I’m no costume historian and we have very very few images of noblewomen in Scotland from the period 1480-1560 (and many have fantastical Renaissance costumes that can’t necessarily be assumed to be a realistic form of dress). Nonetheless I think it’s interesting that, to the best of my knowledge, the only figure who is portrayed wearing anything like an English gable hood is Margaret Tudor. Even in the Stirling Heads (which have some of those fantastic costumes) she is identifiable as much by her gable hood as the greyhound she’s holding. And we know Margaret and her ladies possessed French hoods as well as other headgear, so it’s not like we can say that a gable hood was her go-to piece, but I’ve never seen any other images from before 1560 (or after tbh) of women who lived in Scotland wearing gable hoods.
We have almost no information on what they DID wear, beyond financial accounts which are ambiguous, and the occasional portrait, mostly of French-born women wearing French styles or of mythological characters wearing fantastical headdress or of women from Mary I’s generation when styles had changed anyway, or effigies and paintings from much earlier in the fifteenth century when neither gable nor French hoods had come into existence yet (for example the stone effigies that at Borthwick, St Nicholas Aberdeen, and other churches; or rare paintings like the Trinity Altarpiece, though that one is again ambiguous). But the one thing that I would say is that I know of no evidence (documentary or pictorial) of Scotswomen wearing gable hoods in the English style.
I’m probably wrong but it does seem like it may have been not only a distinctively English style, but one that was not imitated north of the border in the way that the French styles were, even long before the arrival of Queen Madeleine and Mary of Guise. Otherwise though from what little info we have I would say that Scottish fashion mostly followed wider European trends- in the fifteenth century this was certainly the case and the evidence from the later sixteenth century, as well as the fragments we have for the period between 1480 and 1560, especially for men’s fashion, suggests that this was probably true for most female dress as well. Even so there will always be Pedro de Ayala’s tantalising comments on the Scottish headdress in the 1490s, and it remains that we almost never see gable hoods, in stark contrast to England.
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