The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England (31 page)

Make-up and Perfume

Mirrors or looking glasses are available, both in square varieties that stand on a table and round versions for hanging on the wall. As you can imagine, the Puritans do not approve of either. ‘The devil could never have found a more pestilent evil than this,’ declares Stubbes, adding: ‘these looking glasses be called the devil’s bellows, wherewith he bloweth the blast of pride into our hearts, and those that look in them may be said to look in the devil’s arse while he infuseth the venomous wind of pride into their souls’.
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It has to be added that mirrors and looking glasses aren’t cheap; you are unlikely to see one outside the houses of wealthy merchants and gentlemen.

‘The women of England,’ Stubbes observes, ‘colour their faces with certain oils, liquors, unguents and waters made to that end … their souls are thereby deformed and they brought deeper into the displeasure and indignation of the Almighty.’
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You will gather from this that women in Puritan families do not use make-up. Others do: it has long been the fashion to make your face white with lead-based ceruse. ‘They white their face, neck and paps with ceruse, their lips with red and their cheeks with purple,’ explains Horman.
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This has the advantage of covering up any scars you might have left over from some disfiguring disease like smallpox. Sir Hugh Plat offers a different recipe in 1602, and although it will not give you lead poisoning, it has a certain unattractive quality:

wash barrows’ grease [the lard of castrated pigs] often times in May-dew that hath been clarified in the sun till it be exceeding white, then take marshmallow roots scraping off the outsides, then make thin slices of them and mix them; set them to macerate in a seething bath and scum it well till it be thoroughly clarified and will come to be rope [viscous] …
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If rubbing that lot into your face leaves you smelling less than fragrant, Elizabethan London has the answer. Some very strong perfumes are available in the capital, mainly ambergris (a secretion of the sperm whale), musk (a secretion of the musk deer) and civet (a secretion of the civet cat). These can be purchased in small multicoloured glass bottles. Such bottles are jewels in their own right, edged with gold and garnished with rubies and emeralds; some even have screw tops.
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A cheap alternative is a linen pouch stuffed with lavender. In between the two you have pomanders. Made of metal or boxwood, intricately carved and carried on a silken cord from the waist, these are filled with aromatic spices, such as cloves, nutmeg and cumin (at the higher end of the market) or petals and herbs (at the lower).
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Sir Hugh Plat’s exotic recipe is one you might like to try:

Take an ounce of the finest garden mould, cleaned and steeped seven days in change of rosewater: then take the best ladanum [a gum resin], benzoin, both storaxes, ambergris, civet and musk: incorporate them together and work them into what form you please. Then if your breath be not too valiant, it will make you smell as sweet as any lady’s dog.
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Men’s Clothing

In infancy, boys are dressed in skirts, the same as girls. At the age of about five or six they are ‘breeched’ – given breeches to wear instead – and dressed like young men. The clothes a lad now wears are mentioned in the following discussion between a schoolboy and a household maid as he gets ready for school (having got up late, of course, as schoolboys do in all centuries):

Margaret (the servant):
Ho, Francis! Rise and get you to school! You shall be beaten for it is past seven. Make yourself ready quickly, say your prayers, then you shall have your breakfast.

Francis:
Margaret, give me my hosen, despatch, I pray you. Where is my doublet? Bring my garters and my shoes; give me that shoeing horn.

Margaret:
Take first a clean shirt, for yours is foul.

Francis:
Make haste then, for I do tarry too long.

Margaret:
It is moist yet. Tarry a little that I may dry it by the fire.

Francis:
I cannot tarry so long – go your way, I will have none of it.

Margaret:
Your mother will chide me if you go to school without your clean shirt.

