Tumgik
#Coifs were probably worn by all women but especially further down the social scale
the-busy-ghost · 3 years
Text
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.
#Anyway it's an interesting one#Bonnets do seem to have been worn by both men and women but I only know of pictorial representations of men wearing them b4 1560#Coifs were probably worn by all women but especially further down the social scale#We also see the occasional snood/hairnet worn by both men and women from the 1530s at least#Among the fifteenth century headdresses we get lots of escoffions and padded rolls floating around but not much later than 1480#Since Margaret Tudor did not exclusively wear gable hoods I do wonder if she was portrayed in one on the Stirling Heads#Because it was known as a distinctively English form of dress#But I may be reading to much into it#And I'm probably wrong#Still I have yet to see a gable hood in a Scottish context that wasn't worn by Margaret Tudor#or someone else raised in England#We don't see many French hoods either but that's more because of lack of surviving pictures#We know they were worn from at least the 1510s and were certainly popular from the 1530s#I would argue there's good reason to suspect that styles from the Low Countries continued to be popular#And also it's possible that Danish and German styles found their way to Scotland through James III's queen Margaret of Denmark#Not to mention the trade with that area and the wars that Scottish men fought in over in Scandinavia in the 1500s#Margaret of Denmark indeed was the last queen of Scots for almost twenty years#And precious few noblewomen who weren't queens are represented in art or clothing accounts before 1560#So the gap between Margaret of Denmark and her kerchiefs and 'turrets' (i.e. tall 15th century hennins and escoffions)#And Margaret Tudor and her 'caps' and the occasional purchase of a hood after the French fashion#Is a significant one#Broken only really by the occasional royal mistress like Janet Kennedy- though sadly in her case we mostly only get told that#a 'hat' was purchased for her at some point#With little explanation of the kind of hat
52 notes · View notes