1. SUMPTUARY LEGISLATION AND THE POLICING OF FEMALE DRESS

In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century London, clothes had a significant role in regulating women's bodies and defining appropriate female behaviour.Footnote ¹ Statutes and proclamations issued between 1337 and 1604 ordered women to dress in a manner befitting the rank of their fathers or husbands, occasionally referring to items such as veils or headdresses, and from 1574 direct restrictions were placed on female dress, in particular the wearing of silk gowns.Footnote ² In 1611 Sir William Craven, the Lord Mayor of London, and Common Council issued legislation against ‘many and great inconveniences and disorders which daily grow, by the inordinate pride of Maid-servants and Women-servants, in their excesse of Apparell and folly in variety of new fashions’ targeting almost every item of clothing likely to have been worn by a female servant. Also, during the reformations of manners in the 1650s and 1690s women were arrested if they were deemed to be wearing clothes beyond their means or if they were considered to be dressed like prostitutes, with clothes influencing justices' decisions as to whether or not women were guilty of attempting to sell sex.Footnote ³ Critiques of fashion-obsessed women drawing on biblical and classical tropes emanated from press, pulpit and stage, reflecting fears about increasing numbers of women in the capital effeminising London society, as well as increasing consumption of luxury foreign clothing damaging the economy and making it impossible to use dress as a marker of social rank.Footnote ⁴

Contemporaries believed that opulent female attire facilitated whoredom, and that the expensive finery of whores concealed bodies that were frail, disfigured and diseased, or beautiful and enticing. Plebeian women wearing luxurious clothes were suspected of prostitution, and the fashionable clothes of citizens' wives sometimes resembled those of prostitutes. Attempts to demarcate female honesty through dress were made more problematic by the fact that many prostitutes had access to expensive clothes provided by bawds and customers, and dressed as gentlewomen to attract and fulfil the fantasies of their clients. As such, any woman considered to be dressed above her station was viewed with suspicion and had to explain how she came to possess such attire.Footnote ⁵

Yet, despite these restrictions, women used clothes to enhance their social credit and facilitate their ability to survive in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century London. What follows reveals how dressing appropriately provided women with advantages over their rivals in the job and marriage markets, and proved crucial in defining their relationships with women and men. As material objects with strong emotional and moral connotations, clothes were contested commodities that women used to enhance their reputations in a city where appearances mattered greatly.

2. LONDON FASHIONS

The dress of Londoners was influenced by broader trends in Western European fashion, and many clothes available in the capital were created from a range of global products. Fashions grew increasingly colourful from the mid-sixteenth century as trade expansion brought new dyestuffs to London, whilst silk garments fashioned by Dutch refugees, linens from Italy and the Low Countries, Spanish knitted stockings, Flemish lace, Irish mantles, yellow starch, and East Indian floral chintz and calicos added to the diversity.Footnote ⁶ Moralists attacked exotic clothing, linking Spanish and Italian fabrics with lasciviousness and popery, and French materials with syphilis and ostentation, whilst equating wool ‘with England itself; wearing it could signify both nationalist and anti-foreign sentiments’.Footnote ⁷ The Elizabethan homily on apparel attacked Spanish and Turkish fashions, and argued that a woman deserved ‘but mocks and scorns, to set out all her commendation in Jewish and ethnic apparel’.Footnote ⁸ Popular opposition to fashion existed too. In A Rod for Run-awayes Thomas Dekker wrote of ‘a young handsome maid, in very good apparell’ visiting her sister in Kent being driven out by ‘unmercifull, heathenish, and churlish Townesmen, with Bills and Glaues’ because they thought she came from plague-stricken London.Footnote ⁹ Within a few years of Dekker having written this pamphlet Jane Martindale was aspiring to move from Lancashire to London to escape such parochial restrictions. Her brother Adam recalled that in his youth ‘freeholders’ daughters were then confined to their felts, pettie coats and wastcoates, crosse handkerchiefs about their neckes, and white crosse-clothes upon their heads, with coifes under them wrought with black silk or worsteed' and that ‘the proudest of them (below the gentry) durst not have offered to weare an hood, or a scarfe (which now every beggar's brat that can get them thinks not above her,) noe, nor so much as a gowne till her wedding day. And if any of them transgressed these bounds, she would have beene accounted an ambitious foole’.Footnote ¹⁰ Yet godly moralists and rustic parochialism did little to deter women from following London fashions. Many provincial consumers sought out and took pride in clothes made from ‘London silk’ and ‘London russet’, leading Thomas Tuke to complain that ‘once a yeere at least’ an Englishwoman ‘would faine see London, tho’ when she comes there, she have nothing to doe, but to learne a new fashion' and John Williams to wish women were absent from ‘our vaine and sinfull City, where all their imployment [is] … to heighe it abroad, to visit and to see [fashions]’.Footnote ¹¹

