Someone asked me to summarize what having a husky is like. They’re like no dog you have ever had, and in my 45 years I’ve had a lot: shi-tzus, poodles, labs, dobermans, Australian kelpies, and Australian cattle dogs. I described owning a husky as having a mildly brain-damaged wolf as a roommate. This isn’t too far off in terms of evolution, but it helps you think about things from their perspective: these are more “wolfish” dogs than most, and it’s why my family jokingly refer to them as derpwolves.

Thus, huskies are the most maddening, beautiful, lovable, high maintenance dogs you will ever have. Because they’re so difficult, and that HBO series that shall not be named, way too many huskies have ended up as surrenders to kill shelters. So, before you decide that you want to try giving one of these big furry maniacs a forever home, here’s some things you should know.

1.  Hair!

Huskies shed.

A lot.

They need brushing at least twice a week, but that still won’t be enough. You need to accept that husky hair will get EVERYWHERE in your life, including your work clothes. You’ll have to make sure to vacuum and sweep more often. Husky hair tumbleweeds in every corner of your dwelling are just a fact of life. Invest in a company that makes lint rollers. Some people even use the reverse function on their shop vacs to “blow” the fur off their huskies when they are “blowing” their coat in the spring.

2.  Boredom = Destruction

Huskies may be hard to train due to their stubborn nature, but that doesn’t mean they are unintelligent dogs. Quite the opposite: they’re very intelligent and need mental stimulation. If left to their own devices, with no one to interact with, they will amuse themselves by destroying all the things. Their prey drive is often high, so to them, taking squishy things and shaking them until the stuffing comes out both ends is how they play. It is just part of their nature. If you’re not home, and they’re bored, bad things tend to happen to your possessions. And if their toys aren’t built like metal Tonka trucks, they will destroy them.

3.   Huskies need exercise and stimulation

Huskies are working dogs bred to run and run and run, and that energy has to come out somewhere. They usually need a job. Your job is to find a channel for that energy. Whether it’s lots and lots of running, staying at home with them most of the time to provide frequent stimulation, or a second husky for them to play with (outside or inside), you have to be mindful of this energy, and give it outlets. They’re also very “pack” oriented. If someone isn’t home all day with them most days, they need a buddy, preferably another husky. Why? Because they’re derpwolves, and they will find mischief and ways to entertain themselves if left alone.

Or else.

4.   Prey drive

Remember the whole “brain damaged wolf” thing? Part of that wolfishness is a desire to hunt small prey. Cats. Rodents. Small children if they’re not used to them. Our boy Loki caught and dispatched a squirrel when he was 6 months old, and it happened in the blink of an eye. There are horror stories about huskies that grew up with cats, and then suddenly ate their housemate after years of peace.

Huskies generally aren’t recommended for people with cats. Forewarned is forearmed.

5.   Possessiveness / aggression

Huskies, in my experience, are much more likely to be possessive of their food and toys than other breeds. If you get a husky as a puppy, you need to practice techniques to make sure they don’t get food aggressive later on. There are some good videos out there on how to do it. But, this is one of those things where if you don’t want to get bit later on, you need to start early and reinforce it constantly, even if it means a few extra minutes out of your day.

Similarly, if you crate train them, this is their lair. This is their space, and they will often get possessive of it, and the things in it. You need to use a lot of the same techniques meant to eliminate food aggression to teach them not to be defensive about their “spaces”.

6.   Aloofness and difficulty training

Imagine a sci-fi movie about an alien race that selectively breeds another species on their planet to become dumber and dumber, more and more servile, and to instinctually worship the ground the alien race walks on. The subjugated species adores their masters with utter slavish devotion, and lives to please them. It would be pretty awful and terrifying. But, that’s what we’ve done with most breeds of dogs. They really do worship us, fawn all over people, and seek our approval and attention.

Huskies, however…

Huskies really don’t live for our approval. They’re affectionate on their own terms. They want to be around you, but not on top off you all the time. Like that introvert best friend who loves quietly sitting next to you in the family room playing his Nintendo Switch, they’re affection adjacent. They like us, but we’re still just best friend roommates. We’ve never heard of an emotional support husky.

Because they do not live for your approval, they’re harder to train. If they don’t feel like doing it, finding something that motivates them can be tough. Particularly because of point 7…

7.   Picky eaters, except when they’re not.

Huskies can be picky eaters. Ours certainly are. Why? I don’t know, but my guess is that they have better survival instincts that other breeds of dog that are a lot more distant from wolves. Wild animals tend to be more cautious about what they eat, especially when it’s new (rats will spend upwards of 10 minutes investigating a new food source).

At the same time, they’ll occasionally eat weird stuff (like mulch, grass, or socks) and will get upset digestive systems. Be prepared to feed them rice, boiled chicken, and pumpkin to deal with dog diarrhea.

Eww.

This means you’ll have to rotate dog foods, and find what treat will motivate them when doing training. They’re sure as **** not doing it just to please you, hooman.

8.  Get them a buddy

Huskies, despite being kind of aloof, still need lots and lots of interaction with others as pack animals. They enjoy it! It also helps channel their energies into less destructive areas (well, generally, not always). Consider getting two: of similar age, not litter mates, of opposite sexes. You want to avoid litter-mate syndrome. But, it curbed a lot of our huskies’ more destructive impulses when we got him another husky to play with. Trips to the dog park can also be great for them: most of the time they know how to “dog” (i.e. they have enough instinct left to know how to interact with other dogs, including reading dog social cues).

It may seem completely counterintuitive, but we have found that more huskies actually equaled less work because of the companionship they provide each other, and resultant decrease in bad behavior born of loneliness.

Our huskies, that came with the names Thor and Loki. Seriously

9.   They’re chompy little sh*ts as puppies

Even more than most young dogs, huskies like to grab things and people with their mouths. This includes sleeves, pant legs, and anything else they can get their teeth on. Many first-time husky owners are shocked at how much their new puppies “bite.” When they’re young, keep a supply of things to replace what they are biting using substitution (i.e. replacing your sleeve with a knotted rope in their mouth.) The good news is they will grow out of it with good training.

10.  Let me sing you the song of my people…

Huskies are vocal in a way that most dogs aren’t. They howl, garble, growl, groan, whine, and even tell you “no”. They usually don’t bark a lot, though. This isn’t a drawback most of the time, but it’s something you should be aware of.

11.   Houdini lives!

Huskies are amazingly strong, fast, agile dogs. As mentioned above they can also be incredibly destructive and easily bored. This makes them notorious escape artists, capable of destroying a dog crate, crawling out a window, and then leaping over a 4-foot-high privacy fence with ease. They’re so good that sometimes people even try to make them into agility drill dogs and take them to competitions. Their lack of desire to please people and corresponding difficulty to train gives hilariously  very mixed success, though.  (Click the links, seriously).

If you have a back yard with a fence less than 5 feet, they need supervision. Escaping, and getting hit by cars, is one of the most common causes of death for young huskies. This is also why I cannot recommend getting your husky “chipped” highly enough. Perimeter fences and collars sometimes work as a deterrent.

12.   Heat Index

Huskies are snow dogs. Their fur both heats and cools them, and their skin is sensitive to the sun (which is why you NEVER shave a husky). They also don’t need baths; oils in their coats help keep their skin healthy. Husky coats have multiple layers that each serve a specific purpose, and they all work together to try and keep your dog warm, cool, protected from the sun, and parasites away from their skin. In other words, never get your husky trimmed unless there is a very compelling medical reason to do so.

