Our Legal Heritage: The First Thousand Years: 600 - 1600: King Aethelbert - Queen ElizabethReilly, S. A.
History
Our Legal Heritage: The First Thousand Years: 600 - 1600: King Aethelbert - Queen Elizabeth
Reilly, S. A.
Law -- England -- History
Elizabeth came to dress elaborately and fancifully. Her dresses
were fitted at the waist with a long and pointed bodice
stiffened with wood, steel, or whalebone. Her skirt was held out
with a petticoat with progressively larger hoops. There were two
layers of skirt with the top one parted to show the bottom one.
The materials used were silks, satins, velvets, and brocades. On
her dress were quiltings, slashings, and embroidery. They were
covered with gold ornaments, pearls, and gems from America. She
wore decorated gloves. So ladies copied her and discarded their
simple over-tunics for elaborate dresses. The under-tunic was
now becoming a petticoat and the over-tunic a dress. Their
under-tunics became petticoats. Often they also wore a fan with a
mirror, a ball of scent, a miniature portrait of someone dear to
them, and sometimes a watch. Single ladies did not wear hats,
but had long, flowing hair and low cut dresses showing their
bosoms. Married ladies curled their hair and wore it in high
masses on their heads with jewels interwoven into it. Both
gentlemen and ladies wore hats both indoors and outside and
large, pleated collars around their necks (with the newly
discovered starch), perfume, and high-heeled shoes. Gentlemen's'
tight sleeves, stiffened and fitted doublet with short skirt, and
short cloak were ornamented and their silk or velvet hats
flamboyant, with feathers. At their leather belts they hung
pouches and perhaps a watch. They wore both rapiers [swords with
cutting edges] and daggers daily as there were many quarrels.
There were various artistic beard cuts and various lengths of
hair, which was often curled and worn in ringlets. They now wore
breeches and stockings instead of long hosen. Both gentlemen and
ladies wore silk stockings and socks over them and then boots.
Coats dipped in boiled linseed oil with resin served as
raincoats. They wore nightgowns to bed. Fashions changed every
year. When Elizabeth became old, she had a wig made to match her
youthful long red hair. Other ladies began wearing wigs.
Poor men wore skirted fustian tunics, loose breeches, and coarse
stockings or canvas leggings. Agricultural laborers kept sword
and bow in a corner of their fields in the first part of
Elizabeth's reign.
Women spent much of their time doing needlework and embroidery.
Since so many of the women who spent their days spinning were
single, unmarried women became known as "spinsters".
Children wore the same apparel as their elders. They were given
milk at meals for good growth. It was recognized that sickness
could be influenced by diet and herbs. Sickness was still viewed
as an imperfect balance of the four elements of blood (hot and
moist like air), phlegm (cold and moist like water), choler or
yellow bile (hot and dry like fire), and melancholy or black bile
(cold and dry like earth) in a person.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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