Overseas visitors were more complementary of metropolitan tastes. In 1562 Alessandra Magno observed that London women wore leather shoes and ‘dresses laced up to the neck, which make them appear very graceful’, whilst gentlewomen and ladies wore ‘long-sleeved cloaks over their dresses’ and ‘velvet caps which hang down at the back in the French style, and ruffs in the shape of water lilies and violets which go right up to their ears’.Footnote ¹² In 1592 Duke Frederick of Wirtemberg described London women as ‘magnificently apparelled’ with ‘gowns after the old German fashion’, noting that they wore ‘exceedingly fine clothes, and give all their attention to their ruffs and stuffs, to such a degree indeed, that as I am informed, many a one does not hesitate to wear velvet in the streets’.Footnote ¹³ In 1599 Thomas Platter observed that women laid ‘great store by ruffs and starch them blue so that their complexion shall appear the whiter’, that ‘burgher women usually wear high hats covered with velvet or silk … with cut away kirtles when they go out, in old fashioned style’ and ‘a broad circular piece of wood over the breast to keep the body straight and more erect’.Footnote ¹⁴ In 1617 Fynes Morrision commented that merchants' wives were ‘little yielding to others in pride or expence’ but had ‘long used and still returne a decent attire, with little or no inconstancy in the fashion’ and ‘without fit difference of estate or condition’.Footnote ¹⁵ Having visited Hyde Park in May 1662, William Schellinks recorded how ‘all the nobility from the town, court and country present themselves in their best finery on horseback, but mostly in carriages, so that one can see here the most beautiful ladies’ dresses … anywhere in London, everybody trying to outdo the other in their dress in which they appear in public'.Footnote ¹⁶

Women were recognised by their clothes, and if they wore their best attire or anything unusual it attracted curiosity. Katherine Townsend claimed to have seen a gentleman leaving the house of Joyce Holloway in Chancery Lane on 29 September 1598 at six o'clock in the morning, and she knew it was Joyce who let him out because she was ‘in her white wastcoate’. In February 1599 Mary Snow deposed that when Francis Baker had come to the house of her mistress, Elizabeth Hibbens, she had been wearing a green waistcoat and a red petticoat, but that when she returned from an errand she was wearing a buffen gown and a durance petticoat, only to leave the house again later wearing her original clothes.Footnote ¹⁷ Trying to escape after murdering her grandchild, Elizabeth Hazard ‘put on her best apparel’, but this ‘made some of the neighbors marvel being working-day at her being so fine’ and they asked where she was going.Footnote ¹⁸ Women themselves had a clear sense of what constituted appropriate dress for specific occasions. Elizabeth Pepys changed her clothes before meeting Samuel and their friends at The Miter tavern in Wood Street, and in August 1690 a domestic servant spent time ‘dressing her self’ before visiting the fair with a male companion. In May 1684 Edward Kirk, a vintner working near Smithfield, wanted to visit his cousin with his wife Joan, but she claimed to have no clothes ‘good enough to go a visiting’. Only after borrowing a hood and scarf from her fellow servant, Sarah Miller, and being told by Edward that he was not ashamed of her, would she accompany her husband.Footnote ¹⁹

Young single women believed that fashionable clothes would improve their chances in the competitive marriage market, and appear to have enjoyed greater sartorial freedom than the majority of their sex.Footnote ²⁰ Hannah Woolley considered there to be ‘a kind of privilege in youth for wearing fashionable clothes’ and argued that apparel ought ‘to dignify the Wearer, and add more beauty’.Footnote ²¹ Balladeers depicted a London girl who wore silks and bought every new fashion because she was ‘loath to dye a maid’ and city girls decked in ‘rich laces with pleasant perfumes’ telling bachelors ‘for our dress we make it our care/still every way to delight you’ in the hope ‘that we may seem to the world such a prize,/that men may be willing to take us’.Footnote ²² One success story was that of Rebecca Langford, who left Norbury in Staffordshire for London ‘somewhat bare in apparel’ and returned ‘very well apparelled and brought with her a very proper man’, although whether the clothes or the man were acquired first is unclear.Footnote ²³ Clothes also fostered female friendships and sociability. Elizabeth Pepys helped Margaret Penn select a flowered satin suit, took the advice of Lady Sandwich when choosing a petticoat ‘of the new silk-striped stuffs’, and was given a scarf by her husband Samuel's Aunt Wight in return for ‘the many favours she had received of her’, whilst Mrs Tooker and Sarah, the daughter of Samuel's landlady, went shopping for shoes together in St Martin's.Footnote ²⁴ One pamphleteer depicted a young lady and her friend going to the Royal Exchange to buy lace for her sister Nell, and fringe for a glove which Nell was to give her fiancé.Footnote ²⁵ Young London wives were said to ‘take all their best apparel with them’ when visiting, so ‘that their friends in the Country, may see all their bravery’, and mothers educated their daughters about fashion so that ‘neighbouring gentlewomen’ and ‘rich Neeces’ would be honoured by their company.Footnote ²⁶

