um this is how a lady in the 1530s would gradually build up her wardrobe and get ready for her day at court and i'm very happy to take any questions that you might have or if you want to touch any of the fabrics or want to know anything else we're certainly happy to answer any questions for you and we will be staying around there are i do have some copies of the books if anybody is interested in purchasing them and zarina will be here to talk to you about tudor gowns and any of your tutoring needs if you're absolutely now dying to find yourself chewed again for christmas [Music] and thinking you have a team mate of course i have to give a health warning though if you have one maid you won't stop i now currently have four and they are so voluminous they sort of take up more and more of your wardrobe space and my 21st century clothes are being progressively confined to a smaller smaller bit of the wardrobe so yes so yeah i'm happy to answer any questions could you go hunting in that outfit do you know the hunting question is a really interesting one because i searched high and low when i was doing the book to try and find out what ladies wore when they hunted it's so difficult to imagine that you could hunt in this i mean you can't actually raise your hands that far above your head you know you are i have we have done archery in these costumes so you can certainly do archery and we've done falconry um but if you imagine the saddles i don't know when you've seen saddle from the i mean there is one that exists i think it's in stratford and it's got this tiny little saddle there's nothing you know the horn that they have with the victorian so they don't they didn't even have that in the 1530s so they're perching on these these hawks i don't know how they did it the only thing i've seen is that there's a woodcutter elizabeth the first who's i think about the sort of you know doing the honours there's a stag that's been killed and she's she's wearing a sort of a very formal girl like this i think it's more of an english scam but it's quite fitted but i've there seems to be a real paucity of information about what they want to hunt and i have asked all sorts of different people who do reenactment and you know do a lot of stuff with tudor clothes and yeah i haven't got a satisfactory answer but it's difficult to to imagine really um but then again their hunting was quite different as well so you know when we see hunts galloping across the countryside they tended their hunts were more managed so there was a sort of a i can't remember the name but it was like a cheap huntsman they'd find the stags and then they'd drive them in front of where they were waiting so there's an account with ann um hunting with i think it's the french ambassador sometime in the early 1530s and it literally talks about the deal being driven in front of them with a crossbow so they've just sort of stood there so i don't think they always went out hunting at a pace even though it'd be quite nice to think yeah exactly so um and same with falconry they you know they they would cast the bird off from the fist but obviously they didn't go after what happened they had they had falconers who ran into the hedgerows and caught the prey and did all of that so it was all very much sort of you know went home a lot [Applause] yeah so yeah a lot of posing but you know you and the dancing you know the pave such a stately dance but when you're wearing these dresses you begin to immediately understand you know um you know why they danced in that way it was when you get this beautiful movement with the skirts when you start to move it's just you know we've been fairly static but they have a lovely lovely sort of sway and swish to them as you as you walk around and when you're dancing and you do that kind of step for dancing with skirts really beautifully they keep the waist quite comfortable they didn't pull you right no they weren't meant to constrict the waste it was just meant to give you that lovely definition of the raised bust really um and they are comfortable i mean who often say gosh but you once you're laced in your body just seems to accommodate to it and it gives you a lovely posture there's no slouching around like you know you have to really hold yourself very elegantly it really lends itself to elegance and grace that's what we love about them i'm still waiting to go to my life ambition is to go to waitrose dressed like this just fun so when the ladies were pregnant they just let them get looser good yeah they've even got a slide um there we go pregnant ladies for you so yes they let out the laces of the gown and that's what you'll read about the laces were let out and they they quite often inserted an extra panel of material which was called a stomacher i believe it's the same thing although it's worn slightly differently here and that's what they did they just kept letting as far as i can tell they just let out the lace of the gown and they put in the additional material and yeah what they did with other intimate ladies needs is a little bit more perplexing i've heard of course maybe but people were pregnant for so many years and maybe feeding them that they didn't have the last world problems that's got so good but yes yeah i mean well that's true i mean you you know when you do the research into the tudor families as i did for ltv and i was trying to work out who's you know ltv little d'angelo i always call it ltd for short um uh you know you constantly coming across massive families of ten plus and more and more and then some and uh yeah i mean it's just seemed to be an annual round of just being pregnant really so yeah unless you were amberlynn yeah so yeah anybody else but it's about the men's clothing well yes can you remind me we had a talk a few weeks ago about what men wore and you know big baggy pants yeah um henry ate four and they had a really strange name she told us i can't remember it it's something like a bully kindle or it's a really really weird name well i have to hold my hands up and say i can guess i'm not you know i i know much less about men's clothes and are very equally mystifying but they're often a doublet and hose well this is the dublin the hose with the structures too yeah well she gave us a really strange but there could be you see that's yeah that's the confusion you you do get different names for the same item of clothing um probably local names as well yeah how well do your stockings stay up to date actually these are yeah these are okay i mean yeah i should have brought the picture of elena toledo stockings but i mean they just yeah they look very like listen at the moment these are absolutely so they're staying up fine um but my daughter's gone on this obviously i've got elastic um but you know with the garter tied in place but it's actually quite