Francis:
I had rather thou should be shent [blamed] than I should either be chid or beaten. Where have you laid my girdle and my inkhorn? Where is my jerkin of Spanish leather? Where be my socks of linen? Where is my cap, my mittens, my slippers, my handkerchief, my points, my satchel, my penknife and my books? Where is all my gear? I have nothing ready. I will tell my father: I will cause you to be beaten.
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Shirts.
Note that the schoolboy Francis is already wearing a shirt when he starts to get dressed – he simply puts his clothes over the same shirt he slept in, even though Margaret tries to persuade him to put on a clean one. He obviously does not have such a large supply of these that several clean ones are ready to be worn. This not only says something about his status, but also about his personal hygiene: most well-to-do people clean their body through constant washing of the linen that rubs on their skin. Cambric and holland come up fresh and white after a good scrub; lockram and linsey-woolsey are cheaper fabrics and can withstand a harder cleaning process. Most shirts are long, thigh-length, with slits up the sides so that the tails can be tucked between the legs (instead of wearing drawers, which are more expensive).
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Although linen is by far the most common cloth for a man’s shirt, there are some made of silk. The 1533 sumptuary law states clearly that commoners should not wear them, but some Essex gentlemen are known to wear silk shirts.
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Most, however, are not pure silk, but linen embroidered with silk thread.

Hosen, breeches and slops.
A ‘pair of hose’ or ‘hosen’ can mean practically any garment a man might wear below his waist: socks, stockings, netherstocks, breeches, braies, trunkhose, pluderhose, slops and even ‘trousers’ (as worn by sailors). At the start of the reign, most hosen are all of one piece, covering the whole leg, like a pair of tights. Separate breeches and stockings arrive in the 1570s, and by the 1580s a single-piece stocking is thought of in London as something fit for a country bumpkin.
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When visiting London in
this period you should wear breeches (otherwise known as trunkhose or slops) from the waist down, possibly with canions (stockings or ‘upperstocks’) down to below the knee. On your lower leg you should wear netherstocks, which are like stockings up to the knee and over, covering the bottom of the canions and fastened around the bottom of the thigh with a garter. The netherstocks may be made of expensive material, such as satin, in which case they will not enclose the foot; instead an easily washable linen sock will be used. Expensive netherstocks are sometimes decorated with ‘quirks’ or embroidered designs around the ankle. Less showy varieties are knitted.
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Various forms of breeches are available. At the bottom end of the social spectrum you have plain leather or serge breeches, reaching down to the knee. At the top end you have French or round hosen, gally hosen (or galligaskins) and Venetians, made of costly but hard-wearing fabrics, such as velvet, satin and damask. French hosen tend to be short and rounded, ending mid-thigh. Sometimes these are stuffed with ‘bombast’ or wool to make them firm. Galligaskins are wider and more voluminous, tied with garters below the knee. Venetians are longer and baggy, tied beneath the knee and covering the tops of the netherstocks. All of these varieties of hosen might incorporate elements of ‘pluderhosen’, a German style in which the breeches have slits in the sides and incorporate ‘panes’ of other material, juxtaposing the beauty of different colours and fabrics.
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Drawers.
You may find the word ‘hosen’ being used to refer to drawers – people are not too particular when it comes to discussing men’s undergarments. Boys don’t normally wear them, but, as mentioned above, tuck their shirt tails between their legs. Some men at the start of the reign continue the old custom of wearing linen braies, which are like close-fitting linen drawers. However, for those who can afford them, silk-embroidered linen drawers are the underclothes of choice for the sixteenth-century man of fashion. These are loose and extend halfway down the thigh, hanging in pleated folds from a linen cord at the waist.
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Waistcoats.
Like women’s waistcoats, these are undergarments tailored to the waist, designed to be worn over a shirt, but beneath a
coat or doublet. Also like women’s waistcoats, they are put on over the head. Sometimes they are called ‘petticoats’, especially if they hang lower than the waist;
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you might also hear them called ‘vests’ (not to be confused with the modern undergarment of the same name, even though they are worn principally for warmth). Waistcoats are often padded; those worn beneath a coat may have small pockets. For the wealthy they can be extraordinarily lavish, tailored from silk, velvet or cambric, with sleeves embroidered with cloth of silver – especially stylish when worn beneath a casually open doublet or jacket.
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Doublets.
If you know just one thing about Tudor clothes it is probably that men wear a ‘doublet and hose’. Some men prefer a waistcoat and coat, and some labourers have no choice but to wear a short cassock over their shirt, tied with a belt; but most men wear some form of hosen below the waist and some form of doublet above it.