What women dressed in affected their ability to negotiate the city environment. Tradeswomen wore fancy or provocative fashions to draw customers aside on bustling streets, or to inveigle them into shops.Footnote ²⁷ Female thieves dressed well to gain access to wealthy households.Footnote ²⁸ Muffs contained inner compartments to store handkerchiefs, money and scent, whilst fashionable masks and hoods might attract attention to women or increase their anonymity, enabling them to engage in freer social interactions, especially in parks, theatres and pleasure gardens.Footnote ²⁹ Some elite women dressed down to slum it on the streets. Samuel Pepys recorded how ‘Mrs Jennings, one of the Duchess's maids dressed herself like an orange wench and went up and down and cried oranges – till falling down, or by such accident … her fine shoes were discerned and she put to a great deal of shame’.Footnote ³⁰ Other women cross-dressed to participate in festive entertainments; to facilitate their trade as prostitutes and after the Restoration as actresses; to attract and follow lovers of both sexes; and to enable them to move more freely in London, often with criminal intent.Footnote ³¹ One ‘lusty young wench’ pretended to be a Quaker, took up service in Westminster, and robbed her employers on the second evening, fleeing ‘in mans apparel’ whilst Margery Yoel and a female accomplice broke into the house of Edward Stone of Feltham in Middlesex, ‘disguised in Mens Clothes’, stole ‘all of value’ he had, and threatened to kill him unless he gave them money.Footnote ³²

3. ACQUIRING CLOTHES

Clothing was the second largest household expenditure after food, accounting for up to sixteen per cent of domestic budgets. Daily routines of working women necessitated them having practical and informal clothes that had to be repaired or replaced regularly, whilst middling-sort women expected to have ‘best’ clothes for special occasions.Footnote ³³ In 1688 Gregory King calculated that a quarter of national expenditure went on clothing, and thirty-four pounds or twenty-two per cent of his own household's outgoings went on clothes, of which a greater proportion was allocated to clothing a husband than his wife.Footnote ³⁴ However, fabrics ranged widely in price and quality, so clothing budgets for both households and individuals varied greatly. In London constant exposure to new fashions made the need to keep pace with the latest trends intense, with many retailers offering goods on credit. Over a fifth of the workforce was employed in the clothing industry, and the rise of the ‘new draperies’ facilitated the growth of the ready-made clothes market, which was thriving during the later sixteenth century and the second quarter of the seventeenth. Wealthy shoppers favoured the Royal Exchange and the New Exchange, whilst the parishes of St Martin's and St Clement's in neighbouring Westminster housed tailors, shoemakers, embroiderers, glovers and milliners. By the later seventeenth century sign boards and glazed shop windows made sartorial temptations even more visible. Yet despite ready-to-wear decreasing in price, many plebeian women purchased fabrics and accessories to make their own attire, often personalised with decorative embroidery, or invested in second-hand items which functioned as a form of alternative currency.Footnote ³⁵ When Jane Hattersley was ejected from her lodgings her landlady Goodwife King allowed her to take ‘such things as were hers’, except for a gown that she took in payment for arrears owed, and money due ‘for some matter’.Footnote ³⁶ In July 1578 Suzan Watt deposed that Lawrence Dondin had promised to give her and Margaret Bassingeborne each a petticoat ‘and muche other things’ if Margaret could procure Suzan's company for him.Footnote ³⁷ In March 1599 Henry Pennington claimed that his wife Margaret was having an affair with Robert Mountayne, and had sold bedding, clothes and other things from his house to maintain her lover.Footnote ³⁸ In 1623 Leonard Carter deposed that after his daughter Elizabeth became pregnant, Dye Hall, her master and the father of the child, had offered Leonard's wife forty shillings ‘and as good a gowne as ever she did weare’ to persuade Elizabeth to ‘lay ye said child to some other man’.Footnote ³⁹