uncomfortable i find that actually funnily enough the whole thing i wear it's actually the garters i find most uncomfortable because they're tied so tightly around your legs thank you no no there is no give yeah and you have to keep them quite tight to keep them up um and i'm sure without any elastic they had to do that to keep the stockings up otherwise they would have been around their ankles i mean in fact i mean i'm you know as you saw i lost my gutter as i came in i've lost my gaster doing dancing in all sorts as well you know no i mean i think they did have boots they did they did wear boots um again i was trying to research hunting attire for the novel i was writing and the lady i was talking to about that said yeah they would have a short boot um but and i know later in the century it certainly did i mean there's a beautiful pair of boots of elizabeth the first it's got all the buttons on the side it's just exquisite uh with heels and the work but um so yeah i think they did have boots and probably boots for riding but and i think um i mean obviously the queen wouldn't but if people weren't walking out in the streets they had these little wooden kind of patterns of things didn't they have to raise them raise them off the ground and follow those on the ground to keep their shoes off yeah yeah yes yeah those nasty things on the ground wonderful so what age would a young girl be put into clothes like this oh quite early i mean the little children were like miniatures well the picture we've got [Music] they didn't have children's clothing you know once i think they were out with their nappies they were into well they didn't always wear sort of presses they did folks yeah yes they did that wasn't it sorry when they went riding did they wear capes and things and they did happen i mean they weren't the worst items of clothing i've certainly read in the royal accounts particularly eighth of capes and so on you know so there were there were other uh items of clothing that you could wear around here i've not talked about those today of course they have the lovely flavors in the hope that the fleas would jump on to the fur and there are portraits if you look there are a couple of ladies with their flea furs sort of in their hands etc there's a lot of differences about how clean they kept themselves yeah so they did wash some say they didn't wash very often as you say you've got your garment underneath which you did wash but they're actual bodies we don't really know that no but i mean henry viii had a bath didn't i mean he had a bath he had a bane tower yes at places like hampton court i mean it was unusual he had he was he had a piped hot water into his mouth it was like a barrel it's like a big barrel so yeah so i mean he you know he he definitely did a babe i don't know how no the stays were the actual sort of what we would call a corset yeah but they would only come up to that you know it's all about shape and definition support isn't it [Music] so ladies could wear um in the summer they might want to protect their delicate skin from the sun and in the winter if they're outside they might want extra warmth so they would wear something called apartment so you will have actually seen this on a lot of um portraits but sometimes it looks like it's part of the dress and you don't realize it's actually a separate piece which makes it very versatile actually because it does change you'll probably see it like as it goes on it changes the look of the dress quite significantly even though you're only wearing you're quite small tied on basically this is yeah everything is just tied into place um and it's i mean this is furline it's just oh it's a god saying do and there's wind i mean it just keeps you so warm um i should do my own thing so yes so this is a pilot and sorry you're never here so if your lady in waiting is a lady she's obviously got the lady yes to a person dressing themselves yeah well probably that probably the um the servants of the ladies in waiting were probably they were in the background they certainly wouldn't attend on their their lazy waiting in in the queen's chambers although you often hear of of servants hanging around the presence chamber um you know if their if their masters were eating they would just sort of hang around in the background um but yes but you do hear for example that um amberlyn's coronation procession you have ambulance you have all her ladies in chariots and horses and then right at the back you've got servants of all the ladies who were on in chariots and horses but only one step seven that doesn't doesn't go so that's interesting isn't it because maybe if there's only servants of the ladies that's where it does stop um can you imagine everything together there are on your front feet there are yes we would normally actually just tie those in just to anchor the performance the lazy ones yes they're actually tied on with ribbons yeah just yes there's ribbons in the dress ribbons on the holes where yeah laces go like what stitching is that finished with this stitching i mean they're actually over a metal um eyelet but in the actual time of production back in the tudor times they would have used little medical rings uh put them together made a hole and a buttonhole stitch over the top of them oh so they did actually have some kind of metal thing though yeah they've just had little little metal rings if you know they were they had the means if it was just more simpler peasant then you would just make literally the hole and then do the buttonhole stitch [Music] yeah if you look at portraits going on and again i don't thought to be an expert on later in the century but with most of the writing i've done has been around the 1520s and 30s but obviously the the hood sort of disappears you get more caps coming in you get these elizabethan little jaunty elizabethan cats and you see a lot of hair there so i think really by the end of the century this idea of having to keep the care covered was gone really and but they still wore head dresses and it's all part of the ornamentation he was very proud of her hair yeah and a lot but a lot of it was showing this wasn't it was just little cat the little hats and the couch the influence she was the queen she could do what she liked yeah absolutely [Applause] you

Channel: The Tudor Travel Guide

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Keywords: Tudor, Tudor costume, how a Tudor lady dresses, Tudor gowns, Tudor dress, Tudor gown, Tudor lady, Tudor Queen, The Tudors, French gown, French Hood, farthingale, Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII, King Henry VIII, tudor lady, 1530s, the tudor travel guide, The Tudor Travel Guide You, 1530s tudor gowns

Id: nyEioB07qqk

Length: 65min 32sec (3932 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 20 2014