Rich Apparel: Clothing and the Law in Henry VIII’s England
Maria Hayward
Ashgate Publishing, 2009

Henry VIII issued four sets of sumptuary laws during his reign, in 1510, 1514, 1515, and 1533, each designed to place restrictions on what kinds of clothing (made from what kinds of materials) his subjects could wear. Warnings were frequent, like the one issued in 1520 in preparation for Henry’s meeting with France’s king at the Field of the Cloth of Gold: “All noblemen and others are to be apparelled according to their degrees, and no man must presume to wear apparel above his degree.”
Such warnings in such numbers were necessary (at least from the royal point of view) because 16th century England saw an explosion of ways to warrant them. The traditional strata of feudal society – the king, the nobility, the clergy, and then pretty much everybody else – were rapidly blurring as more and more of the ‘middling’ sort, lawyers, businessmen, traders and the like, were amassing fortunes and land holdings great enough to give them aspirations their grandfathers would scarcely have dreamt. Henry VIII was not hidebound enough to scorn employing such men, even swelling their fortunes – but their increasing power made him all the more protective of his own. And then as now, a great deal of power lay in perception.
Maria Hayward does remarkable, often eye-opening spadework on this subject in her comprehensive new book Rich Apparel: Clothing and the Law in Henry VIII’s England (solidly put together by Ashgate Publishing). She focuses her study first on the pinnacle of English power, the king – who was, as she shrewdly points out, “the one individual for whom there were no clothing constraints” – and then on downward, through the landed nobility, the clergy, and spreading out to that burgeoning mercantile class. She scrutinizes wills, estate inventories, guild regulations, import and export figures, and of course she’s as grateful as everybody else for the scrupulous details preserved in the paintings and sketches of court artists like Hans Holbein. Her goal is to lay before the reader as wide and detailed a picture of the role apparel played in Tudor times as the primary sources will allow, and she succeeds admirably.
Readers should be cautioned that this is expository, almost testamentary historical writing – there is no unifying narrative, no bursts of rhetorical fireworks, no argumentative conclusions. It can often be quite technical too, although here it’s uniformly saved by Haywood’s clear, evocative prose:

Taffetas and sarsenets originated in the East but by the fourteenth century were being woven in a number of Italian cities. Both were lightweight, thin silk fabrics that were often used for linings. Both could be woven incorporating metal threads, often to produce a striped effect. Taffeta could also be produced as a shot, tabby weave (with the warp and weft a different color to produce a slightly iridescent effect).

Rich Apparel contains many charts, and its appendixes feature the texts of several Tudor wills and inventories – coming after so many pages of Haywood’s astute use of their contents, the documents themselves prove unexpectedly interesting. The guiding intelligence here makes the entire book interesting, although the steep incline of the scholarship may deter all but the most dedicated fans of the Tudor era. The book’s one major shortcoming (an utterly astounding one, given the subject matter) is that aside from the cover portrait of insufferable hatchet-faced Tudor moneymaker wunderkind Thomas Gresham, none of the book’s other illustrations is in color. True, color plates would add to Rich Apparel’s already considerable price tag, but considering the fact that clothing’s appearance is at the very heart of Haywood’s topic, the addition would certainly be worthwhile in future editions.

Steve Donoghue

The 6 February issue of the venerable TLS Courage Under Fire divx offers, if such a thing is possible (or advisable) a Donoghue-smorgasbord, with no less than four themes in common with Open Letters’ garrulous Managing Editor. In Henry Power’s chatty and fascinating review of two new books about the art of translating in the history of English letters, he naturally makes mention of the great John Denham, whose translations of parts of Virgil concludes with “On the cold earth lies th’unregarded King/A headless Carkass, and a nameless Thing.” Power astutely connects this to the circumstances of Denham’s own life:

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The execution of Charles I intrudes on Virgil’s narrative; cold earth suggests Whitehall in January, rather than the sands of the Hellespont, where Priam’s corpse was dumped.

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And in the course of examining Denham’s life, Power makes mention of the fact that the poet was always welcome in the homes of the Earl of Pembroke, which might prompt readers to wonder about that art-loving noble family – and to read all about them

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, in one of Donoghue’s essays for Open Letters.

The inimitable J.C. turns in a brief notice of the sarcastic writing manual How Not to Write a Novel by Sandra Newman and Howard Mittelmark, remarking:

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For a full – and perhaps more accurate – account of what it is that Newman and Mittelmark say in their book, hark back to X and read Donoghue’s breezy walk-through of the whole thing.

A breezy walk-through of a decidedly more thorough nature is also on hand to counter-balance Elizabeth Scott-Baumann’s “In Brief” squib on the new anthology Tudors and Stuarts on Film, in which the tawdry necessities of the film industry are taken to task:

Using a strategy of “bait and switch”, writers and directors claim historical authenticity, only to wriggle out through the loophole of artistic licence.

Naturally, Scott-Baumann can’t get into much detail in 300 words, but you can bask in all the detail you can handle by reading Donoghue at 3000 words on Tudors in film (the Stuarts will have to fend for themselves, at least until Donoghue gets around to them).

But surely the biggest OLM-echo of this issue is Steven Gunn’s long and wonderfully readable piece on two new biographies of Henry VIII – books Gunn introduces by mentioning the relative paucity of their particular genre:

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Yet full-scale biographies of the King are strangely rare. In part it is the magisterial quality of J. J. Scarisbrick’s work of 1968 that has enabled it to hold the field for so long. But there seems also to be a sense that Henry is so large a character, the evidence so bulky, the controversies so fierce, that the task daunts those who consider it.

To which Donoghue would no doubt respond with a hearty “pFah”! Certainly the task of biographizing Henry VIII seems not to have daunted him – readers are invited to survey the full results.

The next issue of the TLS will no doubt be less Donoghue-centric, although we can never be sure. One of the inevitable side-effects of rattling on The Legend Trip movie as often and as variously as Donoghue tends to do is that echoes abound. Readers seeking a little temporary relief are advised to curl up with the latest issue of Vogue Weddings until they get their strength back.

 Another full-to-brimming issue of Open Letters Monthly goes ‘live’ for October, and it abounds with a surprising variety of romances! Sharon Fulton examines the reading public’s erotic fascination with vampires Band of the Hand movies

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; Karen Vanuska tries to anatomize America’s ever-troubled passion for so-called ‘Southern’ fiction; Steve Donoghue heads Down South too, rooting around in that region’s love of Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson; John Rodwan, Jr. shows us a Christopher Hitchens in love with the sound of his own voice

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. Political Editor Greg Waldmann turns in an epic dissection of Barack Obama

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, the ideological paramour of so many voters young and old; Kathleen Smith looks at the torrid relationship between marketing and the vox populi

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; both Lianne Habinek and Steve Donoghue plumb the depths of Shakespeare, displaying and deconstructing the love critics have of theorizing about the Bard; and Hugh Seames reviews the latest book about that most romantic of cities, Venice. Add to all that a poem by Andrea Zanzotto (translated by Wayne Chambliss) and a photo by Wes Thomas, and you have a lovely bon-bon of an issue to consume!