The rule of thumb to know whether you should leave a husky out is the rule of 100: if the heat (Farenheit) plus percent humidity is more than 100, they probably shouldn’t be spending a ton of time outside unless they want to be out there (we have a doggy door). At 120 heat plus humidity, they should be indoors except to do their business. This means long walks in the evenings and mornings of the summer months.

Some huskies love a kiddie pool to cool off, and will happily hike the water all over the place in the summer. They will also hike all the water out of the dog bowls at the dog park, and lay in the mud they just made while they ignore all the other irate dog owners yelling at them.

13. Crate Training

Huskies are good candidates for crate training. They can be destructive, and you don’t want them eating your cat in the middle of the night. They’re also escape artists. However, you must start crate training from an early age and associate it with good things (like where they get fed). It also needs to feel like a safe place to them, and there are plenty of good videos on how to crate train a husky.

However, because they are such big, intelligent, active dogs they are also poor candidates to stay in a crate while you’re at work or for very long periods. That’s how we ended up with our husky named Thor: his owner kept him in a crate 8 hours a day while they were at work. He was getting neurotic and starving himself to death: he weighed only 38 lbs when we adopted him.

In short, huskies can sleep at night in a crate, and stay there for a few hours at a time if no one’s home, but they shouldn’t be kept there for long periods.

14.   Playin’ rough

Huskies play rougher with other dogs than many other dogs are used to. They act like young wolves: lots of growling, snapping, neck biting, leaping, pawing, and chasing. It’s basically play fighting, but to people not used to the way they interact with each other it can be a little startling. However, if you have experience with dogs you can read when it’s serious, and when it’s just for fun. At the same time, you have to teach them that they don’t get to play with humans that way (though they love a good game of chase).

15.   They’re terrible guard dogs

Huskies are like that stoned roommate who wakes up, finds a burglar in the house, notes that they aren’t stealing anything that belongs to them, and goes back to bed. This makes them God-awful guard dogs. They’re not overly territorial or aggressive, except where their own personal belongings in their own personal spaces are concerned. They’re also generally gregarious with strangers initially and get bored with them quickly if they’re not doing anything interesting. So, unless you keep your jewelry in the dog crate, or burglars are into stealing knotted ropes made of rawhide, a husky isn’t a good option for protecting your house.

16.   Houston, the Eagle has landed

Do you have a back yard? Is it big with lots of space to run, jump, fight, chomp, and exercise? That’s great for huskies!

Do you have grass and other green, living things that you want to keep alive in your back yard? That’s not so good. See, all that running, romping, and chomping kills everything and rapidly turns it into a moonscape.

Our back yard. Also the planned landing site for Apollo 18.

Huskies are notorious diggers too. And what moonscape would be complete without craters big enough to lose a lunar lander in? So, if you love your yard a lot, and if it would cause you all sorts of emotional damage if you weren’t on the short list for Better Homes and Gardens Lawn of the Year, huskies probably aren’t the dog for you.

Unless you plan on never letting them touch the grass. (And who would be that mean?)

17.   Why the heck would anyone want a husky after reading this??

About 15 years ago it was noted that my descriptions of being a parent were enough to put people off of becoming one for several more years. Likewise, after this description of all the things that make being a husky owner difficult, why on earth would anyone want one? Here’s what I love about them.

First, they’re beautiful and their fur is gloriously soft. There’s nothing more relaxing in the evening than petting your warm buddy next to you. They have particularly expressive faces, and, unlike many other breeds of dog that I’m not as fond of, there’s always something going on upstairs. Even if it is scheming.

“We heard you haz hot chocolateses hooman? Vet lies. Is good for us.”

As much as they pretend they don’t need people or their pack mates, it genuinely distresses them when you leave them alone, or take their pack mate for a walk without them.

Thor, waiting for Loki to come home from a walk

There’s something particularly exciting about being this close to an animal that gets you, and likes you, and you can definitely see their distant Pleistocene ancestors looking up at you. There’s a real “Julie of the Wolves” vibe to it.

If you like running, a leash trained husky will be the best buddy you ever had. The word “run” will be enough for them to sprint for the door, plant their butt on the floor, and wait for you to put on a leash. I don’t care how good of a runner you think you are: your husky is better. These are dogs who were born to drag hundreds of pounds of dead weight for hundreds of miles, get up the next morning, and do it all over again. The final leg of the Iditarod is just another Monday to these guys. Going running with you is their job, and these are dogs that need one: it gives them both purpose and happiness.

We also love our huskies because they are so independent, and their personalities are much easier to anthropomorphize than a lot of other dogs. As my spouse described it, it’s easier to “respect” a husky than most other dogs. In many ways they’re much more of a companion or friend than a pet in the traditional dog sense.  At the same time, this dignity makes them even funnier and more lovable when they lose themselves in the moment and let their guard down, embracing their inner derpwolf unashamedly.

Derpwolves in their natural state

In some ways, they’re the Ferrari of dogs. Beautiful. Expensive. High maintenance. High performance, whether you keep them at home or actually race them (because they’re capable of both). Don’t even think of having them trimmed. Each one is slightly different enough to have a genuine personality. You’re attached to them in a way you wouldn’t be with your Honda Civic for all of these maddening, wonderful reasons, and almost no one ever says they regretted having one if they went in knowing what it entailed.

The Elizabethan Corset Pattern Generator was one of the first pages on my website. It’s been around for 20+ year now. It dates from a time before javascript and css, and is made of truly ancient perl calls to an even more ancient c graphics library.

It’s been in need of an upgrade for a very long time, and finally, at long last, it’s happened! The Pattern generator has been rewritten in javascript and svg. It now includes an option for centimeter measurements as well as inches.

Enjoy!

The Brand-New Refurbished Shiny Elizabethan Corset Generator

To make them, you will need the following supplies:

Materials:

• A silver sharpie for marking the leather
• Posterboard for making the pattern
• Garment-weight leather (5-7 oz), about 5 square feet
• 1 yard of heavy fabric to line the leather legs: cotton canvas, denim or linen all work.
• 12-oz aluminum sheeting for the plates
• Lots of rivets, preferably  200 rivets so you have a few extra. We used the Medium Double-Cap Steel Rivets from Tandy Leather; others have used old-fashioned rivets with washers, or even roofing nails.
• @3 feet of Leather strapping for the buckles and straps. We used black ¾ inch cowhide strips from Tandy.
• 4 buckles for the straps. We used  center bar roller buckles from Tandy.
• Brads (from Office max—they are the two-pronged metal things put through the holes in notebook paper to hold bunches of paper together)

Tools:

• A jigsaw with a metal-cutting blade
• A good drill
• A belt sander and 80-grit sandpaper
• Tin snips
• A reamer
• A rivet setter
• A sewing machine with a leather needle and heavy-duty upholstery-weight thread
• A scratch awl
• Leather contact-cement glue
• Scissors

Step 1: Make the Pattern

Using posterboard, paper, cardboard or other material, wrap it around your leg and create a pattern for the leg armor. The highest point of the leg should come to the outside of the hip joint. Make sure that the top of the leg armor is low enough that it doesn’t dig into the top of your leg or crotch area at any point. The edges of the leg should meet at a point between the back of the leg and the inside of the leg. There should be about an inch of space between the edges of the leg.

Once you have your pattern, mark the front center line and the back center line. Wrap the pattern around your right leg and label the outside “right”. Flip the pattern around, wrap it around your left leg and label that side of the pattern “left”. This will be the pattern for the leather legs.