Markets for stolen clothing operating alongside and overlapping with legitimate ones assisted the diffusion of fashionable attire. Children and well-dressed people were often targeted, lodgers and servants were victims and perpetrators of thefts, and shoplifting became a growing problem in the later seventeenth century.Footnote ⁴⁰ Garthine Walker has shown that women were twice as likely as men to steal household-related objects such as clothes and were often receivers of stolen clothes. Walker also argues that clothes played a greater role in the everyday lives of women, who attached greater emotional significance to such items than men; that clothes counted more for women in terms of sexual attraction and social competition; and that women referred in greater depth to colour and adornment of clothes in their depositions. Moreover, when clothes were stolen women usually reported their loss, identified them, gave evidence, and entered into recognisances to prosecute offenders.Footnote ⁴¹

As well as buying and stealing clothes, women were bequeathed them by friends and relatives, and received them as objects of charity from parishes, hospitals and private individuals. Such exchanges reinforced social, cultural and economic distinctions, but also facilitated some social mobility, and, as forms of symbolic capital with personal meaning, clothes bound people together. Their value depended on the relationship between donor and recipient, when the exchange took place, and whether other items were given along with the clothing. Donating clothes to the needy enabled individuals and groups to promote their social and moral standing relative to the recipients, but many exchanges also signified relationships based upon mutual obligations.Footnote ⁴²

On 10 August 1639 Margaret Michener fabricated a letter in the name of Christian Oxnerd to swindle clothes, textiles and money from Christian's sister Ann. Margaret thanked Ann for a waistcoat that she had sent to Christian, and asked for ‘a couple of smocks ready made or else as much Lockram as will make two very good and also a pair of stockings of a good civil colour’ as well as five shillings in cash ‘and an apron to wear every day such a one as you shall think fit, for a gown I shall need none yet, for I shall have a morning gown’. Margaret added that ‘my linen is not good enough, it is found fault with, it is too course because I lye with my lady's daughter’.Footnote ⁴³ The letter provides useful insights into women's attitudes to clothes. Margaret's request for ‘an apron to wear every day’ reflected the need to have practical clothes for everyday chores, whilst her request for stockings of a ‘good civil colour’ and her comment that her linen was ‘found fault with’ for being too coarse reveal that the colour and quality of garments had specific connotations, and that clothes affected female employment prospects.

Providing appropriate attire for a young woman to enter service was expensive, but often proved a worthwhile investment. On 13 December 1659 Goody Marstone appeared before the vestry of St Benet Paul's Wharf to tell how she had cared for the orphaned daughters of the late Goody Tessy for around half a year. Marstone desired to put the eldest girl into service, but ‘being a poore woman and not in a condition to do for the girls what she would’ she craved ‘the favour and good will of the vestry to give and allow her some thinge’ so that she could provide the girl with clothes and other necessaries, promising not to be a future burden on the parish. She received twelve shillings.Footnote ⁴⁴ Contemporaries recognised that good clothes improved the appearance and prospects of servants significantly. Hannah Woolley advised ‘young maidens’ to have ‘neat, cleanly, and huswifely’ clothes, and informed those aspiring to be companions to gentlewomen that ‘the suitableness and comeliness of your habit makes the greatest discovery of your virtue and discretion’, explaining that it did not matter whether their clothes were ‘Silken or Woollen’ so long as they were ‘civil and not wanton’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Elizabeth James allowed ‘a young Mayden, going to take a service’ into her house because the girl was ‘a pretty young wench, and handsomely apparelled’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Women seeking to enter service acquired appropriate attire by various means. In March 1598 Agnes Wilkinson gave Alice Woodstocke one of her gowns when she entered service with one Mr Brooke, whilst Margaret Edwards intended to sell the table linen, spoon, and silver buckles she had stolen in order to buy clothes and enter service.Footnote ⁴⁷

