The History of Underclothes

by C. Willett

  One curious custom connected with the smock, which can be traced back at least to the sixteenth century, deserves notice here.

  There was an old vulgar error, which lasted for several centuries, to the effect that a man was not liable for his bride’s debts provided that he married her in no other apparel than her smock or shift. The strangest thing about this odious custom is that any priest or minister could be found to administer the sacred rite with the woman in such a guise. In 1547 at Much Wenlock, August 4, here was married early in the morning Thomas Munslow, smith, and Alice Nycols, which wedded to him in her smock and bareheaded.

  (The Parish Registers of England, by L. Charles Cox, 1910.)

  2. THE WAISTCOAT

  An undergarment which, like a man’s, was slipped on over the head and so resembled a vest. The materials were flannel, velvet, damask, sarcenet, and linen.

  During Elizabeth’s reign the waistcoat was lavishly enriched with ‘wrought work,’ and by the beginning of the seventeenth century the shops were ‘stored with rich and curiously imbroydered waistcoats of the full value of tenne pounds apiece, twentie, and some forty pound.’17

  From the nature of the material we must suppose that some were quite concealed while the more ornate were intended to be partly visible. Lady Anne Clifford’s description (1616) suggests a negligée attire: ‘All this time since my Lord went away I wore my black taffety nightgown and a yellow taffety waistcoat.’

  3. THE CORSET

  This may have taken the form of an underbodice (made in two parts and so called ‘a pair of bodies’), stiffened with busks of wood or whalebone inserted into casings in the ‘bodies,’ and tied there by ‘busk points.’ We read of ‘12 pairs of busks of whalebone.’18 The Book of Customs Rates (1631), speaks of ‘Bodies for women and children of whalebone or leather.’19

  A good deal of masculine scorn was provoked by them. Thus Philip Gosson:

  These privie coats by art made strong,

  With bones and steels and suchlike ware

  Whereby their back and sides grow long,

  And now they harnest gallants are;

  Were they for use against the foe

  Our dames for amazons might go !20

  There are occasional references to ‘iron bodies,’ and specimens of these, resembling armour, perforated with holes, exist in museums. These, however, are now regarded as orthopaedic instruments, when they are not—as is commonly the case—fanciful ‘reproductions.’ There is no evidence that they were worn by women as stays.

  4. THE PETTICOAT

  We do not know when the petticoat was first worn in England as a separate garment hung from the waist. Unfortunately the word is used in contemporary references both for the undergarment and also for the skirt when separate from the bodice (e.g. in the case of an open robe). We assume that when the material was specially rich or ornamented it was a visible garment—a skirt; when of a more homely nature, it may have been an under-petticoat, and not seen.

  Clearly, however, it was well established in the sixteenth century. Kiecher says, in 1585,21 that ‘the women of England wore three cloth gowns or petticoats, one over another.’ Dekker confirms its existence in 1604,22 and Thomas Middleton mentions that the depth of a woman’s petticoat was a yard and a quarter. Some household accounts speak of ‘two yards of kersey for a petticoat.’

  The under-petticoat was usually tied by ‘points,’ or laces, to the body, though some appear to have resembled the princess petticoat.

  Various materials were used for this garment—red cloth (note the colour again), a kind of serge called ‘fryzado,’ and something like velveteen, ‘mockado,’

  As the circumference of the skirt expanded during the second half of the sixteenth century we may safely suppose that the underpetticoats followed suit, in order to support the shape, until, about 1550, the outline was sustained by the artificial hooped petticoat or ‘farthingale.’

  Though we may suppose that the gentlewoman wore underpetticoats, it seems that the countrywoman often wore none. When William Kempe danced from London to Norwich (1599) he mentions that ‘a lusty country lasse’ danced a mile with him, and ‘tucked up her russet petticoate’ (i.e. skirt) and ‘garnished her thick short legs’ with morris bells:

  Her stump legs with bells were garnish’d,

  Her brown brows with sweating varnish’d,

  Her brown hips, when she was lag

  To win her ground, went swig a swag;

  Which to see all that came after

  Were repleate with mirthful laughter.

