For two weeks I have inched my way through thousands of data points, trying to make sense of where I will travel to look for costume information. Late this week I hit my stride, and data editing took over my brain. I couldn’t walk past the computer without wanting to work. I put off eating, wanting to get just that little bit more accomplished, to run one more search, and oh maybe I wasn’t THAT hungry…. I displayed a similar disregard for the concept of a “sane bedtime.”
My goal is to recreate women’s costume between the time at which the English gable hood became fashionable (probably the late 1490s, when Elizabeth of York was queen) and the time when nobles began flipping up the lappets, like the women here. I want costume during the reign of Henry VII, not his son Henry VIII. No matter how often people refer to Henry VIII’s reign as “early Tudor,” his dad did some fantastic work stabilizing the English monarchy for 25 years before the young, unprepared king took the throne in 1509. Not many costumers try to research Henry VII’s reign, because there aren’t many portraits painted during this time. Holbein didn’t show up in England until 1526 to paint Henry VIII’s queens and leading nobles. There was almost no illumination happening in England in 1500, only a handful of books being published with woodcuts, and few people commissioning busts as artwork for display in the home. To find images of English people wearing typical English costume in 1500, I have to look at what remains: funerary monuments.
To find which monuments I want to see and where they are, I started with the output of a program that catalogs every feature described in the Pevsner’s Architectural Guides. It would only allow me to save 100 or fewer results in each .csv file, so although I could use the software at the British Library instead of buying it, I had 63 files to combine before I started sorting. Copy, paste, copy, paste, etc.
Once I had a spreadsheet with tabs for the different types of queries I had run (15th century and 16th century lists of brasses, monuments, church windows, church wall paintings, and church woodwork), I had to trim the entries I didn’t need. If the date of death was before 1475 or after 1550, I cut it. I have to look well outside my target years because monuments are not always made soon after death, but many monuments are made within the donor’s lifetime, especially if a spouse died. I also think that accurately recreating the hood circa 1500 will require me to know well what type of hat it evolved from, and what it evolved into. I have no interest in clerical costume, so I deleted priests and bishops (how very Henry VIII of me, I thought). Men whose monuments did not include a wife also got axed. I found that the glass, woodwork, and painted walls did not have subjects of use to me — I want images of the rich nobles who were funding the churches, not allegorical scenes, animals or inscriptions.
Then I started searching for images of the carved stone monuments. I am most interested in seeing these, as effigies are the most realistic art I can find. The monumental brasses of the time are not only two dimensional and smaller than life size, but the art on them is simplistic with inaccurate human proportions and very little perspective to the line drawings. They not only ARE flat, they LOOK flat. Although the brasses are what I knew best from my research time in the UNC Art library (there are far more good books about brasses than about memorial sculptures) they are not the ideal resource for recreating three dimensional clothing and accessories.
Oh Google image search, how I love thee. Many of the monuments on my list do not have effigies, and some of the effigies are so badly weathered or defaced as to be impossible to interpret. I can only judge the quality of a monument, and decide how hard to work to see it, if I know what costume details I might be able to glean from it. I also finally found a use for my Pinterest account — when I do image searches and find effigies or brasses, I save them there.
Once I had images, I began sort the monuments and brasses into four costume types: 1 is solidly 15th century dress (a Burgundian gown or a sideless surcoat, headgear is not similar to gable hood, but one of the other crazy styles). 2 is transitional dress (between Burgundian and Henrican) without a gable hood, but often with a hat that features a wide band on the front similar to the lappets on the gable hood. 3 is transitional dress with a gable hood that hangs down in front. 4 is anything later, more Henry VIII in style, including large sleeves, a gable hood with lappets flipped up, or a French hood.
I am most of the way through my first attempt to find the monuments, with over 100 images found. Those I cannot find, I will look up in the printed copies of the Pevsner Guides (conveniently located in my local library, a 10 minute walk away). I have looked up a few of the hard-to-locate monuments in the books and found sometimes an alternate spelling of the name, a revised date of death, or a more complete description of the monument which helped me locate an image. I also plan to search for images of brasses, but if I don’t find them easily, I don’t plan to scour the internet for photos — brasses just don’t attract as much attention as monuments, so fewer of them are online.
Once I rate the monuments according to how useful they will be for my research, I plan to make a map and start planning church-combing adventures. I’ll have to figure out which churches are locked and which require keys, and whether any have restrictions about photographing or making brass rubbings. It wouldn’t hurt me to learn a little bit more about making good digital photographs in low light, and I need to buy paper and wax for brass rubbing. I’ll need to read up on each church, getting as many clues as possible about where to look for the brasses, which are sometimes on walls behind furniture or on the floor under a rug. I have a lot to learn. I’m thrilled to be making progress.