Living Elizabethan: All Work and No Play...

The local news and gossip is awash with stories of our local team's quest to move a small leathern object of possession by hand or foot from one end to the other of a gridded field of dispute against the fervent wishes of their opposite numbers in counter-coloured uniforms who rise up to stop them. It is given me by local lore and custom that Our local sportsmen are better at achieving this endeavor successfully than any other group of combatants similarly accoutered.

Certainly this seems to be the current obsession of townsfolk in every restaurant, bar, party, and workplace that I enter.

(Go Seahawks.)

Of course I'm being a bit silly, but since I'm not a football fan it all seems a bit silly anyway. (Unless we're talking about the Stanley Cup, in which case an overwhelming obsession Makes Perfect Sense!) One of the things I feel like I did wrong in putting this project together was overlooking how the Life Elizabethan really worked.

And believe it or not, that includes football... well, sort of.

So today, let's talk about other things on an Elizabethan's mind. The things of passing import beyond the immediate pleasure of watching or participating... which is to say games.

Henry VIII was a huge football fan and enjoyed playing, though his game would be as unfamiliar to European football (soccer) fans as it would be to American fans of the gridiron. Though rugby fans would feel right at home.

We've talked about Archery, the practice of which was instituted as a matter of law in the centuries preceding Elizabeth's accession in order to train men for war rather than allow them to be distracted by games like football.

Not that Archery wasn't considered a sport or didn't lead to competitions. Around here somewhere, I have a partial court record of a man accused of witchcraft for being too greatly improved at archery, which to me just reeks of a competitor's jealousy. It led to many games meant to sharpen the instinct and aim of the archer from the benign (swinging targets) to the cruel (shooting at a cat in a bag**).

Thanks to Shakespeare*, we know more about what our Elizabethan townsfolk were up to on a day-to-day basis. Our Elizabethan forebears weren't necessarily so wrapped up in work they had no time to play. The rise of the artisan class meant upward mobility and with upward mobility came free time. Beyond archery and football, there were also card games and dice, tables (better known these days as backgammon), baseball-like games such as rounders and stool ball, hurling (for our Irish cousins), tennis (another of Henry VIII's favorites), bowls, badminton...  Also, anywhere there are competitive spirits and things that can be pushed, ridden, or rolled (horses, carts, wheelbarrows, rounds of cheddar...) there will be racing.

They didn't have a Superbowl or Lord Stanley's Cup to vie for, but our modern affection for sport is nothing new and it would not be all that surprising to our forebears.

~ Scott

Rounders: Your humble author at the bat...

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* Let's face it, without The Bard drawing our attention to it, the Elizabethan period would be just another period dimly remembered from history class. Type "Life in Chaucer's England" into the Amazon search screen. 88 hits on that Amazon search and most of them different editions of the same book or irrelevant to the subject. There were 552 hits on a similar search for Shakespeare's England almost all of them actually about the life and times of the Glover of Avon.

**"If I do, hang me in a bottle like a cat and shoot
at me; and he that hits me, let him be clapped on
the shoulder, and called Adam."
-Benedick, Much Ado About Nothing,

Haberdashers, cappers, and the history of the stocking cap

"Your majesty says very true: if your majestie is remembered of it, the Welshmen did good service in a garden where leeks did grow, wearing leeks in their Monmouth caps; which, your majesty knows, to this hour is an honourable badge of the service; and I do believe your majesty takes no scorn to wear the leek upon Saint Davy's day."
                                - William Shakespeare
                                  Henry V

I suppose that I am a few days late for St Davy's day, that festival of Monmouth caps (and caps of every sort) festooned with leeks across the length and breadth of Wales.  The reason Shakespeare has Fluellen so jazzed to be speaking with the king about allium-adorned headgear is that King Harry was a man of Wales himself, born in Monmouth in the Year of Our Lord 1386.

But this isn't a tale about leeks. This is about a cap born of that same fertile corner of the Sceptered Isle, or at least named for it. The Monmouth Cap is nearly alone among Elizabethan headwear insomuch as you could walk down the street wearing one and no one would look at you twice. To the modern eye, it would seem, for all intents and purposes, to be a sort of wool watch cap not unlike the ones you see me wearing in a lot of photos.

Though I'm not above wearing a fedora if it's sunny and I need to shade my eyes, stocking caps (as my dad called them) are hands-down my favorite sort of cap for woodworking outside in the cold and damp of my Western Washington home. This is part of why I decided to make one as my first real knitting project.

There are as many patterns for Monmouth Caps as there are knitters trying to produce them. If you go looking on Ravelry, you will find any number of them on display.  The one I'm going is distilled from many of those projects, but mostly one featured onthe website of Jennifer Carlson.

http://www.personal.utulsa.edu/~marc-carlson/jennifer/Monmouth.htm

I'm a big fan of the website maintained by Jennifer and Marc Carlson and will be referring you to their fine resources on diverse topics ranging from shoemaking to hornwork to medieval stitches. They are a font of knowledge and generous with sharing it all, almost to a fault.

The Cappers

The reason we're making a cap is to tie off the last of the Haberdasher's Company by discussing the duality that exists to this day.

Piled Fedoras - Byrnie Utz Hats, Seattle

Photo by Kristin Perkins

Walk into famed Seattle haberdashery Byrnie Utz and you will get the impression that haberdasher = hatseller. And in the United States for the most part, that is true. Sometimes you will find assorted men's fashions as well, but always, always, always there will be hats.

(Note: Normally I would link to them, but I can't because they're so old school they don't have a website or even a social media presence. If you want to see it, you just have to make the trip.)

As we've already discussed, historically, the haberdasher was a seller of small household goods and sewing notions. Which is not to make them seem small themselves, they rank eighth in precedence on the great roll of the City of London's livery companies and have been, at times, enormously powerful. Nevertheless, they were mainly the merchants of ribbons, pins, beads, buttons, purses, thread, combs, toys, gloves, and even sometimes household goods and even cutlery.

Almost a general store, to put it in American frontier terms.

They overlapped the Mercer's Company on many fronts and it's often said that they were spun off from that fraternity, though their own official history makes no mention of it. Like the Mercers, though, they were the retailers for many other trades, least among them the humble Pinners and perhaps greatest among them the Pewterers and Cutlers.

There are many theories on the history of the word 'haberdasher', and if I can find my magnifier, I'll quote some of them at you from my copy of the Oxford English Dictionary, but the one that I think rings truest is handily online. "Anglo-French hapertas 'small wares'".

In 1502, right at the start of the 16th century, the Cappers Guild either joined with or was absorbed by the Haberdashers, but they never completely soaked in. As a result there came about two schools of haberdashery. On the one hand we had sellers of small household wares and on the other were the hat emporia that I so greatly enjoy today.

Tonight, we sleep. Tomorrow, we knit!

~ Scott

The City of London: The ancient and very odd institution...

I'm rapidly becoming an avid follower of the Youtube channel of  CGP Grey, who basically explains things. I'm a huge fan of people explaining things in a clear and concise manner. If they can use cartoons, so much the better.

Anyway, Grey recently turned his animated flashlight on the ancient and honorable and rather strange entity that forms a backdrop for what I'm doing here: the Livery Companies and how they still govern the City of London.