  Near Norwich Kempe had an accident:

  It was the mischaunce of a homely maid that, belyke, was but newly crept into the fashion of long-wasted petticotes tyde with points and had, as it seemed, but one point tyed before—as I was fetching a leape it fell out that I set my foote on her skirts, the point breaking off fell her petticoate from her waste, but as chance was, though her smock was coarse it was cleanly; yet the poor wench was so ashamed, the rather that she could hardly recover her coate again from unruly boys, that looking before like one that had the greene sicknesse, now had her cheekes all coloured with scarlet.

  Even less seems to have been worn in Ireland. Fynes Moryson23 (1617) reported that the Irish ‘goe naked in very winter time, onely having their privy parts covered with a rag of linen . . . so as it would turn a man’s stomacke to see an olde woman in the morning before breakfast.’ He describes ‘sixteene women, all naked except their loose mantles, whereof eight or ten were very faire and two seemed very Nimphs; sitting down by the fier with crossed legs like Taylors and so low as could not but offend chaste eyes. . . .’

  5. THE FARTHINGALE

  About 1545 appeared the Spanish verdingale or farthingale, a petticoat reinforced by a series of graduated hoops of cane, whalebone, or wire. Its shape was that of a cone, closely resembling that of the Victorian cage-crinoline. The material used was woollen, silk, satin, or velvet, usually of a brilliant colour (crimson, purple, or peach). Fifty yards of whalebone24 might be used, in addition to buckram.

  Although at first a fashion of the Court circle the farthingale rapidly spread to all classes.25 That this fashion was inspired by class distinction was noted by Hugh Latimer in a sermon. ‘It is nothing but a token of fair pride to wear such farthingales.’ To be ‘exclusive’ a garment has to be not only very inconvenient but also very expensive; the former, by itself, is insufficient. Sometimes a ‘double farthingale’ was worn (c. 1550). The size of the garment may be gathered from Heywood’s Epigrams (1560):

  FIG. 19. BUM-ROLLS. FROM AN ENGRAVING, 1600

  Alas, poor verdingales must lie in the streete,

  To house them no doore in the citee made meete,

  Syns at our narrow doores they in can not win,

  Send them to Oxforde, at Brodegates to get in.

  About 1570 a variation, the French farthingale, began to compete with the Spanish form, without ever completely replacing it. It was shaped like a horizontal cartwheel, the hooped petticoat being tub-shaped with vertical sides, while round the hips, under the skirt, was worn a thick bolster-like ‘bustle,’ commonly known as a ‘bum-roll.’ It was tied in front, and often this sufficed to throw out the skirt without the addition of a farthingale. The tub-shape varied much in size but always gave the wearer the appearance of standing within a rampart; and we read of one woman:

  Placing both hands upon her whalebone hips,

  Puft up with a round circling farthingale.26

  The size of the fashionable French farthingale is indicated by a description of James I’s Queen Anne wearing ‘so expansive a farthingale that I do not exaggerate when I say it was four feet wide at the hips.’27 Its decline is implied in Lady Anne Clifford’s statement (1617), ‘All the time I was at the Court I wore my green damask gown embroidered without a farthingale.’

  Compare also:

  Her fardingale is set above her ears,

  Which, like a broad sail with the wind doth swell


  To drive this fair hulk headlong into hell.

  . . . Then gird herself close to the paps she shall,

  Shap’d breast and buttock, but no waist at all.

  (Michael Drayton, The Mooncalf published 1627.)

  A homely substitute for the farthingale was, as its name implies, the ‘bum-roll,’ which was covered with tape or ribbon.28 That the wearing of them carried a sort of social stigma is suggested by Ben Jonson:29

  Nor you nor your house were so much as spoken of before I debased myself from my hood and my farthingale to those bum-rowles and your whalebone bodice.

  6. DRAWERS

  It does not seem that Englishwomen wore drawers before the very end of the eighteenth century. Fynes Morison, in his Itinerary (1605–17), makes it clear that the Italian women of his day wore them: ‘The city Virgins, and especially Gentlewomen . . . in many places weare silke or linnen breeches under their gownes’; and Leloir states that the fashion for wearing ‘calecons,’ or drawers, was introduced into France from Italy by Catharine de Medici; but there is no evidence that the fashion crossed the Channel during this period.