To create the pattern pieces for the metal plates, trace this pattern on some more poster board. Draw a line ½ inch inside the original pattern, and draw vertical lines dividing this into 8 roughly even pieces.  The metal plates should have ¼ to 3/8 of an inch of space between them. Cut out the pieces for the metal plates, numbering them 1 to 8. Label one side of a pattern 1L, flip it over, and label the other side 1R. Label the top and bottom of the pattern pieces as well. Then draw a line down the center of each piece and, starting ½ an inch from the bottom, mark a hole there. Measure up 1 inch and mark another. Continue marking a hole every inch until you get to the top.  Punch out the holes with a nail or needle, and expand the hole with a scratch awl.

Cut out the plate pieces and lay them on top of the posterboard pattern for the leather leg. There should be half an inch of space around the edges of the leather leg pattern, and ¼-3/8 of an inch of space between the plates.

Make the leather legs

Lay the leg pattern down on the inside of your leather and draw around it with a silver sharpie. If the side of the pattern pressed against the leather said “Right”, label this piece “right”. If it said “left”, label this piece “left”. Transfer the markings for the center front and center back from the pattern onto the leather.

Cut out the leather piece about half an inch outside the silver lines.

Lay the same leg pattern down on the lining canvas/linen fabric. Draw around the edges of a pattern with a pencil, and cut on this line. There is no seam allowance for the lining.

Cover the inside of the leather piece with contact cement, out to the silver sharpied lines. Lay the linen onto the inside of the leather leg piece, matching up the edges of the piece with the silver sharpie lines. Put a piece of saran wrap over both pieces and rest a heavy weight on them for at least 5 minutes. Take the saran wrap off and let the glue dry.

Where the leather curves in, cut snips in the leather just to the linen lining. Where the leather curves out, cut notches. Brush contact cement onto the edge of the leather, and fold it over the linen and press it into place. We used clips to help hold the leather down as it dried.

Once dried, sew the leather edging down. Use a leather needle in your sewing machine with heavy duty upholstery thread, and use a long stitch (4-stitches per inch or longer) to avoid perforating the leather overmuch. Stitch around the edges of the leg ½ to 3/8 inches in from the edge, stitching the leather edging down to the linen.

Make the Aluminum Plates

We used aluminum because we didn’t have the tools for cutting and shaping steel.

The aluminum sheeting will be covered with a layer of plastic on both sides. Leave this on until you’re actually riveting each piece to the legs.

For each pattern piece, lay it on the aluminum and trace around it with a sharpie. Mark the holes down the center of each piece with a sharpie as well.

Flip the pattern piece over and repeat. You should end up with sixteen pattern pieces. Where possible, line the pattern pieces up on the aluminum so that you can cut as many straight lines as possible.

Drill the holes before cutting out the pieces. We used a ¼ inch drill bit. Make sure that the rivets you have will fit through the holes without too much extra space, but not too tightly.

Cut out each piece with the jigsaw. Snip the corners with tin snips, and grind the edges with your belt sander, using 80-grit sandpaper. Ream out the holes with a reamer. You want to get rid of any sharp edges that could wear on the leather legs (or on you!)

Sand the edges and corners with a belt sander to remove rough edges

Use a deburring tool to remove burrs from the drilled holes

If possible, you will want to curve each plate a bit for comfort and fit as it wraps around your leg. If you can find a wooden stump, create a groove in it with a belt sander and/or carve out the groove with a chisel. Take each piece, and hammer it into this groove with a ball peen hammer to shape it. (It’s best to try this on a couple of scrap pieces first to get the hang of it.)

Testing the fit

Lay the aluminum pieces down on the leather on top of a piece of wood. There should be some space between each aluminum piece, and a bit of room around the outside edges.

Using your scratch awl and a hammer, hammer through the top and bottom hole of each plate, through the leather, into the wood. With the awl, stretch the hole a bit. Then slip a brad through the leather and the plate at the top and bottom, splitting the two metal pieces of the brad to hold the two together. Once you’ve done this to all eight pieces, hold it up and wrap it around the leg. Make sure that the aluminum pieces fit and don’t bind or lock along the edges. If it is too stiff and won’t bend to wrap it around your leg you will need more space between the metal plates.

Riveting the metal plates

Once you’ve confirmed that everything fits, replace the brads with rivets. Rivet the top and bottom  hole of a plate. Then hammer the awl through the other holes, poke the awl back through from the leather side to stretch the hole, and put in the rest of the rivets for each plate.

Ladies and gents, if you want to do your part for making Queen Elizabeth’s Wardrobe Uploaded even better, now you can! All those manuscripts I photographed in England? Well, if I get enough funding, I can pay the National Archives digital image rights and make them available online.

Kickstarter: Queen Elizabeth’s Wardrobe Uploaded

Check it out!

There’s a lot there to photograph. My goal? To obtain photographic copies of all records relating to Queen Elizabeth’s Wardrobe that I don’t already have copies of, and to eventually transcribe them all and add them to Queen Elizabeth’s Wardrobe Uploaded database.

The National Archives has changed dramatically in the 12 years since I’ve been there. Their document ordering system has evolved from slips of paper to the swipe of a card and a few clicks on a keyboard. And they now have photography stands available, which allowed me to tear through 1,563 photographs in seven hours! (My back doesn’t thank me, but I’m sure that posterity will.)

There are a lot of documents out there–a huge amount–and a lot of them are pretty obscure. So this is a post about that information: the inventories, warrants, day books and other surviving pieces of documentary evidence left by the blessedly bureaucratic clerks of Elizabethan England. What they are, what they contain, and how you can find them.

Wardrobe Inventories

Anyone who’s reached a certain point in their research of 16th century dress has acquired a copy of Queen Elizabeth’s Wardrobe Unlock’d, by Janet Arnold. As well as being a masterpiece of scholarship, It contains the combined transcription of three inventories of Queen Elizabeth’s wardrobe taken at (or a few years after) the time of her death.

The Stowe Inventory at the British Library (and the copy of it held at the National Archives, LR 2/121) and the smaller companion inventory kept at the Folger are one of the best known sources of information to modern costumers; largely because Arnold’s book is centered around it, drawing material for much of what she tells us about Queen Elizabeth’s Dress. And it is a staggering tribute to sartorial genius: 99 mantles, 67 french and round gowns, a hundred loose gowns, and kirtles, petticoats, farthingales, safeguards and cloaks by the gross. All of it described in loving detail that fires the imagination:

Item one rounde gowne of cloth of siluer wrought with purple and yellowe silke laide aboute and downerighte with a brode passamaine lace of venice golde and siluer with buttons and loupes of like golde siluer pipes and small seede pearle.

Although these inventories are wonderful for providing a look under the skirts of the Queen’s wardrobe at a particular point in time and have provided an invaluable amount of documentary evidence,their snapshot nature prevents them from illuminating other aspects of the Queen’s wardrobe. Such as: how did it change? How did her color and style preferences shift over the years? How was everything made? How much of what materials were used? What percentage of her wardrobe was made new, vs. altered from older garments? To answer these questions, we turn to:

Wardrobe Warrants

The warrants are the workhorse of Elizabeth’s wardrobe records. They are full of information about countless aspects of Elizabethan court life and dress. To understand them, though, we first need to know a bit about how the whole paper trail of Elizabeth’s Royal Household worked.

Because the materials and fabrics used by the wardrobe were so expensive–a velvet gown, in the 16th century, was the equivalent of a wearable ferrari–everything had to be kept track of.  Whenever a garment was made or altered for the queen, the wardrobe clerk added a record to the ongoing record book describing the garment, what was done to it, and how much fabric of what kind was used, at what cost. When supplies were bought from drapers, clothiers and haberdashers, this too was noted: exactly how much of what kind of trim was purchased, and how much it cost. Even the linen used to make laundry bags made it into this comprehensive list. Any carpentry work or ironwork done on the coffers and chests that held the wardrobe’s clothing, the work needed to carry clothes back and forth from the wardrobe to the castle–all of this was carefully noted in the records of the Wardrobe of Robes. The clothing and shoes dispersed to poor women on Maundy was also listed.

