Castles, Customs, and Kings: True Tales by English Historical Fiction Authors (43 page)

While the Ecclesiastical Courts gathered order and strength, unhappy marital unions would be dissolved by desertion, or public sales of the wife—the price most of the time already settled between the old and new spouse. This marriage auction publicly announced the new union.

The least expensive and easiest way of marriage dissolution was by mutual agreement. The couple would then go their merry way to remarry, again, possibly to another who lived not far away.

Before the Ecclesiastical Courts could gain momentum, the formal method of marital dissolution was at King’s Bench in Westminster. It provided legal separation, but it almost always went harshly for the wife.

Still at Westminster, a less honest practice was to seek out “straw-men”. They lingered in the Hall with straw sticking out of their shoes, showing anyone with a purse of coin they’d perjure themselves during the court proceedings. They would stand before the judge and say anything the purse holder wanted them to say.

This behavior continued through the century. In the 1690s the Crown imposed a Stamp Tax of five shillings for licenses and marriage certificates. It was soon realized (by the lack of income to the Crown) that clandestine marriages continued to prevail. As a result, a series of acts were implemented to shut down the clandestine marriage shops.

As the English government settled into a more comfortable relationship with the Church of England, so too did the marriage market, but it wasn’t until the Marriage Act in 1753 that it was finally put under control.

For more on this, please read my historical novel,
Viola, A Woeful Tale of Marriage
, set in London, 1660.

Sources

Stone, Lawrence.
Broken Lives: Separation and Divorce in England, 1660-1857
. Oxford University Press, 1993.

________.
Uncertain Unions: Marriage in England 1660-1753
. Oxford University Press, 1992.

Fabulous Fabrics of the 17th Century

by Deborah Swift

I
n th
e 17th century all yarn for fabric was combed and spun by hand using a drop spindle and then woven into cloth. The immense amount of work that went into this process is often forgotten. Linen, wool, and silk were all spun and combined in different ways to give different effects.

Coloured fabrics were usually called “stuffs” and were very popular after the Restoration and the end of Puritan rule when bold colours could be worn again. Many English fabrics sought to imitate those of France and Italy and were characterised by elaborate finishing techniques such as glossing, hot-pressing, and watering. Weaving and finishing was a specialised craft operated typically by one or two journeyman-weavers in small, independently owned workshops. At this period blue was not very fashionable as many servants were uniformed in blue. Orange and yellow were in vogue for women’s clothes. Some fabrics were woven and then cut with decorative slashes. Each slash had to be buttonhole-edged by hand to achieve the effect.

Very desirable too were fabrics embroidered by hand, with what came to be known as “crewel” work, the more opulent the better, as long as you were not in servitude to somebody else, in which case you had to obey the “sumptuary laws” and dress according to your station.

A fabric from a 1630s jacket in the V&A museum features a fanciful bird woven in red wool on a linen twill. Later this sort of work was more often seen on furnishings and draperies for the house.

A linen jacket made in about 1610 was lined with coral silk taffeta. The embroidery includes spider-knots, stemstitch, chainstitch, and buttonhole stitches. The edging is silver gilt bobbin lace. Uniquely, on the V&A website you can see a picture of the jacket being worn in a portrait of the wearer (
http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O11095/jacket/
).

Even handkerchiefs, purses, chemises, and shoes were embroidered, not to mention household linens and drapes for beds and windows.

In portraits too you can see women teaching young girls the art of embroidery and lace-making. One of these displays a lady with a lace-maker’s pad as she is working the pinned individual threads into lace.

Embroidered shoes—I do not know if they embroidered the fabric first and then made up the shoes, or did it the other way around. In any case, they are lovely. I used the shoes as part of the inspiration for my book
The Lady’s Slipper
, which features beautiful embroidered shoes like the ones in the Northampton Shoe Museum.

Party Clothes in the 17th Century

by Deborah Swift

I
wondered
if my 17th century equivalent would open her closet and sigh the way I did when someone invited me to a party and I couldn’t decide what to wear. So just what would the fashionable woman about town be wearing in the 17th century?

At the beginning of the 17th century, a woman wore a farthingale and whalebone corsetry beneath her clothes to emphasise a small waist and large hips. So she was probably not as comfortable as she looked. The large amount of gorgeous lace would be hand-made as Elizabethan ruffs gave way to expensive lace collars. Fancy embellished petticoats were now revealed as skirts were hooped back to display them. After the Restoration of the monarchy, women’s clothes were elegant and colourful and made from costly fabrics such as satin and silk.