Good employers provided clothes for their servants, and rewarded loyal servants with gifts of clothes. In June 1579 Anne Fenton told how the wife of Humfrye Wynnington had made her a gown ‘to be paide for out of her wages’.Footnote ⁴⁸ In March 1598 Agnes Wilkinson explained that Barbara Allen had given clothes to her because she had served her for six months and because they were ‘somewhat of twin’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Samuel Pepys described how Besse received ‘good new clothes’ when she came to work for him, and when she left his employment he claimed she had ‘received the greatest love and kindness and good clothes’. When Samuel first saw Barker, the girl Mr Falconbridge had recommended to him, he deemed her to be ‘poor in clothes, and not bred to any carriage’, but less than a month later deemed her ‘a good pretty wench … being now put into good clothes and fashionable’, considering the transformation to be ‘an example of the power of good clothes and dress’, and when Barker left his service she took clothes with her worth at least ten pounds.Footnote ⁵⁰ Female servants, especially ladies' maids, expected to be provided with suitable clothing, and even to receive some of the clothes of a deceased mistress. Servants complained if provision was inadequate, or if wronged or malicious employers withheld clothes. Either party might resort to the courts to resolve disputes about issues of ownership, or whether clothes had been given as gifts, as bribes, or as payments in kind.Footnote ⁵¹ In 1610 Anne and Garrett Daye initiated a petition in the Court of Requests against James and Eleanor Meadows, who had employed Anne as a servant. When she left their employ Anne claimed to have received neither wages nor any decent clothing ‘by which means she was not then meet and fit for any other men's service of any worth’. Whilst she worked for the Meadows, Anne wrote to her father requesting money, and he sent her forty shillings through a cousin. However, the money was left with James Meadows, who never gave it her. In response James and Eleanor sought to discredit Anne by claiming that when she had first come to request a post in service, she was dressed very poorly, having ‘no more apparel than an old petticoat, one old waistcoat, two old torn smocks, and [several pieces] of old linen’.Footnote ⁵²

Matters could be equally problematic when employers gave clothes to servants. Maidservants were bribed with gifts of clothes from suspicious husbands to spy on their mistresses and from adulterous wives to ensure their silence.Footnote ⁵³ Servants who appeared in court on behalf of employees might be given or lent suitable attire to ensure they created a good impression. Christian Stappleton wore a cloak and a taffeta gown when giving evidence to the consistory court on behalf of her mistress, Jane Hope, but when Emma Anstill appeared before the London consistory court in February 1628 she claimed that Christian was ‘so simple and voyd of reason as that she doth not know what an oath is or the danger of breaking an oath’, and alleged that Christian had received the cloak, gown, and hat from her mistress.Footnote ⁵⁴ Many witnesses claimed to be worth little or nothing besides their clothes, a statement that signified limited worth in a legal context, whilst overdressed or poorly clothed witnesses were viewed with suspicion.Footnote ⁵⁵

Clothes thus mattered to employers and employees in different ways. Female servants regarded appropriate clothes as one of their working entitlements, whilst for masters and mistresses clothes were the first, and often only, means to gauge whether a girl or woman was worth employing. However, clothing servants well could create problems. When Hester Wainwright was indicted for stealing clothes from a gentlewoman in St Andrews, Holborn she alleged ‘that she took them up amongst her own Cloaths, and knew not but that they were her own till she came to open them’.Footnote ⁵⁶ Hester was found guilty, but evidently considered that the court would believe that patrician and plebeian female clothing might be confused. There was an element of truth in this; maids working in elite households who received items handed down from their mistresses, and who invested their wages in good clothes, could be mistaken for women of a higher social rank.Footnote ⁵⁷ Captain Herbert refused to believe that the woman in the black dress with Elizabeth Pepys was her maid, Mary Mercer.Footnote ⁵⁸ Such situations created a conflict of interests for employers who wished to encourage servants to dress modestly in order to maintain the correct social hierarchy, but who also took pride in having genteel servants who helped confirm their exalted status.Footnote ⁵⁹

4. COURTSHIP, MARRIAGE AND CLOTHES

Courtship provided another opportunity for women to acquire clothes, although their responses to such gifts varied. Some avoided accepting anything with emotional, sexual or marital connotations, and if they did so inadvertently either suggested they had been duped or attempted to pay for the item, whilst other women were easily seduced by, or attached unintended significance to gifts. Meanings of gifts and tokens were ambiguous; much depended on how and when they were delivered and accepted. Canon law provided no definitive answers, and regional variations in betrothal customs made matters more problematic, particularly in a city of migrants. Exchanges were personal and private, public and legal, and gifts of clothes sometimes concealed other significant courtship items, such as rings and coins. Women gifted clothes and embroidered textiles, but more often were recipients, and how they responded to such items determined whether a relationship continued or concluded.Footnote ⁶⁰

