Clothing, Fashion, and Sumptuary Laws in the Late Middle Ages
Cloth was the most visible statement of rank in late medieval Europe, and nowhere more so than in the long centuries between the Black Death and the first Atlantic voyages. This section examines that statement in three connected parts. The first article traces the rise of the houppelande — the long, full-sleeved, often fur-lined robe that replaced the older bliaud and surcot as the courtly garment of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries — and the technical innovations in the woollen, worsted, and silk industries of Florence, Bruges, and Norwich that made it possible. The second article analyses the sumptuary laws: the several hundred statutes issued between 1200 and 1500 in France, England, Flanders, Italy, and the Empire, and the question of whether they were a serious regulatory instrument or, as Alan Hunt argued in Governance of the Consuming Passions (1996), a moral performance. The third article treats the late medieval knight’s plate harness — often polished, damascened in gold, and worn over a surcoat of silk — as a form of fashion in its own right.
The visual economy of dress
The houppelande first appears in the illustrations of the Romance of Alexander (Bodleian MS Bodley 264, c. 1338–44) and is fully developed in the figures of the Très Riches Heures of the Duke of Berry (c. 1412–16) and the painted panels of the Master of Frankfurt and Rogier van der Weyden. The garment was distinguished by its deep, often contrasting folds, its trailing length — the queue of a prince could touch the ground — its high or turned collar, and the mégarde, the long trailing sleeve cut to hang past the hand. Behind the fashion lay a textile revolution: the draps de laine of the great cloth-producing cities of Flanders (Bruges, Ghent, Ypres), Florence’s garbo cloth, the English broadcloth of the Cotswolds, and the silks of Lucca and Venice. The historiography was transformed by John Munro’s work on the Flemish cloth industry and by Carole Shammas on the early modern English wardrobe; the late medieval material is best approached through Stella Mary Newton’s Fashion in the Age of the Black Prince (1980) and E. Jane Burns’s Courtly Dress in Italy (2002).
The material sources are richer than the laws. The inventories of the Duke of Berry (1416), the wardrobe accounts of Edward III and Richard II, and the notarial records of Florence’s Calimala and Por Santa Maria cloth guilds preserve the cuts, the furs, the linings, and the prices. The wool furs alone — miniver, ermine, gris, and the vair of the squirrel belly — were a separate code, and the Statutes of Edward II’s wardrobe (1327) and the Parisian sumptuary ordinance of 1340 list the animals and the seasons in which each could be worn.
Sumptuary law and its limits
The lois somptuaires were a European-wide phenomenon. The standard scholarly reference is Catherine Kovesi Killerby, Sumptuary Law in Italy, 1200–1500 (2002), with complementary treatments of the French material by Philippa Maddern. The model is the Parisian sumptuary ordinance issued under Philip IV in 1294 and repeated, with variations, in 1306, 1313, and 1340; the English Statute Concerning Diet and Apparel of 1363, with its attempt to assign the wearing of fur, silk, and gold to ranks of earl, baron, knight, and squire; the Florentine legge sul lusso of 1384; and the sumptuary provisions of the Milanese, Venetian, and Burgundian states.
The scholarly debate is now some forty years old. Alan Hunt’s Governance of the Consuming Passions (1996) argued that the laws were less a real attempt to police consumption than a stage on which authorities performed their vision of the moral social order. Kovesi Killerby’s case studies, drawing on the Italian archives, show that enforcement was patchy: fines were levied, but usually on the relatively poor, and most offenders compounded by paying a small fee. Diane Owen Hughes, in a classic 1982 article, treated the Florentine laws as a battle over female honour, with patrician women as the contested objects. The cumulative picture is that the laws worked as a marker of intent rather than as an effective barrier: the proper place of the sumptuary statute was in the prologue, not the constable’s notebook.
Armour as a branch of fashion
The harness of the late medieval knight — the articulated plate defence of cuirass, pauldrons, gauntlet, and greave that emerged between 1350 and 1420 — was, by 1400, a recognisable branch of fashion. The armourers of Milan, Augsburg, Nuremberg, and Greenwich produced harnesses damascened in gold and silver, blued in the furnace, and engraved with the wearer’s device, motto, or betrothed’s face. The tomb effigies of Edward the Black Prince (d. 1376) at Canterbury, of Richard II and Anne of Bohemia at Westminster, and of the Visconti and Sforza tombs at the Certosa di Pavia preserve a precise record; the painted panels of Paolo Uccello and the stained glass of the Sainte-Chapelle survive as evidence for the heraldic colours and the mantling. The arms-and-armour scholar’s working tool is the Wallace Collection Catalogue (2002) and the database of surviving pieces in the Royal Armouries at Leeds. The link between harness and houppelande was literal: the surcoat over plate was often cut and padded to the new fashion, and the tabard of arms was an article of heraldic display worn over both.
Articles in this section
- Late medieval clothing and the rise of the houppelande
- Sumptuary laws and the regulation of dress
- Armor, fashion, and identity in the late Middle Ages