And that’s not all. There was also the Wardrobe of Beds, which kept track of cloth and supplies used to make furniture, curtains, beddings, and other household textile goods. Stable warrants recorded every bit of leather, fabric and metal used to make caparisons and tack for the hundreds of royal horses: both working horses, like those used to carry supplies on progress, as well as the coursers and steeds for ladies and gentlewomen.

Any clothing made for the queen’s servants were also described and the amount and type of cloth used carefully noted: livery for yeomen, coachmen, littermen, footmen, gentlemen of the privy chamber, gentlewomen of the bedchamber–all received payment in part with cloth or clothing, and all of them ended up in the records. Many of these boilerplate warrants were called “warrant dormants”, which were written up and filled in with names and particulars when they were put to use. Give to _______ ___ yards of black satin for livery.”

The queen’s heralds and pursuivants were also dispensed clothing and cloth from the royal wardrobe store. And any time a lord was made a member of the order of the Garter, a set of garter robes was made up for him–all recorded in dutifully loving detail in the wardrobe clerk’s notes. Linen for the chapel alter and the choirboy’s robes? Hangings for the parliament chamber? These too were written up. Even clothing made for prisoners in the Tower of London, and clothing and furnishings made for visits by foreign royalty, make an appearance in the warrants.

And then there’s the one-offs. If a courtier or some other people was given a gift of a gown, or cloth for a gown, by the queen, a warrant would be written up and signed by her or one of her functionaries, to be delivered to the wardrobe staff. These warrants were also frequently transcribed into the clerk’s book; though sometimes they weren’t.

Let’s not forget the Revels Warrants for the plays and theatrical performances put on by the court. Although Elizabeth perferred plays, there were still tailors and artificers tasked with building the sets and costumes for various productions put on during the holidays, and their expenses, like those of the Wardrobe of Robes and Beds and the Stable, were catalogued in detail.
Needless to say, the 500+ large pages of paper ordered by the wardrobe every six months (with their purchase noted in the records) did not go to waste.

So: Wardrobe of Robes warrants. Maundy warrants. Livery warrants. Warrants Dormant. Stable Warrants. Revels Warrants. Warrants for the Order of the Garter. Warrants for Heralds dress. Warderobe of Beds warrants. Warrants for the chapel and parliament chamber. Still with me?

If you are, and if you want a look at some of these toothsome documents, you’re in luck. Every year, the working copies kept by the various wardrobe clerks for all of these departments were carefully transcribed into a bound book, in full detail; all of the information described above was included. (Aside from the Revels warrants.) The copies were signed by the clerk or assigns, and these books, due to a wonderful stroke of fortune, are available to us today at the National Archives. They are LC 9/53, the warrant for 1558-1559, through LC 9/95, for the last year of Elizabeth’s reign.

The catch? They’re in Latin. All of them. So if you do want to find out exactly how much material was used for a petticoat in 1570, or who the ladies of the bedchamber were and how much fabric they received, you’re going to have to reach for that Latin Dictionary.

But don’t lose hope! these yearly compilations were themselves condensed and transcribed into english, and these documents, too, are at the National Archives.  LC 5/32 holds the qcollected warrants for Queen Elizabeth’s reign up to 1560; LC 5/33 has 1560-1567, LC 5/34 1567-1575, LC 5/35 is 1575-1585, LC 5/36 is 1585-1593, and LC 5/37 is 1593 through the end of the reign.
Although the sense remains, the detail of the english warrants doesn’t match that of the Latin warrants. The English transcription also discards some of the livery information, such as the fabric given to the gentlemen of the privy chamber and the gentlewomen of the bedchamber.
For example, a Latin Warrant of 1568, in LC 9/60, has the following:

To Walter Fish for making a gown of the french fashion of murrey tissue welted with murrey velvet…the edges edged with fringe lace of gold and silver of our store, lined with crimson sarcenet with bayes in the pleats, with vents of fustian and frieze in the ruffs of our great warderobe. 40 shillings. For 8 yards of crimson sarcenet for lining the same at 6 shillings the yard. For 2 yards of baies for lining the pleats at 4 shillings the yard For a yard of fustian for the vents 16 pence  for  7 yards of frieze for lining the ruffs 12 pence

While the English transcription from LC 5/34 reads:

To Walter Fyshe our Tayler for makinge of a Frenche gowne of murrey Tissue welted with murrey veluet of our store…laied on the edges with Frindge lace of gold and siluer lyned with Crimsen Sarcenet and baies in the plaites with ventes of Fustian and frize in the ruffs of our great warderobe.

And these English transcriptions of the Latin transcription? The 1568-1585 warrants from the LC series were themselves transcribed into a larger volume, now called MS Egerton 2806. This book, combined with the Stowe Inventory, forms the backbone of Queen Elizabeth’s Wardrobe Unlock’d, and together are the source for the great majority of the primary evidence contained in the book. This is browseable online as well.

New Years Gifts

Not everything the queen wore was made by her artificers. The traditional New Years’ Gift Exchange was also an avenue into the wardrobe. Usually courtiers gave the Queen gold coins in a decorated pouch, but some gave her items of clothing: smocks, partlets, sleeves, handkerchiefs, scarves, petticoats, foreparts. Most of the gifts were smaller items of clothing, suited to being highly decorated but not requiring a real fit. Some of these garments were accepted and worn; others were accepted and kept for years without seeing any use, until they were listed in the posthumous inventory of Elizabeth’s wardrobe as

“Item one foreparte of white Satten embrodered allover with venice gold syluer and Carnacion silke in squares and flowers Chevernewise unmade.”

We don’t have a full record of all the New Year’s gifts received by the queen. The records, one roll per year, are now scattered about the globe; A couple at the National Archives, one at the Folger Library, and one even turned up in the Dallas Public Library. Some of them have been made available online. And thanks to the Herculean research and saintly persistence of Jane Lawson, the information from all known Gift Rolls–26 of them–are gathered together in her recently published book,The Elizabethan New Year’s Gift Exchanges, 1559-1603

The Day Book

Another record exists of what went on in the wardrobe: specifically, how items left the wardrobe. a single existing Day Book remains from the wardrobe of robes, containing detailed records of all gowns and cloth given out of the wardrobe (usually to one of Elizabeth’s Gentlewomen of the Privy Chamber or Maids of Honor) as well as a listing of each and every item found missing from one of her garments. Given the number of pearls, spangles and jewels loaded on gowns like her “frenche gowne of riche golde tissue with a border of purple satten allouer enbrodered with…pearle lined with purple Taphata”, these entries were frequent: buttons, pearls, jewels, hairpins, aglets, all of them accidental largesse distributed by the queen during her daily round. This document is also in the National Archives, listed as C 115/91, and published by Janet Arnold as Lost from her Majestie’s Back.

Miscellaneous Warrants

These are found everywhere, in a variety of manuscripts. A good number are collected at the British Library in MS Add 5751a: Individual, one-page warrants directing the queen’s tailor to make gowns for her Maids of Honor, or a night gown for her favorite, the Earl of Leicester, or to make six petticoats of various rich crimson fabrics. The content of some of these individual warrants may show up in abbreviated form in one of the Latin or English compiled wardrobe accounts; or they may not.