Clothes received or worn in front of other people indicated that a recipient understood the connotations attached to the gift and affected how an individual was perceived by others, whilst in spousal litigation purchasing wedding clothes was generally believed to signify serious intent to marry.Footnote ⁶¹ In May 1636 William Ashwell deposed that Elizabeth Essex had reported to him that Robert Finch had promised to marry her if he could get five pounds to buy clothes for her.Footnote ⁶² As love tokens, ribbons attracted particular attention as they could be twisted around fingers, waists and arms, or used to tie up hair.Footnote ⁶³ In November 1604 Johan Jennings confessed to keeping company with Thomas Johnson, a married man from Smithfield, and when she was searched at the Bridewell hospital a string was found on her arm, which she admitted Johnson had given her, a private rather than a public affirmation of her affections.Footnote ⁶⁴ In December 1639 Robert Costardine noticed his wife wearing a ribbon about her arm as they sat in a London victualling house and asked her whose favour it was, whereupon she responded angrily that it was ‘none of the pockie whore's favour Edith Bourne of whom you got the poxe and are ready to drop’.Footnote ⁶⁵ Evidently both spouses were unhappily married and were using favours to signal the existence of another attachment.

Women's clothing changed with their marital status. Young unmarried women went bareheaded, but brides had care cloths placed over their heads during wedding ceremonies, and wives wore distinctive scarves and hoods.Footnote ⁶⁶ Marriage allowed a woman to choose new outfits which she might use to fashion a ‘wifely’ identity that reflected her honesty as an individual and a household member.Footnote ⁶⁷ At this point in her lifecycle she expected to be allowed a ‘decent’ outlay for new clothes. If it failed to materialise the parsimony of those responsible was criticised. Ralph Josselin recorded that Margaret Harlakenden angered her father, Richard, by spending £120 on wedding clothes in London, but noted that ‘though he chid her by letters for her vanitie, yett he paid the scores’, presumably fearful of the stigma he would bear for not doing so.Footnote ⁶⁸ By contrast Samuel Pepys described Mrs Turner telling him how the parish talked of how Sir William Penn clothed his daughter so poorly so soon after her marriage.Footnote ⁶⁹ By failing to maintain the style appropriate to his rank through inability or ignorance Sir William undermined his own credit and that of his daughter. A woman's dress might alter if the status of her husband changed. When Francis Barnham was elected Sheriff in 1570 his wife Alice ordered a portrait in which she was depicted wearing a fashionable fur-trimmed velvet gown to reflect her social elevation.Footnote ⁷⁰ Many wives believed they had a moral right to be dressed according to their station, and that it was the responsibility of their husbands to provide appropriate clothes. Men faced criticism for being unable or unwilling to meet such obligations.Footnote ⁷¹ In June 1637 John Dickenson said that Catherine Barnaby had alleged that he had been reduced to buying ‘a piece of stolen stuffe to make his wife a gowne’.Footnote ⁷² Yet men were criticised if they allowed their wives to overspend on ‘gawdy apparall’ too, whether through over-indulgence or because they thought their wives' dress might reflect their own status and wealth.Footnote ⁷³ Barbary Sheldon visited Samuel Pepys shortly after her marriage dressed ‘mighty rich in rings and fine clothes, and like a lady’, leading Pepys to ‘wonder at her good fortune and the folly of her husband’.Footnote ⁷⁴

Women, and some men, were thus conscious of the fine line between what was appropriate and extravagant. In December 1662 Samuel Pepys was ‘in great pain that my wife hath never a winter gowne; being almost ashamed of it that she should be seen in a taffeta one when all the rest wears Moyre’, and a couple of weeks later was forced to buy Elizabeth a new gown. Although unhappy at the expense, he noted that ‘it sets my wife and I to friends again’. Elizabeth was enthusiastic to follow the latest fashions. The following year when Pepys spotted Lady Batten in church wearing a velvet gown he was vexed ‘that she should be in it before my wife’, but did not purchase a similar gown for Elizabeth, fearing ‘it would undo me to think of doing as Sir W[illiam] Batten and his Lady do, who hath a good estate beside his office’. To keep up with the latest trends Elizabeth and Samuel visited ‘Grayes Inne to observe fashions’, and after seeing many women wearing vizard masks at the Royal Theatre they went to the Exchange to purchase one for Elizabeth. Dressing fashionably yielded positive results. When Elizabeth wore her ‘Flower tabby suit’ for the first time Pepys reported how ‘everybody [was] in love with it’. Yet spending too much on clothes was frowned upon, even at the social levels in which Samuel and Elizabeth mixed. Elizabeth was shocked when Mrs Pierce labelled her ‘a gallante’, claiming in her defence that she had bought ‘few suits of clothes these two or three years’.Footnote ⁷⁵

