The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are (21 page)

Trade was stirring up the world, making new
things available to new kinds of people for a price. Silk belongs to that world in
motion: carried up Russian rivers from the east and across the Baltic or in Venetian
galleys to the Flemish coast. So does fashion itself: it belongs to people who know
something different from their settled ways and can imagine taking on other
people’s customs, other people’s style. It
is not about uniforms, as a monk or a courtier might wear;
it is about choosing to reinvent yourself and your status. It didn’t start at
great courts when there were artists to record the tilt of a bosom or the length of a
skirt, and it was never a woman’s matter; it was of interest to the men brawling
in the mud of Grimsby.

It left traces on Greenland, far out on the
wild sea beyond Norway, even as the ice began to creep onto the meadows and start the
process which drove the settlers out in the late fifteenth century. Long before the
earliest-known patterns for cutting out clothes, which come from Germany and Spain in
the sixteenth century, the Greenland settlers knew enough to cut clothes in new styles
and they cared about doing so;
¹¹
yet their lives were as raw and
careful as could be. They didn’t waste a single sinew, bone or organ of their
sheep; scrotums became small bags for storage, horns became eating implements, some
bones turned into reels for storing spun yarn and the tibia sometimes became flutes.
They didn’t waste wool, either, since they depended on it for sails to travel and
clothes to keep out the cold. They paid their priests in the cloth known as
vaðmál
, and that name means a ‘cloth measure’ because cloth
often worked exactly like money: a way to pay bills.

So they learned rather early not to waste
cloth and they knew the old ways could be wasteful, making a shirt the width of the
cloth coming off the loom and not bothering with seams or careful cutting. Instead they
shaped clothes to the body, cut very carefully, sewed together the elements to make a
shirt or a shift; in an astonishingly short time, your farmer and your farmer’s
wife in the blind Arctic winters had tailored clothes. It was a matter of sense and
economy. Clothes were mostly pulled on over the head, but they had buttonholes which
were an innovation and even a scandal further south, they had distinct collars, they
were flared out from the shoulders, they could be dyed with borders of madder red, which
had to be imported. Everyone wore a hood. These were not choices born of necessity, like
the fur of arctic hare woven into cloth for warmth in the harshest months of winter; the
Greenlanders brought in cloth when they did not need to, a reddish diamond twill from
England, a rough weave from Ireland, because they liked and valued them. They
sent away their own cloth for sale in
distinctive stripes and checks and patterns, so other people could make choices.

When the settlers had been frozen out,
chased out and starved, one last ship worked along the Greenland coast, captained by a
man called Jon the Greenlander. He was blown off course deep into one of the fjords and
there he found a body lying face down among the remains of deserted settlements: the
last of the colonists. ‘On his head he had a well-sewn hood,’ Jon noticed,
‘his other clothes were partly of vaðmál, partly of sealskin.’ Even at the
miserable end of a colonial experiment as far west from Europe as Europeans had ever
managed to settle, what he noticed and reported was a ‘well-sewn’ hood.
¹²

Fashion, choosing how to dress and changing
it at will, was not just on Paris streets or in the flamboyant court of Flanders, places
where people had rank to show, money to spend and time to waste. It is much more than
those lovingly painted robes in illuminated manuscripts from the fourteenth century,
those ladies posing very carefully because it would clearly be difficult to move. The
shoes in Bergen, the shirts on Greenland, mark it as one of the aspirations born of the
rough business of trade.

Since trade was involved there was one
consolation: the ships that brought the material also delivered someone to take the
blame. It was usually the French. Robert I, King of Naples, blamed the French for the
bumfreezer styles of the 1330s, even though he was himself from Anjou. In the middle of
the fifteenth century, Florence banned deep V-shaped necklines on a woman’s dress
just on the suspicion of being French. And the English, like the priest Alexander
Barclay in his
Ship of Fools
of 1509, reckoned fancy clothing all came from
France, as he said, ‘like the pox’.
¹³

There had once been a time when parents
could bequeath clothes to their children knowing they would be wearable long after their
deaths and, even more important, they would still have the same significance. A couple
of aristocrats drawing up their will in 863 – the Emperor’s sister and an Italian
count – made a point of leaving to their oldest and second-oldest sons their clothes
that were woven and decorated with gold; they were handing on badges of rank that
everybody could understand, and they were
sure their sons would be able to go on wearing them.
¹⁴
The social order
was fixed, after all, and everyone knew how to read the clothes on other people’s
backs.