Letters

And finally, there is correspondence. Nuggets of information on Elizabeth’s wardrobe can be found here, though truly interesting information is rare. The well known letter from the young Elizabeth’s nurse to the King begs him to give her charge money for apparal,

for she hath neither gown, not kirtle nor sleeves, nor railes, nor body stitchets, nor handkerchiefs, nor mufflers nor biggins.

In 1577, Sir Amias Paulet sent Walsingham a letter mentioning that he

Sends a farthingale such as now used by the French Queen and the Queen of Navarre

…most likely a french farthingale, which first makes its appearance in the Queen’s wardrobe accounts three years later.

There are always more bits of information showing up here and there…but the above sources are the main ones available for serious students of dress. My goal to provide complete coverage of Elizabeth’s wardrobe throughout her reign is progressing; some of the inventories from the end of her reign are available, as are copies of the warrants from 1568-1593. I’m currently working on finishing a transcription of the 1593-1603 warrants, and will then turn to the beginning of her reign and transcribe the warrants from 1558-1568.

And then? Get a copy of the full Stowe Inventory and the Day book transcribed, as well as all of the wardrobe records relating to the Queen’s coronation; and then, perhaps, I’ll start on some of the Latin accounts.

All of which will be in my camera by the time I leave England…

A far cry from Historic Dress, one might be tempted to think. But I’ve found ways to merge my two interests: the Elizabethan Corset Pattern Generator was one of the earlier ones, and my forays into Synonym and Sounds-like searching of historic texts is another.

My most recent all-consuming synthesis of costume and computing is my Wardrobe Concordance. This is a cunning master plan which, at its current rate, should see completion somewhere around 2030.

Cunning Plan Step the first: Here, take this shovel.

Find, Transcribe (or get transcriptions by others) of all the original manuscripts describing Elizabeth I’s wardrobe, and load them into Queen Elizabeth’s Wardrobe Uploaded. Enter in new synonyms for words (like “verdingall” for farthingale, “crammoisy” for crimson, etc) into the glossary as I come across them, so that odd or unusual words are highlighted with their definition available if one hovers over the word.

This step is coming along; I’ve gotten, I would say, about half of Elizabeth’s wardrobe accounts entered so far. As well as a couple of her inventories and a handful of Gift Rolls. There’s about 6,000 individual entries so far. I’m  halfway through the corpus; I still have to transcribe, upload and glossarize the 1593-1600 wardrobe warrants, a good copy of the Stowe Inventory, and the wardrobe warrants from 1558-1568 (which are in Latin. That’s going to be fun to learn).

It’s difficult, though; I come across so many other interesting texts and ideas for research that I’m continually distracted from my goal. I have, however, acquired a minion who also enjoys transcribing wardrobe warrants. Little did she know how addictive it would be! Which helps bring my goal a bit closer.

Cunning Plan Step the Second: Open the Wardrobe Doors, Hal.

Find a way to extract information from each entry so that they can be usefully analyzed.earched, analyzed, linked and visualized. What this means is taking an entry like:

Item to the said William Jones for makinge of a highe bodied gowne of greene veluet (for Thomasine our woman dwarf) laied with Siluer Lace the sleuis cut in panes the bodies styffened with canvas and buckeram and laied aboute with buckeram bordered with fustian and pocketts of fustian the bodies faced with Satten cut and lyned with sarcenet the playtes Lyned and a role of cotton with a paire of sleuis of Satten, cut and Lyned with Sarcenet

And turning it into the following:

Action: making. Garment: High bodied gown. Material: velvet. Color: green. Made by: William Jones. Made for: Thomasine de Paris. Date:1588. Lining: sarcenet. Facing: satin. Stiffening: canvas, buckram. Decoration: Silver lace. Garment sections: Sleeves, material satin, lining sarcenet, cut in panes. Bodice: stiffened with canvas,buckram. Roll, made of cotton.

This process is going to require several steps. First: standardizing spellings and terms across the corpus. This is fairly easy, using the glossary I’ve put together already. In fact, I’ve already done this.

The next step: parsing the text. Identifying words as garments, materials, colors, etc.; and, once that’s done, finding a way to figure out what is related to what. (lining material sarcenet, facing satin, sleeves are made of satin, etc.)

If I was rich, I would do what the EEBO did and farm the 10,000 entries like the above out to an offshore transcription company to crunch through.  But I’m not rich. I am something even better: a programmer.

A programmer who was graced by extraordinary serendipity in the past few weeks. At work, I was tasked with learning about Natural Language Processing, and figure out how to integrate it into our supercomputer platform so that we could run it against thousands of free texts simultaneously. This increased my knowledge base about how the heck one would parse this wardrobe data by a factor of ten in the first week alone, and brought me a lot closer to figuring out how it would have to be done.

And at the Folger Library last week, when I popped in to their 4 pm tea and chatted about this project with some of the people there, I was tipped off about two software programs: Morphadorner and Vard. Both of them were built to parse, standardize spelling, and extract meaning and entities from early english texts. I smacked myself on the head for forgetting the cardinal rule of problem-solving: the answer you seek is always available somewhere on the internet.

Cunning Plan Step the Third:  That’s not a moon, that’s a space station

I want to be able to link together all the records for a given gown.  This will  answer so many questions. How many gowns and garments did Elizabeth truly have, and in what proportions by type?  What sorts of alterations were most frequently done? How often were gowns altered? Were certain garments altered more frequently or mentioned more often, and could this be used to identify her preferences in clothing: favorite colors, styles, etc? Were there certain spans of time where a particular type of alteration was far more frequently seen than other times–like c. 1590, where “lengthening and widening” of skirts starts showing up with remarkable frequency, echoing the change in fashionable silhouette?

I could do this by hand, by starting at the beginning of the corpus, searching the database for all garments with similar descriptions, and eyeballing them to see if they really are the same gown, or different. Here’s an example of one such pattern found:

1572: Item for making of a french Gowne of russett and white damaske garded with carnacion taphata layed with bone lase of golde and silver the bodies and slevis garded very thicke lyned with carnacion and white taphata the Gowne borderid with carnacion taphata with a rolle of white cotten & rolls in the slevis coverid with white fustian all of our greate Guarderobe.

1574: Item for alteringe the bodies of a Gowne of russett and white damaske with a garde of carnacion taphata with a bone lase of venice golde and silver upon it of our greate Guarderobe.

1579: for lyninge of a gowne of russett and white damaske lyned with blak unshorne vellat in the forequarters with a newe steye of sarceonett

But this approach has problems, and not only the cripplingly huge amount of sorting and comparison that would need to be done. the 1572 and 1574 records are clearly the same…but is the 1579 record? It mentions black unshorn velvet. Is there another record for, say, a french gown of orange and white damask lined with black unshorn velvet, that would be a closer match?

Fortunately, performing automated fuzzy linking like this is exactly what I do at work. My employer takes 360 billion public records and links them together using some extremely iterative, arcane and impressive fuzzy matching and statistical algorithms. Once I have all the data parsed out into separate fields for material, color, gown type, etc., I’ll be able to run it through some matching algorithms that will link it all up as nice as you please, providing confidence scores about the certainty of the match into the bargain.

The other thing I want to do is to be able to take the parsed data and build a visualization front end for ad-hoc quering and charting of data.

In English, that means creating a webpage where someone can say, “give me a line chart of the number of spanish farthingales made and altered between 1558 and 1602, grouped by year.” And then they can add another line to the chart for the number of half farthingales made and altered, and another line for the number of rolls made and altered, and voila: the transition from Spanish to French farthingales over the course of Elizabeth’s reign is laid out as neat as you please.  What would have taken hours and days of poking through records is shown in 5 minutes.