But what accessories might you choose on your night out—perhaps dining with a courtier, or attending a concert?

Well one of the oddest 17th century accessories was the mask or “vizard”. These were commonly worn by women to protect their skin from the sun when they went outside, particularly for horse-riding or on carriage journeys. Women also wore masks to maintain their mystery or to keep their identity secret, although not many masks survive, and those that do are in poor condition.

A vizard was found during the renovation of an inner wall of a 16th-century stone building. The nose area is strengthened to stand out and form a case around the wearer’s nose. The outer fabric is black velvet, the lining of silk, and inside it is strengthened by a pressed-paper inner. A black glass bead attached by a string to the mask was used to hold the mask in place—the wearer would hold the bead tightly in her mouth. This of course made speaking impossible, so I don’t think I would have worn mine for long!

An excerpt from Phillip Stubbes’
Anatomie of Abuses,
published in 1583, says:

When they use to ride abrod, they have invisories, or masks, visors made of velvet, wherwith they cover all their faces, having holes made in them against their eyes, whereout they look. So that if a man, that knew not their guise before, should chaunce to meet one of them, he would think hee met a monster or a devil; for face hee can see none, but two brode holes against her eyes with glasses in them.

So now you have your dress and your vizard—what else might you need? Well, fans made from silk and decorated paper were widely used by wealthy people during the 17th century and were the most essential accessory for women during the Stuart period. And without being able to speak you would definitely need the “language of the fan”.

But I feel we are lacking a bit of glitz and glamour, don’t you? So how about embroidered petticoats and a bit of twinkling jewellery?

There was a passion in this period for floral fabrics and jewellery, so it was likely you would put on your earrings by looking in a mirror with an engraved or enamelled back, decorated with floral motifs. You might be tempted to have your dressmaker make a gown, or under-dress, from flower-inspired fabric made in India for export to the English market.

Cosse-de-pois (pea pod) shapes and later flowers became very popular, and many designs in this fashion were produced. Exotic flowers were immensely popular, and botany became a study in its own right.

In
The Lady’s Slipper
, my main character, Alice Ibbetson, is a botanist and artist. Like many ladies of this era, she was fascinated by new varieties of flowers.

The intensification of the trade with the near East brought flowers and bulbs to Europe which had never been seen before, and a true craze for flowers suddenly sprang up. The Tulipomania of 1634 is a well-documented example. Flora had been fashionable in embroidery since the end of the 16th century but was now adopted by jewellery designers as well. From the 1650s on, engraving in metal was another, and later preferred, way of depicting flowers. Other popular jewellery designs were the three droplets, or “girandoles”, called this as they resembled the branches of a lit candlestick.

If you were going to go outside, then the latest fashion was for Venetian “
chopines
”—a type of sandal or stilt designed to keep your shoes protected from the filth and dirt of the city streets, and for short ladies, to add a little height.

Constructed from carved wood and silks, they must have been as uncomfortable to wear as modern platform soles, but twice as difficult to keep on. Chopines apparently caused an unstable and inelegant gait. Women wearing them were generally accompanied by a servant or attendant on whom they could balance themselves, and even to put the chopines on was a little like climbing onto stilts, so they were usually put on with the help of two servants. Some chopines could be as high as 50 cm, and their height became symbolic of the status of the wearer.

So now, in whalebone reinforced black dress, gripping my vizard between my teeth, ears heavy with floral gems, I shall totter on my chopines to my sedan!

17th Century Garden Design for Women

by Deborah Swift

W
illiam Lawson is
credited with making gardening popular for women with his book
A New Orchard and Garden,
which was printed together with the first horticultural book written solely for women,
The Country Housewife’s Garden
. Beautifully illustrated with charming woodcuts, it tells the 17th century woman everything she needs to know to have a productive and visually attractive garden.

The concept of a “pretty” garden would have been anathema to most women of the 17th century, as gardens were primarily about producing food and herbs, unless you were very wealthy, in which case the gardening was left to your servants. The 17th century author of
The English Housewife
, Gervase Markham, claimed the “complete woman” had:

skill in physic, surgery, cookery, extraction of oils, banqueting stuff, ordering of great feasts, preserving of all sorts of wines…distillations, perfumes, ordering of wool, hemp and flax: making cloth and dying; the knowledge of dairies: office of malting; of oats…of brewing, baking, and all other things belonging to a household.