The sober, simple clothes of a monk had
enormous significance to laypeople. Wearing the same clothes as a holy man was a kind of
magic: for two centuries people reckoned they ought to wear monastic clothes when dying
so as to be in the right style for the Last Judgement, until the
Lay Folks’
Catechism
of 1357 found it necessary to point out that a man can’t be
guaranteed a place in Heaven even ‘though he had upon him in his death the clothes
that Christ wore here on earth in His manhood’. Nicholas of Bruère, who paid ten
marks for a chance to live in a monastery and wear ‘at my latter end the habit of
St Benedict’, was entirely out of luck.
¹⁵

It was different if you were the ones
obliged to wear these plain and meaningful clothes; even holy men revolted. Monks on
Lindisfarne, Bede says, had to be ‘discouraged from wearing expensively dyed cloth
and are expected to be content with natural wool’.
¹⁶
In one of
Alcuin’s letters to Higbaldus from the court of Charlemagne, he worries about the
manliness, the modesty and propriety of the church, which had just been wrecked and
burned by Vikings; Alcuin denounces excess and display and he insists that ‘vanity
in dress is not fitting for men’.
¹⁷
Church councils in the ninth
century had to order nuns and monks to wear their habits; twelfth-century monks were
told off for going to Mass ‘indecently dressed – in lay garments – open in front
and behind’; and in the thirteenth century the punishment for taking the habit off
at all was excommunication. Monks were particularly forbidden to wear anything split,
tight, short, pleated or, worst of all, with the new-fangled buttons. It was not easy to
insist on this because if someone in holy orders had a sizeable income – two hundred
marks a year or more, itself an affront to vows of poverty – he was entitled to wear the
same splendour as ‘knights of the same rent’. Money has a way of dissolving
the rules.
¹⁸

Noble and royal courts, meanwhile, required
liveries to identify who was who and show their loyalties. By 1303 the French were
making uniforms to define everyone entitled to attend the opening of the Parlement:
fashion had its bureaucratic uses. Students and
professors at Paris University could be picked out in a
crowd by the way they dressed, which was soberly. The fur you wore became an exact
marker of your standing: ermine for princely families, because white was such a rare
colour, down to lambskin for the king’s fool and the children’s servants.
Rules could change, though, as they did when lambskin, always natural and never dyed,
was taken up by the elegant people after 1430.

At fourteenth-century tournaments, the women
all wore the same colour, had the same devices embroidered on their sleeves, led the
knights out to the jousting field with colour co-ordinated ribbons, as consciously
designed for a deliberate effect as any chorus line in a modern theatre; at Saint-Denis
in 1389 the frocks were a rich dark green, the left sleeves were embroidered in silver
and gold with the king’s device of a broom pod set in May foliage, and the ribbons
were green silk splashed with gold. The ladies became a walking sign of solidarity,
nothing individual about them, and a flattering background to the queen who chose to
wear scarlet from head to toe.
¹⁹

A man displayed his class walking down the
street. A professional wore a long robe, but nobles could afford to flaunt their
buttocks with a short doublet as they did in thirteenth-century Flanders. Ordinary
people weren’t meant to change styles at all or even have an idea of style; or so
the privileged thought. In Flanders, most women wore the same for centuries, and the
only change for most men in the fifteenth century was that they brought their belts up
from buttock level to the waist.
²⁰
The problem was that rules could
fall into disuse. Long robes were once reserved for the literate, for lawyers and
priests, but in 1467 Jacques du Clercq noticed ‘there wasn’t a journeyman,
however minor, who didn’t have a long robe down to his ankle’.