Once I have this, I can answer idle questions like “I wonder how Elizabeth’s color preferences changed over her lifetime” or “were her garment linings switched out between fur and lighter fabrics based on time of year?” with a few clicks of a button. Spotting trends in different types of garments, different sorts of decoration, and different materials become trivial.

And then I can turn my attention to all of the other topics of research that have been queuing up…

The book itself costs an arm, leg and kidney. If I’d had to buy it for myself before Christmas, I’d have refrained. But now, having read through it, I have to say that it’s worth every penny I didn’t have to pay for it; and if I hadn’t got it for Christmas, I’d be saving up for a copy even now.

So, in the spirit of enablement, I’m passing on the details of just what’s in this book to all y’all, so you have an idea of whether or not you need to buy it.  I initially intended to make it a facebook post to my historic costume list. two typed pages later, I had to reconsider; each one of the articles in the book deserves its own review.

The book is a series of essays, each one based upon the information on a particular topic to be found in the various inventories of Henry VIII, each written by a person at the top of their game in that particular field. The first is on King Henry’s Tapestry collection, written by Thomas Campbell. Then comes the section on the clothing of King Henry, and his hunting equipment, by Maria Hayward.  She also writes the following section, on the textiles, tents, flags and costumes that were in the care of the Office of Tents and Revels.

This is followed by an article on table carpets and coverings for tables, seats and floors by the esteemed late Donald King, “The Art of the Broiderers” by Santina Levey, and a section on table and bed linens by David Mitchell. Then comes an article focusing on the textiles in Henry’s Store, by Lisa Monnas, another essay by her on the ecclesiastical textiles and costume in the inventory, and finally, an article on Furs in Henry’s wardrobe by Elspeth Veale.

A solid block of knowledge, indeed! 365 pages of brand new research on Tudor textiles and costume and I was determined to go through every page, even the sections I didn’t really expect to enjoy, like the articles on tapestries, carpets, table linens and ecclesiastical textiles. Even if they were dry, or ancillary to my interests, they were bound to be extremely informative and I was duty-bound to read them.

I had forgotten something, however. When a person is truly and whole-heartedly obsessed with a particular subject, and when they can write well, their love of it becomes infectious. They pass on the contagion of their passion via the written word, captivating the unsuspecting reader and carrying them along into unexpected areas of research.

Such was the case with these essays, even the ones on subjects that I hadn’t thought would captivate me at all. Like:

The Art and Splendour of Henry VIII’s Tapestry Collection

by David Campbell

Campbell answered questions about King Henry’s household textiles that I’d never thought to ask: what was his tapestry collection like? Why was tapestry so popular? How expensive was it relative to other decorations? What did particular tapestries mean to their viewers: their presence, the detail of their construction, and their content?  Where did King Henry get his tapestries? What subjects did he prefer, and why? How did his tastes differ from his son/s How did the changing economic climate in Europe affect tapestry production? And the final question: Henry had over 2,400 tapestries when he died. Where on earth did they all go, and why are virtually none around today?

These discussions are accompanied by page after page of brilliant, full color images of tapestries.

Dressed to Impress: Henry VIII’s wardrobe and his equipment for horse, hawk and hound;

by Maria Hayward

This section covered the clothing of King Henry and was, to my surprise, less absorbing than the section on Tapestries. Less because the subject material wasn’t interesting—it was, most definitely—but because I already knew the majority of what was discussed: King Henry’s clothing, how it was made, who made it, what it looked like, the materials used, etc.  A substantial amount of the material reflected the content of Hayward’s comprehensive book Dress in the Court of Henry VIII, though with added detail focusing on the inventory contents themselves.

His coronation and garter robes are discussed, as are his hats, shoes, walking staves, and equipment for horse, hound and hawk. A section on the clothing of Arthur, Jane Seymour and Catherine Parr was particularly interesting.

The things that I enjoyed most in this article were some of the tables of distilled and concentrated wardrobe information: Lists of the Perquisites given to the officers of the wardrobe of robes, for one. This was an excellent window into what the servants of the King wore, or at least, the clothing they received, between 1516-20.

A few pages after this comes a table summarizing the different types of garments, alterations, and accessories found in King Henry’s wardrobe across the span of three inventories taken. Additional tables lay out what materials were used to make how many of each type of garment, and what colors were found in which types of garments.

A final table categorized the decorative and construction techniques used on particular types of garments; for example, of King Henry’s hose, one was bordered, nine were cut, three were edged, 15 were embroidered, one was fringed; 13 were decorated with Venice gold, and four with Venice silver.

My favorite part of this article was…yes, I admit it…the endnotes.  When it comes to historic costume, I am an endote junkie. You never know what you’re going to find there: references to previously unknown manuscripts, unknown books, even references to books in your own collection that you had no idea contained the information referenced. And Hayward can always be depended upon to reference all sorts of mouthwatering manuscripts and accounts. She has them in spades. I collect the most tantalizing ones, saving them up for my next trip across the pond, so I can order them up at the British Library or Public Records office and roll around naked on them transcribe them for my own nefarious purposes.

In fact, one of the footnotes in this book started me on an entertaining ramble through my own collection. A reference to a farthingale owned by Princess Elizabeth in 1545, made of Satin of Bruges, sent me down to the footnotes to find out more about it. The footnote took me to Dress in the Court of Henry VIII. When I found the quote there, it too was footnoted…back to Queen Elizabeth’s Wardrobe Unlock’d. And when I opened up QEWU to the cited page? You guessed it—it was footnoted too, referencing Costume in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries.

By now, a bit exasperated, I opened up CoDS, fearing that I was about to find  Planché or Norris. But! Finally, I found a reference to the actual wardrobe account mentioning the entry.

A wardrobe account with a catalog entry that looked naggingly familiar. I fired up my computer and poked around the manuscript warrants I’d photographed 10 years ago at the Public Records Office in England. Sure enough, there it was: one of the many I hadn’t gotten around to transcribing yet. Talk about coming full circle!

Temporary Magnificence: the offices of the tents and revels in the 1547 inventory;

by Maria Hayward

This section was another happy surprise. My exposure to Tudor tents and revels has been heavily revels-centric, to date. I’d read many works on revels, the costume and sets and social meaning assigned to them, the evolution into the Jacobean masque, etc., etc.  I had Feuillerat’s transcription of the wardrobe warrants for the revels, and had focused upon the costume-related aspects of them. But tents? Not so much.

This article  remedied that lack. Tudor tents: what they were made of, how they were decorated, what they looked like, practical construction details like windows made of translucent Holland cloth, wooden buttons for hanging the walls, Crow foot ropes, eyelet holes reinforced with calfskin leather, and more. Dimensions for the individual pieces of roofs and tent sides are given, as were descriptions of the various types of tents needed for campaign–including kitchen tents–and what was needed to furnish them.

My imagination was further fired by the glorious pictures of tents and encampments, and by the vivid descriptions of the king’s tents. One, a huge sixteen-sided tent, had a map of  the world painted on the interior of the roof and had a center support made of a ship’s mast.

Another description of a “royal tent” resembled a minor village: One 10 x 15 foot “porch”, a pavilon 18 feet wide, and a 10 x 30 foot hallway leading from this to the first great chamber (16 x 40 feet). This chamber was connected to the first hall (10 x 34 feet), and a 15 x 50 foot “great chamber”. Additional 10 x 30 foot hallways led across into two more pavilions and a timber-framed “house” covered with gloriously painted canvas.