The doublet is a lined garment that opens at the front. Normally it has sleeves and is buttoned up like a jacket. Alternatively it may be laced with leather ‘points’. Some hang long; others are short and stop at the waist, sometimes holding up the breeches. Others still are tailored as a suit of apparel in the same material as the breeches. You might choose a light linen doublet in summer and a padded worsted one in winter; you will also come across leather ones. Prosperous men will wear a doublet of velvet, the less well-off are looking at worsted and serge.
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With the decline of the codpiece, the stuffed peascod doublet slowly takes over as the outward projection of virility: it speaks of both manly courage and the satisfaction of being well fed. As for the fashionable Londoners in 1580, who better to describe their doublets than the arch-critic Stubbes:

Their doublets are no less monstrous than the rest, for now the fashion is to have them hang down to the middle of their thighs or at least to their privy members, being so hard quilted, stuffed, bombasted and sewed as they can neither work nor yet well play in them, through the excessive heat and stiffness thereof; and therefore are forced to wear them loose about them for the most part, otherwise they could very hardly either stoop or bow themselves to the ground, so stiff and sturdy they stand about them. Now what handsomeness can be in these doublets which stand on their bellies as big or much bigger than a man’s codpiece (so that their bellies are thicker than all their bodies beside) let wise men judge. For my part … I see no good end whereto they serve except it be to show the disposition of the wearer: how he is inclined … to gluttony, gormandice, riot, drunkenness and excess …
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(You have to admit that Stubbes has to be the most entertaining writer of the period whom you would not want actually to meet in person.)

Ruffs.
The ruff is a peculiarly unisexual garment. There is a male style of wearing a ruff – open at the front, with bands or ties dangling loose. This is especially popular with big-bearded men. But as the fashion extends to the wide ruffs of the 1580s, the majority of men wear ruffs similar to those worn by women, closed all round the neck, forming a large ‘cartwheel’ shape. The finest are made of cambric, holland and lawn. Stubbes, of course, mocks them all as unnecessary fripperies: ‘if it happen that a shower of rain catch them before they can get harbour, then their great ruffs strike sail and down they fall like dishcloths fluttering in the wind’.
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But even men of very modest means would disagree with him. Richard Hossell of Bicester, who dies in 1587, leaves behind a wardrobe of just one doublet, one pair of hose, one pair of netherstocks, one jerkin and one old shirt, but even he has two ruffs or ‘shirt bands’.
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Jerkins.
By Elizabeth’s reign, the jerkin has become a garment worn by all sorts of people. A worker in the fields may wear a leather jerkin over his shirt. Sailors often wear them too, fastened with eyelets and hooks or leather buttons.
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The most fashionable aristocrat may also wear a jerkin, albeit one of velvet with silver buttons and stuffed shoulder wings.

Gowns.
Ankle-length, fur-trimmed, loose sleeved and normally dark-coloured, gowns are often worn by dignified men of a certain age. They are also a mark of men with a profession: academics, lawyers, physicians and clergymen can be recognised by their gowns.

Cloaks.
Hanging from the shoulders, they might have a collar of fur and be as long as a gown. Alternatively they might be collarless and short, more like a mantle. The German style of cloak is more like a jacket with sleeves hanging loose. The mandilion is another version of this; when one is worn as a cloak, at an angle and with the sleeves hanging empty, it is described as being worn ‘Colley-Westonward’ (as mentioned by Harrison at the start of this chapter). For the courtier, cloaks are essential: the earl of Essex has twenty-eight of them.
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