Samuel and Elizabeth negotiated her clothing allowance. In 1660 Samuel gave Elizabeth fifty shillings to purchase a petticoat, but returned home having bought ‘fine cloth of 26s per yard and a rich lace’ costing five pounds in total. Samuel was ‘somewhat troubled; but she doing it very innocently … could not be angry’. The next day he saw the dress and acknowledged it was of ‘a very fine cloth and a fine lace … but that being of a light colour and the lace all silver, it makes no great show’. In 1662 Elizabeth and Samuel were shopping in the New Exchange when Elizabeth spotted ‘some new fashion pettycoates of sarcenet, with a black broad lace printed around the bottom’, but these were not purchased. In 1664 fashion rather than money was at stake when they fell out because Samuel was unwilling ‘to have her have her gown laced, but would lay out the same money and more on a plain new one’. Elizabeth ‘flounced away’, and later told Samuel ‘in spiteful manner, like a vixen and with a look full of rancour, that she would go buy a new one and lace it’, make him pay for it, and let him burn it if he wished. A few days later Samuel was summoned home to view the gown and changed his opinion. ‘It becomes her very nobly and is well made,’ he noted, ‘I am much pleased with it.’ In 1665 Samuel allowed Elizabeth twenty pounds ‘to lay out in clothes against Easter’, a key point in the fashion calendar, which she spent on ‘a new suit of Flowered ash-coloured silk’ and a ‘new Lace whiske’, both of which Pepys described as ‘very noble’. At the beginning of 1669 Samuel ‘did hang off’ from providing Elizabeth with any money for clothes, which vexed her and led to ‘discontented talk’ until he agreed to an annual allowance of thirty pounds ‘for all expenses, clothes and everything’. Elizabeth was ‘mightily pleased’, but disputes about clothes resurfaced when William Batelier arrived from France with a selection of perfumed gloves for Elizabeth to choose from. Samuel thought them all too big, but Elizabeth bought dozens of pairs, angering Pepys so much that she backed down and took only what he ‘thought fit’. Samuel estimated that he and Elizabeth owed Batelier twenty-two pounds, but was untroubled since they had bought ‘things that are not trifles, but clothes, gloves, shoes [and] hoods’.Footnote ⁷⁶ His evaluation of what constituted appropriate clothing for Elizabeth was therefore based on a combination of style, fashion, decorum and cost.

Samuel praised and criticised Elizabeth's clothes. He approved of her ‘black sarcenet and yellow petticoat’, ‘slashed wastecoat’ and ‘green petticoate of flowered satin with fine white and black gimp lace’, describing them as ‘very pretty’, but the couple fell out ‘about her ribbends being ill-matched, and of two colours’, and the confrontation rose ‘to very high words’, leading Samuel to call Elizabeth ‘whore’, for which he apologised later. When the couple were about to go to church Samuel became angry because Elizabeth was not ‘dressed as I would have her’. He was also unimpressed when Elizabeth cut away ‘a lace hankercher so wide about the neck, down to her breasts almost, out of a belief … that it is the fashion’, and was angered to arrive home and find his wife wearing ‘a silly dress, of a blue petticoat uppermost and a white satin waistcoat and white hood’. Sometimes the couple compromised, such as when Samuel gave Elizabeth money to buy lace on condition that ‘she promised to wear no more white locks’.Footnote ⁷⁷ Neither spouse dominated the other completely; both were aware that good clothes mattered, but disagreements arose about how much Elizabeth should spend, and which fashions were appropriate.

5. THE EROTIC CONNOTATIONS OF FEMALE DRESS

Women had to tread a fine line between being fashionable and dressing inappropriately, not least when it came to deciding how much flesh to reveal. Henry Peacham described how ‘ladies, and waiting women, will starve and shiver in the hardest frost, rather than they will suffer their bare Necks and Breasts to pass your eyes unviewed’ whilst Fynes Morrison observed that ‘young married Gentlewomen no lesse than the Virgins, shew their breasts naked’.Footnote ⁷⁸ Such displays had ambiguous connotations. Elite décolleté fashions signified female fecundity and youthful beauty, but also sin and immorality.Footnote ⁷⁹ Slits and tears were fashioned deliberately in clothes to display clean and luxurious underwear and linings or bare skin, whilst openings in the sides of upper body garments allowed visual and physical access to what was deemed to be an erogenous zone, inviting comparisons with and allusions to the vagina.Footnote ⁸⁰