Guess that did not leave much time for planting pretty flowers!

Because kitchen gardens were about supplying the table, and as much ground as possible was covered with edible plants, every garden was different, planted according to the whims of the women of the household. William Lawson’s book for the country housewife was designed to be read in conjunction with his
New Orchard and Garden
, thus giving women access to the idea of garden design, in print, for the very first time.

William Lawson lived from 1553 to 1635 and was the vicar of Ormesby, a country parish in Yorkshire. No doubt his gardening passion led him to be so long-lived in an age where most people did not reach fifty. Gardening was a national passion in the 16th and 17th centuries, as more species came from abroad, and an interest in subjects concentrating on the useful qualities and medical virtues of plants became popular.

But the war against garden pests was just as hard then as now—Lawson calls them the “
whole Army of mischiefs
” and says that “
Good things have most enemies”
. The enemies in his Yorkshire Garden were apparently deer and moles.

Lawson’s garden plan included long walkways, a maze, and even a bowling alley. Its rectangular shape is split into six sections over three terraces, with flights of stairs and paths to go from one to the other. Its design demonstrates the vogue in the 16th and 17th century for symmetry and patterns. In the top left square he planned to have topiary, signified by a man with the sword and a horse. A river runs at the top and bottom of the garden where he says
“you might sit in your mount and angle a peckled trout, sleighty eel or some other daintie fish”
.

In my novel,
The Lady’s Slipper
, Alice Ibbetson is an obsessive gardener—a pioneer, if you like, testing out the knowledge handed down from her father who was a plantsman much like William Lawson. She finds relaxation in communing with nature. Her maid Ella, featured in
The Gilded Lily
, would try to avoid garden work if at all possible. Her sights are set on becoming a fine lady, just like Alice Ibbetson, and leaving manual labour behind for good.

Source

Lawson, William.
A new orchard and garden: or, The best way for planting, grafting, and to make any ground good, for a rich orchard: particularly in the North and generally for the whole kingdom of England.
London: J. H. for F. Williams, 1626.
http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/16493#/summary
.

Gossip in Early Modern England

by Sam Thomas

I
n today’s world, whether it is
used as a noun or a verb, the term “gossip” has universally negative connotations. Gossips spread rumors of dubious veracity and are often considered the very opposite of what a friend should be.

But such was not always the case, for in early modern England “gossip” had additional and sometimes contradictory meanings.

According to the
Oxford English Dictionary
, the earliest recorded use of the word “gossip” comes from 1014, but its meaning would have no resonance today, for “gossip” referred to a child’s godmother or godfather. The spiritual kinship between the child and the godparent extended to the child’s birth parents as well, making them “siblings in god.”

And here is where things get really cool: “gossip” is short for “god-sib” which is itself an abbreviated form of “god sibling.” Thus your gossips were the women and men you chose as godparents for your child—gossips were your closest friends.

According to the English, the Irish chose wolves as their gossips. As one historian noted, this idea is as interesting if it is false as if it is true. Intriguingly enough, this meaning of the word—including its inclusion of men as gossips—endured into the late 19th century.

In the seventeenth century, “gossip” began to refer to the women who attended a woman during labor and delivery of a child, or at her recovery (or lying-in) afterwards, and here we can begin to see the word taking on its negative connotations. Prior to the eighteenth century, childbirth was women’s business and a central occasion for women’s sociability. A woman gave birth not in the presence of doctors and nurses (whom she knew not at all), but her friends and neighbors.

Such gatherings of women made some men very nervous, and they spilt a great deal of ink voicing their anxiety. In
‘Tis Merry When Gossips Meet
(1602) and its sequel
A Crew of Kind Gossips
(1609), Samuel Rowlands describes the meeting between a widow, wife, and spinster in which the three women exchange complaints about their husbands and the widow offers the other women advice on how to manipulate their spouses.

While there is no denying Rowlands’ misogyny, his description may not have been entirely off the mark. Writing later in the century, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, describes just such a gathering in terms Rowlands would recognize:

...as is Usual at such Gossiping Meetings, their Discourse was most of Labours and Child-beds, Children and Nurses, and Household Servants...at last they fell into a Discourse of Husbands, Complaining of Ill Husbands, and so from Husbands in General, to their own Particular Husbands.