Talk about camping in style! The description of his timber house made me want to rush out and build one myself for next Pennsic: “…a timber house all of Firre painted and gilted with a square tower at every ende and corner, all covered with white plate scallape wise and sealed within with paste work painted, the windows of horne with all beastes vanes and vices belonging to it. ”

This section was followed by an excellent overview of Tudor revels and disguisings. It wasn’t terribly in-depth, but covered the important aspects of revels, what was worn, their place in the social fabric of the court, and the structure and function of the office of revels. It is accompanied by lovely descriptions of a variety of the costumes themselves, bringing the revels to life.

From the Exotic to the Mundane: carpets and coverings for tables, cupboards, window seats and floors

Donald King

The section on carpets was the shortest in the book: 12 pages. It did a good job of discussing what kinds of carpets were used in Tudor houses, and how they were used, and where they came from.

The Broderers’ Work;

Santina Levey

Ah! Tudor embroidery! This section impressed me, not only with its illuminating and clear descriptions and definitions of all of the varieties of embroidery and embellishment used at the Tudor court (each variety accompanied by inspirational photographs of items thus decorated), but by the information on how it was used: embroidery for beds, heraldry, cloths of estate, cushions, carpets, books and more are discussed, all with quotes and references to original items to lend color and life to the information.

Levey has a good section on quilts and quilted decoration, for those people interested in that particular topic. Among other useful factoids I learned that Tudor cutwork was not at all the same thing as the later Elizabethan cutwork: the former was a type of appliqué of fabric upon fabric, rather than the decoratively stitched and snipped linen that “cutwork” came to mean during Elizabeth’s reign. Cutwork was apparently a preferred method for embellishing revels costumes, as it looked impressive and could be accomplished much more swiftly than other forms of decoration.

Levey also takes the time to discuss the embroiderers themselves: the guild structure, female embroiders and their role in the industry, and a captivating portrait of William Ibgrave, broiderer to the king. She discusses the sorts of embroidery that was performed by them—embroidery of garter robes, livery, etc—as well as the sorts of needlework performed by the various women at Henry VIII’s court.

All in all, this was one of my favorite sections. It had richness, depth, was written in a very interesting and engaging manner, and was spectacularly illustrated with color photographs of various types of embroidery. A chapter guaranteed to make you want to rush off and try your own hand at couching gold bullion.

‘One Coverpane of Fine Diaper of the Saluatcion of our Ladie’: napery for tables and linens for beds;

David Mitchell

I admit it: this was one of the sections that I had girded my mental loins to plough through, regardless. I mean, let’s face it—after pages and pages of silk, velvet, gold and brocade, tablecloths are a bit mundane.

Once again I was pleasantly surprised. Linen, as it turns out, contains as much variety within the one fiber as any Great Wardrobe store. David Mitchell describes the different kinds of linen used: plain, diaper of damask work, diaper of birds eye, or diaper of crosse diamonds—and follows this up with a lovely technical discussion on the technology of linen damask and diaper weaving.

If you are interested in exactly how the King ate with linen—sizes of the napkins used by servants and how they were placed, widths of tablecloths, etc–Mitchell has that too. He has many close-up photographs of a variety of extant linen damask fabrics, and a table listing different damask patterns used in the Tudor court.

His description of all of the layers of a Tudor bed caught my fancy. There were many: bedstead first, then canvas, then a feather bed and a bolster/pillow, and then a layer of fustian—presumably to help soften the prick of straw and feather quills that worked their way through the feather bed—and then, finally, the bottom sheet. The fustian and bottom sheet were tucked under the featherbed all round, and the top sheet came after that. Some of the sheets were very ostentatious, bearing gold fringe, tassels and buttons.

After the top sheet came another fustian, and then, finally, the counterpanes, quilts, coverlets and other coverings. Two pillows of down with fustian ticks were typically provided.

The article is followed by a listing of all the inventories used in the article, with their full name, status, document reference number, date and location where they’re held: 50 inventories in all. Bless you, David Mitchell!

‘Plentie and Abundaunce’: Henry VIII’s valuable stores of textiles

Lisa Monnas

This next section, like the one before it, was more than I expected. After all that had come before, what more was there to say about the king’s store of textiles? I think of textile stores and envision the pages upon pages of monotonous listings of velvet, satin, silk and sarcenet I’d seen in the wardrobe accounts and inventories. Hardly a inspirational source of raw material.

But it reveals a lot, as it turns out, and all of it fascinating. Lisa Monnas really hit it out of the park with this essay.

This section contains such gems as a table of “Prices paid for the textiles listed in the great wardrobe”, grouped by textile type and color. Another table lists how much of what type of red fabric was given to every member of the royal household for Edward’s coronation, clearly illuminating the vast ranks of people needed to run the machinery of the Tudor court, as well as their relative rank. It amused me that the yeomen of the Jewel house, Laundry, Ewery, Chandry, Spicery, Waffery, Buttery, Cellar, Poultry (Yes, there is a yeoman of the poultry), yeomen ushers, yeomen porters, and all of the other several dozen flavers of yeomen were given red cloth…but the yeomen of the wardrobe somehow ended up wearing crimson damask and crimson velvet.

There is good detail on just what fabrics were given for livery, and how much; what fabrics were worn by the King over the course of his reign, and how those fabrics changed; and a brief exploration of the mysterious lack of Venetian silks.

We also get a look at the caretakers of the fabric and the suppliers that provided it. Lady Somerset was spotted skulking out of the wardrobe store after Henry’s death with a fortune in fabric wrapped up in a sheet. Mercers and other purveyors of rich fabrics regularly went on progress with King Henry, having the latest velvets and cloths of gold sent to them on the way so that they could continually present the king with something novel. The 33,000 yards of black fabric required for King Henry’s death were provided by over 72 london cloth sellers. I can just imagine the frantic searches performed by the king’s household, looking for every scrap of black fabric they could find…and the cursing and grumbling of the London tailors attempting to fulfill their commissions, when black cloth couldn’t be had for love or money.

The exhaustive documentation of the wardrobe is also entertaining. Each package of silk had a label stating its contents, whether it was old or new, and from whom it was obtained, and when, as well as the price of the silk. Clerks kept track of every delivery: to whom it was made, what use it would be put to, and what piece was used. The “charmed inner circle” of courtiers that received these textiles is described by Monnas.

And all of this isn’t even the heart of the chapter: a complete descriptive listing and definition of all of the fabrics found in the wardrobe. Taffeta, Sarcenet, Satin, Velvet, etc.  What it looked like, how it was woven, the different varieties found, what they were used for, where they were obtained from, and technical details (and diagrams) showing the weaves of the fabrics.

Her section on cloth of gold shows an impressively technical knowledge of the subject, and her section on  cloth of tissue is positively outstanding—for the first time I have a firm and solid grasp on exactly what each of the various varieties of cloth of tissue looked like and how they were made.

Plus, a full compliment of color photographs of extant fabrics and of portraits showing the same, and nine full pages of excellent end notes.  Yes, I can definitely say that this section really was my favorite of all of the essays in the book.

The Splendour of Royal Worship

Lisa Monnas

This article covered the ecclesiastical textiles in the inventory: textiles for the chapel and vestments for the ecclesiastical functionaries that tended them. I really wish I’d had this article back when I was researching the cutting and cleaning of ecclesiastical clothing in the Nurnberger Kunstbuch manuscript; it describes who wore what kind of garments, where, and when.  Copes and dalmatics and albs, oh my. What colors were worn; how the garments moved from place to place over time; what happened to them over the years; a very thorough look at ecclesiastical garments in general.