Women whose clothing was in disarray invited contempt and were felt to lack decorum in dress; Mrs Turner told Samuel Pepys that Lady Penn had once been ‘a dirty slattern, with her stockings hanging about her heels’.Footnote ⁸¹ Forcibly removing head clothes, particularly of wives, had powerful connotations, returning them to the status of single women, or reducing them to the level of whores.Footnote ⁸² Rustling clothes drew attention to adultery, and in rape cases women described how their clothes had been torn by their assailants, although the disorderly nature of women's clothes was held to indicate sex, regardless of consent.Footnote ⁸³ In July 1637 Robert Milner described how he had seen James Robinson and Sibell Hampton in a ditch part way between Stepney and Hackney, James's pointes untied and Sibell's clothes ruffled. James claimed they had only been reading, but Robert thought this a lie since ‘their bookes were both shutt’.Footnote ⁸⁴ In May 1576 Joane Medcalfe was taken in bed with Simon Warmyll, ‘her clothes and smocke up above her middle naked’ and in April 1577 Joane Hartwell was brought before the Bridewell governors having been caught with Thomas Barrowe at the Queen's Head in Red Cross Street ‘with her clothes above her knees and he with his hose downe’.Footnote ⁸⁵ In May 1598 Margaret Browne deposed that she had witnessed Michael Ffludd cast Clement Underhill on the bed in her chamber and when ‘he pluckt upp her clothes to her thighs she pluckt them upp highter’ allowing Margaret to see ‘her hose being a seawater greene colour and also her bare thighs’.Footnote ⁸⁶ The unusual location of clothing aided the discovery of the secret relationship conducted by Robert Finch and Elizabeth Essex in the house of Robert's master, George Tabb. In 1633 Robert's mistress, Anna, discovered Elizabeth's stomacher in Robert's room one December morning whilst making his bed, and came across a neck cloth on the stairs leading up to Robert's room the following Whitsuntide. Anna returned the neck cloth to Elizabeth, who acknowledged it belonged to her. Another lodger, also called Robert, found a neck cloth in his bed that he believed belonged to Elizabeth.Footnote ⁸⁷

The smock a woman wore day and night became almost a second skin and to wear only a smock was essentially to be naked. Smocks were ambiguous garments, signifiers of female morality that possessed ‘a carnal value’ with ‘particular erotic appeal’.Footnote ⁸⁸ When Thomas Francke arrived in Barbican at the house of his lover, Joane Jeffries, and found ‘another a bed with her’ he broke open the door, ‘founde the peticote which he gave her on her back’ and ‘would have cut it of her backe’ to punish her betrayal, implying that to attack a woman's underclothes was equivalent to harming her body.Footnote ⁸⁹ In April 1628 Catherine Baker defamed Christian Nevell as a ‘button smock whore’, intimating that Christian's clothes were undone, or at least might be worn in a manner that Catherine deemed whorish and sexually enticing.Footnote ⁹⁰ One pamphleteer complained that women had exchanged

One man clearly had no problem with scantily clad women. When he fell ill one night shortly after Christmas in 1660, Samuel Pepys called to the maid, who ran ‘up and down so innocently in her smock’, and in 1667 he wrote of ‘pretty Nelly standing at her lodgings door in Drury-lane in her smock sleeves and bodice’.Footnote ⁹²

6. CONTESTED COMMODITIES

Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century London contained distinctive, vibrant and culturally diverse markets for fashionable clothes which provincial female consumers at all levels of society were aware of. Women wanted and were expected to dress well, or at least appropriately, and their freedom to do so was greater in London since cultural constraints were less oppressive and markets for clothes more diverse. Yet even in the metropolis judgments were made about what women wore, and questions asked about how they acquired fashionable or expensive clothes, especially if they were young, poor and single. The answers were: through their own labour, as gifts and bequests, and in exchange for favours. Clothes helped women to blend in and stand out in the metropolis, advantaged those seeking to acquire work or husbands, helped women gain the friendship of other women, and were crucial in defining women's relationships with men. Indeed, what women wore affected the reputations of their fathers and husbands, not least because it was often they who financed the purchase of such attire. Clothes were personal material objects which women put much effort into acquiring and to which both women and men attached multiple meanings. As such they proved crucial in defining the limits of women's agency and the boundaries of female respectability in early modern London.