For if clothes had such clear meaning, they
were dangerous: anyone could open the wrong wardrobe and put on a different status, a
different class. In the thirteenth-century
Le Roman de la Rose
there is a
character called Faker who says he’s good at changing clothes, so he can be
‘now a knight, now a monk, a bishop, a chaplain, now a clerk, now a priest, or a
student or a master or the owner of a proper castle or just a man who works in the
forests. In short, I can be a prince or I can be a page, whatever rank I
like.’
²¹
Clothes defined him, and he
chooses how he wants to be defined: which is the essence of
fashion, which means changing the way you dress just because you want to; and also means
having a shrewd idea of what your time and place require so you can be defiant.

In a more settled society that might just
seem absurd, suggesting kids out clubbing or some carnival queen in her crown and robes.
In a time when rank and status and money were all shifting, the easy changes of fashion
were alarming. All around the North Sea the old kind of manor was disintegrating, which
meant that noble lands were losing their old value. Cities were growing where once there
had only been a market. Nobody had to stay in place any more; if you left the land you
had a good chance of work in the new workshops and manufactures in those cities. Some
men were making serious money, merchants or manufacturers, and they wanted the glory
that goes with being rich. They dressed like nobles.

These issues were so tangled that the law
was invoked to make things at least seem simple. If law laid down who could wear what,
and who was forbidden what, then perhaps all the other issues would somehow resolve
themselves. So when the law started to regulate how people dressed in the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries, and tried to put down excess, there was always a common heart to
the message: go back in time, know your place and dress it. Power did not like rivals.
The King of France in 1279 issued an ordinance that no noble could own more than four
robes made of miniver, the fur of squirrels, and none at all of cloth that cost more
than thirty
sous tournois
the Parisian yard; the king wanted to go on standing
out as king.
²²

And yet the technology of clothes began to
allow all kinds of choice; tailoring, at least the cutting of cloth to create fitted
clothing, goes back in London to the early thirteenth century,
²³
which is also when
you start to find specialist cutters and sewers of clothing, the first tailors, in
northern France and along the Rhine. Tailoring was usual at grand courts, so tailoring
allowed anyone to imply that they were part of the court without saying so, and without
breaking the law.

In Italian cities, these laws were aimed at
women for the most
convoluted reason: their
clothes cost so much that men couldn’t marry, which was leading to sodomy, so
fashion was distracting everyone from the serious business of replenishing the
population of cities like Florence.
²⁴
In the North, the aims were rather
different. The English were much more concerned with men’s clothes than
women’s (which was a quite general rule in the North).
²⁵
England wanted to
maintain its solid system of class, of course, but also to protect English trades
against foreign goods. All this was itself dressed up with a moral anxiousness, so the
laws about fashion were meant to adjust people’s souls as well as their pockets
and their wardrobes, and make them better persons. They would obviously be better if
they knew their place.

The laws kept coming to make sure the wrong
people did not wear the right clothes. In England, no furs for anyone making less than
£100 a year; in Hainault no ermine or silk for servants; in Scotland after 1430, no dyed
clothes in bright colours for the working classes; in France in 1485, a means test for
cloth of gold, which was restricted to nobles who lived nobly and had at least two
thousand
livres tournois
a year to pay for it. These laws suggest that the
wrong people had the cash, and they were looking much better than they were meant to
be.
²⁶

Fashion became something to talk about when
you couldn’t quite discuss all the alarming social change that it made visible. It
was becoming a moral issue.

Mockery was the start. The sainted Bernard
of Clairvaux in the twelfth century already had his doubts about the new generation of
knights (‘not military but malicious’) because their hair got in their eyes,
they were tripped and tangled by the length of their shirts and they buried their hands
in wide sleeves; but at least they didn’t insist, like some aristos, on tunic
sleeves so tight they had to be sewn into them every day.
²⁷
Clothes
didn’t need to be practical, which was a statement in itself; men and women both
needed handbags attached to the belt because they had no pockets.