From Sable to Mink

Elspeth Veale

This last section was one of the shorter ones in the book.  It gave an overview of the various furs used in the wardrobe of the king and his court; the animals they came from and how they were used. The information was solid, and definitely useful to someone wanting to know more about furs in Tudor dress; but it was fairly superficial when placed next to the depth of knowledge displayed in some of the other sections. I’d have been interested in the technical details of how the furs were prepared and sewn; a bit more about the economics of the fur trade; perhaps even biographical details on the furriers and artisans involved with the gowns, if such existed.

The fur pampilion has been a mystery to me for some time. The Dictionary of Fashion states that it was a form of fine budge from Pamplona, and also a felt, but with no citation; Hollyband, in 1598, describes it as a coarse rug; and in 1598, the Duke  of Richmond’s inventory mentions “another [whole fur] of pampilion and budge.”

So when I caught a mention to pampilion in the article I was eager for more information…but none was forthcoming. Not even a footnote, alas.

Another fur that had stumped me in Elizabth’s wardrobe accounts, lybard wombs, was also mentioned in the article. Was it leopard? Something else? But again, no description of what it was.

And lastly, we have the bibliography. You know a bibliography’s going to be good when the first page consists entirely of unpublished primary sources–so considerate of them to group them together like that. Then comes “Published Primary Sources”, “Unpublished papers and dissertations”, and only then the eight pages of secondary sources. I think I spent more time on the bibliography, noting down sources to follow up on, than I did on any single article in the collection.

Conclusion

Usually, in cases where a book is published as a series of articles on a topic written by different authors, there’s a lot of dross to wade through the come to the gems that cover your particular area of interest. This book is an exception to that rule. It is chock full not only of superior information on all aspects of Tudor dress and costume, but also several jumping off points into other sources to help further your research. It’s rare that a dense reference book is such a good read.

The Folger Library is beautiful and absolutely uplifting to walk through. It smells divinely of dust and old paper and leather. The Folger’s reading room is full of Tudor woodwork and Tudor manuscripts and their basement holds  an enticing array of microfilms from the British Library.

The Folger is also rather exclusive–unlike the plebeian British Library, British Museum and National Archives of England, which require a mere driver’s license and a couple of forms signed before allowing any Tom, Dick or Harry to handle as many 12th-century charters as they wish, the Folger insists upon a letter of intent describing precisely what the person wants to view, plus two references from professional academics (sent from an institutional address) before allowing non-academic-affiliated researchers to view items in their collection.

This exclusivity bemused me the first time I encountered it. But I suppose it’s understandable; one can’t be too careful when it comes to those independent researchers. Turn your back on them for two minutes, and they start folding Queen Elizabeth’s letters into paper airplanes and running naked with them through the stacks.

But! I can definitely tell you that their collection is worth the hoops that one must jump through to get access to it.

I initially went to follow up on a lead of possible tailor’s bills in the Stiffkey Estate Papers collection. A dead end, alas. However, I did get to see and photograph my own copy of the 1600 Inventory of Elizabeth’s wardrobe of robes. The ink was a faded brown, hard to read in many cases, but oh, the mouthwatering descriptions of petticoats, kirtles and cloaks! I can’t wait to transcribe them all and start linking them to entries in the wardrobe accounts in DressDB

I also got a look at Freyle’s 1588 tailor’s book.  Unlike Alcega, Freyle includes several patterns for breeches laid out alongside doublets, jerkins, sayas and ropillas. I’m looking forward to making a pair up to see how they look in wool and silk.

He also had a layout for a farthingale that was slightly different than Alcega’s, though the pieces looked to be about the same when laid out, and some patterns for women’s sayas that had high necked doublet bodices with a distinct fish in the front seam under the bust. All in all, a fascinating find!

After these two highlights, the rest of the day passed fairly quickly in inventory-fishing. I’d requested a large number of inventories and household accounts in the hopes that some of them would include apparel in the inventories. I struck out with most of them; they included napery, drapery, bedding and household textiles, but no apparell. One item of interest was the prevalence of red-and-green fringe in the decoration of furniture and bedding; it brought to mind the remarkable amount of red and green fringe sold by the haberdasher William Wray. Red and green, much more than red fringe, green fringe or black fringe, was a popular item in his inventory.

There were only two docs that repaid my investigation. The first  were the Inventories of Elizabeth Berkeley, a set of three wardrobe inventories of her wardrobe taken in 1605, 1611 and 1617. I’d transcribed them in haste the last time I’d been here, and hadn’t had the wherewithall to photograph them. The three inventories themselves are intriguing; not only do they illustrate the evolution and change in a woman’s wardrobe over time (more waistcoats and jackets as the years went on, no farthingales bought but the three she had retained for 20 years, night gowns referred to as loose gowns in some inventories, and other interesting linguistic wardrobe hints, but the garments themselves reveal much about a woman’s wardrobe of the early 17th century. Striped canvas bodies, for one.

The second were the household inventories of the Townshend Family. Almost all of the inventories focused on household furnishings, but there was an inventory of my “Lord’s Apparel” and my “Ladies Apparel” which will be interesting to transcribe.

Other than that, it was merely the odd mention of a shirt, or ‘His wearing apparell, 4 pounds.’

Except for one curious entry in the Inventory of the goods of George Cope taken at the time of his death (1572). It was a long inventory, with only a few lines devoted to his clothing. But take a look at the last line:

Item in the same chest, ii gownes of cloth thone garded with velvet thother with black silke buttons     vis viiid
Item ii Clookes vis viiid
Item a rede taffitye dublet xs
Item a doublet of rewed canvas iiis iiiid
Item iiii letherne Jerkins xiiis iiiid
Item iiii payre of hose xxs
Item ix shertes wherof iiii whyte sherts ii blacke a blewe one edged with golde & one with silver xis

If I’m reading that right, George had two black shirts and a blue one as well. Something I’d never see before in inventory entries.

After finishing with the various inventories, I went downstairs to try my luck in the microfilm room. I had two references to Harleian manuscripts from the British Library that I hoped to get a look at: One was the Probate Inventory of Leicester, and one was a wardrobe account. Unfortunately, all I had were the manuscript numbers and folios, and the 126 rolls of microfilmed Harleian manuscripts were organized by manuscript volume. I didn’t have the means to find out what manuscripts were in which volume just then, so instead I picked a roll of Lansdowne manuscripts at random, sat down and started scrolling through.

Talk about luck! I happened upon the 1559 household inventory of Thomas Cawarden, King Henry VIII’s Master of Revels. It was fairly disorganized, hats and crossbows and furniture and kitchen supplies following eachother higgledy-piggledy, but a couple of entries caught my eye while I was photographing: A reference to a farthingale of satin de bruges, for one. I look forward to transcribing this one, definitely.

I’m going  back tomorrow to try my luck in their card catalog and see what I can find amongst the catalog that hasn’t yet made it into their online catalog, Hamnet. I’m told there’s a considerable number of interesting items from the continent hiding in there.

And here, to make you all terribly jealous, is a Short panorama of the glory which is the Folger Library Reading room.

This gown is based on that worn by a marketwoman or servant in 1560s Flanders. It laces across a sleeveless kirtle of red linen (which laces up the back) and has green woolen sleeves pinned to the gown shoulder straps. A close-fitting white smock is worn underneath. Two partlets, one white linen and one black wool, are worn over the gown. A caul is worn over the hair, and a straw hat over the caul.

For more information on this style of dress and how it’s put together, and pictures showing the original items, visit 16th Century Workingwomen’s Dress and Making a Flemish Workingwoman’s outfit.