[Sca-cooks] ELIZABETHAN KITCHEN

[Ciorstan]

'Lainie writes:

> What I was trying to point out, is that you made a significant exaggeration
> (a foot or two shorter that you is 3'8" to 4'8"- both very short even by
> Tudor stardards) . I suspect you did so without thinking. Stopping to think
> before making an exclamation like that is a Good Thing.

This might be of interest from Jane Ashelford's "The Art of Dress", a
gorgeous 'coffee table' book discussing surviving clothes in the
National Trust's collection (quite of few of them are graphed out in
full detail in Janet Arnold's three books, including the mulberry-satin
loose gown and the 1823 wedding gown specifically mentioned below):

"...Presentation of the clothes is also governed by one essential
difference between the appearance of men and women today and those of
previous generations - that of size.  Very few of the garments, ranging
in date from an early seventeenth-century gown at Hardwick Hall,
Derbyshire, to a beaded evening dress made in 1914, would fit a dummy
with the figure of an average Englishwoman of the 1990's.  At 5'4in, 36B
-25.5-36 and 9st 9.4lb, today's woman has added two inches to her bust
in just twenty years and nearly half an inch to her height in a decade.
  She is also two inches taller than a century ago and has gained a
stone in weight.  Moreover, by receiving the proper calcium intake
during her formative years, she has a thicker and stronger rib cage than
her predecessors.  This change in the density and size of bones is also
true for men, and is particularly noticeable in the way that old clothes
have been cut to accommodate much narrower shoulders and smaller backs.
  The tightness in cut is sometimes so acute that a garment will not
even fit a dummy specially designed for display...

"...were too frail to be placed on a dummy.  One such was the wedding
dress that Mary Elizabeth Williams wore when she married George Hammond
Lucy in 1823.  Writing in the 1950's, Alice Fairfax-Lucy observed, "It
would hardly fit a well-grown child of twelve."

...

One thing I noticed when carefully examining the finished measurements
in the back charts of the garments in Janet Arnold's "Patterns of
Fashion - The Cut and Construction of Clothes for Men and Women C.
1560-1620" is that the people who wore these garments, while in no
stretch of the imagination should be construed as representing the
average human of their time simply due to the paucity of sampling, were
remarkable for their small size ranges. The largest surviving female
snugly-fitting garment is, IIRC, Eleanora of Toledo's burial gown, which
has the comment added by Janet Arnold that Eleanora's waist had grown
thick with bearing 10 children. She died at the age of 40 of malaria;
her gown's bust measurement is 33", her waist 29". The other adult
female, snug-fitting garments in the chart state ranges of 30 to 31
bust, 23 to 25 waist measurements. The men's garments are similarly in
the very small modern purview-- with the exception, I believe, of Sir
Ralph Verney's silk-shag lined coat, which an acquaintance of mine said
it fit him 'right out of the book' with no alterations. My acquaintance
is 6'4" and of what I would consider average build commensurate with his
height.

ciorstan