Introduction

Little first-hand evidence of sumptuary legislation in England survives from before the preserved enrollments of parliamentary proceedings, which were kept from the end of the thirteenth century. Following a brief proscription of items of dress worn by the crusaders and pilgrims to the Holy Land in 1188 (part of the introduction of the so-called ‘Saladin Tithe’ of 1188; extracted as no. 1 below), there is little recorded evidence of centralised attempts to regulate dress in Britain. Localised sumptuary laws appear early in southern European towns and cities (in Italy dating back to ancient Rome), and precedent for many of the individual details of the English sumptuary laws may be found in earlier laws from Italy, France and other continental sources (Newton 1980: 131–2).

France has records of socially categorised restrictions on dress dating from as early as 1279 and 1294. The French laws are intimately concerned to regulate the display of the ranks of the secular and clerical elite. Sarah-Grace Heller has observed how these thirteenth-century laws differ from those that follow in England and France in the later centuries, in that they do not dictate particular fashions, and ‘are more concerned with stabilizing how much a person could consume and display relative to his or her income rather than with prohibiting dubious attire’ (Heller 2004: 313–25). In England, this differs markedly from the sumptuary legislation of the later-medieval and Tudor periods.

In England in 1313, Edward II’s government passed a law forbidding the wearing of arms or armour in parliament (Luders et al. 1810: I.10 – 1313, 7th Edw. II). This obviously had more to do with fear of violence or rebellion in the chamber than any broad, social or economic anxieties informing traditional sumptary law. Then in 1337, Edward III’s government passed a law forbidding the importation of cloth or clothing from lands outside England, Ireland, Scotland or Wales, or the exportation of domestic wool (Luders et al. 1810: I.280–1). It has been suggested that this statute, and the sumptuary restrictions accompanying it, were protectionist measures for the domestic wool trade (Bell and Ruse 1972: 23). The restriction on imports was repealed in 1362 following pressure from the merchants (Luders et al. 1810: I.374), but various trade restrictions on cloth and clothing appear frequently in legislation from later parliaments (Hunt 1996: 299–302).