  7. NIGHTCLOTHES

  Smocks, with varying degrees of embroidery and openwork, were worn by all women of any social pretension. Cambric smocks, often heavily perfumed, are mentioned at the close of the Elizabethan period. It seems to have been a garment very similar to the day chemise and in contemporary descriptions the name is used indifferently for both.

  Night-caps were worn; in the ‘Linnen List’ of Winnifred Barrington30 are mentioned ‘Two night quayfes,’ or coifs: also ‘night crosscloths,’ apparently worn across the forehead at night.

  * * *

  1 Shirts surviving from these periods are naturally exceedingly rare. We therefore give a note in the Appendix on the best known examples, the Sture shirts. See Appendix (figure 117).

  2 ‘Shertes brodered and displayed in fourme of Surplys.’ Alexander Barclay: The Ship of Fools, 1509.

  3 ‘Band’ was the general term for collar.

  4 Francis Thynne: Animadversions, 1599.

  5 Fitzgeffery: Poems, 1617.

  6 Fletcher : The Custom of the Country, 1625.

  7 Dekker : The Witch of Edmoton, 1621.

  8 Nicholas Breton : Bower of Delights, 1591.

  9 Ben Johnson : The Staple of News, 1625.

  10 Shakespeare mentions ‘your straight (i.e. close-fitting) strossers’: Henry V.

  11 John Corbett in 1557 left to his father ‘my beste velvet nighte cappe.’ (Saffron Walden Wills. Walden Muniments, Vol. 5.)

  12 Joseph Hall: Satires, 1598.

  13 E.g. My maids, gae to my dressing-room

  And dress me to my smock

  The one half is o’ the Holland fine,

  The other o’ needle-work.

  Percy: Reliques of Ancient Poetry: The Ballad of Lord Thomas and Fair Annis.

  14 Faery Queene: from the fight between Redegund and Artegal.

  15 Medieval laundry bills throw light on the condition of underclothes as worn by our ancestors. Thus in the thirteenth century the washing bill for the entire household of Bishop Swinfield for one year amounted to 43/2 (household rolls of Bishop Swinfield). In the reign of Henry VIII, the Duke of Northumberland’s establishment of 170 persons had an annual washing bill of 40/- (Northumberland household book). The charge for washing one of Henry VIII’s shirts was a penny or twopence—roughly a day’s wage for, doubtless, a day’s work.

  16 Harrison’s ‘Description of England,’ 1577, quoted in Our English Home. J. H. Parker, 1861.

  17 John Stow : Annals of Angland, 1601.

  18 Egerton MS., 1583.

  19 Linthicum, Costume in Elizabethan Drama.

  20 Pleasant Quippes for Upstart New-fangled Gentlewomen, 1591.

  21 Linthicum, loc. cit.

  22 The Honest Whore.

  23 Itinerary, 1605–17.

  24 Whalebone cost 2d. a yard, and red buckram 1/2 a yard, in 1594.

  25 Nicholas Udall: Ralph Roister Doyster, c. 1577.

  26 Micro-cynicon, 1599.

  27 Linthicum, p. 181.

  28 ‘One roole (bum-roll) covered with Karnacion ribben’; ‘a roole covered with wyght tape.’—Essex Record Office; Winnifred Barrington’s Linnen List, 1589.

  29 The Poetaster, 1601.

  30 Essex Record Office, 1589.

  III

  1626—1710

  IN this romantic period of the Stuarts, underclothes, with both sexes, developed new significance. Ceasing to be merely utilitarian in function, they were being exploited to indicate class distinction and sex attraction to a striking degree. We may regard this as a natural antagonism to Puritanism which persistently disapproved of the display of underclothes for erotic purposes though it had no objection to class distinction in costume.

  Up to this period, as we have seen, underclothes had very much the same significance in both sexes, but from now on there is a division; the male garments are designed mainly to express social rank, the female mainly to attract.

  Man’s shirt, for example, is in the Stuart period an integral part of the visible costume of the fine gentleman while the neck and sleeves of the lady’s chemise are equally conspicuous. But it was the change of design of her skirt, from rigid to flowing, which enabled provocative glimpses of under-petticoats to be seen, and so gave her a new weapon of attack. The petticoat became the recognized symbol of feminine charm and poets discovered in it an appropriate theme for erotic verse. Herrick’s familiar lines (c. 1650) struck a new note in English poetry—namely a greater interest in feminine clothing than in woman herself.

  A sweet disorder in the dress

  Kindles in clothes a wantonness;

  . . . .

  A winning wave (deserving note)

  In the tempestuous petticoat . . .

  Do more bewitch me, than when Art,

  Is too precise in every part.

  If we examine the fashionable portraits of both sexes, of the period just before, as well as just after, the Restoration of 1660, it will be noted how the shirt and the chemise are glorified. Still more remarkable and significant was the masculine fashion, therein portrayed, of exhibiting the shirt extruding between the bottom of the waistcoat and the top of the breeches (which, indeed, often appear as though about to slip down): while the feminine chemise is shown sliding off the shoulders and the gown itself in as precarious a position as the man’s breeches.

  The meaning of this impulse affecting the costume of both sexes is obviously erotic, and it can be said that never before, or since, have fashionable folk elected to be painted for the benefit of posterity in such hazardous toilets.

  The period is important in that it was the last time that the male attempted to give his underclothing an erotic suggestion. In one of Mrs. Aphra Behn’s licentious comedies, The Rover (1677), the stage presented an amorous scene with the man dressed only in ‘his shirt and drawers.’ This was evidently accepted, at the time, as highly attractive to the female part of the audience—a sort of masculine ‘strip-tease act.’ It is significant that to-day this kind of exhibition is limited to women; male underclothing has become, on the stage, merely comic and we are beginning to view the female display in the same spirit unless it is done with infinite skill and tact to avoid exciting ridicule.

  Laughter is a psychological resistance to would-be erotic appeals, and in our attitude towards underclothes ‘du sublime au ridicule il n’y a qu’un pas.’ But as we view and criticize the use for erotic purposes which the Stuart fashions made of those garments, we have to allow for the fact that at the time spectators discovered in them a charm just because they ‘were not amused.’

  Portraits and museum specimens fail to convey to us another aspect of those underclothes but on which, however, we must insist, if we are to appreciate an obstacle to sex appeal which they had to overcome. Men and women, even of high rank, were generally dirty and often verminous.1 Exquisite lace ruffles did not entirely conceal grimy hands and
black finger-nails, and the fashion for heavily perfumed undergarments imperfectly distracted attention from less agreeable odours. It was their experience that silk and linen garments next the skin were less liable to harbour lice than the wearing of woollens, which did not become usual for undergarments until the era of physical cleanliness opened a century later.

  FIG. 20. CERTIFICATE OF BURIAL IN WOOL, 1707

  The nineteenth century accepted cleanliness as a sign of class distinction; to-day it has become so general that it has ceased to be significant of class; instead it has become almost an essential of sex attraction, so that to the modern taste those fine folk of the seventeenth century, in spite of their clothes, would have been physically repellent. Our eyes would have admired the quality of their underclothes and recognized their attraction—at a certain distance.

  The apparent dislike of wearing ‘wool next the skin’ was perhaps accentuated by the Act of 1678, which provided that:

  ‘No corpse of any person (except those who shall die of the plague) shall be buried in any shirt, shift, sheet, or shroud, or anything whatsoever made or mingled with flax, hemp, silk, hair, gold, or silver, or in any stuff, or thing, other than what is made of sheep’s wool only.’ The Act was not repealed till 1814, and parish registers constantly stated that the deceased had been ‘buried in wool’ (figure 20).

  It would have been natural, therefore, that ‘wool next the skin’ had disagreeable associations. The more fashionable folk2 ignored the Act and the famous actress, Mrs. Oldfield (Pope’s ‘Narcissa’), had herself buried in Westminster Abbey arrayed in ‘a very fine Brussels lace Head, a Holland shift, with tucker and double ruffles of the same lace and a pair of new kid gloves’; a circumstance inspiring Pope’s lines: