Fashion and Popular Print in Early Modern England: Depicting Dress in Black-Letter Ballads 9781350986374, 9781786731968

Citation preview

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Clare Backhouse received her doctorate from the Courtauld Institute of Art. She has taught at the Courtauld, New York University in London, the University of Oxford, and the Victoria and Albert Museum. She is a contributor to Printed Images in Early Modern Britain (2010).

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‘This is the first serious study of English seventeenth-century illustrated ballads and is an important book for anyone interested in the dynamics of popular culture and clothing in early modern England. Focusing on the ballad as text and image, Backhouse places these most popular of print products in their material, economic, social and artistic milieu and uses them to draw out a new history of changing fashions and social attitudes towards fashion, for both workers and wearers across the century.’ – Angela McShane, author of Political Broadside Ballads of Seventeenth-Century England: A Critical Bibliography (2011) ‘Clare Backhouse’s Fashion and Popular Print in Early Modern England transforms the way we think about fashion and popular culture in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Single-sheet ballads, illustrated with woodcuts, offered ordinary English men and women unmatched access to the output of the new printing presses. A cheap price and accessible content ensured them a wide audience. The words of the ballads remain familiar today as a key source for English folk song, but Clare Backhouse shows that, for those who bought, read and sung them, their illustrations were equally important. In an era when the modern fashion system was emerging, the ballads’ woodcuts disseminated clothing fashions to ordinary people. They did so by drawing on the rapidly changing conventions of courtly portrait painting, in the process transmitting fashion in art as well as fashion in dress. This is a pathbreaking book. It bridges the gaps between high art and everyday life and between image and text, while obliging us to rethink the origins of popular fashion.’ – John Styles, University of Hertfordshire and Victoria and Albert Museum ‘This is interdisciplinarity at its best, connecting popular prints with the complexities of early modern fashion. Clare Backhouse has taken blurred, often badly printed ballads and pamphlets and used them to reconstruct the changing economic, social and political worlds of pedlars, their packs of ribbons, fabrics and papers, and their clients and consumers.’ – Evelyn Welch, Professor of Renaissance Studies, King’s College London

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Fashion and Popular Print in Early Modern England Depicting Dress in Black-Letter Ballads Clare Backhouse

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Published in 2017 by I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd London • New York www.ibtauris.com Copyright © 2017 Clare Backhouse The right of Clare Backhouse to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Every attempt has been made to gain permission for the use of the images in this book. Any omissions will be rectified in future editions. References to websites were correct at the time of writing. ISBN: 978 1 78453 837 8 eISBN: 978 1 78672 196 9 ePDF: 978 1 78673 196 8 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK), Croydon, CR0 4YY

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CONTENTS

List of Illustrations Citations and Abbreviations

vi x

Introduction

1

1

Commodities of Print and Dress

9

2

Ballad Comment on Dress

43

3

Ballad Pictures: Conventions of Clothes and the Body

84

4

Classical Ideals and Satirical Deviations, Part I: Masculinity, Fashion and the Defence of the Nation

126

Classical Ideals and Satirical Deviations, Part II: Female Bodies, Feminine Fashions and Economic Benefits

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Epilogue

191

5

Notes 203 Select Bibliography 226 Acknowledgements 245 Index of Ballad Titles 248 Index 250

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ILLUSTRATIONS

0.1

The Country Lass, 1690?, PB 3.290. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge. 1.1 Detail of a crimson velvet jerkin, showing collar and centre front, c.1628–32. © Museum of London; author’s photograph. 1.2 Jan Steen, A Pedlar Selling Spectacles Outside a Cottage, c.1650–3, oil on oak panel. © The National Gallery, London. 1.3 The Pedler Opening of His Packe, 1620, PB 1.238–​9. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge. 1.4 Jolly Jack of All Trades, 1685–​8, PB 4.263. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge. 1.5 The Sorrowful Lamentation of the Pedlars, 1685–​8, PB 4.298. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge. 1.6 The Crafty Scotch Pedlar, c.1692–3, PB 4.326. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge. 1.7 A Mad Crue, 1625, PB 1.444–​5. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge. 2.1 Thomas Deloney, A Most Excellent and Vertuous Ballad of the Patient Grissell, 1624?, PB 1.34–​5. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge. 2.2 The Deserued Downfall of a Corrupted Conscience, 1621, PB 1.142–​3. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge. 2.3 Richard Day’s A Booke of Christian Praiers, known as ‘Queen Elizabeth’s Prayer Book’, 1578, pp. 95v, 98v. © The British Library Board. 2.4 M[artin] P[arker], Times Alteration, 1630, PB 1.160–​1. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge. 2.5 Anonymous, Cries of London, seventeenth century, etching. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

1 15 20 24 25 26 28 30

45 48

51 54 62

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

2.6 2.7 2.8 2.9 2.10 2.11 3.1a

3.1b

3.2a 3.2b

3.3a 3.3b

3.4

3.5 3.6 3.7 3.8

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Merry Tom of All Trades, 1658–​64, Wood E 25(47). The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. 63 L[awrence] P[rice], Round Boyes Indeed, 1632, PB 1.442–​3. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge. 65 The Coblers New Prophesie, 1678–​80, PB 4.230. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge. 67 The   War-​Like Taylor, 1681–​4, PB 4.282. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge. 69 A Warning and Good Counsel to the Weavers, 1688, PB 4.356. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge. 74 The Weavers Request, 1685–8, PB 4.355. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge. 76 First page of the Book of Esdras from Miles Coverdale’s translation of the Bible, Marburg?, 1535. © The British Library Board. 90 The second part of The Historie of the Prophet Ionas, c.1620, PB 1.28–​9. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge. 91 Michael Drayton, Poly-​Olbion, ed. John Selden 1612; 1622, p. 4. The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. 92 The second part of Robert Johnson, The Good Shepheards Sorrow for the Death Ef [sic] His Beloued Sonne, 1612, PB 1.352–​3. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge. 93 Frontispiece to Haec Vir, or the Womanish Man, 1620. © The British Library Board. 96 The first part of A Most Delicate, Pleasant, Amorous, New Song, 1625, PB 1.254–​5. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge. 97 Sir Walter Rauleigh His Lamentation, 1618, PB 1.110–​11. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge. 99 Any Thing for a Quiet Life, c.1620, PB 1.378–​9. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge. 100 A Batchelers Resolution, 1629, PB 1.232–​3r. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge. 101 The Young-​Womans Complaint, c.1655–60, Wood E 25(37). The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. 102 The Famous Flower of Serving-​Men, 1664, Douce 1(83b). The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. 103

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

3.9

The Unbelieving Maiden, 1684–​6, PB 3.111. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge. 3.10a The Lovers Invitation, 1684–​6, PB 4.46. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge. 3.10b After Pieter Borsseler, Catherine of Braganza, 1662–​85, engraving. © National Portrait Gallery, London. 3.11 Engraved illustration by Thomas Cross in Francis Hawkins, Youths Behaviour, 1652; 1661. The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. 3.12 Forsaken Lovers Resolution, 1678–​80, PB 3.97. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge. 3.13 John Hayls, Samuel Pepys, 1666, oil on canvas. © National Portrait Gallery, London. 3.14 After Peter Lely, Princess Mary of Orange, published by Richard Thomson, 1678–​9, mezzotint. © National Portrait Gallery, London. 4.1 Alexis Loyalty, 1685–​8, PB 3.180. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge. 4.2a Studio of  Willem Wissing, Mary of Modena, oil on canvas, 1676–​85. © Museum of London. 4.2b Edward Cooper after Samuel Cooper, Mary of Modena, 1680–​ 1704, mezzotint. © The Trustees of the British Museum. 4.2c Robert White after Godfrey Kneller, James Duke of York, 1682, engraving. © The Trustees of the British Museum. 4.3 The White-​Chappel Maids Lamentation, 1685, PB 3.338. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge. 4.4 Englands Happiness Reviv’d, 1689, PB 2.279. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge. 4.5 The Souldiers Prayers, 1690, PB 2.305. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge. 4.6 The Royal Farewel, 1690, PB 2.327. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge. 4.7 A Groats-​Worth of Mirth for a Penny, 1686, PB 3.207. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge. 4.8 The Crafty Miss of London, 1672–​96, Douce 1(39a). The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

104 105 106

110 113 118

121 129 130 131 132

136 137 138 139 147 148

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

ix

4.9

A Looking-​Glass for Lascivious Young Men, 1689–​92, PB 2.72. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge. 5.1 An Excellent Sonnet of the Unfortunate Loves of Hero & Leander, 1684–​95, PB 3.322. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge. 5.2a Peter Lely, Louise de Kéroualle, 1671, oil on canvas. From the Collection at Althorp. 5.2b Gerard Valck, Louise de Kéroualle, 1678, mezzotint. © National Portrait Gallery, London. 5.2c Abraham Blooteling, Louise de Kéroualle, 1677, mezzotint. © The Trustees of the British Museum. 5.3 The Pensive Prisoners Apology, 1675, PB 2.80. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge. 5.4 The Young-​Mans Labour Lost, 1678–​80, Roxburghe 4.81. © The British Library Board. 5.5 Broadside, Which of These Fower,That Here You See, in Greatest Daunger You Thinke to Be, 1623. By kind permission of The Society of Antiquaries of London. 5.6 Anonymous designs for inn-​signs, c.1660, engraving. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge. 5.7 The Princess Welcome to England, 1689, PB 2.256. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge. 5.8 The Maulsters Daughter of Malborough, 1684–​98, PB 3.70. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge. 5.9 Advice to the Maidens of London, 1685–​8, PB 4.365. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge. 5.10 The Somersetshire Wonder, 1690s, PB 4.362. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge. 5.11 A Fair Warning for Pride, 1690s, PB 4.310. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge. 5.12 The London Ladies Vindication, 1690s, PB 4.363. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge. E.1 Sections from anonymous linen panel, c.1670–99, woodblock printed and painted. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

153

159 160 161 162 168 172

173

174 175

177 180 182 183 184 195

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CITATIONS AND ABBREVIATIONS CITATION OF BLACK-​L ETTER BALLADS It is customary for ballads to be cited like books; this study, however, also treats them as primary art-​and dress-​historical sources. Named ballads are therefore specified in each chapter’s Endnotes by collection and shelfmark. Approximate publication dates are given according to the English Ballads and Broadsides Archive, the holding institution’s catalogue, or the English Short Title Catalogue. To differentiate clearly between Samuel Pepys’s diary and print collections, Pepys’s ballads are cited ‘PB’ before the selfmark. Some ballads exist in two parts, with consecutive shelfmarks, for example ‘PB 1.76–​7’. An index of titles for surviving ballads cited can be found within the main Index, while the principal ballad collections consulted are listed in the Bibliography.

ABBREVIATIONS Some key reference sources are cited as follows: Oxford English Dictionary: OED followed by word reference, for example ‘OED “pedlar”’. B.E. Gent’s A New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew (1699):  Canting Dictionary followed by word reference, for example ‘Canting Dictionary “pedlar”’. Diaries of Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn: cited by author and date, for example ‘Pepys 2 October 1663’. The English Short Title Catalogue: referred to as ESTC. Victoria and Albert Museum: referred to as V&A .

1

INTRODUCTION

Fig. 0.1  The Country Lass, 1690?, PB 3.290. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge.

This sheet of paper, about eight by twelve inches in size, was printed in London around 1690 (fig. 0.1).1 Set to the tune of ‘My Maid Mary’, its rhyming stanzas relate how Jenny, a country girl, strives to elevate herself socially from poor spinner to well-dressed woman. Neatly encapsulated by two woodcuts, the legend of Jenny’s finery reached its beholders as song, text and image in seventeenth-century England. Sheets like this were printed mainly in London throughout the seventeenth century, before being distributed and sold throughout the country

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Fashion and Popular Print in Early Modern England

by pedlars –​in streets, at fairs or door-​to-​door. Costing a penny or less, their high circulation made them available to every sort of person: even with no money or literacy, people could hear the words sung by the seller, see them pasted up on alehouse walls and distinguish between them by the arrangement of their pictures.2 As such, sheets like The Country Lass were some of the most accessible and visible print products in seventeenth-​century England. Predating the earliest British fashion journalism by over a century,3 they offer rich material for historical research today. Yet, until recently, they have been largely forgotten in histories of dress and representation. Papers printed on one side like this are known as ‘broadsides’, and when they contain rhyming songs in gothic text, they are now described as ‘black-​letter ballads’. Their publishers were entirely dependent on market uptake for profitability, which meant ballad themes had to attract and amuse a very broad audience. Ballads addressed a great variety of subjects, but dress was a recurring topic because it was central to widespread controversies on religious and social morality, and vital to England’s employment and export trade. This book examines how English black-​letter broadside ballads represented dress in the seventeenth century, how these representations changed in the period, and why. Part of this question has to do with the development of the concept of ‘fashion’, as opposed to dress. Today, while the classic definition of ‘dress’ refers to any kind of modification or supplement to the body, ‘fashion’ is generally understood to mean dress styles that are particularly of the moment, or associated with newness and change.4 The idea that fashionable clothing could be valued for being ‘up to date’, without necessarily comprising textiles of high intrinsic value, was in certain respects established during the period covered by this book. As garment industries and international fashions developed in the seventeenth century, England saw a ‘widening and deepening of the market for clothing’.5 Christopher Breward observes that, connected to these changes, ‘the old assurances of explicit links between social standing and choice of clothing underwent rapid change and permutation’ which in turn expanded the vocabulary of dress and its meanings.6 Ballads could register and communicate this shift to enormous audiences –​indeed, as we will see, they could do so for almost anyone in seventeenth-​century England.

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Introduction

3

Seventeenth-​century writers themselves certainly considered ballads to be concerned with clothing styles. For example, in 1620, Thomas Middleton’s play A Courtly Masque summarised the merits of making ballads: scholar :

I could make Ballads for a need soldier : Very well sir; and Ile warrant thee thou shalt never want subject to write of: One hangs himself to day, another drownes himself to morrow, a Ser[v]‌ant stabd next day, here a Petti-​fogger ath’Pillory … Fashions, Fictions, Fellonies, Foolleries, a hundred havens has the Ballad-​monger to traffique at, and new ones still daily discovered. In their short dialogue, Middleton’s characters portray ballads as market-​ driven commodities of news and legend, pragmatically produced for financial ‘need’ rather than for literary acclaim, their subjects responding to contemporary events and ‘fashions’. Black-​letter ballad publishing flourished throughout the seventeenth century, but today there are only a few thousand ballad sheets left: these are preserved, on the whole, in collections made by relatively wealthy men of the period. The largest known collection of just over 1300 black-​letter sheets was begun by scholar John Selden, bought and added to by naval administrator and diarist Samuel Pepys, and bequeathed by Pepys to Magdalene College, Cambridge in 1703.7 Other significant collections are now kept in major libraries such as the Bodleian in Oxford, the British Library, the National Library of Scotland and the University of Glasgow.8 Owing to the vicissitudes and chances that have always governed the movement of ballads, however, this book does not attempt to examine them on the basis of the collections in which they now happen to reside. Instead, we will take a cue from collector Samuel Pepys, who bound his ballad sheets for posterity into five volumes, as a means to understand the transient concerns of his own times. On the title page of his first volume, Pepys quoted John Selden’s (now famous) comment, that: you may see by [ballads], how the Wind sits. As take a Straw, and throw it up into the Air; you shall see by that, which way the Wind is; which you shall not do, by casting up a Stone. More solid things do not shew the Complexion of the Times, so well as Ballads and Libells. Preserving ballads alongside his ‘more solid’ books and fine prints, Pepys sought to capture the ephemeral fashions and preoccupations that he and Selden had

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Fashion and Popular Print in Early Modern England

seen pass in their lifetimes. He even divided his collection into themed categories, such as ‘Devotion & Morality’, ‘History True & Fabulous’, ‘Tragedy –​vizt Murdrs. Execut.s Jugdmts of God &c.’, ‘State & Times’ and ‘Love Pleasant’. A book of this length could not hope to do justice to the full variety of seventeenth-​century ballad texts and images; however, pursuing Selden’s and Pepys’s approaches, it aims to elucidate some of the key changes in ‘the Complexion of the Times’ which ballads portray, especially with regard to that other ephemeral and Protean commodity: dress. It examines certain developments in the attitudes to dress and fashion consumption represented in ballads over the course of the century –​from the lapse of sumptuary ‘fashion laws’ in 1604 to the lapse of the Licensing Act restrictions on print in 1695 –​and analyses these developments in light of other visual and textual evidence of the period, such as books, printed images, petitions, white-​letter ballads and paintings. On the whole, the media listed above tended to be commissioned by patrons, or undertaken by named authors, or to be more expensive than black-​letter ballads. These are the kinds of sources that typically inform histories of seventeenth-​century dress. Compared with such media, black-​ letter ballads appear hard to pin down. They were produced outside the traditional arts patronage system, destined for speedy sale on the open market, and they rarely state their authors or dates. However, ballads almost always list the name of their publisher. For example, The Souldiers Prayers of 1690 was (it declares) ‘printed for James Bissel at the Bible and Harp in West-​Smithfield near the hospital gate’.9 Recent scholarship uses the biography of publishers and their professional peregrinations to identify rough dates, or date ranges, for ballad sheets.10 For this reason, although ballad dating is best approached tentatively, broad chronological developments in ballad representations can still make a fruitful starting-​point for analysis. Ballads’ wide social reach, and typical designation as material evidence of ‘popular’ culture, may seem to promise new information for a history of dress ‘from below’. However, there are two reasons we shall not aim for that here.The first is that ballads do not offer information purely about the lower social orders. They are just as concerned with nobles and monarchs as they are with beggars and labourers. The second reason is the difficulty of making any firm correlation between ballad woodcuts and surviving seventeenth-​century clothing. The study of surviving seventeenth-​century garments already faces the challenges of rare survival and provenance, but even the objects that fortunately do remain cannot be linked in a simple manner to what we see in ballads.

5

Introduction

5

While a fully rounded understanding of historical dress always requires evidence from image, object and text sources,11 ballad texts and images need to be understood in relation to conventions of representation –​which have a dynamic of their own –​rather than as reliable documents of what was actually worn. Hence, this book pays attention to the associative qualities of words and images about fashion –​the way they refer to contemporary themes and issues, but also to other words and images.12 To do justice to the particular image/​text evidence offered by ballads, we will examine them primarily in relation to other images and texts of the period.13 In order to employ ballads as a resource for dress history, then, what follows is indebted not only to numerous authors of dress history and cultural history, but also to a great deal of scholarship on art and print history. Building upon research in cheap print and popular culture, scholars have turned from the canonical or ‘great’ cultural traditions fostered by patronage, to the less-​studied, market-​driven, ‘little’ traditions. This approach seeks to find something of the ‘mentalities’ of early modern England.14 The recent flourishing of scholarship on British printed images of the period has also been foundational for this book.15 In terms of ballads, however, there is a much smaller range of scholarship to build upon, due to the fact that they have largely been studied as aural, or textual, entities.16 Until recently, indeed, ballad texts have often been investigated separately from their images. Ballad pictures have typically been dismissed as irrelevant to the text and too poorly executed to merit attention.17 However, the work of those scholars who have pioneered a more positive approach to ballad woodcuts –​most importantly, Alexandra Franklin, Angela McShane and Tessa Watt –​has proved a crucial basis for all that follows here.18 Yet, despite this recent research, there is still no book-​length study to redress the general bias away from the visual aspects of ballad sheets.19 On the whole, ballad images still tend to be examined as if they might offer direct insight into contemporary social practice, or to be judged according to how precisely (or otherwise) they are presumed to ‘fit’ their texts. Here, however, we will approach ballads both as an ‘intra-​textual’ whole –​ in which word and image create an interlinked web of meaning –​and as single elements within a wider network of ‘inter-​textual’ reference, in which meaning is created by association with, or evocation of, other visual and textual sources.20 Furthermore, adopting the priorities of cultural history, this study aims to explore why and how ballad meanings shifted and changed during the seventeenth century.21

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Fashion and Popular Print in Early Modern England

Nineteenth- and twentieth-century printed editions of ballad collections tended to reproduce ballads as texts only (with some copied woodcuts),22 or in facsimile where the text is not always legible.23 However, recent ballad digitisation projects now represent ballads more clearly as word-and-image combinations. Such endeavours seek to make ballad material that would otherwise be physically confined to specific collections, freely available on the Internet. On websites such as Bodleian Ballads, Early English Books Online and English Broadside Ballad Archive, ballad sheets appear as clear, expandable images. Although nothing can replace the experience of physically encountering ballads on paper, these online archives nevertheless preserve and emphasise the text-and-image appearance of the black-​letter ballad. Such projects not only restore something of the free visibility of the seventeenth-​century ballad, but also draw fresh attention to the ballad image.24 At the lower right of ­figure 0.1 appears the line ‘Printed for P. Brooksby, J. Deacon, J. Blare, J. Back’. Groups of named publishers are commonly seen on ballads, sometimes in a variety of combinations, as individuals moved location, made new alliances or died. Certain preferences of text or image can, in some cases, be associated with specific publishers. However, while publishers’ imprints often help with dating (as described above), one cannot consistently use them to analyse ballads, as one might do with books by the same author. There were no image copyright laws in seventeenth-​century England; print piracy was everywhere and ballad texts and images could be copied, swapped, traded and inherited between publishers. Whether in business as individuals or groups, publishers tended to trade under their own name rather than retain that of their predecessor: this prevented any long-​term build-​up of ‘brand’ loyalty towards the name of one publishing house over another. In any case, trends in ballad production tended to cross the boundaries of publication. If something worked for one publisher, others were sure to copy. Therefore, this book embraces ballads’ more nebulous status as market-​driven commodities. Drawing from historical evidence for their sale alongside dress commodities, and guided by the idea that objects’ ‘social life’ can only be understood by examining the conditions under which they become (and cease to be) commodities,25 what follows will focus not just upon styles of dress, but also upon how ballads represent dress consumption.

OVERVIEW OF THE BOOK Chapter 1 establishes the historical relationship between ballads and clothing in the seventeenth century, locating them as commodities with a shared

7

Introduction

7

and mutually dependent history at the stages of production, circulation and consumption. It demonstrates how ballads throughout the century merit examination as evidence for attitudes to dress, introducing the figure of the pedlar and the location of London as central to our understanding of the ballad product and its representations. Chapter 2 expands upon this commodity connection. It examines how ballad texts commented upon the consumption of clothing, and outlines the key ways that these comments changed during the century. By charting shifts in attitude to the circulation and consumption of print and fashion, seventeenth-​century ballads responded not only to significant national events such as the Civil Wars, the Restoration or the Glorious Revolution, but also to contemporary developments in sumptuary legislation, religious practice, economic theory and technological innovation. Chapter 3 turns from the ballad as commodity and as text, to address the neglected aspect of its visual imagery. After setting out the principal problems that have thus far beset the study of ballad images, it engages approaches that highlight ballads’ links to wider visual culture, as well as acknowledging the distinctive ways ballad images functioned. Overall, we see how changes in ballad comment on dress consumption during the seventeenth century were also registered by new visual conventions of depicting the clothed body. Having established the ballad as a commodity that was physically, textually and visually connected to issues of dress production, circulation and consumption, and having distinguished key shifts in attitude towards dress consumption and the representation of dress in ballads during the seventeenth century, the following chapters harness the conclusions of Chapter 3, to examine further the symbolic effects in ballads of changing visual conventions. Chapters 4 and 5 focus on representations of gender in ballads’ depictions of the clothed body. Chapter 4 charts the ways that ‘masculine’ ideals in ballad images related to ideals of male consumption of dress, satirical depictions of men and notions of England’s international military achievements. Chapter 5 explores the different trends evident in ballad representations of women and fashion consumption, showing how both ideals and satires of femininity related to concepts of the nation’s economic success. The Epilogue looks ahead from the seventeenth century, to the early eighteenth-​century calico crisis, examining the extent to which the central trends discussed in this book continued to characterise the relationship between print and dress.

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1 COMMODITIES OF PRINT AND DRESS

‘The logic of clothing,’ Daniel Roche observes: offers a way of understanding and a means of studying the social transformations taking place within urban melting-​pots … It poses all the problems, those of raw materials, of the processes and structure of production, of cost and benefits, of cultural constraints and variations in time and space.1 During the seventeenth century, this ‘logic’ of clothing –​its raw materials, its production processes and its cultural space –​was also shared with broadside ballad sheets. That is to say, broadside ballads and dress were fundamentally connected on many levels. To some extent, early modern scholars have already recognised a connection at the point of sale. For example, certain geographical areas of London, such as St Paul’s churchyard, were centres for selling both printed and clothing commodities.2 More importantly, as Margaret Spufford has shown, print and dress were typically sold by the same itinerant salesmen, who were described at the time as pedlars, chapmen or hawkers. These highly mobile vendors –​called pedlars here3 –​ carried printed paper and clothing from the centre of cities to the farthest corners of the country.4 However, the links between print and dress in seventeenth-​ century England are much deeper and more complex than has been recognised hitherto. Taking a cultural history approach, we will attend to the circulation of ideas surrounding print and dress both before and after they entered the pedlar’s pack, focusing on ‘use and practice’ in order to ‘gain entry into the

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Fashion and Popular Print in Early Modern England

world of meanings of those among whom we have never lived’.5 As this chapter will contend, ballads and dress were commodities linked at every stage of what Arjun Appadurai has called their ‘exchangeability’ or ‘commodity potential’, from production, through exchange and distribution, to consumption.6 This fundamental and many-​layered relationship offers a historical basis upon which to examine the representation of dress in ballads. The chapter therefore explores what the basic materials of dress and ballads –​fabric and paper –​shared in terms of their production processes, sales and patterns in consumption. Drawing upon contemporary literature and documentation, we will examine their physical and figurative shared history and ask how it was understood in the period.

PRODUCING TEXTILES AND PAPER By the time that ballads and clothing items found themselves as objects in the same pedlar’s pack, they had already shared a long series of other connections that would have been commonplace to seventeenth-​century consumers. To open up these associations, we first examine ballads and clothing as commodities within the wider context of textile and paper production. An overview of textile manufacture introduces the principal raw materials of the period –​wool, silk, cotton, hemp and linen –​elucidating their production processes and their relative cultural value on the textile commodity market. This gives background to the meanings that ballads assigned to these materials as clothing, which will be discussed in later chapters. A brief survey of English paper-​making in the period demonstrates not only how the paper and print trades relied upon recycled clothing, but also how the the clothing trades relied upon paper as an element of both of inner garment construction and surface textile design. Together, this variety of physical interconnections will reveal how clothing and print were objects tied together in multiple ways, as they moved in and out of the commodity phases of their existence. We therefore now turn to examine the typical textile contents of a pedlar’s pack, how they were made, and what they might have meant for the pedlar’s customers. Wool Of all the textiles a pedlar carried, wool was seen as the quintessentially English type.7 Sheep farming and wool processing had brought great

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prosperity to England, and wool was associated with the very essence of English identity. This is portrayed in the ballad The Shepheard and the King, where the social gap between the title’s two protagonists is closed by their shared appreciation for wool and sheep.8 In practice, several kinds of woollen textile were named after specific English towns or counties, such as ‘Tauntons’ or ‘Short Suffolks’, so that the welfare of England’s people and land was both imaginatively as well as practically tied to wool production.9 From the Middle Ages, raw English wool dominated the country’s export economy; after the 1550s, woven wool cloth was exported as well. Depending on its yarn and weave, this ranged from very light, fine ‘New Drapery stuffs’ to cheap, ‘kersey’ cloth, made of uneven, worst-​quality thick yarn. Heavy, dense ‘broadcloth’ was considered the best and most characteristic of England’s woollen textiles.10 Overall, however, wool’s national symbolism was connected to its importance as a source of employment. Its numerous stages of production required many workers, including shepherds, wool brokers, clothiers, spinners, weavers, fullers, rowers and, finally, shearmen.11 Although the association between wool and English national pride continued through the seventeenth century, its peak of success in the mid-​ 1500s was long past. European-​wrought silks brought strong competition in the early 1600s, while the over-​reaching aims of the Cockayne Project of 1614–​17 tried (and failed) to force Dutch markets to buy dyed and finished, instead of unfinished, wool.12 Yet, despite its trade and production problems, wool remained a textile which aroused recurring nostalgic lamentations of lost national pride, particularly whenever it faced new market difficulties:13 it was materially and culturally important for the country’s identity. Silk Silk was more expensive than other textiles, because it had to be imported raw from China and defied all efforts to produce it in England. In 1680, a pedlar called Richard Ridding had his wares valued. His red woollen tape was valued at a halfpenny per yard, but his silken ribbons were costlier, at twopence each.14 The ballad The Virgins Constancy imagined a ‘Faithful Marriner’ returning home to deck his sweetheart with valuable gifts from abroad, saying: I’ve brought thee home most costly things, Rare precious stones, and diamond Rings, Rich Taffities, and Silks so fine, To deck my Love, for thou are mine.15

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Woven silk was uniquely colourful, lustrous, light and strong, and its high value throughout the seventeenth century supported the perception of silk fabrics as significant love-​gifts. Even low quality, leftover scraps were spun into threads for sewing and knitting, or perhaps for ribbons like those sold by Richard Riddings. Taken as filaments directly from silkworm cocoons, silk fibres were twisted or ‘thrown’ into threads:  strong ‘organzine’ for warp, or weaker ‘tram’ threads for weft.16 Until the mid-​sixteenth century, independent silkwomen were largely in control of importing and working silk goods into ribbons and small luxury wares. An influx of Huguenot refugees to England in the late sixteenth century helped establish broadloom silk weaving as a male-​only industry, which expanded considerably after a second wave of Huguenot immigration in the 1680s.17 Women lost their independent foothold in silk working, but a divide remained between ribbon-​weaving or ‘narrow-​wares’, and broadloom weaving of wider silk textiles.18 As we will see in later chapters, while immigrants aroused anger and suspicion from native silkworkers, their new production techniques allowed England to compete with Continental silks.19 Although silk textiles were associated with high fashion, weaving them was a long process and complex brocade designs could further slow the pace. Master weavers employed outworkers to make individual pieces of broad silk for an agreed piece-​rate; the design for one piece could take up to six weeks to plan and set up for weaving, which even then progressed at a maximum rate of only one yard a day. Silk’s unmatched expense and kudos might suggest that it was a reliable luxury commodity (particularly compared to the troubles of the wool cloth industry); but in fact, it too could be subject to sudden changes in fortune. In addition to the vicissitudes of fashion, silk weavers faced the constant threat of deaths at Court, because the sobriety of national mourning precluded the wearing of colourful silk altogether. For a weaver in the midst of constructing a new piece of silk, this fashion hiatus might last until the design he was weaving had ceased to be popular.20 Cotton Like silk, raw and finished cotton were imports. However, unlike silk, the relatively gradual increases in consumption of pure cotton goods in seventeenth-​century England may explain why few seventeenth-​century ballads mention them. Presumably cotton had not built up enough of an individual ‘character’ in consumers’ minds to merit specific discussion.21 Unlike silk,

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cotton goods were associated with imperial expansion: they first appeared on English shores as cargo of the East India Company. Cotton had been woven in Europe since the fourteenth century, usually mixed with linen into a twill ‘fustian’;22 but until Crompton’s spinning mule appeared in the 1770s it was impossible to produce in England a strong, even warp thread for pure cotton cloth.23 Pure cotton cloth consumption is therefore often associated with the eighteenth century, though in fact such fabrics were imported to England from at least the mid-​sixteenth century, for both furnishing and dress.24 Woven in India, pure cotton textiles were known as ‘calicoes’, a reference to ‘Calicut’, or Kozhikode, then one of India’s main trading ports with Europe. There were many practical reasons for their success: unlike worsted and wool, cotton held its colour and washed easily.25 Cottons could thus replace the lighter wools of the ‘New Draperies’, and compete with the washability and weight of linens; by 1695, cottons were already in common use for shirts and shifts.26 To promote demand for cotton across different levels of society, the East India Company created different varieties and quality grades of cotton.27 They were assisted in this project by Catherine of Braganza’s marriage dowry to Charles II in 1662, which included the Indian port of Bombay.28 In addition to its widespread social appeal, cotton’s bright colours and lively designs competed with silk’s, but were cheaper. Imports of both cottons and silks increased during the century, but remained controversial.29 There were several protectionist attempts in the Commons to create a renewed dependence upon English wool, with varying success,30 but the craze for calicoes merely increased over the eighteenth century.31 Linen Notwithstanding the increasing importance of silk and cotton, seventeenth-​ century pedlars’ inventories are dominated by linen.32 As Beverly Lemire observes, linen consistently remained a staple good, used ‘from birth to death, from swaddling bands to shifts, shirts to shrouds’.33 Although localised and small-​scale production obscures its history, linen has been described as ‘the most essential raw material for local textile use’.34 Furthermore –​and unlike all other clothing textiles –​linen was the essential ingredient for producing white paper. Linen is made from the inner bark, or ‘bast’ fibre, of the flax plant. In the seventeenth century, its hardy strength provided raw material not just for

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clothes, but also for rope, sailcloth, canvas, sacking and carpeting. Sometimes the term ‘linen’ was used loosely, to refer to cloth made from either flax or hemp.35 Flax and hemp plants required a great deal of labour to grow and linen required several stages of processing. The plant fibres had to be combed, rotted in water, beaten with knives, hammered, untangled, twisted, wound, spun, scoured, woven and finally bleached, before they produced linen.36 Owing to this complex production, almost all types of linen were intrinsically valuable. Surviving shirts and shifts, as well as textual accounts, reveal how linen was cut out –​in neat squares and rectangles –​to avoid wasting the tiniest amount of material.37 Pawning clothes and other valuable objects was commonplace in the period, and even used linen had financial value in the pawnshop.38 Linen’s cultural significance differed from other textiles, being neither symbolic of the nation (like wool), nor exotic (like silk or cotton). Lemire observes the paradox that, although linen was economically very important, it was not perceived to promote national prestige.39 In part, this may be because linen products were more heterogeneous than other fabrics. Being highly absorbent and hardwearing, it was used for undergarments and domestic sheeting; a surviving coarse linen doublet from this period suggests it was also material for outer clothing.40 Tough linen interlinings supported finer and more expensive textiles: for example, a jerkin from the period reveals a sturdy linen ground beneath a decayed silk velvet exterior (fig. 1.1). Furthermore, linen could range all the way from hardy sailcloth to intricate lace, which was an important aspect of fashionable display throughout the seventeenth century.41 Heavy-​duty canvases, towels, tents and tarpaulins were thus formed, paradoxically, from the same plant as the most delicate, transparent head veils and finest domestic damasks.42 Linen also had a gendered significance. Clothes of silk and wool were cut and sewn by a male tailor, but the workforce dedicated to making and decorating linen clothing (whether professional or amateur), was almost entirely female. In the ballad The Dorset-​shire Damosel, Nancy the ‘damosel’ offers herself in marriage to a miller, with the promise of ‘three Ells of good Linnen /​For to make you a Shirt, of my Mother’s own Spinning’.43 Even wealthy and titled women sewed linen shirts for their family, as Brilliana, Lady Harley did in 1642.44 Linen materials were thus malleable, multivalent, capable of extremely diverse transformations, and appealing to a very broad range of people and occupations. Paper Once clothing textiles had been used beyond repair, they became fodder for paper-​making. Brown paper for packaging could be made from almost any

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Fig. 1.1  Detail of a crimson velvet jerkin, showing collar and centre front, c.1628–32. © Museum of London; author’s photograph.

fabric, while paper for printing and writing was made out of used white linen, in a process that changed little between 1500 and 1800.45 The diarist and writer John Evelyn described his visit to a paper mill in Byfleet in his journal for 24 August 1678: First they cull the raggs (which are linnen for white paper, Wollen for browne) then they stamp them in troughs to a papp, with pestles or hammers like [a]‌powder cloose as a Weavers reede: upon this take up the papp, the superfluous water draining from it thro the wyres:  This they dextrously turning shake out like a thin pan-​cake on a smoth board, between two pieces of flannell: Then presse it, betweene a great presse, the [flannel] sucking out the moisture, then taking it out ply & dry it on strings, as they dry linnen in the Laundry, then dip it in allume water, lastly polish, & make it up in quires: &c: note that the[y] put some gumm in the water, in which they macerate the raggs into a papp: note that the marks we find in the sheetes is formed in the wyres.46

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Evelyn’s description tellingly evokes the connections he perceived between textiles and the paper-​making processes: in the clothing materials used; the simile of beating rags as ‘a Weavers reede’ beats threads on a loom;47 noting the use of ‘two pieces of flannell’ to drain water from the sheets of paper; comparing drying sheets of paper to ‘linnen in the Laundry’; and even the geometric ‘weave’ of the paper itself, imprinted by the wire moulds. Like linen textile production, paper-​making had several complex stages that required running water and considerable space for airing and drying. Once dried and ‘sized’ in animal gelatine, paper was pressed smooth and cut into sheets of various sizes. These were then sorted into ‘quires’ of twenty-​ four or twenty-​five sheets of paper, twenty of which made a ream. A single-​ vat paper mill might produce up to 5000 sheets of foolscap-​size paper per day,48 which, like linen and wool manufacture, relied upon the coordination of several different workers and processes: a rag-​sorter, a vatman, a coucher, a layer, a presser, an engine-​worker, a finisher and a paper-​sorter.49 Until 1665, paper-​making in England was vulnerable to the effects of plague, because used linen sheets and underclothes were considered a risk to health in times of contagion and collection was prohibited.50 England had more wool than linen rags, so it produced mainly brown paper,51 and imported most of its paper for the book trade from France.52 After 1670, however, native paper production picked up, with engines introduced to speed up cutting and beating the rags. By 1690 there were over 100 paper mills in the country, over half in the south-​east, a number which increased and spread significantly after the lapse of the Licensing Act for printing in 1695.53 Converting old clothes into paper was not just of interest to owners of paper mills. It was a universal commonplace of the period, because rag-​ collectors visited towns and villages, even if the paper mills were remote.54 The irony that human clothing could became mere fodder for the mills offered rich comic potential for seventeenth-​century authors. On a sheet printed in 1663, a ‘Poore Scholar’ poet confesses that his ‘Thred-​bare Suit’ became so tattered that part of it accidentally ‘Fell in the Batter, and was fryed for Dinner’, which shows, he laments, That Land is ful of Ignorance and ills Where Scholars Teeth, prove their own Paper mills.55 Joseph Addison later considered this process in a comic meditation on the production of his own periodical, The Spectator, noting how even fine clothing could disintegrate to become nothing but ‘mean Materials’ and ‘Gleanings’

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for the rag-​collector. Yet such fragments could eventually ‘assume a new whiteness’ in paper, so that ‘A Beau may peruse his Cravat after it is worn out, with greater Pleasure and Advantage than ever he did in a Glass.’56 We can vividly imagine Addison’s ‘Beau’, unwittingly reading his own recycled necklinen. This highlights how linen’s cultural flexibility was perceived at the time, not just as a malleable textile, but also as a highly mobile product that could enter and re-​enter the commodity stage in different forms, and with a different status each time. Rag-​ collecting was important street trade right up until the mid-​ nineteenth century, when wood pulp was introduced for paper production.57 This ease of recycling meant that paper and linen shared similar qualities even in their ‘afterlives’. Most seventeenth-​century linens that survive today have been preserved for their finely worked embroidery. Likewise, paper’s longevity was contingent upon what was printed upon it, either as literary content or an assigned monetary value: the first paper money dates from 1695.58 In this sense, linen and paper were both ‘foundational’ materials. Outer clothes or embroideries were placed upon the basic covering of the linen shift, just as symbolic letters were laid upon the blank white paper. Another key link between clothing and paper in the period was that paper could also play a part in making textiles and dress. In the first place, printed designs on paper were an important medium for disseminating textile designs, whether as emblems, lace patterns or engravings of biblical texts.59 Such patterns were often lost as people would tear out designs from pattern books and distribute them to needlewomen and lace makers to produce the desired pattern.60 The term ‘passementerie’ or ‘passments’ for lace trimmings comes from the method of making ‘parchment’ needle lace, which was built up, stitch by stitch, on threads tacked to a design drawn on a parchment, or paper pattern.61 There was a neat circularity to the way linen could re-​enter the realm of personal adornment after being recycled into paper form. While linen textiles could form supple yet supportive interlinings for silk garments, once they had been reformed into paper or card, they could be layered to reinforce sections of clothing with an even firmer effect. The ‘Poore Scholar’ mentioned above humorously describes this as a cheap method of clothing repair: My Doublet canvasse worn out quite behind I put a Poem there, to keep out the wind.

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Paper products have in fact been discovered within surviving early seventeenth-​century garments used to give fashionable shape to men’s doublets. For example, after x-​ray examination, a woollen doublet of c.1625–30 was found to contain layers of paper or card as a collar stiffener.62 This physical joining together of paper and textiles within a garment reinforces once again the interconnectedness of paper and textile commodities. In Appadurai’s terms, then, paper and linen were thus commodities whose ‘social lives’ were tied together by their shared paths in the ‘total trajectory’, from production to exchange and consumption. Furthermore, they were similar kinds of commodity:  Protean, easily transformed from one kind to another, and moving from high exchange-​value to low. Even as they deterioriated and appeared to move out of the ‘commodity state’, they could quickly be recycled and reintroduced into it as new kinds of object for exchange.63 In this circulation, they even helped to form and reform each other, as old linen became paper, and paper helped to design and construct new clothes. As we will see, these commodities’ remarkable mobility and flexibility was furthermore shared by the pedlar who sold them.

SELLING TEXTILES AND PAPER Having briefly traced the physical affinity between paper and textiles through their processes of production, we now turn to the way this relationship continued right up to the point of sale, in ways that ballad texts themselves acknowledged. While the city of London embodied the importance of novelty for both print and dress, the figure of the pedlar –​solitary, itinerant, crossing social and geographical boundaries –​embodied their fluid cultural characterisation. Itinerant sellers Many surviving records for early modern pedlars refer to efforts to repress them, particularly because they could avoid taxes and undercut other traders.64 In 1691, a group of ‘drapers, mercers, haberdashers, grocers, hosiers, glass sellers, cutlers, and other … shopkeepers’ petitioned Parliament, complaining that ‘most of [the hawkers] pay neither scot nor lot, taxes, rent, or any other charge … they multiply daily and … must of necessity be as a canker to eat out the life of trade.’65 Looking back, they lamented the origins of ‘this growing enormity’, developing like an unwelcome weed which was ‘in its bud seen’ in the reigns of Queen Mary, Queen Elizabeth and James I,

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when three acts tried to suppress pedlars altogether. Only after ‘our unhappy domestic war’ of the 1640s had numbers increased rapidly. Trade, the petitioners argued, ought to be rigorously controlled. Furthermore, it should be geographically and socially fixed in specific locations and vendors. And above all, trade must be taxed. Pedlars and their goods attained none of these virtues. Eventually, efforts to suppress itinerant sellers were given up and, in 1698, an Act was passed to tax them more effectively instead.66 This required every ‘trading person or persons going from town to town or to other men’s houses’ to pay four pounds duty per head for man and beast of burden. By 1691, such people were estimated to number at least ten thousand.67 The importance of pedlars as carriers of official news (and one of the possible reasons for not suppressing them altogether) was recognised by the Act’s proviso that it should not prohibit anyone from selling ‘Acts of Parliament, forms of prayer, proclamations, gazettes, licensed almanacs or other printed papers licensed by authority’.68 Men and women worked as pedlars (women particularly if widowed and continuing a husband’s business) but the surviving evidence suggests that most were men.69 They often came from mountainous areas such as the Scottish highlands, where agricultural livelihoods were less viable, and the words ‘Scot’ and ‘pedlar’ were often interchangeable.70 The Canting Dictionary,71 which offers meanings for late-​century street slang words, listed ‘pedlars’ as, ‘Scoth [sic] Merchants, also English Retailers of Goods, that stroll from Town to Town’. The fact that pedlars rarely stayed for longer than a few days in each town or village meant that they could not become trusted neighbours in the way that local shopkeepers might: xenophobia and suspicion seem to have informed many contemporary responses to them. In general, pedlars were suspected of underhand ways and of selling prints with risqué content. The Canting Dictionary termed them bawdy baskets –​‘those who have ‘Pins, Tape, Obscene Books, &c. to sell, but live more by Stealing’. On the other hand, the ballad The Crafty Scotch Pedlar seems to have been written specifically to help English pedlars justify their trade and distance themselves from their Scottish counterparts.72 The whole ballad condemns the Scots as ‘a beggerly Crew’ who ruin trade by undercutting competition, selling shoddy wares and avoiding taxes. In a Commons debate about the suppression of pedlars in 1693, those against the motion praised ‘the conveniency gentlemen have by buying things at home’; those in favour complained that pedlars ‘carry about libels against the government and tend to corrupt your children and others by carrying letters and helping on other intrigues’.73 Thus, despite being

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potentially objects of suspicion, pedlars were also convenient, because they could retail to households door-​to-​door. Jan Steen’s humorous image showing A Pedlar Selling Spectacles Outside a Cottage, painted in about 1650–​3, shows a bent old man offering wares to a woman outside her home (fig. 1.2). She experiments with the pedlar’s spectacles by peering through them at one of his ballad sheets, suggesting a gullible susceptibility to her visitor –​which the laughing characters around her invite us to mock. Although painted in The Hague, this comic genre scene draws on a commonplace of informal commerce that was familiar to England as well.74 Travelling sellers also frequented fairs, markets and streets, up and down the country. Even people living far from markets might travel regularly to such places, and print publishers exploited this trade.75 For example, chapmen’s almanacs were printed in London from at least 1684, offering travel and trade information for itinerant salesmen.76 A surviving copy of this type of publication for 1691 advises how best to travel between market towns, which were their market-​days, and how to reckon accounts.77

Fig. 1.2  Jan Steen, A Pedlar Selling Spectacles Outside a Cottage, c.1650–3, oil on oak panel. © The National Gallery, London.

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The ‘ballad partners’ of London, a group of booksellers formed in the early 1620s, took care to arrange careful distribution networks for ballads that ‘took cheap printed material to all parts of the country’;78 which may have simply exploited the sales routes already established by pedlars.79 Surviving ballad sheets often carry advertisements directed from the publisher to the pedlars themselves, such as: Printed for P.  Brooksby at the golden Ball in Py-​ corner. Where any English or Irish Chapman may be furnished with all sorts of new Books & Ballads.80 Various parts of London had particular associations with different types of print: news and political pamphlets were sold near Westminster Hall, while pedlars bought their printed goods for resale at the warehouses at Smithfield and London Bridge.81 Pedlars were often willing to sell on credit, or barter in return for a share of the harvest later in the year, which gave poor people an important avenue through which to sell their own goods, but also supplied the pedlars with a greater variety of merchandise to sell.82 As Craig Muldrew has shown, this credit economy meant that although commodities might be measured by monetary prices, money was not always the means of exchange. This brought about ‘a system of cultural, as well as material, exchanges in which the central mediating factor was trust’.83 The lone pedlar shown in Steen’s genre painting thus seems to be the type of an irrepressible, ubiquitous figure circulating England throughout the seventeenth century. Able to undercut his competition, travel to where trading was good, and offer his customers convenient, personal, cheap and credit-​ based service, the pedlar was ideally placed to circulate the small luxuries and trifling pleasures of print and dress. As such, the pedlar and his wares were desirable to poorer consumers and convenient to rich ones –​even while their frivolous, hidden quality seemed to threaten the structure of society. Pedlars in ballads Pedlars’ vital role in selling printed goods makes it no surprise that pedlar-​ themed ballads date back to the mid-​sixteenth century.84 By the seventeenth century, some ballads are even narrated by the persona of a sales-​hungry pedlar. Often the ballad’s final stanza addresses and acknowledges a gathered crowd of listeners and directly rouses them to buy. For example, Tobias Observation finishes with the advertisement:

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I would have you one penny bestow & that is the price of this Ballad you know … It is good for pastime on each holy day, and here be the Ballads come buy them away.85 In contrast, a more imploring version of this invitation addressed the anticipated crowd at the end of The Wonderful Praise of Money: Every one which is in this Throng, if kindnesses you will shew any; Pray now be willing to Buy this New Song, the Price of it is but a Penny.86 This self-​referentiality was typical to ballads, emphasising their status as commodities to be bought and functioning ‘primarily as an advertising technique, staking a claim for ballads in the marketplace of print’.87 Encouragement to buy was important for sellers of black-​letter ballads, because this genre of print relied heavily upon audience popularity in order to be economically viable. White-​letter, or Roman-​typeface ballads, tended to be unillustrated, portrait-​format sheets with political content, often aimed at restricted audiences of educated people. They were relatively cheap to produce, but could be sold for more than black-​letter sheets. Black-​letter ballads were in contrast aimed at the widest possible market and expensive to produce –​particularly if woodcut-​illustrated –​but with a sales price that remained static at around one penny throughout the century.88 While ballad publishers ultimately sought popularity with consumers on the pedlar’s sales route, the ballads first had to attract pedlars themselves. This was because pedlars undertook significant financial risk in purchasing ballads in bulk, spending money (or credit) in advance, and hoping that their selected titles would bring good returns. Titles about pedlars thus offered the pedlars concerned an attractive means of advertising and promoting their work to audiences, as well as some ready-​made, humorous sales-​patter to use. It is perhaps for this reason that pedlar-​themed ballads (here called ‘pedlar ballads’) usually carry large images of these vendors.89 Their typical appearance implies long journeys taken without the aid of horse or coach, showing large packs carried on the shoulder, walking-​ staffs, wares for sale held in the hand, and plain sturdy shoes. Since ballads were traditionally pasted up on domestic walls and chimney-​pieces,90 it is

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tempting to speculate that these pedlar images may have acted as a souvenir of the sales transaction. At the very least, it seems reasonable to assume that pedlars were in favour of distributing mementoes of their profession to the countryside. The overall good condition of pedlar woodcuts on ballads may be significant too, since pedlars would be unlikely to prefer old or worm-​ eaten self-​representations. In addition to woodcut pictures, another ballad-​selling technique was verbal humour, which would draw crowds, keep them entertained for a while and therefore make them more likely to purchase.91 Texts in pedlar ballads frequently alternate between earnest sales descriptions and bawdy jokes, flirtatiously suggesting sexual as well as financial transactions. The Pedler Opening of His Packe offers a detailed sales patter laced with double entendres, from the opening lines  –​‘Who is it will … come and see my packet’  –​ to the clinching of the deal: ‘All you that want my Ware /​approach unto my Standing’ (fig. 1.3).92 ‘Commodities’ had a sexual as well as a financial meaning in early modern England, and ballad texts made the most of this coincidence.93 Fashion and sex, like pedlars and ballads, could cross social boundaries and threaten to dissolve the distinctions of status. Pedlars’ commodities Ballads could be knowingly satirical about pedlars’ wares and the wild claims they made for the more exotic items, particularly religious relics and beauty potions. The Pedler Opening refers jokingly to concoctions that will make fifty-​ year-​olds look twenty, or ‘restore /​A Mayden head that’s banisht’. But such humour is usually a crowd-​pleasing relish spread amongst the factual offers. As well as rude jokes, pedlars’ wares included clothing, metal goods, food and drink. Most pedlar-​themed ballads date from the latter years of the seventeenth century, but throughout the period, ballads imply that vendors could sell anything and mend everything. The City Rambler, for example, offers vegetables, fruit, milk, old clothes and pot-​mending,94 while the Jolly Jack of all Trades mentions a variety of fish, baskets, socks and brooms (fig. 1.4).95 This diversity underscores the freedom that Muldrew observes in seventeenth-​ century pedlars, that they could sell all kinds of commodity and be highly responsive to the latest supply and demand of goods wherever they went.96 Above all, however, a pedlar’s staple goods were print and clothing. These twin mainstays are attested to throughout the century and by a variety of sources. In addition to anecdotal contemporary references, chapmen’s inventories between 1590 and 1730 show that the typical range of

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Fig. 1.3  The Pedler Opening of His Packe, 1620, PB 1.238–​9. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge.

textile, haberdashery and clothing accessory goods were sold along with print.97 Household textiles sold by the yard were particularly associated with pedlars: plain-​weave ‘huckaback’ linen took its name from the travelling ‘hucksters’ who sold it from their packs.98 Plays throughout the seventeenth century featured pedlar characters whose goods also appear to be mainly print and clothing. A  well-​known example is the pedlar Autolycus in Shakespeare’s Winters Tale; he is clearly a stock type, which suggests pedlars were a familiar sight by 1609/​10 when the play was first performed:

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Fig. 1.4  Jolly Jack of All Trades, 1685–​8, PB 4.263. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge.

servant :

O master, if you did but hear the pedlar at the door … He sings several tunes faster than you’ll tell money; he utters them as he had eaten ballads … clown : He could never come better; he shall come in. I love a ballad but even too well … servant : He hath songs for man or women of all sizes; no milliner can so fit his customers with gloves … He hath ribbons of all the colours i’ the rainbow; points, more than all the lawyers in Bohemia can learnedly handle … inkles, caddisses, cambrics, lawns.99 Almost seventy years later, the pedlar in William Cavendish’s play The Triumphant Widow (1677) advertises similar goods: Rainbow-​Ribbands of each colour, No walking Shop yet e’re was fuller,

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Various Points and sev’ral Laces For your Boddies straight embraces, Silver Bodkins for your hair, Bobs, which Maidens love to wear … Ballads fresh, all singing new, And all those Ballets too are true.100 Colourful, glittering and new, the seventeenth-​century pedlar’s pack thus appears like a magpie collection of small attractions, designed to support and adorn the body and entertain the mind. Ballad texts themselves also emphasised the mix of dress alongside cheap printed paper: The Pedler Opening advertises many types of clothing accessories but also ‘Bookes to read’, probably referring to two-​penny ‘small books’ of merriment or godliness, or even bound books.101 The Sorrowful Lamentation of the Pedlars mentions garters, hoods and lace almost in the same breath as ballads and ‘merry books’ (fig. 1.5).102 As pedlar’s goods, then, print and dress occupied a highly mobile and rather

Fig. 1.5  The Sorwrowful Lamentation of the Pedlars, 1685–​8, PB 4.298. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge.

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indistinct position within seventeenth-​century commodity culture. Yet, they offer insight into the everyday and lived experience of a wide range of people in the seventeenth century. Just as ballad texts advertise that their printed wares are ‘fresh’ and ‘new’, they also indicate that pedlar’s clothing wares kept up with the new fashions. The goods mentioned in The Pedler Opening include ‘Poking sticks of steele … Rebatoes, Tyres and Ringes … a Ruffe or falling band’. Steel rods were used to press linen ruffs into shape; a rebato supported a linen collar or ruff to stand close to the chin; tyre was very fine flax for spinning. All of these items were fashionable from the late sixteenth century, well into the 1620s, when the ballad was first registered.103 In contrast, a ballad printed after the Restoration, The Sorrowful Lamentation of The Pedlars, makes no mention of neckwear for women (which by then was no longer such a main point of display) but offers instead ‘dressings’ and hoods, fashions for women which took hold around the 1630s and remained popular until the century’s close.104 Besides new fashions, however, some small haberdashery wares remained staple goods in the pedlar’s pack for decades. Pedlar ballads from the 1620s to the 1680s offered remarkably similar wares: ‘Gloves … Scarfes … points105 and Lace … Bone-​lace … Lawne and Cambricke’; ‘Codpiece Points and Pins,Thread-​ Laces three, for one penny’; ‘Points for the Men, and Pins for the Maid. … Bandstrings … Gloves’; ‘two a penny Laces, /​and Pins’.106 All of these commodities were small and easily transportable, the kinds of dress items that easily disintegrated, got lost, and needed replacing –​with recourse to the pedlar once again. Yet not all pedlars’ wares were necessarily small in cost. Carrying a good mixture of wares allowed vendors to sell successfully to a very wide range of customers, whether at the door of wealthy family houses or in the street to the poorest passers-​by. Pedlar ballads advertise this range, describing expensive goods like ‘Bracelets … /​of Corall, or of Amber’, ‘a Bodkin of pure Silver’ and ‘Silkes of any hew’, as well as smaller, humble items such as ‘Inckle’, or cheap linen tying tape, ‘Spanish needles’ and the cheap sparkle of ‘St Martins Beades and Rings’.107 As Margaret Spufford deduces from their inventories, pedlar’s wares included both ‘courtship-​gifts for the poor’ and ‘little temptations for the gentry’.108 The variations in quality of wares in pedlars’ inventories, together with the presence of very cheap items, suggests they were undoubtedly popular amongst poorer sorts of people,109 but, as discussed above, moneyed gentlemen also favoured the convenience of buying at home; titled families in pre-​Restoration Norfolk

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and late-​century Cumbria recorded their regular patronage and even strong preference for buying from passing pedlars.110 This catholicity of custom was echoed by ballad texts themselves. The Crafty Scotch Pedlar extols the virtues of pedlars who help the poor by their ‘By honest plain dealing’ (fig. 1.6):111 I cannot deny But the poor of our nation Wou’d make lamentation And want a supply were pedling put down The narrator of Jolly Jack of all Trades boasts of his broad social appeal –​he can deal with ladies as well as their servant women, with butlers, ‘precious Maids’ and ‘lusty Blades’ (young gentlemen).112 The stanzas evoke a roving, carefree traveller who brashly sells to high and low alike:

Fig. 1.6  The Crafty Scotch Pedlar, c.1692–3, PB 4.326. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge.

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Come will ye buy my Flounder? My Gudgin or my Roath? I’le sell ‘em to the Gentry, or those that have no Coach. The objects sold by this pedlar –​from singing birds to various fish –​are portrayed as highly diverse, as are their consumers. The consumer culture evoked by ballads thus appears defiant of social divisions, ranging across social barriers and trading on commercial, not social, success. Images on pedlar ballads often worked in tandem with their texts to emphasise their theme. An early street vendor picture appears on A Mad Crue, a tale narrated by a ‘Ballad-​seller’ who takes the last word in the text (fig. 1.7).113 Filling his own plain oblong frame, the seller holds a rolled-​up ballad in each hand and carries more sheets in a tray.114 He carries a pack on his back that is suspended from a yoke across the chest and balances the waist-​level tray at the front, all well-​adapted for journeying. He wears well-​padded slop breeches and matching jerkin, flat shoes and a black hat: a modest figure, by comparison with the gallant portrayed beside him. The gallant’s spurs and hanging-​ sleeved cassock denote a man who rides a horse instead of walking; his large flowing hat-​feather, smoking pipe, and laced collar and cuffs all suggest a man who can spare money (or credit) on display, leisure and pleasure. Ballads continued to portray pedlars in the 1680s and 90s, using a mixture of old and newly made woodcuts. The Pedler Opening (fig. 1.3) depicts pedlars who carry burdens hanging from a pole on the shoulder. The left-​ hand cut shows an itinerant couple in the midst of a wood, meeting a fellow traveller.  The delicacy and detail of this image suggests it may originally have been cut for a book illustration, but for the purposes of the ballad, the rural setting, large packs and journey by foot were all relevant to its theme. The right-​hand woodcut shows a crowd of travellers approaching the gate of a city from the countryside, some carrying burdens on their backs, others leading pack animals. Later, The Sorrowful Lamentation of the Pedlars (fig. 1.5) emphasised this sense of the long distances covered by pedlars and their goods: We travail all day through Dirt and through Mire To fetch you fine laces and what you desire The pedlar figure who appears on The Sorrowful Lamentation of The Pedlars and The Crafty Scotch Pedler –​possibly the same woodblock115 –​has a distinctly plainer

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Fig. 1.7  A Mad Crue, 1625, PB 1.444–​5. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge.

and more burdened look. The woodcut shows a man walking with a staff to support him and carrying rabbits to sell, a sack of goods belted to his shoulders. His identity as a wanderer is emphasised by the appearance of grass and birds around him: groups of houses either side of him suggest that he is on the road between two settlements. The plainness of the pedlar’s clothes is highlighted by comparison with the ladies who flank him, whose structured gowns, laced necklines and coiffed hair imply a level of ostentation in total contrast with his practical clothing. Jolly Jack’s clear pedlar woodcut (fig.  1.4) suggests it has been quite recently made; it relates closely to the text of the title rhyme, which reads:

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Maids where are your hearts become look you what here is? Betwixt my Finger and my Thumb look ye what here is? The picture shows the pedlar’s left hand holding, between thumb and fingers, a comb, a pair of scissors and what may be a lace bobbin. In his right hand are the ‘two a penny Laces’ of the eighth stanza. The table before him carries a pack of cards (with the ace of ‘your hearts’ on top) a die, a comb, a brush (from the sixth stanza), a pot (for when the pedlar ‘turns  Tinker’ in the fourth stanza), and two small items which may be the ‘save-​alls’ or spiked candle-​holders mentioned in the seventh stanza. Ballads thus emphasised the variety and provenance of pedlars’ goods throughout the century in order to attract buyers to the seller. Recent work on the global history of textiles has emphasised the importance of international commerce in urban centres as a catalyst for fashion,116 and certainly, in these ballads, it is as if the themes of travel and urbanity have become attractions in themselves. In the 1620s, The Pedler Opening emphasised the range of countries whence pedlar goods came, the narrator divulging ‘treasure’ from ‘Turky, France and Spaine’, as well as India, China, Venice and Flanders. Over half a century later, Jolly Jack offered ‘The Cries of London City’, and The City Rambler purported to convey ‘the Merry Cries of London Town’, as if pedlar ballads were exporting, almost as a commodity itself, the variety and urbanity of London to the provinces. An expansive repetition of the word ‘all’ is tied into the quality of the capital by The Sorrowful Lamentation of the Pedlars: Here’s all things that’s fine, and all things that’s rare All modish and neat, and all new London-​Ware. As such, the value of place association was circulated through texts and images, as well as literally in the form of commodities. The pedlar’s pack thus offered a variety of goods purveyed via the alternative trade networks of petty chapmen, something to please everyone. Yet, this variety and catholicity also threatened to dissolve social hierarchies, allowing consumers to buy into fashionable appearances outside established local retailing. Pedlars represented an alternative vision of fashion: market-​ driven as opposed to socially conscious, individual as opposed to communal, and with questionable relation to the good of the nation.

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CONSUMING TEXTILES AND PAPER Interconnections between print and dress, evident in their modes of production, and sales from pedlars’ packs, were also present in the manner of their consumption after purchase. Being sourced in London, pedlars’ ballads and dress were literally exports of the capital to the provinces, and ballads exploited London as subject matter. Exporting London’s news and fashions around the country, however, exacerbated concerns about preserving the social order. The importance of London As Sheila O’Connell observes, print is by definition an urban and commercial phenomenon, and even the most crudely made print requires the coordination of a variety of complex production and distribution processes.117 Indeed, in seventeenth-​century England, press production was officially restricted to the city of London, and the universities of Oxford, Cambridge and Edinburgh, until the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695.118 It seems reasonable to assume that a pedlar who had to enter London to stock up on print might take advantage of purchasing textiles and accessories there too. Although, unlike print, varieties of textiles and accessories could be bought all over the country throughout the 1600s, particularly from large cities, pedlars’ wills and inventories show that London was still a prime source of textile supplies for them, even as far away as Lincolnshire.119 In this way, news and fashions were disseminated from London, not only by elite families who travelled between London and their country residences,120 but also via the pedlar’s pack. With almost evangelical fervour, The Sorrowful Lamentation of the Pedlars celebrates pedlars’ ‘choice of songs’ and ‘merry books’ that spread to the countryside: Which Every young swain may Whistle at Plough And Every fair Milk-​Maid may sing to her Cow. ‘New London-​ware’, as advertised in The Sorrowful Lamentation, was therefore an apposite term for pedlars’ goods, which relied upon London’s production of novelty and variety in order to attract customers to make regular purchases. Ballads capitalised on London in their texts, not just because they were produced there, but also because the city symbolised the newness and fashion they required for successful sales across the country. Numerous ballads refer

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specifically to London, or refer to specific notorious areas in or near London (such as Newgate, Billingsgate or Tyburn) without any explanation.121 This suggests that even the cultures of London’s local neighbourhoods and parishes were known well beyond its gates. The use of London-​specific slang, such as ‘Billingsgate Whore’ in seventeenth-​century depositions in York, has been cited as evidence that London’s cultural concerns were indeed being exported to the provinces.122 Ballad publishers were adept at stirring popular debates that were likely to encourage sales, and London’s status as the country’s capital was suitably controversial. Urban migration helped to swell its size at considerable pace throughout the century. Inhabitants doubled from two to four hundred thousand between 1600 and 1650, and by 1700 around 575,000 people were living in the city.123 While its overseas trade and the shopping spaces of the New and Royal Exchanges promoted the country’s wealth, there was also censure for London’s excess of vanity and licentious behaviour, its dominance and its threat to trade in other towns.124 This ambivalence is reflected in ballads throughout the century, which oscillate between moralistic prejudices against London’s excesses and a fascination with its sophistication and sensual allure. Nevves Good and Nevv of circa 1623 sets up a dialogue that encapsulates the two views. On his return from London, the character Rowland meets a rural friend, John, who wants to hear ‘what newes’ from the capital. Rowland sings the city’s praises for sixteen stanzas, to which John’s apparently innocent refrains respond, ‘I never will beleeve it, /​Tis too good to be true’.125 Sixty years later, Down-​Right Dick of the West recounted in a similar vein, ‘The Plow-​Mans Ramble to LONDON, To see … the Vine Volk of the City’.126 Although his west-​country accent and social awkwardness are showcased for comic effect, Dick confidently asserts country people are superior because they make their own ‘Linnen and woollen’ clothes with ‘industrious care’, and, above all, because they provide London’s food. This hard-​working self-​ sufficiency was a central tenet of the most well-​established economic doctrines of the period, which advocated that England should rely on its own produce as much as possible and guard against too many imports.127 Here it is imagined as a sober counter-​point to the extravagance of London’s wealth, ‘Rich chains & choice jewels with diamonds and rings’ –​which was itself the product of a so-​called weak dependency on foreign trade. As we will discuss in Chapter 2, moral debates about the status of fashion were a significant preoccupation for many seventeenth-​century writers, but for the present, it was clearly useful for pedlars to underscore the association between London and the wares they sold.

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The existence of an answering ballad, The Londoners Answer to Down-​Right Dick of the West, suggests that Down-​Right Dick’s assertions about London’s dependence had touched a nerve with consumers.128 It ripostes that country people, far from being self-​sufficient, in fact rely on London to convert their goods into ready money and new clothes: The Dairy-​Maid comes into London town, Full often to buy her a Russet Gown You know by experience that this is true: But here you first got the money too … We teach you fine fashions and fine things Without us you can’t buy your wedding Rings The idea of London as a city that will ‘teach you fine fashions’ was a commonplace notion of the period, since, as well as the Court and the Exchanges, it hosted increasingly numerous public spaces in which to see and be seen.129 Walks and carriage rides in St James’s, Vauxhall and the Strand provided information about fashions, sometimes straight from aristocratic bodies. For example, in 1662, Samuel Pepys went with his wife Elizabeth to Gray’s Inn ‘to observe fashions of the ladies, because of my wife’s making some clothes’. She used the same technique when selecting a fabric for a new gown four years later: she chose what her social superior Lady Castlemaine had just bought ‘before her face’ at Unthanke the tailor’s shop at Charing Cross.130 In addition to fashions in dress, London was famous for fostering new fashions in ideas. It was a centre for religious dissent and radicalism in the seventeenth century, particularly during and after the Civil War and Interregnum. The proliferation of opinions in religion was satirised in the popular print, These Tradesmen are Preachers in and about the City of London, in 1647. The sheet offers itself as a sartorial handbook to religious dissent, listing the varieties of heretical beliefs –​Jesuit, Anabaptist, Adamite –​with each one dressed like an ordinary tradesman. Detached as they were from the Established Church, preachers like these were perceived to pose political and social threat. Helen Pierce observes the way this and similar prints fused the style of religious polemics such as A Catalogue of the Severall Sects with the popular pictorial genre of the London Cries, encapsulating widespread fears, not only about heterodox ideas, but also ‘the fluid nature of status, occupation and social hierarchy’.131 Anxiety about the capital and its dissenters continued during the Restoration, with edicts

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and legislation designed to prevent such groups congregating or exercising civic power.132 Emphasising London as a theme allowed pedlars (and the ballads they carried) to exploit the lure of the capital city, in order to attract sales both within London and in the provinces far beyond. London’s associations with novelty, wealth and fashion helped assure customers that pedlars’ ballads and other commodities were also likely to be new, valuable and fashionable. Like fashion and ballads, London’s appeal could cross social boundaries and help the pedlar draw customers from all walks of life. Proliferating fashion and print As ever-​flourishing commodities in seventeenth-​century England, fashion and printed news were seen as a threat because their multiplicity of forms and ideas could, like pedlars, permeate the country through unofficial networks, influencing large groups of people without the permission or corroboration of official authorities. Fear of the ungovernable quality of print was widespread, since public opinion was likely to be misguided; common people were feared to prefer rumours, sensational gossip and stories instead of the truth, and cheap print, highly accessible to all, was often seen as scurrilous and morally damaging.133 In 1684, Richard Steele warned his godly readers away from ‘Such Callings as directly tend to the hurt of Man’, such as ‘Bawds, Cheats, Ballad-​ makers … Gamesters… [and] Stage-​players’.134 This was long after the print explosion of the late 1640s, which had brought not just more print to the market, but a change in the types of print available; Joseph Monteyne notes there was an increase in ‘small, quickly composed, and relatively cheap forms of print that openly dealt with political and religious issues’.135 After all, print had already played a key role in establishing Protestant reformations in Europe. For example, the preacher Richard Baxter attributed his religious conversion in the 1630s to the ministrations, not of a priest, but a pedlar. As he recounted: a poor pedlar came to the door that had Ballads and some good Books: And my Father bought of him [the contemporary printed sermon series] Dr Sibb’s bruised Reed. This … gave me a livelier apprehenshion of the Mystery of Redemption … And thus (without any means but books) was God pleased to resolve me for Himself.136 The potential of print to incite changes or conversions like this was central to debates about print censorship and the extent to which it could be

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enforced. Yet, even in this controversy, print and dress were often imagined together. Attacking print censorship in 1644, John Milton warned that the government could end up regulating ‘all recreations and pastimes, all that is delightfull to man’. Such things would be too petty to regulate –​as petty, in fact, as ballads and dress. Villages, Milton derided, would have to have visitors to ‘enquire what lectures the bagpipe and the rebbeck reads ev’n to the ballatry’. Even clothes, he imagined, would be ‘referred to the licensing of some more sober work-​masters to see them cut into a less wanton garb’.137 When Milton wanted to emphasise the impossibility of censoring print, the aptest comparison he could find was dress. Both commodities were ungovernable, but too ubiquitous and too petty to take seriously. Many of Milton’s contemporaries were less optimistic, however, seeing a direct correlation between dangerous texts and physical danger. In 1636, John Rous recorded punishments for sermons and ‘diverse seditious bookes’ that included cutting off the ears and (where that had already been done) branding on the face.138 Later, Richard Atkyns claimed that the liberty of printing, and specifically cheap printed goods, had directly led to the death of Charles I. At the Restoration anxiety continued. Roger L’Estrange, Surveyor of the Press in 1662, also believed that print could lead directly to political violence.139 Part of this fear was the belief that the ‘meaner sort’ believed everything they read in print. In 1664, print commentator Richard Atkyns observed that ‘the Common People … believed even a Ballad, because it was in print’.140 James II attempted (unsuccessfully) to license pedlars in 1686 because, though most of them sold harmless ‘trifles’, many, ‘being of no Religion, Carry abroad and Disperse Without Inspection, Schismatical and Scandalous Books and Libells’.141 On the whole, however, the overall trend during the seventeenth century was gradually to accept the increasing circulation of commodities, reaching a culmination in the final decade. After 1695, the lapse of the Licensing Act allowed printed goods to be produced all around the country, while the apparently restrictive licensing of pedlars from 1698 in fact demonstrated an acceptance of their existence and allowed itinerant trade to flourish legally.142 Yet despite relaxations in the law towards pedlars and ballad-​sellers, anxiety remained till the end of the century and they were frequently targeted for circulating sedition. For example, in 1697 a group of women were taken into custody for singing a ballad against taxation,143 and in 1700 ‘The Justices of the Peace of the City and Liberties of Westminster … ordered all Ballad-​Singers, Wheelbarrow People, &c., to be taken up’.144

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The threat of disorder was partly due to the commercialisation of ideas through print, the process by which news became a traded commodity. News was no longer governable at the ‘commodity’ or convenience of the crown and the presses. Instead of purely promoting qualities like truth and reason, printers could just as easily print lies if they sold well.145 Monteyne describes this vividly: mobile and linked to the street, to mutable opinion and everyday speech, [print had] no other sanction than the marketplace. Institutions of power and privilege were thus challenged by the proliferation of new and diverse forms of print and graphic culture, upsetting boundaries between economic and cultural modes of value.146 Indeed, the perceived dangers of proliferating print invited many efforts at censorship throughout the seventeenth century. Little luxuries If print and dress could be perceived as a threat because of their tendency to proliferate, they could also be dismissed as superfluous luxuries. While early modern writers found luxury difficult to determine, it was generally defined as something not strictly necessary.147 The spread and increase of consumption in general, with more varieties of affordable luxuries in particular, has received much scholarly attention, but mostly for the eighteenth century, though the concept of a late seventeenth-​century ‘industrious revolution’ has also long been proposed (if contested).148 Developments in home production and retailing during the seventeenth century allowed working and urban people towards the end of the century to accumulate money and thus increasingly indulge ‘in a small way’ in cheap luxuries like stockings, ribbons, buckles and lace.149 However, although clothing offers a prime opportunity for luxury, it is also a human necessity.150 Maxine Berg defined luxury in the long eighteenth century as ‘special items of personal or household adornment in distinctive materials and styles’,151 but how any garment counts as ‘special’ or luxurious is highly subjective. As such, luxury in apparel does not easily stand alone. It emerges as an ill-​defined outcrop from essential clothing expenses, which has made it difficult to analyse from examining household inventories.152 By contrast, humdrum necessities could mutate into vehicles for display. For example, after ribbon points were displaced by hooks as the main method  of tying men’s breeches to their doublets, they were then worn

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outside the doublet, in a lavish show of colour –​a decoration seen in English portraits of men particularly between the 1620s and 1640s. In a similar way, small items bought from a pedlar’s pack, such as a yard or two of ribbon, or some silk thread, could be simultaneously practical and ‘unnecessarily’ decorative. Tying clothes together or adding strength to seams were practical matters, but they could be achieved with a variety of materials. These might range from humble tape to embroidery, ribbon or even lace, which was a ‘minor, constant item’ in chapmen’s inventories, ‘a straightforward index of cheap luxury’.153 The same hybrid quality is evident in goods such as perfumes, pomanders and combs (also pedlars’ wares), which could hover between the realms of seemingly unnecessary luxury and items essential to health.154 Ballads similarly lay at the juncture between necessity and luxury. Although they were not strictly needed, they were the cheapest material available to teach literacy: the black-​letter typeface was considered the easiest to read and was used in pedagogical hornbooks, ABCs and grammars. The ballad Tobias Observation, quoted earlier, promoted penny ballads with, ‘You know it is good to learn Children to Read’. Despite its frequently bawdy tone, this didactic deployment of cheap print seems to have occurred widely, both in England and the Low Countries.155 Spufford and Watt have shown how small luxuries became increasingly available during the early seventeenth century. They insist on the importance of the pedlar’s inland trades as well as the international trading ships, and the circulation of varieties of luxury, not just the best. Spufford describes two-​penny booklets and ballads carried by pedlars as small indulgences ‘of an order with carnation-​coloured tape, ribbon, and cheap tobacco … one of the goods created for the humble consumer society of the seventeenth century’.156 In this way, ballads and pedlar’s clothing wares shared a similar status in the eyes of consumers, both useful (like tying tapes or letters for children) and also unnecessary little pleasures in the form of pretty colours or amusing tales. Cheap print and pedlar’s clothing wares were, moreover, easy to devalue for being physically ephemeral. Unlike expensive jewellery or a painted portrait, these comparatively tiny luxuries had to be purchased quite frequently, because they were meant to be enjoyed and used up in the present, not preserved for posterity. Once purchased, print and dress were adapted to the immediate needs of the consumer, needs which usually caused the disintegration of the object altogether. Though she does not explore this connection, Tessa Watt suggests it when she describes a pedlar’s printed wares

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being ‘like the “scotch cloth” or “coarse linen”, sold by the yard, made into something by the buyer’.157 As early as the fifteenth century, woodcuts were made specifically for decorating furniture,158 and in the 1660s cheap woodcuts were sold for decorating tobacco-​boxes.159 Even better-​quality engraved prints were lost through being applied to objects, such as screens and boxes, or by being varnished for hanging on the wall.160 As discussed above, the physical ephemerality of print and dress was also rooted in their intensive handling and the incentive to recycle. Ribbons and bolts of cloth were cut up, sewn, tied and used until they no longer resembled the object bought from the pedlar’s tray. Whereas old linens and ribbons might be passed to the rag collector, old ballads were reused as lining paper, spice wrappers, pipe lighters, or even lavatory paper.161 One mid-​century ballad punned on this lowly treatment with the title, Bum-​Fodder or Waste-​Paper Proper to Wipe the Nation’s RUMP with, or your Own.162 Like garments, paper might begin white and clean, but would eventually became irretrievably soiled with use. At the beginning of the century, the physical transience of print and clothing, and their reliance upon newness and sales, fed into ideas that such fripperies only flourished in times of wanton ease. These criticisms depended upon the ideal of a past era of solidity and unchanging styles. Ballads and dress are derided in the same breath as shallow parasites on humanity; peacetime in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus is described as ‘nothing but to rust ireon, increase tailors, and breed ballad-​makers’.163 Such an ascription portrays both fashion and cheap print as a kind of vapid degeneracy, destroying the sharpness and strength of the nation just as rust destroys iron. In 1612, The Courtaine-​Drawer of the World looked back to a better world where frivolous ‘invention’ had not taken hold, with: not halfe so many puling Ballett-​mongers, nor a quarter of so many fashions, nor half a quarter of so many Taylors, Poets and Taylors [sic] as they here stand within the lenght of a paire of sheares together, so in their Arte & use in the world, they differ not much. The Poet stands all upon invention: so doth the Taylor.164 By the end of the seventeenth century, although anxieties remained, the concept of the circulated, traded commodity as a reflexively beneficial object had taken hold. Already in the late 1670s, coffee-houses in London and across the country had been established as new locations to read printed goods, confirming and promoting the national appetite for absorbing news.165 The

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industriousness that brought employment and stability to the country was increasingly accepted as also bringing a capacity for purchasing and enjoying new goods. Moral condemnations of fashion or news were still made, particularly by religious writers, but there was an increasing acceptance that newness brought trade, and that trade brought benefits. These benefits were recognised by Nicholas Barbon, son of the Commonwealth parliamentarian and radical preacher Praise-​God Barebone, and pioneer of banking and insurance after the Great Fire. In 1690, his Discourse of Trade praised the benefits of fashion in business terms, asserting that: Those Expences that most Promote Trade, are in Cloaths and Lodging: In  Adorning the Body and the House, There are a Thousand Traders Imploy’d … Fashion or the alteration of Dress, is a great Promoter of   Trade, because it occasions the Expence of Cloaths, before the Old ones are worn out: It is the Spirit and Life of Trade; It makes a Circulation, and gives a Value by Turns, to all sorts of Commodities.166 In Barbon’s opinion, then, the ‘alteration’ of fashion was to be celebrated, not castigated, because it encouraged trade, and trade was beneficial because it provided employment, even though such circulation could be disruptive and controversial. As Appadurai comments, political efforts to control demand for goods are doomed to be disrupted, because ‘commodities constantly spill beyond the boundaries of specific cultures (and thus of specific regimes of value)’.167 The circulation of commodities in seventeenth-​century England certainly threatened the very social structures that their consumption was hoped to express and embody. Pedlars were represented as ‘a general image of disruption, a scapegoat for the undisciplined and ultimately uncontrollable consequences of print’.168 Novelty in dress, and those who had most to gain from producing it, may have created beneficial trade –​but it came at the cost of stable regimes of value and threatened traditional hierarchies.169 Monteyne captures this sense of the mutable meanings arising from new attitudes to print and clothing, describing garments in etchings by Wenceslaus Hollar in the 1640s ‘as if poised on a threshold between different economies of object, between residual classical and medieval systems of representation and newly emergent anxieties about urban identities and the commodity’.170

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COMMODITIES OF PRINT AND DRESS This chapter set out to contextualise the analysis of dress in early modern ballads by demonstrating their complex interrelationship in seventeenth-​ century England. Tracing their similar and connected processes of production, sales and consumption has shown that printed paper and dress textiles were not only physically interdependent commodities, but also conceptually linked, with deeply intertwined cultural resonances that were recognised in the period. Although different clothing textiles had distinctive cultural and economic importance in early modern England, linen in particular had an ‘afterlife’ which was at least as important as its textile state, in that it was recycled to become white paper for printing. The circularity by which linen textiles could then re-​enter clothes in the form of paper stiffening, or provide paper patterns for accessory designs, was a cultural commonplace which created a firm link between ballads and dress in the minds of seventeenth-​century consumers. Despite scarce documentation, transient lifestyle and unpopularity with other traders, pedlars were an enduring and popular feature of seventeenth-​ century society. Their travels across the land, and into the locales of both high and low in society, meant that pedlars’ print and clothing wares could potentially reach or influence almost everyone in the country. Vendors’ wide range of goods at a wide variety of prices would have tapped into a variety of trade and retail networks in order to gain custom from as many people as possible. Ballads themselves emphasised this variety of goods and origins, assuring audiences from a broad social spectrum that there was something in the pedlar’s pack (and his ballads) for everyone. This underscores the broad social relevance of these wares for the cultural historian. The trade of both print and dress commodities was driven by their ephemerality. Physical disintegration prompted regular new purchases and thus not only encouraged the pedlar’s trade, but also the consumption of novelty as a part of the value of goods. Although in one sense this trend originated with the existence of pedlars, newness was also becoming increasingly accepted and accessible for its own sake, as purchasing power grew across society toward the end of the century. Ballad texts exploited this trend by emphasising their own freshness and the newness of pedlars’ clothing wares. This sense of unnecessary novelty was particularly easy for ballads to exploit, because their production was exclusive to London throughout the century and newness in print and dress were predicated on the circulation of

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news and fashion from London. Ballads themselves emphasise their cultural connection to London and suggest that a sense of London’s vibrant urbanity and novelty was widely appreciated throughout the country. Indeed, they also suggest that an association with London was an important attraction of the ballad sheets and dress items themselves. Although surviving sheets suggest that such topics were attractive to customers, they could also cause anxiety amongst social commentators. London’s news and fashion were expressions of its foment of new ideas, which could also include seditious theories in religion and politics. This also reflected the fact that, in the consumer-​driven (rather than patron-​driven) market for print and dress, their profitability was indeed at the mercy of ungovernable consumption. Alongside positive comments about trade and consumption such as Barbon’s quoted above, there were also recurring expressions of anxiety throughout the period, about the tension between the prosperity offered by commodity commerce and the threat it posed to existing social hierarchies. Print and dress were at the core of both these chronological developments and persistent concerns. As we have seen, they were versatile, mobile and ephemeral commodities that could easily permeate social boundaries and quickly respond to new invention. And as the following chapter will discuss, these concerns and ambitions were also hallmarks of ballad discussions of dress.

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2 BALLAD COMMENT ON DRESS

Given how deeply ballads and dress were interconnected as commodities in the seventeenth century, it is not surprising that ballads should make comment on fashion. The present chapter addresses the question of how to interpret this commentary. Approaches here are partly modelled on Paul Jobling’s analysis of fashion journalism in the twentieth century, which argues that images and words on a printed page do not have to reflect the precise reality of dress ‘as worn’, in order to be useful for the study of fashion. Rather, one can identify the ways that texts and images place fashion and the body in various ‘discursive contexts’, linking them to the ‘wider cultural issues of the society and time’ for which, and in which, they appear.1 Samuel Pepys, in fact, took something like this view of ballads in the late seventeenth century, when he arranged his collection into bound volumes: a section within his first volume bears the handwritten title, ‘The Times: viz. Fashions & Humours of ye Age; Abuses in Trading; &c.’2 Furthermore, as Angela McShane suggests, even when reporting real events, the ballad genre aimed at ‘moral gloss or response’, rather than meticulous attention to detail.3 This was congruent with the contemporary notion that a ‘feigned example’ was able to convey truth, even if it were not itself a fact.4 Thus, though the seventeenth-​century ballad precedes the advent of dedicated fashion journalism in England, ballad comment on dress can be studied, not as an accurate account of clothing practices but rather, as Pepys saw it, as a trace of the moods, issues and trades associated with fashion at the time.

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The association Pepys made between ‘Fashions’, ‘Humours of the Age’ and ‘Trading’, was rooted in the contemporary practicalities of clothing production outlined in Chapter 1 –​a connection made by ballads themselves as well as other printed literature such as sermons, religious tracts, political petitions and economic treatises. Since cloth and textiles were the most important commodities for employment and export throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they were at the heart of –​ even a driver of –​major debates about what would make England prosper financially.5 Furthermore, as the most visible expression of morality, dress was also central to Church directives about personal behaviour. Thus, as this chapter will demonstrate, if the significance of the Church, or the balance of governing power or trade policies were to change dramatically, it seems reasonable to expect that ballad discussion of dress would alter too. In terms of evidence, there are fewer surviving ballad sheets for the first half of the seventeenth century than for the second. By contrast with decreasing levels of registration between 1600 and 1700, this reflects an overall increase in the quantity of ballad publication: surviving sheets suggest there was also a greater variety of ballads produced from the early 1680s.6 This may have been influenced by a wider trend in printing during 1678–​82, which witnessed what Harold Weber describes as ‘an explosion of print unrivaled since the early 1640s’.7 Ballad printing was officially banned after the Civil War, though surviving sheets were clearly printed during the late 1640s and 1650s, many of them political in character.8 However, the most striking contrasts in commentary on dress occur across the divide of the Interregnum and Restoration, between ballads printed in the 1620s and 30s, and those from the 1680s and 90s. This chapter begins by examining two groups of ballads printed in the 1620s and 30s, and relates their narratives and commentaries on dress to other broadly disseminated contemporary discourses, whose critiques harked back to the Elizabethan era. The intervening years between these ballads and the 1680s saw turbulent changes in religion, politics and the economy; these new contexts are briefly sketched out in the subsequent section, before turning to three groups of late seventeenth-​century ballads which gave new and particular focus to producers in the clothing trades. The final section examines ballads of that same later period which comment on dress consumption and in turn further illustrate and confirm the shift in ballad comment on dress across the century.

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TRADITIONAL COMMENTARY IN THE 1620S AND 30S Social hierarchy Published in the 1620s, A Most Excellent and Vertuous Ballad of the Patient Grissell is one of the earliest surviving seventeenth-​ century ballads to discuss dress explicitly (fig. 2.1).9 The story of Grissell was venerable, taken from Boccaccio’s medieval tale Patient Griselda in the Decameron and then appearing in ballads (now lost) from the sixteenth century.10 Yet the tale’s popularity in ballads continued into the seventeenth century and beyond, printed with the same or similar illustrations to the Pepys edition until at least 1750.11 The 1620s ballad story tells

Fig. 2.1  Thomas Deloney, A Most Excellent and Vertuous Ballad of the Patient Grissell, 1624?, PB 1.34–​5. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge.

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of a marquess who marries a poor woman, raising her to his social level, but who then tests her patience by sending her back to poverty.  Thus, although ostensibly a story about the virtue of ‘patience’ in women, the fable in fact turns upon a nobleman’s diktats, whose implementation is traced by changes in clothing. The very first line of the tale sets out the central importance of social standing –​‘A Noble Marquesse’ hunts in the forest –​and throughout, it is this status which legitimates and governs who wears what.12 Social inequality between the marquess and Grissel is also expressed in the ballad’s images of dress. The left-​hand woodcut depicts a riding scene with accoutrements of nobility –​horses, knightly armour –​while, by contrast, the right-​hand picture shows the eponymous Grissel at her spinning wheel. Her ‘simple attire’ is depicted as a plain bodice and kirtle, while her modest, plain head covering contrasts with the distant marquess’s ostentatious, fashionable feathered hat.13 Narrating Grissel’s social vicissitudes, the ballad pivots around the assumption that clothing is directly correlated to rank. When the Marquess chooses her for his wife, Grissel’s change of social status is described as a change of garb: they married were with speed: Her country Russet Was chang’d to silke and velvet as to her state agreed. Grissell exchanges the coarse, homespun wool she has inherited from her ‘parents poore’ for finely worked, imported silks, because her marriage brings social elevation and such materials ‘to her state agree’. By the same token, when her husband apparently divorces her, the ballad narrates Grissell’s social humiliation as sartorial divestment: Thou must be stript Out of thy stately garments all, and as thou cam’st to me, In homely gray, Instead of Bysse and purest Pall,14 now all thy clothing must be. Grissell then expresses her descent in society by exchanging her velvet gown and silk petticoat for her old russet clothes, enduring ‘many a scoffe’ from her foes at court.

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While this story must have been a figment of legend, at the time Grissell was printed the link between social position and dress was central to contemporary legal process: changes of status were frequently enacted by ceremonial investment or divestment. For example, on 4 May 1621, when Sir Francis Michell was charged with ‘many great crimes and offences relating to his maj[esty] and the commonwealth’, the Lord Chief Justice pronounced that he should be ‘degraded of the order of knighthood’, by means of ‘ceremonies of degradation’.15 These ceremonies were held in the Earl Marshal’s court and illustrated in a ballad of the same year, The Deserued Downfall of a Corrupted Conscience (fig. 2.2).16 Although the ballad does not name Michell, it clearly refers to him:17 in any case, by the time the ballad was printed, news of the event was likely to have been widely disseminated already, orally and perhaps in letters. But this ballad interpretation, like most ballads, was not concerned so much with sober relation of the facts, but rather with the event as source material for a sensational and affective tale. This is registered in the frequency of emotive title words in ballads such as ‘lamentation’ and ‘delight’.18 The main woodcut in Deserued Downfall was probably made especially for the story, depicting the very moment when the ‘degraded Knight’ is ceremonially divested. Two heralds stand by, as the ‘sword of knighthood’ is broken ostentatiously above the ex-​knight’s head, while the ‘spurs of knighthood’ lie shattered beside his feet. Since a sword and spurs were the symbol of knighthood, given at investiture, demotion from knighthood required their removal. The heralds are bareheaded before their social superiors, but the ‘Barons, Lords and Knights’ surrounding the scene wear hats, because their higher status means they do not have to uncover their heads. While this mixture of peers clearly contains gradations of rank within it, the degraded knight is distinctive from all of them: he wears an indoor nightcap, which emphasises that he no longer has the right to wear his own hat in their presence.19 This imagery accords with the way the ballad describes dress as a major attribute of rank: His sword, his spurres, his name, his titles, and his state, His knighthood and his fame, Which he possest to late thus all disgrac’t and cleane defac’t For ever claiming more, and chang’d him quite from being knight And what he had before.

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Fig. 2.2  The Deserued Downfall of a Corrupted Conscience, 1621, PB 1.142–​3. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge.

Like Patient Grissell, dress is described as if it were an explicit and accurate marker for rightful social position. The ballad text makes clear –​despite its prominent mention of Parliament in the title –​that the king and ‘nobles of the land’ were the ones to determine this degradation, a comment corroborated by the Parliamentary record. This was in line with Elizabethan codes of

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honour and heraldry that placed the monarch as sole arbiter of social honours.20 Thus, the ballad dramatises and endorses the authority of the ruling elite to determine the rank and the clothing of others, by virtue of the precept that dress ought to be a visible expression of society’s order, rightfully governed by the king and nobility. This paradigm of dress, rooted in the rights of social hierarchy, had long been endorsed across the country outside the ballad genre, in the only other medium of comment on dress that could have had as universal a reach as ballads: the church sermon, or ‘homily’.21 Together with the Book of Common Prayer, the Church of England’s Homilies were the authorised texts for compulsory weekly church services in every community across the country.22 Edward VI commissioned the first volume of homilies (1547); Elizabeth I commissioned the second (1562–​3), which was ‘Set out by the aucthoritie of the Queenes Maiestie: and to be read in euery parishe church’.23 When re-​issued in 1623, it explicitly affirmed continuity with previous Elizabethan editions, reprinting the old preface and explaining that it remained ‘as it was published in the year 1562’. Reprinted once more in 1633, the Homilies were officially in use, with unbroken continuity, until they were suspended by Parliament in 1645.24 It is therefore likely that most ballad audiences under James and Charles I would have heard comments on dress from this source. The Homilies as a whole mostly addressed topics of obvious theological import, such as prayer and receiving the sacraments. It was the second volume, commissioned by Elizabeth I, which contained a homily entitled explicitly ‘Against Excesse in Apparel’, that affirmed sartorial display according to social hierarchy. As may be expected, ‘Against Excesse’ quoted freely from the Bible, but it was also one of only a few homilies in the collection to quote pagan writers as well.25 Warning against ‘superfluity’ in dress, it repeated ancient classical arguments against luxury, which stated that ‘anything unneeded’, particularly amongst the lower orders, could cause lapse and decay in individuals, societies and nations.26 Yet, ‘Against Excesse’ affirmed the right of the nobility to be magnificent within the concept of ‘estates’. It exhorted individuals to keep to their own ‘estate and condition’, and wear clothes ‘euery one according to his degree’; indeed, the text was at pains to underline the value of display, being ‘not against conuenient apparell for euery state agreeable’. Listeners were further urged to consider how ‘GOD hath appointed euery man his degree and office, within the limittes whereof it behoueth him to keepe himselfe.’ This argument –​inherited from early Christian interpretations of the classical luxury discourses –​upheld the rightful superiority of ruling classes, so that

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‘liberty and magnificence were reserved for the highest rank but prohibited to all others, and so on down the great chain of social being’.27 Such logic effectively affirmed the virtue of sumptuous display for those in the upper ranks of society, while at the same time seeking to control the appetites of the lower orders: those whose ignoble state made them most likely to offend the laws of necessity, as perceived and endorsed by those in power.28 The way ‘Against Excesse’ affirmed fashionable display as the prerogative of social elites, is thus highly congruent with how Patient Grissel and Deserued Downfall used apparel to signpost changes in rank. It was, furthermore, also commensurate with sumptuary laws, which had been officially in force in England since the fourteenth century. These statutes stipulated that fine dress was the appropriate badge of elevated social position. Sumptuary legislation reached its apogee under Elizabeth,29 proscribing highly wrought or imported goods such as furs, silks, embroideries and ‘woollen cloth made out of the realm’ for all but specified elite ranks; it was otherwise illegal to wear them.30 Certain types of dress were thus legislated upon, as if their styles and materials were intrinsically a reliable index of social order. Yet, these laws were also an attempt to safeguard the social order, with a conservative concern to ‘preserve England, both socially and economically, as a permanently agrarian nation’.31 Even though this legal gradation of clothing lapsed in 1604, twenty years before the publication of Patient Grissel and The Deserued Downfall, endeavours to preserve sartorial distinctions continued: at least five sumptuary bills were debated in the Commons between 1610 and 1630.32 However, hierarchical dress codes based on social position were not merely stated in texts; they were also visually reinforced in popular devotional books printed under both Elizabeth and James I. Nearly contemporary with the second volume of the Homilies, Queen Elizabeth’s Prayer Book was enormously successful, printed in several editions after its first publication in 1569, with a final edition appearing under James I as late as 1608.33 Designed for domestic use, its invocations attended to moments in daily routine, with titles such as, ‘A Prayer at the putting on of our clothes’ and ‘A Prayer to be sayd when we unclothe our selves to bedward’.34 A series of substantial marginal woodcuts depicted labelled ranks of men and women, from king and queen down to beggar and ‘poore woman’; correspondingly decreasing levels of sartorial display were portrayed according as sumptuary law required (fig. 2.3). In this way, religious piety, hierarchical social order and sumptuary law were visually conflated in a manner that resonated with Elizabethan proclamations and the ‘Homily Against Excesse in Apparel’. Thus,

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Fig. 2.3  Richard Day’s A Booke of Christian Praiers, known as ‘Queen Elizabeth’s Prayer Book’, 1578, pp. 95v, 98v. © The British Library Board.

ballads like Patient Grissel tapped into concepts about fashion, morality and social order, which had been widely circulated long before the 1620s.35 Social justice In addition to affirmations of fine dress according to social hierarchy, the homily ‘Against Excesse’ warned that fashion could also threaten social responsibility. It railed ‘against the superfluity … to spend so much vpon thy carkasse, that thou [art] compelled to robbe the poore, to maintaine thy costlinesse’. It therefore advocated sartorial restraint, so that the rich might provide financial support to their social inferiors. It warned that the expense of fashion  –​mentioning specifically the Elizabethan and Jacobean fashion

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for ruffs –​might ruin noble estates: ‘Some hang their reuenues about their neckes … in their ruffes.’ Choosing what to wear was thus a matter of social responsibility, because ‘one man spendeth that which might serue a multitude, and no man distributeth of the abundance which hee hath receiued.’ If fashionable dress could threaten social hierarchy, then it also threatened the chain of dependence on which it was based. As the homily warned, ‘excess’ also risked the reputation of the nation since, ‘with our phantasticall deuises, wee make our selues laughing stockes to other nations.’ But the call for sobriety was, however, not primarily about looking sartorially dignified in front of Continental neighbours. It was an implicit call for economic caution in relation to them, which was linked to Elizabethan policies on trade. Echoing the phrases of the homily, an Elizabethan proclamation warned: The excess of apparel and the superfluity of unnecessary foreign wares [has reached] such an extremity that the manifest decay of the whole realm generally is like to follow (by bringing into the realm such superfluities of silks, cloths of gold, silver, and other most vain devices of so great cost for the quantity thereof as of necessity the moneys and treasure of the realm is and must be yearly conveyed out of the same to answer the said excess).36 Since the luxury of ‘unnecessary foreign wares’ was primarily interpreted as pertaining to clothing, the sumptuary laws and the homily ‘Against Excesse’ were strongly implicated in the effort to protect ‘the treasure of the realm’ from being sent out to other nations to pay for them. It was according to this logic that James I tried to set up a silk industry in England, to marry his need for fine clothes with the desire to prevent ‘the moneys and treasure of the realm’ being ‘yearly conveyed out of the same’.37 These social concerns also appeared in ballad comments on dress, such as in Times Alteration (fig. 2.4). Published in 1630, it is one example of at least a dozen black-​letter sheets of this period that particularly focus, not on the nobility’s rights to magnificence, but on the danger that their sartorial indulgence will unbalance society’s structure and the strength of the country as a whole.38 Narrated as an ‘Old Mans rehearsall’, Times Alteration laments the way that new fashions have caused the nobility to forget their social responsibilities and focus instead on their own personal display. It evokes the passing of time with the nostalgic phrase, ‘When this old

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Cap was new’, implying that venerable customs, like clothes, ought to be preserved and retained, not changed. In the ideal past, it declares, nobles looked after their social inferiors: they maintained and clothed ‘a crue of lusty men’ in livery ‘of tawny, red or blue’. But now, ‘pride hath banished all’. Aristocratic indulgence in fashion has, it laments, reduced the available money for maintaining such people; three woodcuts of three bare-​footed men reinforce the text’s message that ‘Good Hospitality’ and even ‘Charity’ are sadly lacking. Such anxieties were current in contemporary London, where the behaviour of the country’s better sorts was itself being called into question. An inflated cohort of nobles developed as James I sold peerages on his accession and throughout his reign.39 Since newly elevated families had no history of managing tenantry on landed estates, they had more freedom to spend on themselves. The tension between the nobility’s rights to consume and its obligations to employ and oversee –​increased by the inflation of honours –​had already been discussed in the ballad Pitties Lamentation (1625):40 Since Coaches here florisht so much in this Land, One servant or two now serveth the turne: Forty good Geldings were else at command, As many good fellowes uprising each morne … But now this good order, From England is fled … Whole Farmes are consumed in pride for the back, In Shoo-​strings and Garters of silver or gold. Even for well-​established noble families, absentee lordship increased:  as customs of aristocratic urban socialising became established as the London ‘season’, the nobility were tempted to spend more time and money in the city. There were increasing concerns that landed revenues were being spent on London pleasures instead of on social dependents.41 Charles I made royal proclamations in an effort to force aristocratic families back to administrate affairs at their rural seats, but despite this, two hundred and fifty noblemen and gentlemen were fined for staying in London in 1632.42 Developing these types of concern about the behaviour of the nobility, Times Alteration urges that English-​made woollen fabrics –​such as undyed ‘Countrey gray’, or ‘Broad cloth’ –​are not just appropriate for the poor, but ought to be worn by the mighty, as a sign of loyalty to the nation. Despite

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Fig. 2.4  M[artin] P[arker], Times Alteration, 1630, PB 1.160–​1. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge.

its nostalgic tone, Times Alteration suggests that, in the present, nobles should champion these fabrics, instead of wearing ‘French fashions’ and ‘Fond fangles’, like the imported silk and velvet admired at Grissell’s adopted court. Wearing English wool instead of imported silks is therefore portrayed both as a sign of national strength and a means to promote it. To avoid imported luxuries is likened to the benefits of renouncing ‘Bribery’, ‘Simony’ and

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‘Usury’ –​tantamount to a powerful foreign policy, which can subdue ‘foreign foes’. This interpretation of fine dressing as a weak and selfish capitulation to foreign imports implies that all of society suffers as a result of irresponsible attitudes to fashion. England cannot flourish unless the wool trade flourishes –​ although this is expressed not as trade wisdom, but as social and national responsibility. While the majority of ballad audiences may not have read them, current economic theories were congruent with these ballads. Well into the Jacobean period, merchant writers such as Gerard Malynes helped argue for Elizabethan-​style economic policies.43 His concern for the ‘treasure’ of England required a high volume of exports, to balance imports and prevent having to pay for exports in money. Malynes did not account for fluctuation in demand for goods but saw it as fixed; for example, it was preferable to alter the value of the currency than to reduce the price of English wool exports. This was a protectionist approach, in that it aimed above all to protect the store of money in the country, money that was not yet in paper form but related to actual stores of precious metal, or ‘bullion’. Too much imported clothing and textiles, like expensive silks, could therefore threaten the country’s economy by unbalancing payments made abroad. On the other side of the equation, the sheer magnitude of England’s wool and woollen cloth production –​its near monopoly of exports –​meant that woollen textiles and dress were, inevitably, fundamental to any economic debate.44 Troubles in the textile trades, whether on the import side (for example with the East India Company), or the export side, always tended to produce a new flurry of treatises on the economy.45 Malynes’s economics were tied to a nationalistic ideal of social order, looking back to an imagined fixity in the past: his 1601 treatise was entitled Saint George for England. Later, in 1622, he castigated those who ignored ‘the need and occasions of the poore & mechanicke people … [their] hearts overfrozen with the Ice of uncharitableness’.46 Such phrases cast classical anti-​luxury ideas into hard economic theory, but with a firmly Elizabethan interpretation of Christianised social concern. Indeed, Malynes generally tended to hark back to Tudor ideals, ‘by which the members of each constituent group in society should be vouchsafed adequate maintenance for themselves and their households in accordance with their place and contribution to the common weal’.47 Trade relations and, by extension, what people chose to wear, were therefore ideally governed, not by the ‘hazardous’ profits of commerce and fashion, but by distributive social justice.48 Thus, although ballads like Times Alteration only addressed the trade and import issues of clothing indirectly –​in the guise of being kind to the poor, upholding one’s dependents in society and ensuring national prosperity –​they

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were congruent with the social justice economics of the Elizabethan period, which were encouraged subsequently by writers like Malynes. As Roze Hentschell has shown, many popular and theatrical authors of the late Elizabethan and Jacobean periods also connected woollen clothing with national loyalty, in a call for conservatism in dress and manner.49 Although Hentschell does not discuss ballads, they seem to have followed in this tradition, which conflated the nation’s economic with its social health, using domestic wool cloth as a symbol to express ‘moral superiority’ and ‘national selfhood’. Economic concerns were ‘written over as a narrative of uncertainty and anxiety about national distinctions’; thus it appears that the nation’s virtue, rather than financial prosperity, is the primary victim of foreign imports of cloth.50 Yet, in the first half of the seventeenth century, this apparent social concern for the ‘mechanicke people’ did not lead to depictions of them on their own terms in cheap print. As L. C. Stevenson has demonstrated, when popular printed literature of the Elizabethan and early Jacobean periods did praise merchants and artisans, it was not for trade-​orientated qualities, such as thrift, skill or industry, but rather for typically noble virtues such as chivalry and magnanimity.51 The praise of artisans as it developed in the later seventeenth century will be explored further below. At this point, however, it is clear that pre-​Civil War ballads participated in a wider trend that discussed England’s trade issues along the lines of economic theory, but primarily using time-​honoured paradigms of social order and rooted in the ideal of the great chain of being. Seen inter-​textually –​in the context of other comment on dress in proclamations, sermons, economic tracts and popular fiction –​it is now evident that ballad comment on dress in the Jacobean and Caroline period participated in expressing the concerns of wider and long-​lived political, religious and economic ideals. These interrelated issues drew from classical and religious critiques of luxury, economic critiques of unbalanced trade and religious obedience, all revolving around the ideal of social hierarchy and social obligation. Thus, whether concerned with sartorial rights, or sartorial obligations, ballad comment on dress in this period was centred upon the axis of rank and its visual appearance in fashion. Fashion was thus portrayed as both morally important and politically and economically dangerous, imbued with the power to uphold or destroy the nation’s peace. New contexts Fifty years after the publication of ballad discussions on sartorial display and social degree, though their themes did not die out,52 they were superseded

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by ballads that paid attention to the practicalities of production practices and clothing workshops. Typical of these were titles such as The Trades-​men’s Lamentation; or A Discourse between Will the Weaver, and Richard the Glover, concerning the Dullness of their Trades (1688).53 Comments in ballads like this focused less upon noble-​centred ideals of social hierarchy and social morality and turned instead to the voices of artisans and the importance of ‘Trading’ and profit. Anxieties about the limitations of display in terms of social rights and responsibilities, so closely connected to the wool trade, gave way to a new openness to imports and the benefits they might offer to producers, consumers and ultimately the English nation. However, before exploring such themes further, this overall shift needs to be placed in the context of the political, religious and economic discourses that had circulated in the interim, arising out of the radical social changes that had taken place during the Interregnum and the Restoration. The outbreak of Civil War in 1642 precipitated tumultuous change in almost every aspect of the country’s organisation. Charles I’s execution in 1649 was soon followed by the sale of his goods on the open market, as if to confirm that neither the monarchy nor its inherited privileges would ever return.54 Other traditional ruling institutions were suspended too: the House of Lords was abolished and the Church’s bishops were sacked. Even the moral rhetoric of the old hierarchy was under attack: after Archbishop Laud’s execution in 1645, the Long Parliament abolished the Church of England’s liturgies, including the Homilies and the Book of Common Prayer. While the voices of the old authorities were silenced, however, the print trade experienced new-​found freedom: indeed, the Civil War and Interregnum saw a free-​for-​all of religious and political ideas in print.55 Although the House of Commons banned ballads in 1647, and none were licensed till 1656, they were still printed.56 Hence, authors could now challenge the ideals of the old social hierarchy more than ever before. Evidence of both Royalist and pro-​Protectorate ballads being printed and registered during the Interregnum suggests that there was little concern to quash even anti-​ Parliament sheets either.57 Ever since the ‘godly’ ballads of the sixteenth century, zealously Protestant, or ‘Puritan’58 piety had been promoted in cheap print;59 the continued blurring between ‘godliness and Grub Street’ in the seventeenth century,60 embodied in the confluence of printers and sermonisers at St Pauls Cross in London,61 meant that cheap texts were no stranger to explicitly reforming religious sentiment. This link strengthened during the Interregnum, when many Protestant sects used the press to win converts, as contemporaries

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complained at the time.62 During the 1650s, for example, the newly formed Quaker sect sought converts primarily through print, publishing almost three hundred new pamphlet titles in London between 1652 and 1656 alone.63 Though some non-​sectarian Puritan writers despised black-​letter ballads,64 others saw their wide readership as a potential avenue to influence society with godly ideas.65 Indeed, ballads with Puritan themes flourished during the Interregnum.66 When Charles II returned to England in 1660, it might have seemed that the old social hierarchy would reestablish itself after the upheavals of the Wars and Interregnum. In 1662 the Church of England and its liturgy were fully reinstated, including the Book of Homilies, which remained virtually unchanged since 1645. Crucially, however, this lack of updating meant that the Homilies were unlikely to inspire fresh interest or attention. A white-​ letter ballad of 1663 satirised the reinstated Homilies as merely ‘Sermon by retail’, ‘printed lurry’ that could be rattled through thoughtlessly.67 As for the homily ‘Against Excesse in Apparel’, its denunciations of luxury were levelled at clothes no longer generally worn in England, such as neck ruffs.68 Furthermore, its exhortation to observe social distinctions in clothing was no longer supported by any new status-​based sumptuary laws.69 While the Quaker movement took pains to articulate how to dress without superfluity in the second half of the seventeenth century,70 the Church of England’s official doctrine, based on social hierarchy, merely reiterated out-​of-​date customs from the 1560s. At any rate, by the 1660s, the established Church had lost its monopoly on weekly sermons. Pepys’s accounts of this time note a new laxity in attendance at Church of England services. He saw emptier churches merely as a symptom of the fact that religious allegiance was ephemeral: religion, ‘be it what it will, is but a humour, and so the esteem of it passeth as other things do’.71 Confessional plurality was accepted to an extent when Charles II licensed Dissenters’ meetings in 1672 with a two-​year-​long Declaration of Indulgence,72 again when James II issued a Declaration of Indulgence to Dissenters in 1687, and with the Act of Toleration in 1689. All the while, Puritan influence remained strong after the Restoration, largely through the medium of print. Though print technology was in itself no agent of change, it ‘altered the discursive field’ in a manner related to the interests of ‘those who knew, used, and controlled’ it.73 There were certainly efforts at closer central oversight early in Charles II’s reign: in 1662, the Act of Uniformity tried to suppress nonconformist influence in the Church, and a print Licensing Act sought tighter control of print.74 But neither

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print nor religious observance could be managed as they once had been. While Presbyterians, Baptists, Quakers and other sects were all designated as Dissenters from the Church after 1662, they continued (despite sporadic attacks) to exert strong cultural influence through print.75 One famous example is the allegory Pilgrim’s Progress, published in 1678 by nonconformist preacher John Bunyan. Its numerous editions suggest that ‘godly’ literature remained widely popular well into the 1680s.76 After the Restoration, press freedom and the radical writings of the 1640s and 50s lived on, because despite considerable and early efforts, the government failed effectively to suppress them.77 Thus, although power was ‘seemingly invested in the body of Charles II and a heirarchical social order reasserted at the Restoration’, in fact, ‘an expansionist mercantile and consumer society with its roots in the Interregnum exerted ever-​increasing influence.’78 This sense of independence is evident in printed ballads, which (as we will explore below) began to depart from praising the ideals of social hierarchy and display, and to represent the opinions and experiences of those outside the ruling elite. Another important strand in this chronological phase of printing was the appearance of a Dissenting literature, which affirmed that ordinary people in everyday life could experience the presence of God. Both within and outside the established Church, individual religious practices, such as private prayer, meditating on the scriptures and diary-​keeping, were encouraged by godly writers –​all of which pointed to an equality of persons before God, if not an equality in the world. In the 1670s, for example, a popular tract encouraged weavers to enjoy the invisible presence of God even at their looms, and to exclaim: Blessed God! How great art thou in all things? And never greater than in the least of things; How little do we know thee, or consider thee, who yet art ever at our fingers ends?79 This concept –​that God’s presence could be as close to a weaver in a workshop as to a king in a church –​prioritised spiritual encounters over specific outward forms and their symbolism.80 John Bunyan was typical of popular Dissenting authors in his use of a contemporary plain speech style and affirmation of humble people, while casting suspicion on ‘worldly’ elevation and display. If the divine were available, not primarily in Church ceremonials, but amongst the ‘least of things’ –​even a weaver’s loom –​then perhaps the sartorial signs of divinely ordained social hierarchy were not so reliable either.

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Those particularly receptive to this ‘potentially democratizing impulse’81 included tradespeople, who were well represented amongst Puritans and (after 1662)  Dissenting groups. As early as 1642, John Taylor, the Thames waterman known as the ‘water poet’, had written specific satires against uneducated individuals in the clothing trades who enthusiastically joined Puritan religious meetings and even attempted to preach.82 This trend was still alluded to fifty years later by Dissenting writers like George Fox (himself the son of a weaver and apprenticed as a shoemaker), who exhorted readers from trade backgrounds to be spiritually self-​confident in their vocations, reminding them: how God hath anointed … shepherds, husband-​men, fisher-​men, and trades-​men made prophets and apostles, to preach the Word of God, and set forth His glory.83 Quakers were particularly populous in the clothing trades, and in cities where the local economy was dominated by the textile industry, such as London and Norwich. Dissenters were also particularly noticeable in weaving, shoemaking and tailors’ trades, groups which were already noted for being susceptible to religious radicalism in general and for a higher than average literacy.84 Despite the strong Dissenting presence in the clothing trades, however, the new ballad focus on artisanal sorts was not necessarily (as the Dissenters potentially were) a politically subversive or seditious development. Overall, the black-​letter ballad genre tended to endorse existing political order.85 Publishers preferred subjects that were already established, popular and easy to sell, which in turn ensured a bias towards current hierarchies and made ballads unlikely to be at the vanguard of social change. The shift in ballad comment on dress was therefore not obviously bound up with an agenda for political revolution, but instead connected to a wide circulation of social and religious ideas that lent new credence to the voices of those in the clothing trades. Furthermore, the ongoing importance of textiles and clothing to the nation’s economy meant that they continued to be central to the ballad genre’s enduring preoccupation with what would make the nation flourish.

NEW NARRATIVES AFTER 1680 Ballads of the 1680s gave new focus to workers in the clothing trades, exploring the way that new trade trends affected textile and clothing production.

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These ballads are particuarly important in light of the considerable historiography on consumption, economic change and luxuries in the long eighteenth century.86 In this scholarship, there has been little investigation into whether the tradespeople implicated in these shifts would have been aware of, or interested in, commentaries about them. For example, Keith Wrightson asserts that ‘most people … were not engaged in imagining the economic system as a whole … they were preoccupied not so much with the search for meaning in economic affairs as with the more immediate problem of getting a living.’87 But ballads of the 1680s suggest that new religious and economic ideas gained the attention of a remarkably broad audience, going well down the social scale after the Restoration. Surely such ballads would have stirred debates about trade and the economy, not just amongst the better sorts, but also amongst artisans who were themselves in the clothing trades? It is true that there were already long-​standing trends for portraying artisans in other print formats, but these tended to remain within the Elizabethan conception of ‘vocation’, firmly rooted in a ‘traditional order and social justice’.88 This can be seen for example in George Gascoigne’s 1574 poem The Steel Glas, which mentions many different trades, but only as a list of perfunctory stereotypes.89 As noted above, even when late-​Elizabethan texts such as Dekker’s play Shoemakers Holiday did praise artisans, they tended to use the language of nobility rather than trade-​specific phrases.90 Another example is the ‘cries’ tradition of picturing workers and street vendors in print, in which static lines of decontextualised figures are shown separated from the activites of their trade, creating a somewhat bald taxonomy of lower sorts (fig. 2.5). Even the more lively figures of Laroon’s engraved ‘cries’ of 1688 present criers in blank frames without contextual background. This tradition visually proffered tradespeople to wealthier buyers, very much in the manner of Gascoigne’s poem, often listing a phrase of sales patter or ‘cry’ associated with each vendor.91 Certainly, ‘cries’ were not aimed at the artisanal figures they identified. Before the Civil War, ballads that refer to the ‘cries’ of London remained largely within this ‘cries’ tradition.92 Mentions of individual trades or people were generally brief; few titles in the Stationers’ Registers include trades specifically, and those that do tend to focus on other themes.93 Merry Tom of all Trades is a mid-​century ballad in the ‘cries’ convention (fig. 2.6), but it embodies some of the trades stereotypes developed in later trades ballads.94 Typical of the earlier tradition, its narrative does not focus on any one trade in detail but succinctly satirises many. While terms for workers in the clothing trades were various and used interchangeably during the seventeenth

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Fig. 2.5 Anonymous, Cries of London, seventeenth century, etching. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

century, ballads like Merry Tom most consistently referred to these artisans as tradespeople,95 and ‘all Trades’ referred to a wide variety of artisanal professions that typically included tailors, shoemakers and weavers. While the ‘cries’ tradition, as its genre title suggests, focused on trades at the point of sale, in contrast, Merry Tom shows the way that ballads began to focus on the processes of production and their implications. This is most obviously signalled by its largest woodcut, which depicts two men ‘beetling’ or beating hemp on a block.96 In the text, a tailor confesses to stealing his customers’ fabric, which is usually more expensive than the cost of his making it up; the shoemaker boasts how his profession allows him intimate access to female clients; and the weaver’s irregular work leaves him free to drink in the ‘Ale-​house’ and to pursue women. Since workers in the clothing trades –​particularly shoemakers and tailors –​were

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Fig. 2.6  Merry Tom of All Trades, 1658–​64, Wood E 25(47). The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

largely employed in a made-​to-​measure context, their labour required direct contact with their customers’ individual bodies. They also clothed people from all levels of society. Anxieties about this physical access and social mobility are expressed in a manner similar to the pedlar satires discussed in Chapter 1: shoemakers, tailors and weavers are imagined as shameless social adventurers, liable to take sexual and financial liberties with their clients, regardless of their rank. These broad stereotypes continued to inform satires of the clothing trades but, from around the 1680s, new ballads began to showcase shoemakers, tailors and weavers as central protagonists, focusing on just one trade per ballad and dramatising the challenges and issues that were

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particular to that trade. Trades characters are celebrated not in terms of nobility, as they had been in late Elizabethan popular culture, but in terms that specifically describe the practical details of their work.97 Visually, too, they are no longer represented by static figures, but instead shown as actively employed in their workshops. In Paul Jobling’s phrase, these ballads chart a shift in the ‘discursive contexts’ of fashionable dress: comment embraces the terms of trade, turning away from a focus on the display and spectacle of social hierarchy, and toward the tools and labour of the producer’s workshop. This can be seen in the contrast between the presentation of shoemakers in ballads produced in the 1630s and those described in ballads of the 1680s. Shoemakers The early shoemaker ballad, Round Boyes Indeed, or, The Shoomakers Holy-​day is typical of pre-​Restoration ballads in that it does not tell us very much about shoemakers (fig. 2.7).98 This is first implied by three of the four woodcuts, which depict men posing in swords and plumed hats, a far cry from workshop practicalities. Such images suggest that the standards being invoked are likely to be those of traditional hierarchy. The text mentions various clothing trades and locates them firmly within a wider world of urban tradesmen who are united by drinking and good fellowship. Printed in the early 1630s, it implicitly draws parallels between the universal appeal of the ballad form and the universal need for shoemakers, since song and shoes alike can ‘fit both Country, Towne and Citie’. Yet the ballad ignores the details of shoemakers’ trades, focusing instead on their connection to noble characters of literary legend, St Hugh, Crispin and Crispianus.99 Typically ballad-​like satire is raised against, rather than with, the shoemakers, ventriloquising their inadvertent admissions of heavy drinking and laziness: the shoemakers’ ‘Holy-​day’ is evidently spent in the alehouse instead of church. By contrast, a series of twelve shoemaker ballads in the 1680s explored the concerns of the clothing trades themselves, combining older shoemaking legends with songs that referred to specific details of the workshop.100 Angela McShane’s study of the series has shown how it also expressed a fresh political engagement, responding to events such as the Popish Plot, the Glorious Revolution and recruitment to the Irish wars.101 Most unusually, five of the twelve ballads advertised authorship by ‘Richard Rigby’. The prominence of the name on the sheets suggests it was a selling-​point and, as McShane

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Fig. 2.7  L[awrence] P[rice], Round Boyes Indeed, 1632, PB 1.442–​3. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge.

demonstrates, all except one contained unique ‘signature’ images related to this persona. In the Rigby ballads, then, the closely linked trades of shoemaking and shoe mending (or cobbling) are given not only a sense of prominence, but also a truly distinctive ‘character’. Such characters would have held wide appeal, because in this period people from all social backgrounds needed and sought the services of both shoemakers and cobblers.102

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A woodcut on The Coblers New Prophesie depicts the protagonist sewing shoes at a workbench, surrounded by the tools of the trade (fig.  2.8).103 Dressed in soft cap, loose plain shirt, apron over his breeches and flat shoes, the cobbler is no static ‘cries’ figure but depicted engrossed in his labours. In his hand he holds a stitching-​awl to make holes for sewing the leather; his arms are spread out as he pulls the stitches taut. The song text opens with his voice narrating: As I sat Singing in my Stall At work with parting-​knife and Awl Beside the cobbler lie more appurtenances, ready to be used; another ballad with the same (or very similar) woodcut lists them specifically as ‘hammer, pincers and tickling sticks … a rubbing-​clout … With St. Hughs Bones, Old Shoes to mend’.104 Meanwhile, a caged bird emphasises that the ballad song is sung by the cobbler, whereas the other figures on the sheet are portrayed using books and scientific instuments. Attention to the details of the trade is further confirmed by a banderole signifying the cobbler’s speech: ‘I will now my Awl lay by, /​And will begin to Prophesie’. The ballad lyrics favourably compare this distinctly Puritan concept of lay ‘prophesying’ (preaching), together with the cobbler’s diligent labours, to the ‘Young Heirs’ who fritter their money away in ‘Taverns’, and to ‘Plotting Jesuits’ who spread sedition. The cobbler repeatedly expresses anxiety for the ‘Nation’ and the ‘Nations Wealth’ alonside assertions of his own loyalty, godliness and hard work. At the end of the ballad, he zealously resumes his trade –​‘now with speed to work go I /​To set them right that tread awry’ –​an occupation with implicitly greater virtue and value to the ‘Nation’ than the leisured ‘Young Heirs’. In contrast to Round Boyes and its broad praise for shoemakers who wash down ‘a Jugg or two’, The Coblers New Prophesie and other 1680s shoemaker ballads take a strongly moralising tone. Unlike the innuendoes in Merry Tom (which were quite familiar in literary legends about shoemaking) this newer approach frames shoemaking as a distinctly godly occupation. The cobbler’s ‘Prophesie’ alludes to Puritan concepts of public speaking, which sanctioned and encouraged lower social sorts and women to engage actively with spiritual meetings.105 The voice given to shoemakers in ballads is also keen to underscore their zeal for a Protestant England, which gives them a platform upon which to speak and be heard on their own terms. While England was at fairly constant war with Catholic countries

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Fig. 2.8  The Coblers New Prophesie, 1678–​80, PB 4.230. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge.

in the last quarter of the century, shoemaker ballads repeatedly expressed their willingness to fight ‘In loyalty to King and Queen /​and for their Country dear’.106 Though these lines might appear to signal a return to loyalty to the old social hierarchies, the ballad here equates monarchs, not with their status as head of the social hierarchy, but with embodiment of an independent, Protestant England. It is not the ranks of knighthood, but men from ‘every Trade, whate’er they be’, who will wage and win the war. Here, what Benedict Anderson describes as the ‘imagined community’ of the nation is already evident as ‘a deep, horizontal comradeship’, which replaces hierarchies with a new sense of national allegiance between all sections of society.107 This new vocational purpose is also expressed in ballads by the term ‘calling’. Though the concept had appeared in the homily ‘Against Excesse’ as a ‘vocation … in as much as GOD hath appointed euery man his degree and office’, in the shoemaker ballads, ‘calling’ takes on different significance, affirming non-​elite trade: ‘Shoo-​makers they are the first that

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repair /​… this to their Calling much credit does bring’. Such a use of ‘Calling’ went against the grain of the old nobility-​centred narratives, by making leisure –​the prerequisite of a land-​owning gentleman –​morally suspect. Unlike silly ‘Young Heirs’ and seditious ‘Jesuits’, manual labourers are honourable and loyal. Indeed, the term ‘calling’ in ballads of this type is representative of the positive way clothing trades are discussed on their own terms. Thus, rather than being taken for granted as a means to express the superiority of social elites, the work of the clothing trades is depicted in shoemaker ballads as a good in its own right, which by implication could benefit from the custom of anyone. A similar trend is seen in tailor ballads, which, despite their important differences from the shoemaker series, also showcase the practicalities of dress producers in newly trade-​orientated texts and images. Tailors Like shoemakers, tailors as central protagonists are not a feature of ballads during the first half of the century. However, in the early 1680s, ballads began to represent them both as main characters and in various woodcut images.108 These tailor ballads offer vivid verbal and visual descriptions of the trade on its own terms, enumerating the tools of their profession. The War-​Like Taylor depicts the protagonist sitting ‘tailor-​fashion’, that is, cross-​ legged on a table (fig. 2.9),109 much as tailors appear in other visual representations of the period in Europe.110 The lyrics incorporate trade-​specific items such as ‘Goose’, ‘Sheers’, ‘measures’, ‘thimble’, ‘lap-​board’ and (more jokingly) ‘yard’.111 In addition to these pragmatic details, there may be allusions to wider trends affecting the trade as a whole. For example, from the 1670s onwards, xenophobic sentiment against immigrant clothing workers in London kept tailors frequently in the public eye with disturbances and riots.112 The joking title of The War-​Like Taylor may have taken its inspiration from the more serious fact that tailors were the first trade group to take direct action against foreign artisans, on Mayday 1670. Despite the aggressive subject, such attention to the problems and details of trade matters was congruent with the Puritan affirmation of the presence of God in all work: these trade tools and problems were, after all, bound up with the fulfillment of an individual’s ‘calling’. The concept of ‘calling’, explored from the perspective of tradespeople, began to open up the possibility that a tradesperson might be just as valuable, on his or her own terms, as a member of the nobility. Indeed, a focus on the intrinsic

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Fig. 2.9  The War-​Like Taylor, 1681–​4, PB 4.282. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge.

value and experience of different callings meant that, more than ever, social ranking could be disregarded as merely a worldly construction –​a mirage created by the tailor. Tailors could thus be deployed as a symbol for social equality too: for example, an ‘answering’ ballad, The Taylors Vindication113 proclaims that all levels of society –​‘The strong, the weak, the rich, the poor, /​the Free-​man and the Jaylor’ –​rely on the clothing trades. But it goes further and asserts that the finery of the better sorts is nothing but the product of the tailors’ skill: The best of all will badly speed If Taylors did not make it And help them when they are in need they might like Beasts go naked. ‘Royal Robes and rich array’, it suggests, are merely ‘of the Taylors making’. Even as these boasts suggest that tailors are complicit in creating the

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sartorial expression of social hierarchy, they also undermine the correlation between hierarchy and appearance, by underlining that the work of the tailor constructs this appearance. After all, without the tailor even ‘the best of all’ might become ‘like Beasts’. On this basis, at least in theory, tailors can claim a level of equality even with monarchs: they can even, as the ballad suggests, be ‘friends to Kings’. In keeping with this subtle critique of social hierarchy, tailors in ballads have none of the royalist Protestant zeal seen in the shoemaker ballads. Instead, they are roundly mocked, either for not fulfilling, or for overreaching, their social and personal responsibilities. This appears in satires on sexual promiscuity, sexual inadequacy, cowardliness and dishonesty, some of which relate to aspects of tailors’ trading practice. Men who created made-​ to-​measure clothing for individual women’s bodies were likely to provoke sexual anxieties. A New-​Fashioned Marigold humorously exploits this tension, narrating how a naive young man, unable to find his new wife’s ‘marigold’ on their wedding-​night, sends his wife to ‘Tom Stitch the Taylor’ to make one. Tom Stitch accomplishes this feat of ‘tailoring’, not in the workshop but in his private ‘Chamber’ where, with his piercing Bodkin then he drove a subtile trade; In less then half an hour, the Marigold was made. Tailors’ access to women’s bodies was already a source of tension and humour in plays of the period,114 fuelled by the relative secrecy of tailors’ workshops. Cobblers and shoemakers might have stalls in the street, but tailors were usually located indoors, where textiles could be spread on large tables and not become dirtied in the open air. Pepys frequently mentions his wife’s visits to Unthank the tailor, where she would have taken her own fabric and ordered clothing that was fitted to her body.115 Though Unthank’s was a fairly large establishment, smaller workshops were more easily susceptible to rumours of sexual misdemeanors taking place under the guise of a fitting. Paradoxically, however, tailors were also stereotyped as cuckolds. The Canting Dictionary translates ‘cabbage’ as ‘a Taylor … [and] also that part of the Deer’s Head where the Horns are Planted’, which punningly associated tailors with cuckold’s horns. The proverb, that it took more than one tailor to make a man, was associated with the unflattering physical effects of their sedentary work.116 Unlike weaving and shoemaking, tailoring

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was particularly suited to older men, because it required little physical strength.117 The woodcut for The War-​Like Taylor certainly implies that a younger man will cuckold the cross-​legged tradesman. Unusually for ballads, the image is inscribed clearly: ‘tom ye talor & his wife Jone’. In the foreground, Tom wears a pointed beard of pre-​Civil War fashion and plain straight hair instead of a fashionable curled wig. While he is engaged in making breeches on his lap (possibly a pun on sexual inadequacy), behind him, his wife receives a gallant bow from another, clean-​shaven man wearing a fashionable coat and vest. A  small vignette in the top right of the frame shows a couple in a curtained bed, suggestive of Jone’s adultery behind her husband’s back. Tailors’ sedentary work may also have fuelled satires that they, unlike the war-​talking shoemakers, were weak and subservient to women. Several ballads of this period imagine groups of young women forcibly pressing tailors to enter the armed forces, with titles such as The Maidens Frolicksome Undertaking To Press Twenty Taylors,With the Success of that Comical Adventure.118 The subtitle of The War-​Like Taylor, a ‘great Fight between a Taylor and a Louse most Heroically performed’, suggests that the only fight tailors can take on is with the vermin in their clients’ clothing. Here, a large woodcut represents the threat of the louse as comically outsized in comparison to the figures beside –​perhaps also glancing at tailors’ fear of immigrants, other unwelcome intruders to their work. Tailors’ association with weakness and effeminacy could have been connected to the fact that tailors took dress commissions from women, but it also seems likely to reflect other new issues in the tailoring trade. During warime exigencies in the 1680s, women forced some tailors out of business. During the Nine Years’ War with France from 1688, the armed forces increasingly relied on women to make the required large bales of ready-​made uniform to take to war. Though barred from becoming tailors in their own right, women thus effectively challenged the dominance of male, made-​to-​measure tailors in the new clothing market.119 Tailors made official complaints until the end of the century, but to no effect.120 In this way, therefore, without discussing the factual details of trade, ballad stories gave dramatic focus to current trends in the tailoring industry, creating fictional and emotional responses to real causes of anxiety about social change. Finally, tailor ballads satirised the fact that tailors had ample opportunity to steal some of the fabrics supplied them by clients, who could never be sure whether it had all been used as promised. Ballads described this as taking ‘cabbage’ and putting it into ‘hell’, a phraseology in use until

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the twentieth century and a practice which, given the expense of silk fabrics, could be tantamount to stealing quite significant sums of money.121 Although the stealing-​tailor stereotype was present at the beginning of the century, after the Restoration its new form simultaneously satirised tailors who espoused the Puritan piety that had developed so significantly during the Interregnum. Puritan groups –​always a ripe target for printed satires122 –​were particularly useful butts for humour, since any misdemeanor could be made all the more ludicrous by contrast with their supposedly high moral standards. For example, Yea & Nay the Quaker, Deceiv’d pinpoints the incongruity that workers in the ‘holiness’ movements made fine clothes for the elite.123 Ballads targeted the Quaker movement shortly after it began in the 1650s,124 perhaps because they avoided pedlar networks for their printed tracts (preferring to spread their spiritual literature via commercial cloth transports instead).125 Quakers refused to take oaths, using only ‘yea’ or ‘nay’,126 which was satirised in ballads as equivocation, ‘yea and nay’ –​ hypocritically saying one thing and doing another. This also tapped into criticisms that Quakers and other Dissenters were, despite their focus on holiness, quite unashamed to make money.127 In this ballad, the Quaker tailor makes ‘a Satten Gown … for a Lady’, making a great show of his honesty –​but he still steals four yards of silk: ‘the Spirit forsook him’, the ballad explains, in mock gravity. His malpractice exposed, the Quaker falls to ‘quaking and shaking’, not with religious fervour, but ‘with terrible fear’, presumably of losing his custom. Yea & Nay the Quaker is typical of tailor ballads in the way that it highlights the dissonance between underhand trade practices and claims to religious morality. Tailors in late-​century ballads were thus portrayed in a variety of contradictory ways: ‘war-​like’, yet inept at fighting; sexually predatory on female clients, yet themselves easily cuckolded; religious types, yet famous for stealing. As such, tailor ballads not only presented practical details of the profession itself, but also exploited traditional consumer anxieties associated with tailoring alongside topical issues surrounding the trade. However, perhaps because tailors were involved with remaking old clothing as well as creating from new cloth, tailor ballads do not frequently discuss the benefits of new clothes. As we will now examine, weavers’ constant production of new clothing wares encouraged a much stronger focus on the matter of consumption and new fashions.

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Weavers As in the case of shoemaker and tailor characters, weavers as characters are largely absent from ballads before the Restoration, except as mentioned alongside other trades.128 But from the 1680s, weavers appear as sole protagonists in at least ten ballads.129 Taken together, these songs give voice to an increasing acceptance of fashion and its trades as a divinely given benefit to the country. Alongside the tailors, weavers became particularly newsworthy in London from the 1670s because of their public protests. The more visible and violent nature of their demonstrations may have been due to the fact that their work, as discussed in Chapter 1, was particularly vulnerable to changes in fashion and placed considerable financial risk upon the individual weaver. Their supply of work was also much more susceptible to trends in national and international trading than those of tailors and shoemakers, whose labour, as noted, included alterations and repairs as well as making new items. An important cause of discontent was the immigration to England of skilled weavers. Protestant Huguenots, notable for their silk weaving, had been arriving in England in small numbers since the sixteenth century, but came in larger numbers from the 1660s to escape religious persecution in France.130 In 1681 Charles II granted them legal rights to settle in England: after the 1685 Edict of Nantes this brought around forty thousand new immigrants to the country, with a significant proportion working in artisanal crafts and especially weaving.131 Even before Huguenots brought ‘Spitalfields silks’ to prominence in the early 1700s, their new weaving techniques were winning favourable treatment in the trade, and resentment from native workers.132  This, in turn, lent fuel to accusations that French Huguenot weavers were involved in seditious Papist plotting, even though they were in fact Protestant co-​religionists.133 A Warning and Good Counsel to the Weavers was published in 1688, when the pressure of immigration after the Edict of Nantes must have been felt acutely (fig.  2.10).134  Weavers at this time claimed they numbered three hundred thousand in England,135  a sizeable audience and worthy of ballad-​publishers’ attention.136  Yet it is unlikely that such ballads were created solely for weavers to buy. Ballads about weavers inevitably touched on broader issues that attracted wide audiences, because weavers’ livelihoods were symbiotically connected to –​and perhaps symbolic of –​the national economy and international trade.

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Fig. 2.10  A Warning and Good Counsel to the Weavers, 1688, PB 4.356. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge.

A Warning and Good Counsel illustrates two weavers seated at work in large wooden-​framed handlooms. One is a broadloom-​weaver making wide cloth; the other is a narrow-​weaver producing ribbon or tape. Both types of weaving experienced acute change and difficulty in the later years of the seventeenth century, as the ballad describes. One of the problems was underselling by immigrants,137 which meant that ‘wholesale Men’ might do business in London instead of with provincial ‘Weavers in Norfolk’, a centre for wool weaving. At the same time, however, the fact that weavers bought their own materials meant that if they sold cloth on credit but received delayed payments, weavers could hold up the whole chain of production which was linked into weaving. The ballad’s list of affected parties includes ‘wholesale men’, ‘spinners’, ‘Wool-​men’, ‘The Women’, ‘Journeymen’, ‘Merchants’, ‘Weavers Prentices’, and even the ‘husbandman’. It is for the sake of these trade networks that the ballad pleads with the weavers, ‘e’re you part with your stuffs, in your hands take pay’. The weavers addressed here, being ‘in Norfolk’, were likely to be wool weavers who made New Draperies.138 Yet, silk weavers were also experiencing

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problems: by the 1670s, violent protests focused on the increasing use of the engine loom. Ribbons and tapes (called ‘narrow-​ware’) were traditionally woven by hand on narrow-​looms, as seen in the woodcut, but an engine loom permitted one journeyman to accomplish the work of ten. Engine looms were first mentioned in England in 1616, and in 1638 Charles I issued letters patent against them to protect weavers’ livelihoods. They were still used, however, particularly after the return of the Court in 1660 brought an increased fashion for silk ribbons. Children and older people, who were particularly employed in hand narrow-​weaving, were most likely to lose their livelihoods as a result. Weavers expressed their anger at this threat with a three-​day riot, which broke out in London in August 1675.139 Always ready to protest, the weavers made later demonstrations outside Parliament in 1689.140 These events suggest that producers of dress in the late seventeenth century were not merely hidden cogs within an invisible ‘machine’ of fashion, or simply a backdrop to more important political or economic problems. Instead, the clothing industries were of fundamental national importance themselves: their problems were England’s political and economic problems. Ballads explicitly connected issues in the clothing trades with England’s wider, late-​century trade controversies, but without necessarily referring them to the old question of social hierarchy. Ballads about weavers thus gave voice to problems that the weavers themselves identified, as well as to the solutions they themselves proposed. For example, the ballad The Weavers Request aligned the cause of the weavers with the importance of women’s fashions (fig.  2.11).141 Women must continue wearing ribbon headdresses, it declares, if the weavers’ trade is to flourish. The left-​hand woodcut on the ballad sheet illustrates the weavers’ ‘request’ with a man who doffs his hat while proffering a text on paper; to the right of this, a woman’s bust with curled hair and pearls represents in metonymy the fashionable women being addressed by the weavers. The ballad directly connects producers’ livelihoods with fashion. When men wore ribbons, it explains, weavers did well: Formerly Weavers their work was in haste when Gallants did wear on their Breeches Ribbons at knees, nay and all round the waste, O then the brave Weavers got Riches.142 But once this fashion passed, it was only the new fashion for ribbon headdresses for women that saved the weavers’ trade from ruin:

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Fig. 2.11  The Weavers Request, 1685–​8, PB 4.355. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge.

Had it not been for the Women indeed our Trade had been utterly fallen: But by the making them Ribbon and Breed it was a great help in our Calling. This further connects women’s desire to be fashionable with the producers of fine clothes who are trying to fulfill their ‘calling’. Implicitly describing the production of fashion as a worthy vocation in itself, The Weavers Request confers a sense of virtue upon those who promote it. As discussed above, cheap print had always had close links with sermons and religious writings,143 but in these weaver ballads, religion, ‘calling’ and fashion are linked in a new way, from the perspective of the producers instead of the legislators of society. Indeed, the ballad suggests, in diametric opposition to the old sumptuary laws, ‘some strict Order’ should be taken against any who try to oppose fashion and the trade of the weavers.

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Although a tradesman’s ‘calling’ was not necessarily a religious term, as has been discussed, the idea of ‘calling’ had its roots in the belief that a divine hand allocated different types of work to individuals. Where the Homilies had treated ‘vocation’ cursorily as one aspect of social hierarchy, here, in the Weavers Request, with its practical descriptions of making fashion and its blunt invitations to consume it, ‘calling’ resonates with the concerns of the trade itself. This was an interpretation of the clothing trades found in other cheap literature. For example, The Weavers Pocket-​book was a popular work addressed to weavers in Norwich, offering ‘how to raise Heavenly Meditations, from the several parts of their Work’. Quoting liberally from the Bible, it showed how godly people in the trade could perceive the divine in their labour,144 which was, it asserted: an Employment that hath a good end and design, … you could warantably go, and pray to God for a Blessing … Prosper thou the work of our hand upon us, Lord, Prosper thou our handy-​work.145 Far from being concerned about whether fashion might be an ungodly or unnecessary pursuit, it suggests the weavers are too busy producing fashionable cloth to be at risk of bad behaviour.146 As such, ballads and other forms of print portrayed weavers as worthy workers whose livelihood deserved to flourish –​even if this meant that fashion flourished, and that consumers might reach, sartorially, beyond their social station. Furthermore, The Weavers Pocket-​book explicitly connected fashion with religious virtue: the holy ‘calling’ of the weaver specifically includes a divinely given ability to anticipate fashion, to ‘invent a new piece of Stuff, to judge of its acceptableness to people the next year’. This might be construed merely as a religiously coloured description of weavers’ particular trade vulnerability to changes in fashion. Yet the tract goes further, to assert God’s approval of fashion per se: We have food and rayment for delight as well as for necessity … Doth not God think it enough to cloth[e] our nakedness, but he will delight us with our clothes, he will adorn us in clothing?147 Crucially, this endorsement of fashion and luxury, ‘for delight as well as for necessity’, was not addressed to people of noble rank or great wealth, but rather to the producers of raiment themselves. Here was a ‘religious’ argument

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for luxury in support of those who made it, a pro-​luxury discourse aimed at an audience of non-​ruling lower-​sorts. In contrast with Dissenters’ (particularly Quaker) preference for plain clothing, this doctrine of ‘calling’ implicitly required that frequently changing fashions in dress be consumed by an increasing number of people, thus not just by the nobility, but by large sections of the populace. Here, then, in cheap literature about the clothing trades, the axis of comment had thoroughly shifted away from that of the leisured nobility, and toward tradespeople, for whom the concept of success in trade –​and even the consumption of fashion –​was increasingly becoming an acceptable goal. Linda Levy Peck has argued for a ‘back-​dating’ of England’s luxury debates to the reign of James I, but on the whole the writings she discusses were aimed at the wealthy. Peck argues that James’s project to start a native silk industry produced a literature that demonstrates that ‘the de-​moralisation of luxury had already begun in Jacobean England’, trumpeting the public benefits of private luxuries well in advance of Nicholas Barbon or Bernard Mandeville.148 But these early arguments in favour of luxury were addressed to landowners who might be persuaded to plant mulberry trees, and were not concerned about the experiences of silk weavers, except to keep them out of trouble by employing them.149 It is not until we get to the ballads, trade petitions and religious tracts of the 1680s that we find convincing evidence of pro-​luxury ideas being aimed at a wide audience.

NEW COMMENTARIES: WEAVERS AND PRO-​FASHION ECONOMICS This overall shift in favour of luxury in ballad comment on dress was roughly contemporary with shifts in the direction of the country’s economic policies that were published in 1690, but had been developing in major ways since the 1620s –​a decade that has been described as the turning point for seventeenth-​century English economics. Amid the controversy caused by the collapse of the Cockayne wool project in 1617, while Gerard Malynes was still advocating Elizabethan-​ style protectionist policies, merchant-​ writers Thomas Mun and Edward Misselden proposed a new perspective on the economy. For them, trade was not primarily a human means to uphold social justice, but an impersonal mechanism of supply and demand. Economic problems were therefore not viewed in terms of morality, but merely a sign that ‘something was wrong with the complicated economic machinery’.150 Such Baconian rationalist conception saw the nation’s economy as an independent

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system or body, governed by a ‘science of trade’, rather than control of money-​value.151 Although older moral concerns by no means disappeared altogether, these new discourses linked the economic health of the country with an abundance of trade and employment. Thomas Mun’s English Treasure by Foraign Trade, written in the 1620s, was not printed until 1664, when controversy over the East India Company provoked a flurry of other pamphlets.152 In the 1690s, another depression in the cloth trade stoked another outbreak of economic debate. Financier and insurance broker Nicholas Barbon built on Mun’s and Misselden’s conception of the autonomous economy, but went further, stating that ‘the freer the trade is, the better the nation will thrive’.153 Writing at the time of England’s recoinage, Barbon declared that it was trade, not conserving money, which ensured the nation’s prosperity. Like the economic treatises of seventy years before, Barbon made explicit links between his argument and the clothing trades. Fashion offered ‘livelihood for a great part of Mankind’, he argued, listing specific trades such as ‘Clothier, Silk-​Weaver, Lace-​Maker, Ribbon-​Weaver’.154 If fashion and luxury goods could be justified by their ability to promote trade, then opulence could be seen as ‘necessary’ to the health of the nation, in turn allowing luxury and luxury goods to become ‘de-​moralised’.155 Thus, the meaning of luxury –​once monopolised by the classical critiques enshrined in the ‘Homily Against Excesse in Apparel’ and restrictive trade laws –​was now open to more positive interpretations. The link with fashion was fundamental: despite their optimism on trade, Mun and Misselden had held to the old ideals of sumptuary legislation,156 whereas the newer economics were even more optimistic. As Barbon’s contemporary Dudley North expressed it, ‘countries which have sumptuary laws are generally poor’.157 Sympathy with these ideas may have informed Parliament’s listening ear to the petitions of tradespeople. Where the early years of the century had seen a continuation of some Elizabethan-​style efforts by the crown to control the textile and clothing trades, after the Restoration there was no return to sumptuary laws, though they continued on the Continent. One Act was passed in 1667, requiring all burial shrouds to be made of wool, but no further acts on wool-​wearing succeeded. Instead, the economic policy of Parliament became increasingly reactive, swayed by lobbying and petitioning from special interest groups and especially trade groups.158 Particularly after 1688, when Parliament sat annually, the Journals of the Commons and Lords were filled with concerns raised by groups of textiles workers.

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In August 1689, for example, an act was proposed in Parliament, ‘for the enjoining the Wearing of the Woolen Manufactures of this Kingdom, at certain Times of the Year’, for men and women.159 Significantly, this was not directed at any one stratum of society. The Act made no attempt to imitate the old sumptuary laws, or to operate on a system of social hierarchy. Instead of excluding some people from wearing certain types of dress, it sought, forcibly, to include everyone. When the Weavers’ Company made an official petition against the bill, their arguments did not refer to social hierarchy either. Rather, the very first argument of the petition took fashion as its starting point, noting not just the importance of fashion in general, but pointing out the speed of its changes. It even referred to seasonal novelty in clothing: the persons that wear English made Silks and Hair Stuffs are … either Leaders or Followers of the newest Modes and Fashions, and therefore it cannot be supposed that they will buy Silk Garments to lay by them all the Winter to wear in Spring, for that then the newer Modes and Fashions will come in.160 This argument does not, as it might have done sixty years earlier, describe the nobility or gentry as the principal or rightful consumers of silk clothing, but instead it imagines a more vaguely defined group of ‘Leaders or Followers’ of fashion. ‘Newer Modes’ are described as if they are part of an inexorable and universal force, impersonally arriving each spring. But as the petition itself implies, this mysterious energy does not only dictate what fashionable people wear, it also (as the Weavers Request also noted), governs the shape of clothing workers’ lives. Moreover, the free operation of fashion is not portrayed merely as a financial benefit to the clothing trades, but also as a religious imperative, because to harm England’s clothing trades would ‘much depress the Protestant, and advance the Papal Interest’. Indeed, if they do not prosper, the weavers argue, then the newly secured Protestantism under William and Mary –​‘the Fortress of the Protestant Religion’ –​risks becoming ‘indefensible against Papal designs’. Presumably this glanced at the fact that England was currently engaged in war with Catholic France, and strong national finances –​always bound up with the clothing trades –​were vital for this endeavour. In this light, the concept of legislating or restricting fashion is even described as a kind of blasphemy; as the weavers argue, such a thing would threaten to:

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carry away the Trade of the Nation (which is now increasing and flourishing) to other parts of the World … to the utter ruine of the whole Nation, both in Trade and Navigation, and the sacred Religion thereof. In striking contrast to Queen Elizabeth’s proclamation and homilies quoted above, the weavers see the nation’s success residing in its ‘Trade’, rather than the preservation of its money. As ‘the most chief and principal Manufacture of the Nation’ whereby ‘many Thousand Native Protestants get their livelihood’, if the country is to prosper, weavers must prosper. Thus, the petition asserts, to allow freedom to fashion is to show allegiance to God and country. Here, then, fashion production and consumption are no longer a threat to social cohesion or national pride: indeed, ‘greater Consumption’ is explicitly a virtue of national and religious loyalty. While the spiritual sincerity of the weavers may be hard to discern, they clearly hoped Parliament would comprehend the links they made between religion, fashion consumption and England’s success as a Protestant country. The weavers’ petition against the bill was read first to the Commons and then to the House of Lords on 17 August 1689. The Lords responded to the petition and rejected the bill in question on 19 August.161 Shortly afterwards, a white-​letter ballad appeared, celebrating the weavers’ success:  ‘The Bill which caus’d such Discontent /​Is thrown quite out of Parliament’.162 Like the petition, the ballad aligned the weavers’ cause with fashion, consumption, Protestantism and the flourishing trade of England. Their victory is proclaimed as a vindication for the reformed religion: Our Papist Forces shall never Boast That they made us Mutiny to our Cost For the Loyal Weavers will submit To what the Parliament shall think fit. However, if England did not see a widespread relaxation of trade policies at this time –​and the Calico Laws of the early eighteenth century suggest that anxieties continued –​this may in part have been the result of war. England waged war almost continuously between 1652 and 1713, against the Dutch, the Spanish and the French: the country therefore needed extra control over tax and revenues, which meant tighter jurisdiction over industries and trade. It is therefore possible that the authoritarianism of late-​ century economic policy was not so much due to economic ideals so much as

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a pragmatic response to warfare.163 Nevertheless, the concept that Britain was becoming increasingly commercial  –​and aware of its commercialism  –​is now widely accepted. It is well established that the end of the century saw an overall increase in wages and a decrease in commodity prices, which allowed ever-​broader groups of people to engage in the consumption of new luxury goods, produced in turn from an ever-​expanding array of manufactures.164 As we have seen, ballad content reflected these shifts in attitude and made them widely available to late seventeenth-​century consumers of ballads. Furthermore, if fashion consumption meant that the nation’s trade flourished, then perhaps its problems could be overlooked. For example, in 1699 the writer Charles Davenant called trade ‘a pernicious thing’ which ‘extinguishes virtue’, but also admitted that it had ‘become with us a necessary evil’.165 As Bernard Mandeville more famously put it a few years later, in The Grumbling Hive of 1705: The Root of evil Avarice, That damn’d ill-​natur’d baneful Vice, Was Slave to Prodigality, That Noble Sin; whilst Luxury Employ’d a Million of the Poor, And odious Pride a Million more.166 Private vices and fashionable luxury could be precisely what the nation needed to flourish after all, leading to public benefits that even resolved the older Elizabethan concerns for social justice that Mandeville eschewed.

BALLAD COMMENT ON DRESS Ballad comment on dress thus evoked current concerns raised by the production and consumption of dress, which were in turn at the heart of religious and economic discourses that changed dramatically through the century. Ballads in the 1620s and 30s ventriloquised social elites’ authority to determine social position and its sartorial expression, discussing fashion in terms of social responsibility. In the 1680s, ballads voiced clothing producers’ concerns, emphasising their agency in creating appearances. Meanwhile, fashionable display was presented less as a danger to the nation’s financial prosperity and order as a whole, but increasingly as a vital aspect of

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its trading success. With regard to dress, the voices of the leisured nobility were joined and then superseded by the voices of tradespeople and working consumers. While the connections between religion, the economy and dress remained constant, the contrast in ballad commentary between the groups of ballads in these two time periods emphasises the development of religious and economic ideas that had taken place in the interim. One aspect of this was how suspension of the established Church ruptured Elizabethan sumptuary discourses based on social hierarchies, ideas that had endured under James and Charles I, but were dissolved completely by the time Parliament sat yearly under William and Mary. The increased freedom of the print trade in the middle years of the century and the failure to control it afterwards allowed a greater circulation of radical religious ideas and the voices of those outside social elites, which encouraged a new attention to humble tradespeople and their own experiences of work. New ideas about the autonomy of the nation’s economy and the benefits of unrestricted trade emerged to compete with older concerns to preserve the country’s money reserves and social hierarchies intact, a development which affirmed the importance of producers but also consumers of dress. Ever-​increasing consumption of fashion began to seem essential for the health of the nation. As paper money entered the economy in the mid-​1690s, allowing transactions to take place without the use of metal coins, so ballad commentary on fashion detached dress from the standard of the great chain of being and instead positioned it as a trade product, which worked best when allowed to proliferate freely. With clothing and textiles at the heart of the nation’s employment and trade, ballad comment on dress charts an increasingly positive range of attitudes to an increasingly broad consumption of fashion.

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3 BALLAD PICTURES Conventions of Clothes and the Body

As we saw in Chapter 2, ballad texts gave increasing attention and positive comment to the producers of fashion, and to the broad proliferation of fashionable display. It would therefore seem logical to expect that, as the seventeenth century progressed, ballad pictures would also give greater attention to fashion. To a certain extent this is the case, and these specific instances will be examined in detail in Chapters 4 and 5.Yet, we also find a paradox: a significant and opposite trend in which, over time, many ballads appear to divulge less and less visual information about dress. Related to slightly earlier shifts in painted portrait conventions, this development involved a transmission –​though by no means a straightforward one –​between other forms of visual culture and ballad images. As Marcia Pointon has observed, the mediation of ‘distinguished’ portraits into more widely accessible culture brings ‘transformations and appropriations with consequent shifts in meaning’.1 While not attempting to create an all-​encompassing or normative description of ballad woodcuts in the seventeenth century, we will concentrate on identifying and defining certain broad recognisable trends and suggesting some of the reasons why they occurred.2 In what follows, then, we will consider some of the overall changes in ballad images during the seventeenth century, the way that these related to other forms of representation, and the implications of this for the depiction of the dressed body. We begin with an overview of developments in ballad layout and typography, and how these related to developments in printed and painted visual media. Then we shall examine the ways that ballad images of the clothed body altered over the course of the seventeenth century and how these, too, were connected with developments in the print market in the later part of the century. As

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this chapter will demonstrate, ballad images provided a visual resonance with ballad texts, and the apparently contradictory ways that ballad texts and ballad images presented dress over time were in fact complementary and connected. ADDRESSING BALLAD PICTURES Scholarship on seventeenth-​ century black-​ letter ballads has, with few exceptions, paid little attention to their pictures. Lyrics, tunes and performances have been granted central importance, while woodcuts have, on the whole, been seen as little more than decorations arranged around the text.3 Indeed, at the outset, it must be acknowledged that images were not necessarily essential to the black-​letter ballad. A relatively small number of black-​ letter sheets survive from the early and later years of the century that carry no images at all, or only tiny ones.4 While the black-​letter ballad medium could, in theory, have existed perfectly well without images, the text was the sine qua non. Even if an illiterate ballad-​buyer might have bought a ballad for its picture, without a thought for its text,5 if it had no text, it was no ballad. For this reason, there will always be, or perhaps ought to be, something of a bias toward texts in the study of ballads. Yet, if ballad texts must be considered the main work, ballad images were not therefore merely secondary or superfluous within the black-​letter sheet. As the Derridean concepts of the supplement and the parergon suggest, items which are considered superadded to a work, or detachable from it, can also reconstitute it and appear essential to it.6 The paradox of the supplement is that ‘it is a surplus, a plenitude enriching another plenitude’, and yet it also ‘fills … as if one fills a void’. Contemporary comment suggests that seventeenth-​century audiences expected woodcuts on ballads: in 1648, the Mercurius Britanicus asked, ‘How many ballads would sell without a formal woodcut?’7 As ballad scholars Alexandra Franklin and Angela McShane have proposed, the fact that woodcuts appear at all in the black-​letter ballad sheet represents a significant financial outlay on the publisher’s part, and should invite closer attention to them.8 McShane argues that the images were: consciously chosen as part of the publishing investment and in order to  target buyers in the market … woodcuts were not unique to any publisher or publishing group; they were a shared resource, and must

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have belonged to the printer or perhaps a group of printers. So often dismissed by scholars as ‘irrelevant’ or even ‘preposterous’, woodcuts were by no means an unimportant part of ballad production. Re-​use of images does not mean inappropriate use … the images were clearly valued by ballad buyers.9 As we will explore, woodcut images remained a central component of black-​ letter ballads throughout the seventeenth century: indeed, they were used with increasing prominence as time went on. These points notwithstanding, scholarly marginalisation of the ballad image has often been justified on the basis that woodcut blocks were reused across different ballads over many decades. Thus, while ballad texts clearly cover an extremely wide range of subjects, ballad images by comparison can seem repetitive and less varied. Yet the reason it was effective to reuse woodblocks to accompany different texts, is that the images were malleable in meaning: they were flexible enough to create, echo and amplify a variety of symbolic allusions. This ‘recycling’ may have been an inheritance from the historical overlap between manuscript and print illustration. The pattern books used for manuscript illumination had allowed, if not invited, visual repetition  –​a tendency that, with the advent of print, was facilitated by the ease of reusing woodblocks alongside moveable type.10 It was in the print publisher’s interests to continue this pattern of recycling:  the narrow profit margins of the black-​letter ballad made it worthwhile to trade, swap and reuse the same blocks, rather than commission new ones too frequently. The lack of pictorial copyright, along with the hardwearing nature of the woodblocks used for printing, also facilitated this practice: woodworm holes on many of the images betray their longevity. Yet, even if certain blocks were repeatedly employed over a long period of time, choice still had to be exercised in the selection of images for any given ballad sheet. It is impossible to be certain whether an image was chosen simply because of a lack of alternative, or because it was expected to be popular or believed to combine effectively with other images. In any event, it seems safe to assume that publishers selected and commissioned blocks, in the belief that they would help ensure the commercial success of their ballad products. Alexandra Franklin describes ballad printing as ‘an art of collage, joining texts of old and new songs to woodcuts of various provenances’,11 underscoring the fact that individual images cannot be assigned to any particular publisher’s output, or studied in the hopes of finding meaning through

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some kind of ‘authorship’. In Michel de Certeau’s terms, ballad images are therefore not ‘strategic’ but ‘tactical’, since they have no ‘institutional localisation’.12 Like de Certeau’s buyer, who combines a variety of information to decide what to purchase –​‘what she has in the refrigerator, the tastes, appetites, and moods of her guests, the best buys and their possible combinations’ –​the ballad publisher had to consider the woodblocks already owned, market popularity, the rapport between text and image, the availability of new motifs and the possible effect of various new and existing combinations. In this way, the arrangement of ballad images on a sheet can be seen as bricolage, not so much a clear and systematisable ‘discourse’ but rather a series of seized opportunities and improvisations. Although de Certeau uses this terminology to describe the activities of consumers rather than producers, his account helps us to imagine the ways in which the publishers and printers of ballad sheets had to make creative decisions about the perceived desires of a variety of consumer-​recipients. Yet one important question remains:  in light of their reuse across long periods of time, how can ballad images be understood in relation to their texts? A great deal turns on what is deemed to constitute a ‘relevant’ relationship between text and image. Writers on cheap print typically place images on a continuum between ‘meaningful’ and ‘decorative’, often on the basis of whether the image was used elsewhere or not.13 However Dagmar Freist and Robert Scribner argue that images played a part in bridging the gap between the literate and illiterate, creating symbolic connections and references.14 The way these symbolic associations worked, developed in important ways in the seventeenth century. Sheila O’Connell has contrasted the ‘naturalism’ of the better sorts of seventeenth-​century art with an older, ‘emblematic’ approach to illustration found in ballads, which was used to ‘reinforce the word or to visualize abstract ideas’ rather than express the text precisely.15 This hypothesis, which focuses on the choices made by the publisher and questions the congruence of meaning between images and text, will be looked at in more detail below. Once the relationship between images and text on a ballad is assumed to have had significance for contemporary viewers, a more positive examination of ballad layout can then ensue. Here, we refer again to Paul Jobling’s discussion of twentieth-​century fashion spreads. Using his idea of ‘intra-​ ­textuality’, we can operate on the assumption that texts and images on a page should be considered as a symbiotic or ‘composite’ whole, in which meanings ‘accrue from the relationship of one picture to another and of words to images’.16 As such, ballad images will here be studied as part of a wider

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arrangement, or compound, of text and image. After all, regardless of how often woodcuts were reused, in practice any illustrated black-​letter ballad is always seen –​even at a glance –​as a text-​and-​image composition.17 With this proviso in mind, we will nevertheless redress the balance somewhat in favour of ballad images, paying more specific attention to the visual layout and effects of ballad sheets than in the two previous chapters. We shall also use another of Jobling’s terms of analysis, ‘inter-​textuality’:  the ways in which words and images in a fashion spread ‘appear either to evoke or quote other media’.18 We shall explore how, in parallel with the practice of visual recycling, both the overall appearance of the sheets and the images within them developed during the seventeenth century, changing the ways in which the clothed body was portrayed. This in turn will suggest that, far from being a kind of ‘popular’ subculture of print, divorced from wider developments in the visual arts, ballads tracked shifts in the conventions of depicting fashion and the body that occurred in other, ‘higher’ visual media such as portrait painting.

BALLADS, BOOKS AND WOODCUTS Ballads were always firmly connected with other illustrated texts. From early on, ballads used images that were shared with printed books, even much older ones. For example, Margaret Aston has shown how twelve images from the 1572 Bishops’ Bible were used to illustrate seven ballads between 1603 and 1635.19 Similarly, an image from the book of Esdras (Nehemiah) in the Miles Coverdale Bible of 1535, depicting travellers approaching a large city, was used (or copied) to illustrate a religious ballad of c.1620, The Historie of the Prophet Jonas, telling the story of ‘The repentance of Niniuie that great Citie’ (fig. 3.1).20 As well as appropriating much older prints, ballads could borrow from more elevated ones. For example, in 1612, the ballad The Good Shepheards Sorrow for the Death Ef [sic] His Beloued Sonne lamented the death of Prince Henry with an image inspired by a portrait limning by Isaac Oliver.21 Casting the grieving King James I as a ‘good shepheard’ who has lost his son, the far right-​hand image was copied from, or shared a source with, William Hole’s engraving for the book Poly-​Olbion, published in the same year (fig. 3.2).22 This engraving, in turn, was taken after a miniature portrait of the prince in the royal collection (later burned at Whitehall).23 In this way, a ballad image could disseminate to the populace a royal image that had been originally commissioned for the court.

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However, Henry’s portrait translated into print carried very different cultural significance, depending on whether it was copied into engraving or woodcut. Although woodcut was the more established printing technique,24 by the second half of the sixteenth century, Antony Griffiths observes, a ‘hierarchy of print media’ had emerged, with the intaglio processes of engraving and then etching at the top, and woodcut ‘at the bottom by a long way’.25 The most obvious reason for this scale of value was the higher cost of producing engravings compared to woodcut. The metal plates used for engravings and etchings degenerated quickly; an engraved plate might make at most three thousand impressions, and a finely etched one, just a few hundred.26 In contrast, a woodblock could make ‘an almost unlimited number of impressions’ and last for generations;27 hence it was far more economical. Intaglio printing was also a much more complicated process than woodcut, requiring higher skill and better quality paper to produce it; before 1640 the least expensive engraved print cost at least six times more than a ballad.28 As well as the economic differences between the intaglio and woodcut processes, by the sixteenth century, a creative separation had also developed, whereby commissioned artists tended to experiment with intaglio processes for their stylistic refinement, while market-​focused printers continued to use woodcut for its economic benefits.29 Thus, in the first half of the seventeenth century, while engraving and etching were used for commissioned artworks in England  –​patronised by the likes of the Duke of Arundel and Charles I30 –​woodcuts generally remained as anonymous images, used within items like almanacs, chapbooks and ballads, or for widely consumed books like the Bible and Foxes’s Acts and Monuments. Artists’ preferences for intaglio was partly due to the respective visual potential of woodcut and engraving. Intaglio plates can register very fine details, with depth of groove as well as width affecting varieties of tone; the engraved portrait of Prince Henry evidently allows for some chiaroscuro in the modelling of the face and legs. Furthermore, the placing of a design onto an intaglio plate is a technique reasonably similar to that of drawing. Although a woodcut can, in theory, be manipulated in various ways to imitate the tonal variety of intaglio print,31 by comparison it is a binary affair. Gouging out sections of a woodblock requires a more sculptural approach than engraving a copper plate and, like sculpture, obliges the cutter to create the image negatively.32 In the ballad portrait of Prince Henry, the woodcut relies upon outlining, which is particularly evident in the delineation of the nose and the much flatter appearance of the body armour. These

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Fig. 3.1a  First page of the Book of Esdras from Miles Coverdale’s translation of the Bible, Marburg?, 1535. © The British Library Board.

strong, relatively simple lines and consistently stark black-​and-​white contrasts would have been highly visible across considerable distances. As early as the mid-​1400s, woodcut had been typically used for cheap playing cards and small religious images.33 For ballads, such bold definition would probably have permitted an illiterate customer at the back of a crowd to identify a specific ballad as it was sung, even before approaching the ballad-​monger to purchase it. Being sold on busy streets, this would have promoted the quick identification of individual sheets, as well as recognition from afar, and helped each new ballad to be a successful commodity.

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Fig. 3.1b  The second part of The Historie of the Prophet Ionas, c.1620, PB 1.28–​9. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge.

Owing to their different production techniques, then, Prince Henry’s portrait had to be adapted more drastically in a woodcut than an engraving; this divergence was made additionally greater thanks to the specific requirements of the woodblock printing processes. While there is considerable detail delineated in the ballad portrait of Prince Henry, it does not reproduce the same delicate lines of the engraving, since, unlike embedded intaglio grooves, very narrow relief shapes on the block would not be strong enough to stand up to the pressure of the press. Perhaps this was just as well for the

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Fig. 3.2a  Michael Drayton, Poly-​Olbion, ed. John Selden 1612; 1622, p. 4. The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

seventeenth-​century cutter, since woodblock images were incised with sharp knives, rather than specialised engraving tools.34 Furthermore, woodcut prints could not incorporate large areas of blank, unprinted paper. Where the engraved image of Prince Henry is surrounded by a large area of unprinted white space and only a thin border, the cropped ballad picture is hemmed in by a strong black outline and two strips of printer’s lace. This arrangement was a classic characteristic of woodcut, which helped to balance the press, protect the edges of the central relief design and distribute pressure equally across the sheet. For

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Fig. 3.2b  The second part of Robert Johnson, The Good Shepheards Sorrow for the Death Ef [sic] His Beloued Sonne, 1612, PB 1.352–​3. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge.

this reason, ballad woodcuts often also contain small details in otherwise blank spaces, such as flights of birds in the sky, so that these relief details in the block could ‘float’ the paper evenly above the block.35 On the other hand, finely detailed designs could potentially pose problems, because they were much more likely to collect thick, greasy printer’s ink in the small spaces between the relief.36 Perhaps for this reason, the ballad cutter did not depict in detail the embroidered trunk hose that is intricately described in Henry’s engraved portrait.

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Another important difference between intaglio and woodcut portraits is their relationship to text publishing. Henry’s engraved portrait appeared in Poly-​Olbion as a separate page inserted into the text, since the metal intaglio plates used in production required (like etchings) a special rolling press that was not compatible with standard text-​printing. In contrast, in The Good Shepheards Sorrow, the woodcut portrait is ‘framed-​in’ with the text, that is, inked and printed together with the moveable type in a letterpress.37 Woodcut and text printing were both relief techniques, which made them highly compatible. It is for this reason that illustrated texts with very large print-​runs –​widely consumed or cheap items like Bibles, ballads and almanacs –​were routinely illustrated with woodblock printing. As such, Henry’s portrait in woodcut captured a royal likeness, not just for a wide audience, but also within a medium of humble associations. Thus, although the limitations of woodcut made it less attractive to artists seeking to work in a manner akin to fine drawing or painting, it remained a distinctive characteristic of ballads, and other inexpensive products. Its bold and recognisable images could be shuffled, reassembled and transferred between publications with an ease inimitable by engraving or etching. In this way, although woodcut images appear in some ways supplementary to the ballad text, they actually helped to constitute a distinctive black-​letter ballad ‘character’ within the market of print. The great durability of woodblocks, moreover, together with their suitability for simultaneous printing with moveable type, allowed and encouraged the practice of combining and recombining word and image. Ballads exploited this quality par excellence. Since, however, the characteristic combination of word and woodcut originated in the traditions of the book trade, it will be useful to explore just how ballads related to, and appropriated, these traditions.

IMAGES IN BOOKS AND BALLADS Ballad images of the first decades of the seventeenth century did not only borrow from religious books and engravings, as we have seen, but also borrowed from (or shared sources with) popular wood-​cut illustrated books on romantic or comic themes. For example, the title page image for the satirical book Haec  Vir, or the Womanish Man (1620) later reappeared as an illustration to the ballad A Most Delicate, Pleasant, Amorous, New Song (fig. 3.3).38 The female figure’s gown and petticoat contrast with her spurs, handgun and sword,​ which were items typically carried by men, and underscore the satire on

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cross-​dressing in the book. However, in relation to the ballad story, such accoutrements lend comic emphasis to the unattainability of the hunting goddess Cynthia mentioned in the ballad,39 and humorously update the attributes traditionally associated with her. In a similar manner, ballads of the 1620s, 30s and even 1670s reused woodblocks from a much earlier book, The Contemplation of Mankinde (1571), re-​purposing their associations in apposite and sometimes comic ways.40 But this again touches on the question of what kind of text/​image connection can now be deemed a meaningful one, or would have been considered meaningful at the time. Given the limited amount of scholarship done on the precise relationship between texts and woodcut images on seventeenth-​century ballads, we will need to turn briefly to some of the work done on publications of the previous century. James Knapp has argued that ballads inherited the types of illustration that gradually ceased to be used for book production towards the end of the sixteenth century, and indeed many of the problems besetting their study are similar.41 Like ballads, woodcuts in printed books that are repeated or perceived to be ‘anachronistic or inaccurate’ have been denigrated as meaningless.42 Ruth Samson Luborsky sets out to address this problem in her discussion of Tudor book illustration, describing three categories of connection between illustration and text: ‘decorative (or ornamental), general (or typical) and direct’. In this scheme, ‘decorative’ images are merely there to fill space attractively, ‘general’ images are ‘appropriate to but not specific to the whole text or to its parts’, while ‘direct’ refers to an image that ‘depicts a particular textual reference, whether by visual translation or by commentary’.43 Yet for all this, Luborsky is pessimistic about readers’ appreciation for repeated images because they sent ‘mixed signals’, creating a ‘disjunction’ between text and image.44 With regard to Bible woodcuts in ballads, Margaret Aston argues for an even greater loss of meaning, describing a ‘kind of pictorial annulment’, since, ‘[w]‌ith the obliteration of their original context these ballad woodcuts could only be read as disembodied icons, valued for ornament rather than for specific content’.45 Such contempt for reappropriated cuts implies a preference for images that are commissioned for a single purpose and ‘systematised’ meanings tightly controlled by an author. While we can, of course, no longer be certain how ballad audiences understood Bible cuts in popular ballads, there has recently been a greater willingness on the part of scholars to appreciate and examine the ‘tactical’ choices made, not only by the publisher in using images, but by the consumers who reappropriated them.46 For example, Ann and Mary Collet became famous in the first half of the seventeenth century for cutting up and

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rearranging woodcut scripture illustrations to create ‘biblical scrapbooks’ of collaged text and pictures.47 Repeated images are becoming more accepted as meaningful aspects of a published work and not solely as a financially prudent saving on the part of a publisher.48 Martha Driver suggests that fifteenth-​and sixteenth-​century printed books replicated ‘factotum’ figures to represent ‘Everyman and Everywoman’ characters, which reappeared in print for over sixty years, helping to encourage readers precisely through their familiarity.49 Thus the history of woodcut consumption in England –​to which ballad production was closely connected –​had constructed or presupposed a habit of viewing, which saw the same images of human figures repeated in a

Fig. 3.3a  Frontispiece to Haec Vir, or the Womanish Man, 1620. © The British Library Board.

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variety of contexts. By the same token, this invited audiences to imagine a variety of different characters in different narratives, using the same woodblock. It is helpful therefore to see ballad publishers’ decisions to use certain cuts for certain texts in light of this type of connection between text and image, rather than with an expectation that images ought to have been created for each new published text. Nevertheless, Tessa Watt observes an increasingly close connection between image and text during the seventeenth century, in which even ‘generic’ or much-​used figures were ‘applied with care to fit the ballad’.50 It would seem then that the tactics, or decisions, of the ballad publishers were becoming increasingly image-​conscious in the seventeenth century.

Fig. 3.3b  The first part of A Most Delicate, Pleasant, Amorous, New Song, 1625, PB 1.254–​5. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge.

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The expressive function of the connection between text and image on ballad sheets is also evident from merely glancing through large ballad collections. Franklin and McShane, who have surveyed very large numbers of ballads, both comment on the ways that certain types of image accompany certain textual themes, as if to ‘brand’ or mark the ballad as a particular type.51 Even the ballads illustrated thus far in this book attest to an obvious rapport between text and image. Detailed depiction of decorated armour in The Good Shepheards Sorrow (Fig. 3.2b) helps to evoke the princely subject of the ballad, directing the pastoral connotation of the title’s ‘shepheard’ towards courtly associations. The combination of a long gown and spurs on one figure in the woodcut to A Most Delicate, Pleasant, Amorous, New Song (Fig. 3.3b) infuses the ballad with a sense of subverted gender roles, even more potent for those who had seen the frontispiece to Haec   Vir (Fig. 3.3a). While not strictly delimiting meaning, then, these woodcuts shaped audiences’ expectations towards a particular range of possible associations. In this way, ballad images helped to determine the emotion or the tone of the whole ballad, which, given ballads’ emphasis on arousing an immediate response from their audiences,52 was a particularly important role. In the printing press, ballad pictures were created by woodblocks that were quite separate from the lyrics’ moveable type, but on actual ballad sheets, images and texts were joined in intra-​textual signification. Furthermore, with their inter-​textual links and references to other visual sources, woodblock cuts created emotive echoes of meaning, or visual resonance, rather as the song tunes listed for each ballad provided aural associations through music. Moreover, the repetition, reuse and appropriation of images in woodcut-​illustrated publications underlines the strong links between ballad production and the broader print market, a theme whose development will be explored further below. This close connectedness is important to bear in mind as we turn to explore the visual development of the ballad format over the course of the seventeenth century, and how it related to a yet wider market for images.

THE LOOK OF BALLAD SHEETS Overall, early seventeenth-​century ballads have a relatively high ratio of text to image.53 In some cases, just one small woodcut perches atop four columns of closely laid text, as in Sir Walter Rauleigh His Lamentation (1618, fig. 3.4).54 Positioned above the first ballad stanzas, like an illuminated letter marking the beginning of a manuscript text, this illustration does not

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Fig. 3.4  Sir Walter Rauleigh His Lamentation, 1618, PB 1.110–​11. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge.

necessarily attempt to illustrate any specific aspect of the lyrics. Rather, it evokes an aspect of it: in this case, the ship may recall Walter Raleigh’s sea voyages. While this ship picture has almost certainly not been cut especially for the ballad, its use is relevant to the story as an allusion to one of its key themes and a symbol for one aspect of Raleigh’s life.

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Fig. 3.5  Any Thing for a Quiet Life, c.1620, PB 1.378–​9. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge.

Images on ballads became increasingly numerous in the early seventeenth century; whereas only a quarter of sixteenth-​century ballads were illustrated, pictures appear on five-​sixths of ballads printed between 1600 and 1640. Tessa Watt describes the conventional appearance of the black-​letter ballad as it was established by the 1620s: a two-​part folio sheet ‘with a row of woodcuts along the top’.55 A typical layout shows a series of separate cuts

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Fig. 3.6  A Batchelers Resolution, 1629, PB 1.232–​3r. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge.

with male and female figures, placed at full-​length above the text, sometimes divided by printer’s lace, as for example in Any Thing for a Quiet Life (c.1620, fig. 3.5).56 This format remained popular from the 1610s to the 1630s, with well-​ dressed figures in farthingales and plumed hats appearing and reappearing, much in the manner that ‘Everyman’ and ‘Everywoman’ figures did in

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Fig. 3.7  The Young-​Womans Complaint, c.1655–60, Wood E 25(37). The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

fifteenth-​and sixteenth-​century printed books.57 In such cases, a connection between any one illustrated figure and any one character or aspect of the narrative song, is rarely ‘direct’ –​that is, tailored precisely to that particular song alone –​but they visually animate the text’s protagonists. In such ballads, there is little apparent interaction between the figures themselves; Any Thing depicts characters wearing clothing from different eras, which appear to have been drawn from different sources: each has a different foreground and at least one appears to have been borrowed from an earlier woodcut-​ illustrated book.58 A ballad sheet thus registered something of the experience of seeing dress in the street: a mix of clothing dating from different periods that would continue to be worn. In A Batchelers Resolution (1629, fig. 3.6) there are glimpses of a greater connection or rapport between images of the human figure: the separate left-​hand cuts show a male/​female couple turned towards each other, while the right-​hand cut portrays a man and woman gesturing with their arms toward each other in the same space.59

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Fig. 3.8  The Famous Flower of Serving-​Men, 1664, Douce 1(83b). The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

Between the 1640s and 1660s, size was the one major change in the black-​letter ballad format: they began to be printed landscape-​wise on half-​ sheet folio paper, known as ‘pot sheets’.60 The advantage of this for the publisher was that it reduced the primary production cost of paper by half, while the standard ballad sale price of a penny remained unchanged. Although old blocks were reused on these mid-​century sheets, the updating of dress fashions indicates that new blocks were also created regularly. For example, ballads of the 1650s such as The Springs Glory,61 and The Young-​Womans Complaint (fig. 3.7)62 show roughly contemporary fashions (described further below). Yet despite these developments, ballads at mid-​century show an overall similarity to the presentation of the human figure in the 1620s and 30s: the body continues to appear at full-​length and on a relatively small scale.

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Fig. 3.9  The Unbelieving Maiden, 1684–​6, PB 3.111. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge.

From around the 1650s, however, a significant change began in black-​ letter ballad pictures. The introduction of oval portrait shapes brought the human figure much closer to the beholder than in most previous images. In ballads such as The Young Man’s Tryal (1655),63 What Is That to You (1663),64 and The Famous Flower of Serving-​Men (1664, fig.  3.8),65 the figures appear at bust-​ or three-​quarter-​length in oval frames. This places greater emphasis on the human face, and the upper body is drawn closer to the viewer so that its dress can be seen in more detail. With the lower half of the body cut off from view, the priority accorded to the surface decoration of the figure is greatly reduced, while the face and upper torso are made to ‘stand in’ for the whole body. This in turn also creates a much stronger identification with the character, inviting a closer attention to facial expression and thereby prioritising ‘inner’ or emotional truth over sartorial expression –​a transformation in the registering of the figure, which will be discussed further below.66 The popularity of the portrait bust continued through the 1670s and into the early 1690s.

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Fig. 3.10a  The Lovers Invitation, 1684–​6, PB 4.46. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College Cambridge.

Most black-​letter broadsides from this period continued to be printed horizontally on half-​sheet folios, a format which, in retaining these smaller dimensions, also changed the relationship between images and text. The reduced size of the ballad sheet, together with the comparatively smaller quantity of printed lyrics, meant that woodcut images now took up a greater proportion of the sheet and thus a greater physical proportion of the ballad’s signification than it had done before. Another change was that titles appeared in much larger, white-​letter type, which meant that a specific ballad could be easily identified at a distance by the combination of its title and the woodcut images placed immediately beneath it. The largest and most significant images were usually placed below the title on the left hand side so that, if rolled from right to left, the title and image together made a kind of ‘headline’ or distinctive identity for the sheet. Pictures thus

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Fig. 3.10b  After Pieter Borsseler, Catherine of Braganza, 1662–​85, engraving. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

developed a stronger position within the ‘intra-​textual’ relationship of word and image and therefore in the construction of the ballad’s overall theme. In this way, the likely contents of each individual ballad were advertised to prospective buyers at point of sale, helping individual sheets to compete in the burgeoning late-​century market for print. At the same time, bust-​length images in ballads created a more self-​conscious presentation of the body, both by evoking the artificiality of the framed portrait and by bringing subjects into closer rapport with the viewer and each other. In Trap, or,TheYoung Lass (1675),67 a floral frame dominates the ballad; within it, a woman’s gaze arrests the beholder, in a much more direct manner than earlier full-​ length images could engineer. The picture appears again later in The Unbelieving Maiden (1684–​6), this time paired with a separate but complementary cut (fig. 3.9).68 Such an arrangement is typical of the paired bust-​length portraits appearing in ballads around this time, with an increasing emphasis on male/​

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female couples: matching frames and inwardly turned bodies set up an obvious reciprocity between them.69 In addition to the oval format, smaller, rounder portrait images appeared in the 1670s. One of the earliest of this type is The Pensive Prisoners Apology (1675; see fig. 5.3),70 in which a man and woman are shown at bust length, but set within smaller frames that allow little background between each figure and its surround. In the 1680s, these images were also set up in rows, as for example in Content and Rich (1684–​6),71 or in The Lovers Invitation (1684–​6, fig. 3.10a),72 discussed further below. Here, the woodcuts are placed much closer together than the rows of full-​length figures in earlier ballads. And since full-​length images do not disappear from ballads, this format is by contrast all the more distinct for its restricted shape and closer focus on the head and shoulders. Like the painted portrait miniature, bust-​length ballad images prioritised the depiction of the face over dress,73 inviting the viewer to come close and examine ‘in hand near unto the eye’.74

MINIATURES AND BUST-​L ENGTH PORTRAITS As discussed above, Isaac Oliver’s painted miniature probably formed the basis for what is today a rare ballad portrait of Prince Henry. But did ballad publishers afterwards intentionally imitate the portrait miniature format? If not –​then what were the likely sources of this visual development in ballads? Certainly, the miniature would appear in many ways a medium far removed from cheap print. Originally a small-​scale watercolour technique for medieval manuscript illumination on vellum, miniatures or ‘limnings’ in England belonged to elite cultures of learning and wealth. As print began to compete with manuscript, limners diversified to make small pictures as separate objects, such as images of saints mounted in precious metals, for personal religious use. Even after the English Reformation prohibited the depiction of saints, limning continued as a medium to express devotion and loyalty to an elevated person. Artists like Hilliard and Holbein created secular pictures of the monarch or courtiers that were encased in jewellery settings and worn on the body.75 Thus the miniature became a kind of love token, or expression of emotion,76 commissioned at court throughout the seventeenth century, even during the Interregnum.77 By the first decades of the seventeenth century, a bust-​length oval format was also widely popular in England for oil portraits on panel, giving greater attention to the facial features.78

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It is impossible to say whether most ballad buyers would have associated the new small form of ballad images with its origins in manuscripts and courtly jewels. It is principally the size and shape of these oval and round woodcuts that recall the format of miniature painting or ‘limning’, rather than any other quality. Yet, as we have seen, woodcut as a medium simply could not imitate the delicate delineation, tonal subtlety, colour or value of the miniature. The one other shared characteristic was the fact that, like miniatures, ballads could be carried on the person or held in the hand, creating the closest proximity between the image, and the body and clothing of its owner. Such familiar handling of print was common since the fifteenth century, when pictorial woodcuts were pasted into deed and travelling boxes, and even sewn into clothes.79 In this sense, ballad woodcuts resonated with both the spiritual devotion once accorded to pre-​reformation religious cuts and the courtly or erotic devotion accorded to the monarch or lover represented in miniatures. If the small bust-​length format did not transfer directly from miniatures to ballads, it is likely –​given the already close connection we have seen between ballad and book publishing –​that ballads appropriated it from printed book illustrations of ‘heads’, which in turn were influenced by emerging portrait traditions of the Renaissance. Marcia Pointon traces the form back to the Roman portrait bust, in which the head and shoulders became an acceptable synecdoche for the whole body. Collectors such as John Evelyn, Elias Ashmole and Samuel Pepys sought out printed ‘heads’ and assembled them almost as social histories of England.80 Such collectors thus took advantage of a publishing trend that had started in England around the 1590s: a marked increase in engravings in printed books, and the inclusion of the author’s portrait, in the style of an oval miniature, as a title-​page.81 Small oval portraits were also used to illustrate the biographies of illustrious characters in history books,82 but since books were not routinely bound before sale, such illustrations and frontispieces were likely also available as loose sheets for separate purchase or advertising.83 In this way, portraits of kings and authors would have been more visible and accessible than present-​day evidence of expensive bound volumes would suggest.84 They also offered an ideal new image-​source for ballad publishers to appropriate, while also tracking a shift in ways of seeing the human portrait subject and the concommitant new consumer expectations. Soon afterwards, images of non-​ noble, even unnamed figures were printed in this format. Series of separate, decorative bust-​length prints were made in the 1630s and 40s, in the tradition of Hollar’s etchings of English

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women,85 and during the Civil War, Thomas Glover and Wenceslaus Hollar designed small, engraved portraits of specific individuals. Increased press freedom after 1641,86 as well as fervour for news of wars and military leaders, encouraged publishers to answer an increasing demand for topicality, which favoured fame over status. For example, small oval engraved portraits appeared on a 1646 broadside depicting untitled men amongst Earls and minor gentry.87 Printed portraits could furnish a speedy response to demand for new images of the individuals involved in changing conflict situations, copying or reusing old plates and blocks instead of drawing from the life.88 Small bust-​length portrait prints continued to be popular and successful at mid-​century, as attested by printseller Peter Stent’s advertisements which survive from the year 1654. By this time, printmakers (such as Hollar) had lost aristocratic patronage and were almost entirely dependent on book publishers and the print market for their work, which consisted mainly of portrait frontispieces and other illustrations.89 In 1662, Stent listed small pieces of the king, queen, princess and other nobility ‘for to adorn Tobacco-​boxes, much in use’.90 Alexander Globe has estimated that images like these would have cost just a few pennies, affordable to middling and lower sorts of people and certainly not restricted to elites. These small images demonstrate how the print market was moving ‘away from connoisseur craftsmanship to the mass production of small, inexpensive pieces’.91 The likenesses of noble persons, which had once been reserved exclusively for the court, could thus be bought and personally appropriated by a broad audience. Ballad pictures were also copied from, or were inspired by, satirical printed portrait busts that proliferated from mid-​century with the lapse of print censorship in 1641 and increased interest in political print in the 1640s and 50s. For example, the oval picture in The Famous Flower of Serving-​Men (see fig. 3.8)92 closely resembles a bust-​length oval image of ‘vice’, originally engraved by Thomas Cross and used to illustrate the conduct book Youths Behaviour (fig. 3.11),93 here opening the section entitled, A Discourse upon some Innovations of Habits and Dressings; against powdring of Hair; Naked-​Breasts, Black Spots, and other unseemly Customes. With its intimate bust-​length portrait design, and clear depiction of feminine ‘dressings’, the oval picture resonates with the ballad’s narrative of intimate revelation, whereby a ‘servingman’ reveals she is a cross-​dressed ‘Lady fair’ before marrying her employer. Any association made by the audience with the ‘vice’ character of the conduct book would merely have bolstered the ballad’s sexual frisson. As we have seen, then, by representing the whole body by means of the head, ballads created a new immediacy for the human subject. As the head

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Fig. 3.11  Engraved illustration by Thomas Cross in Francis Hawkins, Youths Behaviour, 1652; 1661. The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

became, in visual terms, the locus of identity, this downplayed the subject’s ‘social’ identity or position as expressed in clothes. All this was a development related to changes in the wider visual arts in Britain, but delayed by almost half a century. However, there were other visual conventions in ballads that played down the importance of clothes for human identity in different ways, to which we will turn now.

PICTURING GARMENTS AND THE ‘HERALDIC’ CONVENTION Changes in fashion offer an important tool for the dating of ballads: although clothing styles often appear decades after their currency had waned, they can suggest a terminus post quem for sheets. Over the course of the century, however, there appeared new modes of depicting of the human figure within the new bust-​length format in ballads, which changed not just the garments

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illustrated, but also the way of delineating clothing in the first place. We now turn to examine this convention, as it originated in painted portraiture in England, and in the context of the new styles of clothing that appear in ballads during the seventeenth century. Ballads printed before the Civil Wars reveal clear details of men’s dress. For example, in Any Thing for a Quiet Life (see fig. 3.5), and A Batchelers Resolution (see fig.  3.6), male figures are almost always shown wearing or carrying hats, sometimes emphasised by feather decoration. Prominent ruffs or standing collars at the neck are supported by smooth, firmly fitted doublets, often with voluminous collared cloaks hanging from the shoulder. Breeches are narrow ‘venetians’ or full ‘slops’, below which shoes are flat or heeled and sometimes decorated with circular shoe-​roses. Figures appear fairly static and decorated, and images of women are depicted similarly. In A Batchelers Resolution (1629), the upper bodies of the male and female figures bear a close resemblance to one another. The woman’s hair is brushed up and away from her face and neck and adorned with feathers, not unlike the man’s plumed hat. Like men, women in ballads wear ruffs or standing collars and their bodices have the same smooth and straight contours as doublets. For both sexes, bodies are well-​covered and clothing protrudes from them in feathers, starched lace or the full folds of cloaks and skirts. Indeed, it is principally the skirts, sometimes jutting outward with wide French or ‘tub’ farthingales, and fans, that denote the female sex. These immobile, highly decorated figures were typical of Tudor and early Stuart painted portraiture, which usually favoured clothing over facial likeness. Nicholas Hilliard’s treatise on limning advocated depicting sitters’ garments so precisely that the painting ‘seemeth to be the thing itself’,94 yet his portraits of Queen Elizabeth were famous for treating facial features as an impassive mask.95 This approach continued to characterise miniature and full-​length portraiture into the early seventeenth century.96 Ellen Chirelstein describes this artistic convention as ‘heraldic’: an approach to the subject that constructs a picture ‘not as a view into another world … but as a flat heraldic field, influenced by the non-​illusionistic ordering of heraldic shields’. Clothing delineated in heraldic painted portraits  –​such as gold thread, embroidered silk, fur or fine lace –​operates as a kind of social index, much as heraldic quarterings referred to specifically ranked families. Such portraiture evokes nobility and ancient lineage, keeping a strict division between real characters –​portrayed in fixed, iconic poses –​and mythic figures, who appear with more physical mobility and fluidity.97 The heraldic convention was not necessarily restricted to depictions of the nobility: as Tarnya Cooper has shown, painted portraits of the middling

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sorts and members of Elizabethan and Jacobean urban elites also evince its ‘elaborate decorative accuracy’.98 Furthermore, Tara Hamling argues that the heraldic approach was like biblical symbolism, very widely understood and valued, being associated with commercial urban signboards, and church and domestic ornament, as well as portraiture.99 In ballad images printed during or after the 1640s and 50s, a full-​length format is still often used, but certain changes are evident. For both sexes, the overall impression is of a softer fullness in the clothing, a replacement of upward-​or outward-​tending structures with a sloping, downward fall of hair and necklinen, and the looser, less angular shape of breeches and gowns. Approximations of spiky reticella lace, represented by jagged lines in ballads like A Batchelers Resolution, now appear as rounded scalloping shapes, seen in ballads such as What Is That to You?, registering the fashion for softer, bobbin lacemaking techniques in the 1630s.100 New types of clothing are introduced too. Men’s hats now appear with broader brims and without feathers; collars become ‘falling collars’.101 Doublets appear fuller, with larger sleeves, while breeches are slimmer and leather knee boots with spurs are more ubiquitous. Women are now shown with hair long to the shoulders and plain neckerchiefs or wide flat neck collars. Sleeves are fuller yet shorter, showing the forearm, while gowns are full but more draped than stiffened in shape. Folding fans, tabbed bodices and necklaces appear. The new types of clothing depicted in these images show that ballad publishers were keen to register novel fashions. These fashions created a softer silhouette, but were depicted in much the same stiff, detailed way as appeared in pre-​Civil War ballads. After mid-​century, however, ballads depict new kinds of fashion that in the period were associated with a greater retreat from intricacy, stiffness and formality. In images of men, the dominant feature of the head changes from being the hat, to the hair or the wig, often shown at shoulder length or longer. The Forsaken Lovers Resolution depicts both a full-​length and a bust-​length man, both of whom have hair that reaches below the shoulders (1678–​80, fig.  3.12).102 This ballad also highlights the difference between men wearing their hair long and the fashion for wigs, which became increasingly widespread from the early 1660s.103 Where the left-​hand woodcut shows loose long hair, the right-​hand woodcut shows a man wearing the kind of full curls that were the hallmark of wigs in the late seventeenth century. In these ballads and in many ballads of the 1670s and 80s, the hat looks much smaller than in previous decades, and has a much reduced prominence. Not only are hats largely absent from the bust-​length portrait format, but in full-​length images they are frequently held in the hand, or absent altogether. Since, in reality, hats continued to

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Fig. 3.12  Forsaken Lovers Resolution, 1678–​80, PB 3.97. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge.

be worn, and men removed them before social superiors,104 the depiction of a man without a hat may have evoked a sense of social deference or equality between the subject depicted and the viewer. Such images thus created a sense of informality in comparison to earlier pictures of men wearing hats in the 1620s and 30s. Another example of this new informality in Forsaken Lovers Resolution is evident in the left-​hand woodcut depicting a man. This reveals a new type of men’s dress, which was remarked upon by contemporaries. Instead of breeches, doublet and cloak –​the standard garb for men until the Restoration –​ this figure wears an early version of ‘the king’s new fashion’: a smoother, almost triangular silhouette created by a knee-​length vest and coat hanging straight from shoulder to hem, which also covered the breeches. Instituted by Charles II in 1666 after the Great Fire had decimated London, the new fashion was evidently adopted beyond the nobility and became the new norm for male dress.105 Since the vest and coat were ideally to be made of wool, this may have appeared as a step back toward the old ideal that the nobility should wear native-​made cloth to support the economy. In the context of

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recent oppositional politics under James I and Charles I that made ‘a rhetorical denunciation of tyranny and idolatry, luxury and effeminacy’, Charles II’s new fashion can be seen as an attempt to co-​opt critics of the crown before they could begin. In the widespread doubt and anxiety following the Great Fire, the king sartorially re-​aligned himself to the old ideal that ‘gentlemen would lead the nation by their modest example rather than by their magnificence’.106 The looser shape and plainer construction of coats in comparison to doublets thus created a new sense of simplicity in images that depict them. New kinds of women’s clothing are depicted in ballads after the 1670s, which also convey a sense of greater informality. For example, the full-​length figure on the left in the Forsaken Lovers Resolution, a frequently used woodcut, shows a woman with bare forearms, hair curled and tied up on the head, and a stiff, conical bodice with draping skirts over a petticoat. Compared to the styles of the early 1600s, this image reveals a greater amount of bare flesh, a pronounced looseness in the skirts and much less emphasis on surface decoration. Ballads such as The Unbelieving Maiden (see fig. 3.9) depict the mantua, a new T-​shaped garment worn in England from around the late 1670s. The unstiffened mantua fabric was pinned into place on the front of a separate bodice and then draped from the waist, creating full skirts over a petticoat. As such, the new fashions for men and women which ballads depicted were becoming markedly plainer, looser and less decorated.

DRAPERY AND THE ‘CLASSICAL’ CONVENTION However, in addition to the depiction of these new kinds of fashion, ballad images also registered new kinds of artistic representation that overrode the portrayal of specific garments. In The Forsaken Lovers Resolution (see Fig. 3.12), the king’s new fashion on the left stands in contrast to the right-​hand cut, which depicts clothing very differently: a man wears a cravat and indistinct swathes of cloth over his upper body. The gendered associations of the cravat will be examined in Chapter 4, but for the present, the appearance of such indistinct clothing worn below it presents a conundrum –​it covers the upper body, yet the image gives no clear indication of what garments are being worn. Bust-​length images of women also begin to adopt new modes of depicting clothing. For example, the two bust-​length images of women in The Lovers Invitation (see fig. 3.10a) take very different visual approaches. The left-​ hand female bust emphasises specific details of a complicated hairstyle,

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pearl jewellery and décolletage according to the fashion of the 1660s. This was almost certainly appropriated from, or shared a source with, portraits of Catherine of Braganza after Pieter Borsseler (fig. 3.10b). The ballad imitates many of the details of the print, even down to the cross-​shaped jewels pinned to her bodice and the flower-​shaped jewellery in her hair. While the fabrics on the proper left of Catherine’s body are quite indistinct, the smooth, obviously stiffened body of her gown and suggestions of recognisable items (such as stays, bodice, necklace and brooch) counter this effect. All of this, however, is markedly different from the right-​hand bust, in which the entire ensemble is only an indistinct swathe of cloth and what might be four or five pearls. Historians of dress usually categorise loosely defined textiles –​coverings that are difficult to identify as a specific item, interior decoration or garment –​as ‘drapery’. Anne Hollander describes ‘drapery’ as a painterly convention for depicting billows of flowing fabric, used instead of purporting to describe exactly what the sitter is actually wearing. This itself could have a symbolic force: Painted drapery became the clothing of portraits, not of sitters … Cloth placed near the sitter in a portrait could evoke pictorial drapery’s whole past –​the cloth of honour of the Virgin and royalty, the seductively draped undress of Venus and her votaries, the robes of saints and Apostles, the capes of antique heroes.107 However, in order to examine what the conventions of drapery may have meant when translated into ballads, we will need to trace its history in painted portraiture in seventeenth-​century England. After Anthony Van Dyck became painter to the king in 1632, new modes of painted portraiture developed.108 The mid-​century writer William Sanderson described the artist as: The first Painter that e’re put Ladies dresse into a careless Romance. This way suits well to most fancies, and not improperly befits the various modes, that alter with the time … But if we looke upon Paintings of late ages, how ill doth the apparrell in use then, become the Picture now?109 Van Dyck’s portraits prioritised the physical features of the face over the depiction of clothes. Garments were often added into the portrait later, not in order to allow painstaking observation of them, but rather as a secondary stage, in

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which the dress could be somewhat quickly executed and invented where desired.110 While Van Dyck usually kept to whatever was the fashionable silhouette, a reduced attention to the details of contemporary clothing was understood by observers like Sanderson to create a time-​proof image, a painting that in later years would not be marred by the appearance of outdated clothing. This attempt at chronological vagueness in dress also allowed the sitter’s image to incorporate fictional themes and roles, for example classical associations, ‘the sacred and the profane, Arcadian nymphs and shepherdesses, mythological characters’.111 The sitter was therefore to some extent portrayed as if he or she did not belong within the realities of contemporary dress. Thus, the clearly identified luxury goods and clothing that operated as indexical markers of wealth and social standing in the ‘heraldic’ style of portraiture became decreasingly popular as indicators of personal identity. Instead, it was as if Van Dyck took the metaphysical leanings of court masques and incorporated them into portraiture, forming a hybrid identity of fashion, classicism and mythical association. The body in portraiture was now less seen as a decorated surface carrying social meaning than as a naked vehicle for projecting a transcendental identity. Thus increasingly removed from indexical relationship to fine clothes, and seemingly suspended in metaphysical fantasy, these figures in art can no longer be described as ‘heraldic’. In Chirelstein’s account, their greater fluidity and focus on the body is akin to the ‘mythic’ characters in heraldic portraiture.112 In Foucauldian terminology, however, they could also be described as ‘classical’, in that they were developed in the period of Descartes’s philosophy, and paid new attention to the body as a register or ‘map’ of the soul, and questioned the reliability of clothing as sign.113 For the purposes of this study, then, the body in painting was becoming less ‘heraldic’ and increasingly ‘classical’. Although many portrait painters in England continued to depict clearly recognisable garments,114 Van Dyck’s innovation influenced other English and Dutch artists’ approach to the clothed body in portraiture for the rest of the century.115 This was most obviously the case with Peter Lely.116 As the principal artist at court from 1660 until his death in 1680, Lely’s commissions were extremely numerous and, like Van Dyck, he hired drapery painters to paint sitters’ bodies and clothes.117 Lely’s style suggested an even greater looseness in the draperies and paid even less attention to the details of fashionable clothing, allowing his assistants to bypass the labour of copying real clothes, and presumably saving both time and money. Building on the sartorial simplification (and prestige) of Lely

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and Van Dyck, artists Godfrey Kneller and Michael Dahl continued the vogue for draperies in court portraits, but took a more sober, pared-​down approach.118 Flowing fabric became an ideal of moderation; commentators even began to wish that these ‘everlasting’ draperies could be worn in life.119 The popularity of looseness and informality in commissioned portraits paralleled the social superiority which loose or informal dress  –​such as shirts, shifts and night-​gowns  –​conveyed in real life at court. Charles II introduced the ceremonies of lever and coucher, in which his courtiers ritually dressed and undressed him.120 This practice, which continued into the reign of William III, emphasised that the king had no social superiors, since the informality of appearing undressed or half-​dressed was a privilege reserved for meeting social equals or inferiors. Loose gowns or ‘night-​gowns’ were T-​shaped wrapping garments for informal indoor use, increasingly popular from the 1660s; they could be worn during the day by both sexes over a smock or shirt.121 When the diarist John Evelyn saw the king’s mistress Louise de Kéroualle wearing a ‘morning loose garment’ in her ‘bed-​chamber’,122 this merely emphasised the social constraints which meant that he himself, as a non-​noble visitor to the court, had to be fully dressed before he was allowed to enter the palace. Informal fashions worn in reality were sometimes associated by contemporaries with drapery in painting. In his description of Van Dyck’s portrait of Maria Ruthven, Sanderson used a variety of terms for the dress, calling it ‘a Petty-​coate, and Wast-​coate, or morning dresse’, conflating the painterly image with a variety of garments that were all distinctly for informal or indoors use.123 Pepys also made the link between loose gowns and portraiture when he asked his mistress Judith Penington ‘to undress herself into her nightgowne, that I might see how to have her picture drawne carelessly (for she is mighty proud of that conceit)’.124 Whatever relationship painted drapery had to real fashions as worn at court, however, as an artistic convention it altered the way that clothing could work in images as an indicator of identity. This did not mean that clothing in reality ceased to be considered important as a marker of status; rather, the drapery portraiture convention seemed to disavow the importance of fine clothes to a sitter who might, in reality, have been very concerned with fashion. This paradox can be seen clearly if we compare Samuel Pepys’s diary with his contemporaneous portrait by John Hayls (fig. 3.13). The diary suggests that Pepys was constantly aware of sartorial details to be attended to, such as lace collars, gold braiding and cuffs,

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Fig. 3.13  John Hayls, Samuel Pepys, 1666, oil on canvas. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

but the portrait reveals only a plain white linen cravat and a plain brown, ‘Indian’ gown which (his journals reveal) he actually hired for the sitting.125 While the gown may have been an index of informal fashion in its own right, and even a way of showing that one’s life was not spent in manual labour, its enveloping coverage was, crucially, a way of playing down current fashions in order to stand the test of time. In both of Samuel Pepys’s subsequent bust-​length portraits, by Godfrey Kneller in 1689, and John Closterman in the 1690s, he looks remarkably similar, wearing little besides a draped brown gown and a linen cravat. True to his passion for preserving his reputation for posterity, Pepys’s commissions followed the example set by Van Dyck. Thus drapery was itself a fashion in portrait representations, evincing a desire to escape the tyranny of the moment and express the human subject as unchanging and untainted by the passing of time. In Bakhtinian terms, then, such a convention can again be described as ‘classical’, in that it portrays the ‘completed, self-​ sufficient individuality of the given body’ with all signs of growth or degeneration kept hidden.126 Attempting to avoid the

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degeneration or passing of fashion, ‘classical’ drapery portraits focused on the physical body in a bid to express the unchanging identity as hidden within the individual.

DRAPERIES INTO WOODCUT Ballad woodcuts took up the convention of drapery at the very point when, thanks to dramatic increases in uptake in the print market, it had been unmoored from the confines of painting and become a widely affordable and available new image. Until Van Dyck’s death in 1641 his paintings had a muted impact on the London print market, but by the second half of the century, thanks to printsellers such as Peter Stent, printed copies of his portraits found a much wider market and audience.127 Their popularity proved to be remarkably enduring, with engravings of Van Dyck’s ‘countesses’ made in 1660–​1 by Pierre Lombart aimed at reasonably wealthy collectors, but hugely influential on other printmakers.128 This commercial interest in the art of Van Dyck thus served to disseminate and perpetuate the court images of twenty years’ past to a country in the midst of resurrecting court life. Yet while engravings after portrait paintings served to keep the older styles of portrait in circulation –​printsellers’ acquisition of second-​hand plates helped this129 –​they also helped to bring new types of portrait quickly to the attention of a broad audience. Unlike Van Dyck, court artists like Lely and Kneller themselves collaborated with printmakers to circulate their paintings widely via the London print market, which of course increased elite portraits’ visibility beyond the court.130 In the late 1670s, interest in separates was further encouraged when the new graphic medium of mezzotint was introduced, whose novelty inspired a ‘huge vogue’ until about 1685.131 Mezzotint’s arrival coincided with a general surge in the print market, helped on by the lapse in press censorship around the Popish Plot and Exclusion crises. This burgeoning of the print market for images has been compared to a religious reformation, in which the ‘sacred mystery’ of the arts became a common commodity ‘produced, owned, distributed and discussed by many’.132 As Joseph Monteyne argues, ‘papyromania’ seized London, whereby ‘the dominance and uniqueness of painting were clearly challenged by new types of printed and serialized imagery’.133 Paradoxically, then, the well-​established tradition of drapery painting in portraits, with its connotations of timelessness,

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aristocratic undress and the ‘classical’ body, was transformed by its availability in this novel type of print commodity. However, the way that ballads borrowed from mezzotints was not a straightforward copying of the original. Mezzotints listed the artist and sitter beneath their portraits, but ballad portraits separated the copied figure from its original textual identification, thus cancelling out the claims of artist, sitter and date. As Marcia Pointon observes, this moved the image from its anchorage in a particular individual toward a generic type.134 Furthermore, ballad cuts also tended to omit everything from the original portrait except the head and shoulders. For example, in The Forsaken Lovers Resolution (see fig. 3.12), the female portrait image with drapery appears to be taken from, or least shares a common source with, a three-​quarter-​length mezzotint of Princess Mary of Orange, published by Richard Thomson in 1678–​9 after a portrait by Lely (fig. 3.14).135 The ballad replicates the head and shoulders of this portrait in reverse, albeit in looser fashion: curled hair coiffed close to the head, one partially revealed breast, loose folds of drapery and the distinctive jewelled strap which rests on one shoulder and between the breasts. None of these clothing details referred to recognisable garments, but by retaining the distinctive shapes of the hairstyle and jewels in the mezzotint, and dispensing with the more generic details of the lower body, the ballad visually alludes to the portrait. At the same time, focusing on the features of the face created a greater sense of intimacy and proximity with the sitter. What proportion of ballad audiences would have understood that ballad cuts like that on Forsaken Lovers Resolution were copied, if indirectly, from court portrait paintings, is of course impossible to discover. But it is possible to say that the wide circulation of mezzotints made after these courtly portrait paintings, which usually included (as Thomson’s print does) the name of the artist and sitter below the image, were likely to have disseminated an association between ‘undress’ draperies and high social status. As the convention of drapery was ‘translated’ from commissioned, painted portraiture, to market-​ driven mezzotints, and then into ballad woodcuts, it was likely to have been perceived in ballads, not just as a potentially erotic or intimate pose, but as an appearance connected with socially elevated persons. Yet the sartorial vagueness of drapery could also have created an indeterminate identity for the figure, which would therefore have made it versatile for a variety of stories: both the social elevation and the vague identity would have been useful to ballad publishers. Thus, even though it would have been possible, in theory, to recognise the visual elements of a popular portrait copied in a woodcut, the

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Fig. 3.14  After Peter Lely, Princess Mary of Orange, published by Richard Thomson, 1678–​9, mezzotint. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

accurate representation of identifiable fashionable clothing and accessories became less important in many ballad portraits. Clothing was seemingly ‘cut off’ from the body, both by the bust-​length format and by the convention of drapery, even as the convention for depicting the body this way became itself a kind of fashion. As in portrait painting, while drapery styles changed comparatively little, the style of hair (for women and men) and necklinen (for men) became the most changeable and recognisable elements of personal appearance. As such, specific garments ceased to be the pivotal marker of social identity in these ballad images: styles of depiction, rather than the elements of recognisable clothing themselves, now took over as the most important means of constructing the subject of portraiture. Hence various contradictions emerge from ballad images of the figure in the late seventeenth century. The artistic spectacle of the draped body, apparently unreliant upon fashionable commodities, became a visual

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commodity –​thanks in part to the impact of mezzotint and the explosion of the print market in the 1670s and 80s. Ballads circulated a vision of carelessness about dress even as they, too, commodified this convention for the broadest audience of print buyers. Draperies, together with the bust-​length portrait convention, effected a greater focus in ballads upon the head and bust of sitters at the expense of the body and the details of its clothing. The apparent absence of fashionable clothing in these ballad subjects seems, however, to be totally at odds with the contemporary ballads that (as we saw in the previous chapter) celebrated the production and circulation of fashion as a benefit to the country. Why should ballads have adopted portrait conventions that downplay the details of dress, when they were so heavily invested in the concept that fashion could and should proliferate as a freely circulating benefit to the country? In fact, as will be examined in the following section, these apparently contradictory trends formed two sides of the same coin.

RESOLVING THE COMMODITY In order to understand how ballads could disseminate images of seemingly ‘clothes-​less’ drapery at the same time as they produced increasingly positive texts about dress commodities, we need to begin where drapery began  –​ in portrait paintings –​and elucidate the issues surrounding their changing approaches to the human subject. At the outset, Van Dyck’s English draperies were patronised in conjunction with the Neoplatonic ideals that Queen Henrietta Maria promoted at the Caroline court. Ultimately expressed in the masque, Neoplatonism interpreted physical beauty as merely a spur to contemplating the divinely beautiful human soul.136 Portraits which dissolved exact details of fashion (such as lace collars) into draperies that referenced ancient Rome, or the Pastoral mode, or undress, allowed Van Dyck to transport the sitter –​without any of the ‘props’ normally required in a portrait historié –​into a world of fantasy and masque, encompassing ideals and themes beyond their everyday status.137 The visual convention of inexact fashion could therefore evoke a whole variety of meanings which ostensibly favoured the ‘inner’ meaning or soul of the sitter, expressed in a ‘classical’ body, over their social meaning or place as expressed in the decorated surfaces of a ‘heraldic’ body.138 Indeed, seeing the portrait as a kind of bridge over the chasm between the sitter’s appearance and his or her ‘interior’ life may even have been a driver of the fashion

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for collecting portrait ‘heads’.139 This is not to downplay the fact that any sitter with the wealth to commission from Van Dyck and be depicted in draperies was also making something of a social statement; but rather to emphasise that, under Van Dyck’s influence, the visual arts in England began to change the mode in which they conveyed human identity and value.140 The poet Richard Lovelace explicitly praised portraits that, unlike those ‘of old’, which used ‘Hieroglyphicks’ to express meaning, instead showed the ‘interior’ of the person: of an early portrait by Peter Lely of Charles I and the Duke of York he praised, ‘None but my Lilly ever drew a Minde’.141 Even if, as Diana Dethloff observes, the Neoplatonic principles of art at Charles I’s court were read and used in a very different moral and sexual climate after the Restoration,142 the location of the sitter’s identity had nevertheless shifted towards a hidden self –​a self whose significance could no longer be encapsulated primarily in the depiction of clothes. Will Fisher has identified a key cultural shift parallel to this development, whereby persons began to be understood as indivisible, mechanical entities, or ‘individuals’.143 As the human subject began to be understood as located in the mind and imagined in analogy to the idea of the ‘atom’, so the criterion for the subject became its indivisibility, and detachable objects such as clothes became ‘relegated to the realm of the secondary or the superfluous’.144 While late seventeenth-​century portraiture does not fall within Fisher’s purview, in light of his argument, draperies appear firmly opposed to the idea that specific clothes could constitute identity. With the location of the self no longer perceived to be so strongly rooted in the social and divinely ordered hierarchy, but increasingly understood to reside in the mind or soul, the possibility of expressing human identity by using detailed images of recognisable clothes was greatly compromised. By their very looseness and lack of detail, draperies allowed bodies to appear like monolithic unities arising distinctly out of indistinct swathes of fabric. If the ideal sitter was therefore a complete and ‘indivisible’ self, to a large extent unreliant upon the material world to construct him-​or herself, then the drapery convention  –​which certainly downplays the ‘constituent parts’ of identity in dress –​was a suitable visual means to convey this notion to a viewer. If the use of draperies in art can be linked to a new understanding of the human self as inward and complete, the same convention also expressed a new understanding of clothing, in which garments themselves were perceived to be leached of the meaning they had under the ‘heraldic’ system. Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass argue that before Van Dyck, portraits

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displayed ‘a self … constituted by investiture’.145 While they do not address the development of a ‘classical body’ or draperies in art, Jones and Stallybrass argue that developments in international trade, together with colonial conquests, encouraged a Protestant suspicion of sacramental objects to be applied to non-​European objects. Hence the power or importance of exotic imports, such as silk, was denied anything other than a potential market value. Thus, the ideal subject of portraiture ‘disavowed any but a financial investment in objects’. In this way, they argue, clothes were increasingly portrayed as ‘detachable and discardable goods’ rather than objects that could work upon or transform the wearer.146 Like Fisher, Jones and Stallybrass do not examine late seventeenth-​century portraiture, but their argument nevertheless helps to explain further how drapery could become, in court portraits, more desirable than detailed depictions of currently fashionable clothing. For the more that clothing became viewed principally as a commodity like any other, the less it could have or express meaning in and of itself. In this sense, the increasing appearance of drapery in portraiture allowed sitters’ identities to appear unconstructed by objects in the real world. If seen as a ‘mere’ commodity, whose proliferation was necessary for the benefit of the economy and country, clothing could no longer have the same power to express social standing. Instead, since convention required some kind of covering for the body, as we have seen, the draped, ‘classical’ body in images could evoke the elevated associations of ‘Roman dress’, the allegorical themes of masquing dress, or the themes of biblical or mythological subjects.147 Even as the commodity trade in clothing was increasingly accepted as necessary to the mechanism of the English economy, this ‘necessity’ no longer found the same place in the portraiture of the noble and wealthy. Drapery, therefore, was ideally suited to express the concept of self as located in the mind, unchanging, hidden and complete, quite unreliant upon objects to constitute it. Visually, this convention marginalised real clothing as a meaningful constituent of human identity, which in turn meant that dress could be reimagined as merely a commodity in the economic machine, a neutral item that could and should proliferate for the benefit of the nation. John Evelyn encapsulated this in his comment ‘Garments be Superficials, and extrinsecal to us’.148 Despite Evelyn’s critiquing manner, his tone is a far cry from the seriousness of the Homilies (discussed in Chapter 2): indeed, he couched this comment within a kind of apology for paying attention to such superfluity in the first place. Ballads captured this attitude in their images of the draped body.

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CONVENTIONS OF CLOTHES AND THE BODY Images were, thus, far from being extraneous decoration but instead became crucial to the market viability of the black-​letter ballad. Regardless of, and also by virtue of, their reuse or repetition in other ballads or visual media, woodcuts created visual resonance for the texts that helped to evoke an immediate emotive response from audiences and draw them into the subject at hand. Within ballad images, shifts in the depiction of dress, particularly toward draperies in the later part of the century, implicitly affirmed the concept of fashion as a freely circulating commodity which could benefit the economy. Images of human subjects swathed in drapery implied that the most important aspect of the human subject was the interior mind or soul, hidden within the person, and that this was safely untouched by the economic flow of these commodities. For ballad publishers, the possible recognition of courtly characters in drapery images would have been a useful market draw, yet the removal of title and artist information allowed them to be used without any precise reference to any individual or social ‘sort’. Such versatile figures were likely to be financially useful to ballad publishers. At the same time, ballads disseminated new ways of imagining the individual by appropriating visual conventions of the body and clothes from paintings via ‘high’ print culture. However, with both positive and negative attitudes to fashion consumption reworked in light of this new approach to the individual, the ‘classical’ body became in itself emblematic of contemporary ideals of the nation and of gender, and the gendered division of the sexes in ballads became increasingly evident and demarcated in new ways. This will be examined in the following two chapters, which explore in more detail how women and men were depicted in ballads over the course of the seventeenth century.

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4 CLASSICAL IDEALS AND SATIRICAL DEVIATIONS, PART I Masculinity, Fashion and the Defence of the Nation As the previous two chapters have shown, ballad texts increasingly portrayed the proliferation of fashion as essential for the prosperity of the nation, an idea covertly affirmed in ‘classical’ ballad images, though they appeared to deny it. Intra-​textually, then, ballads represented people’s relationship to fashion commodities in quite a complex and contradictory way, since the ‘classical’ visual ideal ostensibly refuted what texts explicitly accepted as an economic reality. This and the following chapter demonstrate how, towards the end of the seventeenth century, ‘classical’ images in ballads further differentiated the consumption of fashion, according to gender. Inter​textually, ballads connoted modes of ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ behaviour in relation to the defence of the Protestant nation and notions of ‘the public good’.1 ‘Masculinity’ as a ‘quality or condition of being masculine’ is first recorded in the English language only in 1748,2 but nevertheless it has received much attention in studies of early modern England.3 Although no ideal of masculinity can be monolithic or normative (since there are always competing social practices, as well as representational norms),4 there is some consensus that the norms of masculinity in representation, at least, did change towards the end of the seventeenth century, when ‘politeness’ or ‘civility’ became an influential concept across social strata.5 Ballad representations of men and their relationship to fashionable dress help to support the argument for this latter development. Although the ‘classical’ convention downplayed details of fashionable dress, woodcuts of men continued to depict the body as extremely well covered, and to include certain aspects of fashion. As the century progressed,

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male figures appeared even more shielded by the depiction of military armour and weapons. Indeed, as we will explore, the ‘classical’ male body in ballads evoked political and martial activity in defence of the nation. Likewise, in response to actual naval and military battles abroad from the mid-​1680s, ballad stories of male/​female couples reacting to news of war depicted the ‘classical’ sexes as increasingly distinct polarities. However, ballad publishers did not only take inspiration from the painted portraits and engraved copies that informed their ‘classical’ imagery. Another significant source for ballad bricolage was graphic satire: an increasingly popular commodity on the print market, which offered up an entirely different approach to depicting dress. Printed satires explored precisely those aspects of human identity and fashion that the ‘classical’ convention appeared to suppress; above all, the human subject as an explicit consumer of clothing commodities. Despite clear differences between this ‘satirical’ convention and the ‘classical’ one, they were linked in a mutually dependent relationship, as Mark Hallett has argued for a slightly later period.6 ‘Satirical’ representations of manhood created an internal polarity within ballad depictions of masculinity that pitted the ideal of courageous, self-​ governing men against effeminacy, excess and license. These contrasting concepts were not new:7 effeminacy in particular had long caused anxiety.8 Yet, as this chapter will argue, in late seventeenth-​century ballads, the relationship between masculinity and fashion was reconceptualised:  the consumption of fashion appears paradoxically both crucial to the formation of the masculine ideal and dangerous to its preservation.

GENDERING THE ‘CLASSICAL’ CONVENTION In Chapter 3, The Unbelieving Maiden (1684–​6, see fig. 3.9), stood as an example of how bust-​length portrait images in ballad woodcut created the effect of an immediate relationship between the subject and the ballad viewer. They also created a closer reciprocity between paired images than the use of a full-​length format had been able to achieve. Here, the female figure appears slightly smaller than the male, and her décolletage and pearls contrast with her companion’s high-​necked clothes.Yet despite these differences, the paired images are instructive for the obvious likeness between the figures: the two busts seem almost as similar to each other as are their matching floral frames. Most strikingly, both have smooth hair, similarly curled into ringlets, with a ribbon knot tied

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to a lock of hair. Both figures are half-​turned to the viewer, and wearing wide collars in the fashion of the 1640s. Were it not for the more diminutive stature of the female figure, it would be difficult to determine from a distance which figure represented which sex. As we saw in Chapter 3, portraying a visual similarity between the sexes was evident in ballads from at least the 1620s. The likeness between the sexes represented in The Unbelieving Maiden is initially apparent also in Alexis Loyalty (1685–​8, fig. 4.1).9 Here, images of a man and a woman appear in oval frames, whose laurel leaves recall the frames of painted portraits. Both pictures appear to have been appropriated from (or shared a source with) printed copies of court portraits of James II when Duke of York, and his wife Mary of Modena, painted by Godfrey Kneller and Willem Wissing respectively in the early 1680s (fig. 4.2).10 Like The Unbelieving Maiden, the ballad portraits are of a similar size and their frames match. While they both gaze out at the viewer, the two figures are also turned inwards towards each other, creating a sense of reciprocity between them. Both images are depicted in accordance with the ‘classical’ approach to the body, so that neither sex is portrayed in identifiable garments such as a mantua or coat. However, the two Alexis Loyalty figures relate to their printed antecedents in clearly distinguishable ways. Most obviously, the male figure retains the fashionable elements of a wig and a cravat and is not as physically exposed as the female body. By contrast, the exposure of the female figure is intensified in the process of transmission. First, the mezzotint’s soft monochrome chiaroscuro markedly accentuates the undulations of revealed flesh and the limpid gleam of eyes and lips. Second, the mezzotint adjusts the painting’s depiction of the lower clasps of Mary’s stomacher, so that they appear opened up, revealing her shift beneath. Finally, the ballad portrait intensifies this bodily exposure even more, because woodcut, obliged to create volume using clear black lines, delineates the breasts much more prominently than they appear in the mezzotint. The male ballad portrait, by contrast, follows the lines of James’s printed portrait with little alteration, there being no subtleties of flesh to capture save in the face: the shape of the armour, necklinen and wig all closely correspond with the engraved copy by Robert White.11 The overall impression is of a well-​covered and well-​protected body. Thus the woodcut medium translates to the ballad form, and even intensifies, the gendered differences portrayed in painting and engraving. Where the ‘drapery’ convention replaces Princess Mary’s necklinen and upper bodice with a somewhat vague appearance of frilled textile, Prince James’s

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necklinen and wig are reproduced in considerable detail and his ‘timeless’ garb is not the soft vaguery of textile, but the hard surface of metal armour. Up until 1673, James had been in command of the British navy; as such, his armour in engravings and painted portraits was commensurate with his martial position and achievements. Although the identities of James and Mary may not have been recognised by all ballad audiences, the gendered conventions of their portraits in woodcut became available as generic forms of masculinity and femininity. Ballads thus included certain aspects of male fashion into their ‘classical’ images of men, in a way seen in other painted and engraved portraiture. This correspondence emphasises how important the details of linen, wigs and armour were for the portrayal of men in the ‘classical’ convention. Similar to drapery, the depiction of James II’s body armour divulges few details of quotidian fashionable dress. Yet his wig and lace imply that a certain degree of fashionable display was necessary as a sign to designate men’s

Fig. 4.1  Alexis Loyalty, 1685–​8, PB 3.180. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge.

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Fig. 4.2a  Studio of Willem Wissing, Mary of Modena, oil on canvas, 1676–​85. © Museum of London.

place in the social order. Whether made of plain linen and tied on itself, or of Venetian point lace and tied with a bow,12 a cravat was, with the wig, one of ‘the two crucial elements in male dress in terms of recognition in contemporary literature and art’ from the 1660s and for the remainder of the century.13 Such necklinen was relatively new to late seventeenth-​century ballads, replacing neck ruffs and collars during the 1660s. Where lace had once appeared at the circumference of ruffs and collars, encircling the whole head, here we see the new typical form of necklinen, concentrated in a single fall of lace or plain linen beneath the chin, in the space where earlier portraits might have shown a beard. The female figure in Alexis Loyalty displays a generous décolletage and very little necklinen compared to the figure in Unbelieving Maiden, but the male figures in both ballads clearly retain a layer of covering, specifically over their chests. Ballads inherited this convention from painted portraiture via engraving: in the closing decades of the seventeenth century, portraits almost always depict men in necklinen, whereas women’s necklinen is frequently left out. In drapery

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Fig. 4.2b  Edward Cooper after Samuel Cooper, Mary of Modena, 1680–​1704, mezzotint. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

portraits of elite English sitters until the 1690s, the linen collar or cravat and the wig are –​unlike women’s fashionable dress –​almost always included.14 However, as well as being an important symbol in paintings of the respectable elite man, the cravat was also a crucial element of male fashion in practice. Famously, Pepys made several efforts to improve his social standing by means of fine clothing, and personal linen was his first priority.15 Yet, unlike ruffs and the earlier styles of collar, cravats were particularly associated with men. Adopted from martial garb, they were symbolically connected with men at war. As Thomas Blount’s Glossographia explained in 1674, ‘that Linnen which is worn about Mens (especially Souldiers and Travellers) Necks, instead of a Band … took [its] name from Croata, because the Croats first used them in the German wars.’16 It was also inaugurated, John Evelyn averred, simultaneously with the man’s vest, as part of the king’s new fashion.17 Furthermore, a clean white cravat implied the cleanliness of the shirt lying next to the skin and hidden beneath the outer clothing, a kind of purity understood not only in terms of health, but also as a sign of wealth

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Fig 4.2c  Robert White after Godfrey Kneller, James Duke of York, 1682, engraving. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

and good manners.18 In contrast to the exposed female body, cravats in the male ‘classical’ image could thus connote the masculine world of the battlefield as well as refined bodily habits. Although cravats were sometimes depicted as worn by cross-​dressed women in court portraits19 and French fashion plates,20 in ballads, cravats were restricted to representations of men. Without the courtly identification, print title or social context required to create the frisson of a cross-​dressed woman, publishers presumably realised that there was no means of knowing that the image did not refer to a man.21 In ballads, cravats were exclusively associated with masculine identity; one ballad even used the word ‘cravat’ as an euphemism for penis.22 The other principal item incorporated into ‘classical’ portrait imagery was the full-​head wig. Men wore wigs in England in the 1640s as a supplement when long hair became fashionable,23 but they became more generally accepted and worn after King Charles II and the Duke of York began

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to wear full wigs in the early 1660s.24 These items were part of the typical male painted portrait in England throughout the last third of the seventeenth century and well into the eighteenth, operating as a symbol for respectable masculinity, civic participation and moral order, and connoting both elite fashionability and social stability.25 Wigs also quickly became an important part of theatre costume, either worn by male actors who played noble characters, or by female actors in ‘breeches’ roles.26 Pictures of wigs in ballads thus related to the conventions of both painted images and stage practices, perpetuating in woodcut the symbolic conventions of ideal or ‘classical’ masculinity. If wigs and necklinen were the prerogative of images of men in ballads, they also associated male figures with a certain formality of setting, since these objects were in life habitually taken off in informal or intimate situations, and replaced with a nightcap and nightgown.27 This is particularly evident in Alexis Loyalty, in the contrast between the female figure’s open décolletage, with soft frills implying an open nightgown or loose smock, and the fully covered, male figure wearing a cravat and wig. Although (as discussed in Chapter 3), images of men in drapery created associations of informality, wigs and cravats maintained for ‘classical’ masculinity a certain degree of ‘outdoor decorum’ and public action. THE ARMOURED BODY As well as demonstrating the importance of certain fashionable accessories for creating ‘classical’ images of men, Alexis Loyalty also exemplifies how such images often portrayed men as armed, hard and invulnerable. The motif which helped to create this image relates inter-​textually to wider artistic conventions. Armour had long been depicted in painted portraits of English men. Though not always of the kind actually used in battle, it usually referred to the military activity of the sitter in reality.28 However, Van Dyck’s arrival at the English court prompted new ways of portraying men. Like ‘undress’ or drapery, armour was linked to the Platonic courtly love tradition, but signified virtue very differently: it could allude not just to action in armed conflict, but also more generally to ‘heroic virtue’, beauty and power.29 Armour in a Van Dyck portrait could thus imply the male sitter’s ‘inner’ quality of strength and heroism. Later, Peter Lely’s painted portraits of men combined armour with drapery, simultaneously appearing to disavow fashionable dress while evoking military prowess.30 Since women tended not to be depicted in

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armour (except when portrayed as goddesses), armour and its associations of power became firmly connected with masculinity. During the Civil War, the vogue for armour in painted male portraiture expanded, with a new focus on the reality of going into battle. Paintings depicted a mix of ceremonial types of armour with the more recent battlefield armour of extremely tough oxhide buff coats; William Dobson’s oeuvre contains numerous examples.31 Such representations served to remind audiences that, although participation in the conflicts was not confined to the elite, it was of course officially restricted to men.32 In ballad pictures, however, the armoured male body only appears frequently quite late in the century. Occasionally, it featured in early ballad images, such as that of Prince Henry examined in Chapter 3,33 but these are something of an anomaly: in ballads of the 1620s and 30s, men are usually shown armed only with swords. From mid-​century, armour appears more often, perhaps on account of Civil War battles taking place on English soil and the response of the print market to these conflicts.34 Although it is still unclear how the Civil Wars formed concepts of masculinity in the seventeenth century,35 we can at least observe the way that martial imagery in ballads created a strong representational link between ideal masculinity and military action. Ballad imagery depicts few of the buff coats and sashes ubiquitous in Civil War paintings and instead portrays older, ‘parade’ types of armour. This is possibly because a woodcut image of a buff coat might appear similar to a cassock or riding coat, whereas the shape of ceremonial parade armour would look unequivocally military.36 From the 1670s and 80s, marching scenes increasingly appeared as processions of armed men at full length, as for example in The English Courage Undaunted (1680),37 and The White-​Chappel Maids Lamentation (1685, fig. 4.3).38 In both cases, troops of men parade their flags, swords and guns in long, arrow-​shaped formations, whose shape conveys a sense of motion and firm purpose. Bust-​length woodcuts like the portrait of Prince James in Alexis Loyalty depict men in body armour; and from the mid-​1680s, increasing numbers of full-​length images depict men mounted on horses, brandishing weapons. Such pictures thus emphasised men’s participation in the swagger and spectacle of military display, rather than the harsh experiences of the battlefield. Yet military-​themed ballads multiplied towards the end of the century, in response to actual military events such as the Duke of Monmouth’s failed rebellion in 1685,39 the victory of William III in 1689 and his subsequent battles abroad. Although the image of Prince James in Alexis Loyalty referred to

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a particular portrait, it appeared at a time when woodcuts of men at arms in general increasingly appeared on ballads to illustrate lyrics about war. These ballads may also have been published in response to the army recruiting (or pressing) significant numbers of men, particularly after 1689.40 As Angela McShane observes, ballad numbers increased in wartime, and many appear to have been written to encourage the call-​up process into the army and navy.41 Thus, where necklinen and wigs created a sense of formality and ‘outdoor decorum’ in classical-​type ballad images, martial motifs went further in this direction, since they visually associated men with participation in the public duties of war and international politics.

ENGENDERED BY WAR The theme of war fostered a similar effect in texts too, in gendered narratives where male and female protagonists were characterised principally as combatants or non-​combatants in battle.42 A very popular ballad story was the lament of lovers being separated by war on sea or land, such as The White-​ Chappel Maids (see fig. 4.3), a ‘Lamentation’ by the titular maids ‘For the loss of their Sweet-​hearts, upon the Souldiers Departing to the Army to fight for the King’. Here, the two woodcuts contrast a full-​length woman in a low-​ cut bodice and clinging petticoat, with a scene of multitudes of marching soldiers who beat drums, wave a large flag and carry arms. Like the exposed female décolletage in the left-​hand image, the ballad lyrics described their female protagonists as physically soft, ‘softer then Down’, while the departing soldiers are loud and bold, ‘Warlike brave Heros [with] hearts void of fear’.43 Heroes of military and naval conflicts could thus become familiar ‘types’ with which to represent male protagonists. After 1688, this kind of visual and narrative gendering was increasingly apparent in ballad depictions of King William, which emphasised his military zeal. Ballads welcomed William’s arrival at Torbay in November 1688, celebrating the overthrow of ‘popery’. These continued to show the male figure as very well-​covered, either with armour, or wigs and cravats, or both, symbolically evoking a well-​defended, invulnerable monarch. A large woodcut in Englands Happiness Reviv’d (1689, fig.  4.4),44 shows William in armour, astride a rearing horse. He tramples a priest and the pope, tipping off the papal tiara with his drawn sword, while the ballad text announces, ‘the Triple Crown is Totter’d’. To the right, a comparably large picture shows a couple standing either side of a fruit tree, presumably a reference to William’s

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Fig. 4.3  The White-​Chappel Maids Lamentation, 1685, PB 3.338. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge.

House of Orange. Other contemporary images referred to William this way,45 and furthermore the text admonishes, ‘Orange is bitter in the tasting, /​ but for Health is very good’. Although not wearing full armour, the male figure stands in a dominant position, with sword and sword belt shown prominently across his coat, one arm akimbo and one gesturing expansively toward his partner. In contrast, the female figure leans her body and head modestly aside, a passive stance that accords with the absence of women from the ballad lyrics. As befits the song’s focus upon William, his visual representation in both pictures is active and commanding, and in the primary woodcut, it is explicitly military. Other typical ballad images of William after 1689 also portray him mounted on a horse, but conspicuously brandishing the baton of martial command, as for example The Souldiers Prayers (1690, fig. 4.5).46 Placed beside a woodcut of a townscape entitled ‘Ireland’, William’s image appears both to be leading a battle charge towards the country, and also to symbolise

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Fig. 4.4  Englands Happiness Reviv’d, 1689, PB 2.279. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge.

his victory over it. The motif was already established in court portraits, in which draped or half-​armoured men gestured towards vanquished lands or battle scenes in which they had gained victory.47 Ballads employed a similar approach, but by keeping the human figure separate, a variety of combinations could be created. This, in turn, would have highlighted the newness or difference of successively printed ballads. Cutting the townscapes with a blank banderole also allowed the name of a vanquished city or country to be inserted in letterpress according to the conflict at hand, as in ballads such as The Loyal Subjects Prayers for King Williams Good Success Over His Enemies in Flanders (1691).48 Through this kind of visual arrangement and the way that their texts described each city’s defeat by William, ballads created a sense of his dominance and power over a wide variety of places. Perhaps in order to play down difficult elements, such as the monarch’s Dutch nationality, or the fact that he set out to fight his wife’s royal English father, such ballads verbally celebrated King William, not so much as the leader

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Fig. 4.5  The Souldiers Prayers, 1690, PB 2.305. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge.

of the English troops, but rather as the head of an all-​male, all-​Protestant army, out to conquer the French, and a tyrannical ‘popery’.49 Both The Souldiers Prayers and other ballads repeatedly make references to the ‘brave boys’ and ‘lads’, who fight with the king against ‘Papists’.50 The lyrics to Souldiers Prayers are narrated in the voice of an ordinary fighting man who declares, ‘With our Swords in our hands brave Boys we will go’. By the fact that William is not praised as an exception to men, but simply as the foremost of many men (implicitly including non-​elites), these ballads operate along similar lines to the ‘marching procession’ images discussed above, in that they associate dominance and power with all sorts of men, not just officers or the monarch. In their depictions of William as a martial leader, these ballads also retain his image as a ‘classical’ masculine ideal, that is, with elements of fashion incorporated into his military appearance. For example, Dublins Deliverance (1690) tells of ‘King William’s Conquest over his Catholick Enemies in his Warlike Progress in Ireland’.51 Two cuts of a cavalryman and an infantryman are shown alongside a large-​scale woodcut of a man’s head, which presumably represents William. A thick luxuriant wig and a tied cravat dominate his

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Fig. 4.6  The Royal Farewel, 1690, PB 2.327. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge.

face, while the small crown hovering above it (probably made using a separate woodblock) seems almost an afterthought. The key fashionable elements of the ‘classical’ masculine image are thus given central place alongside the military pictures: indeed, within the ballad’s overall layout these masculine attributes are given much greater priority than William’s royal status. In The Royal Farewel (1690, fig. 4.6),52 a woodblock the same as (or very similar to) that used in Souldiers Prayers is used to illustrate King William. Although armour is not clearly in evidence, elements of male fashion are incorporated with weapons into the king’s military appearance. Besides his long sword, boots and spurs, and the baton of command, he wears an ostentatiously feathered hat, large ‘pagoda’ sleeves to his coat,53 a cravat and a long curled wig. Different elements of the masculine image are in play here, both fashionable dress and military power; but by implication, the king’s martial purposes offset any potentially effeminate associations of his fashionable dress.

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The different deployment of the image of William on horseback in Royal Farewel and Souldiers Prayers creates highly contrasting intra-​textual meanings. In Souldiers Prayers, as we saw, the arrangement of the woodblocks causes the king’s baton to point toward a collection of buildings labelled ‘Ireland’, as if to suggest his movement towards that country and eventual command over it. In Royal Farewel, however, the woodblock is placed so that the baton points away from the paired images of king and queen, and seems to gesture out past the limit of the ballad sheet. Such an arrangement resonates with the ‘Farewel’ theme of the text, in which the king declares he must leave his queen and country out of martial duty. Where Souldiers Prayers places the image of King William so as to connect with a similarly framed ‘Ireland’, in Royal Farewel, it contrasts in style with the other images so as to underscore the text’s tension between the safety of love and the danger of war. On the right, musical putti, and oval, bust-​length portaits evoke the geographically settled and culturally refined qualities of elite framed paintings; on the left, the woodcut’s bold outlines, King William’s clear gesture and the rearing horse appear comparatively stark and aggressive. The gendered divide of the sexes was particularly evident in ballads that depicted the royal couple as lovers unwillingly sundered by conflicts abroad.54 In the lyrics for The Royal Farewel, Mary II features as the lamenting wife left behind, while William’s honourable courage propels him to fight as a soldier bound for martial glory. Ballads of this type tend to portray Mary using a décolleté bust-​length portrait image, while William is represented with either a single, ‘mounted war-​horse’ picture, or with this type of woodcut placed beside an additional bust-​length one.55 William’s bust-​length portrait shows his upper body entirely covered (except for his face) by a wig, a cravat, an ermine mantle and a crown, while Mary’s robes of state are absent (along with any necklinen), in order to reveal a low décolletage. Beside these busts, a full-​length image shows William in military action. Mary’s image is therefore ‘naked’ not only in the sense of ‘lacking clothes’ by comparison with William’s portraits, but also in the sense of ‘without weapons or armour’.56 With his larger crown, ermine-​covered body and martial accoutrements, William’s double representation appears much more powerful in comparison to the single image of his physically exposed wife. This visual contrast is supported in the ballad lyrics, which suggest that Mary is, on account of her sex, physically and mentally less able to protect the country’s interests than King William, who is only too keen to race back to the battlefield. He is explicitly associated with martial valour, saying, ‘When Cannons do rore, and Bullets do flye; /​Who honour would win,

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must not fear to dye’.57 By contrast Mary weeps silently, showing that she is ‘modest & meek’. William reminds Mary that in his absence ‘The Power of the Government is in your hand’, but the queen demurs: A Woman’s soon daunted, and when you are gone Your wit will be wanted, and I be undone … My Sex, it is fearful, and quickly cast down … Contests at home and abroad … are, for a Woman, too heavy a load. Although Royal Farewel was printed in the same year that the Regency Act allowed Mary effectively to rule in William’s absence (a move which saw her political reputation steadily improve),58 these gendered self-​deprecations were, in reality, a moot issue in their reign. Mary refused to be queen in her own right and deferred to her husband’s supremacy so that, at their coronation, William was inaugurated as the dominant monarch in overtly gendered terms, despite their officially joint rule.59 Regardless of the reality of William and Mary’s balance of power, however, ballads emphasised the emphatically masculine and martial dominance of William.

MARITAL RELATIONS AND NATIONAL POLITICS While the assignment of warlike characteristics to men and softness to women was by no means a new idea in the late seventeenth century, in ballads, the visual and intra-​textual comparison of covered, martial men and uncovered, ‘soft’ women, connoting these attributes with distinct political and social roles, was only fully established after the Restoration. In connecting gendered responses to war with gendered visual imagery of the body, ballads already exhibit an increasing division between representations of the sexes. This trend in early modern Europe is discussed in Thomas Laqueur’s Making Sex.60 Here, Laqueur argues that the criteria of sexual difference altered from a largely transcendental, sociological basis to an increasingly mechanical, biological one in the early eighteenth century and beyond.61 Though this thesis has received some amendment and critique (particularly on the precise periodisation of change from a Galenic ‘one-​sex’ to a ‘two-​sex’ model of conceptualising sexuality),62 there is some scholarly consensus that belief in the divine ordering of the sexes began to be reimagined as a fact of nature toward the end of the seventeenth century.

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As Will Fisher has argued, in this latter period the body was imagined to be less malleable and less responsive to its material accessories than in the first decade of the seventeenth century. According to Fisher, it was increasingly understood to carry within itself the essential physical markers of ‘male’ or ‘female’, rather than responding to a divine pre-​assignment.63 In the differences we have observed between men and women in the ‘classical’ ballad images examined here, the visual distinction between the sexes increasingly contrasts between the physical exposure of women and the generous coverage of men. Images of well-​dressed men imply biological difference, simply by the fact that male bodies consistently seem to be invulnerable and solid, and especially in comparison with the vulnerable appearance of female décolletage. Thus King William’s dominance over his submissive wife in the intra-​textuality of the ballad had some important political ramifications. Emphasising his patriarchal role as a husband, as well as a martial leader, located and affirmed William’s legitimacy as joint monarch within a logic of biological and marital superiority. In contrast, Mary’s ‘meek’ acquiescence in the text conforms to the increasing tendency in conduct literature of the period, to characterise women as loving and sentimental as opposed to rational, and therefore not qualified for citizenship in the same way as men.64 Yet, though Mary’s ‘fearful’ attitude could have hinted at national instability in William’s absence, in ballad terms this characterisation of male/​female relationships worked to create an image of royal stability.65 Intra-​textual focus on Mary’s submission to her husband helped to explain and legitimise her sole rule in William’s absence. At any rate, when set against a long history of ballads ridiculing shamed cuckolds, ‘roaring girls’ and wives doing ‘battle for the breeches’,66 ballads about a loving royal couple that conformed to a clear, patriarchal gender hierarchy sounded a note of political stability and national confidence. Although the idea of representing a stable monarchy with a ‘happy couple’ was not an entirely new one (a double portrait of Charles II and Catherine of Braganza featured prominently in a ballad celebrating the failure of the Rye House plot),67 William and Mary’s image added to this trope by emphasising the military dominance of the male figure. In Royal Farewel and similar ballads, therefore, the gendered significance of covered and uncovered bodies is made overtly political. Visual representations of protection and martial coverage are emphasised in ballad texts which portray men as soldierly ‘brave boys’, and active in defending the nation from its enemies, while women, represented as ‘soft’, ‘daunted’ and physically exposed, signify a defenceless weakness that acts

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as a political foil for the masculine ideal of martial conflict and political responsibility. The nation’s stability and safety is thus symbolically placed in the hands of military men who will protect an otherwise helpless, vulnerable country.

SATIRISING MEN’S FASHION As we have now seen, the ‘classical’ convention of portraying men created a sense of solidarity and identity between men and a strong contrast between masculine and feminine behaviour. However, this ‘classical’ convention also contrasted with another set of representations:  that is, satirical depictions of masculinity. These alternative visions of men’s behaviour evoked and explored themes deeply contradictory to the ‘classical’ convention, and yet, as we will now examine, they operated implicitly in reference to this ideal of masculinity. As Stallybrass and White describe it, the opposite of the ‘classical’ ideal is not just ‘grotesque’ but also ‘satiric’ –​a useful shorthand for the types of word and image we are about to discuss.68 Ballads that satirise fashionable dress deal squarely with what the classical convention suppresses: people’s consumption of clothing commodities. This explicit focus on human relationships to fashion involves a greater emphasis on narrative and text, and creates a closer intra-​textual relationship between word and image. As we have seen, depictions of men in the ‘classical’ convention visually disavow fashion to a large extent, but at the same time incorporate key aspects of fashionable attire by portraying wigs and cravats. Satirical representations, by contrast, verbally acknowledge fashion to be an object of economic exchange and also explore who is consuming it and with what consequences. As we will see, where the classical convention frequently seems to ‘fence off’ the human subject from the quotidian world in bust-​length frames, the satirical convention envisages the human body in constant dynamic interaction with people and objects. As Mark Hallett has shown for early eighteenth-​century print, graphic satire cannot operate separately from ideas of the ‘classical’ or ideal: in fact, it works in dialectical relationship with them.69 This is certainly true for seventeenth-​century ballad satires, whose humour and critique is reliant upon, and in dialogue with, the ‘classical’ model of human subjectivity. If the ‘classical’ model aspires to an ‘inner’, unchanging human identity, unassailable by the circulation of commodities, ballad satire creates humour by drawing out the very aspects of fashion that the ‘classical’ convention seeks to stifle: that is,

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the commodity value of clothes, the ability of dress to shape or affect human subjects, and both the value and the threat of luxury consumption. Ballad satires on fashion flourished in the 1680s and 90s, but those relatively rare sheets that offered focused critiques of fashionable dress before the Restoration reveal the kind of themes which endured to the end of the century, and those which lost popularity. Furthermore, they show that satirical attention to men in ballads before the 1680s tended to be included in lyrics that addressed the sartorial shortcomings of both sexes. For example, The Phantastick Age (c.1634),70 contains four separate framed figures in the stiff, ‘heraldic’ convention of this period (as discussed in Chapter 3), along with traditional discussions of fashion (as examined in Chapter 2). The lyrics specifically address ‘English’ men and women together,71 lambasting them for changeable, ‘chameleon-​like’ apparel, dressing like foreigners, and being more concerned with personal pride than ‘hospitality’ and the needs of the poor. A few gender-​specific comments are included: men are criticised for adopting ‘a higher style than women claime’, and endeavouring ‘their names to raise /​By clothes, and complement’ instead of concentrating (supposedly like their forefathers) on ‘manly actions’, though these actions are not specified. Women are less often targeted, but are briefly described as greedy for demanding new clothes to imitate what they see in the play-​house audience. Thus, although the sexes are warned not to dress like each other (and become ‘neutrall monsters’) men and women are imagined to be equally susceptible to fashion: both are called to spend less on their appearance, and more on the poor. About twenty years later, The Downfall of Pride (1654–​6)72 also ridiculed fashion: it developed some new critiques, but it reveals a continuity of approach with the earlier ballad, addressing both sexes together. As with Phantastick Age, certain stanzas are addressed to one sex, but overall the narrator addresses both sexes together throughout the song: ‘men and women are out of their wits’, both affected equally by the madness of fashion. Like the earlier ballad, Downfall of Pride still mentions the needs of the poor which are overlooked by fashionable dressers, but madness and oddity are now central: new critiques single out women’s patches, men’s periwigs, powder and ribbon points worn ‘just against the place of lust’. Each of these fashions is derided for being ‘fond’ or mad. The narrator imagines that ‘pride’ might cause any style (even wearing ribbons in the nose!) to be adopted by followers of fashion. With these new objects of ridicule comes a new approach to derision: where the earlier ballad castigates those who try to ‘raise’ themselves with dress, here fashion is an aberration which creates ugly, strange sights, and ‘pride’ is a source of comedy

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rather than shame. In the end, however, the ballad resumes a religious tone, ending with a traditional appeal to charity: I do desire that great and smal May fear the Lord above: That cruelty and pride may cease, And that we may injoy true peace. That Pride may be o’rethrown, And charity take place. Despite the gradual developments in ballad discussions of fashion, then, there is also continuity in the way that both sexes are addressed together. The call to forsake pride in favour of the poor is aimed at both men and women: men are not addressed separately as yet. After the Restoration, however, there is a marked new emphasis on the division of the sexes: just as visual representations diverge more clearly, so also separate sheets are increasingly addressed specifically to, or about, one or other sex, regarding their particular fashions. As we will now consider, ballad satires of men gave specific attention to issues regarding the consumption of fashion that were envisaged as particularly appertaining to men.

NEW COURTIERS AND MEN ABOUT TOWN In ballads printed after the Restoration, satires on fashionable men respond to the ambivalent public perception of the court, as Charles II abandoned the martial sobriety maintained under Oliver Cromwell and adopted what was perceived as vice and hedonism.73 For example, the words to The New Courtier are written as if by a nobleman returned to power at the Restoration court.74 He describes his transformation first and foremost as a sartorial one:  after being ‘In tater’d trim from top to toe’ (as a discredited Cavalier during the Interregnum), his rags are now ‘all to Ribbons turn’d’. This newly fashionable courtier then boasts of his lying, cheating and cuckolding, and explicitly connects his fashionable dress with his pursuit of vice: Since Venus shav’d off my Hair A powdred Perewig I wear Which brings me in the Golden Girls

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For the ‘New Courtier’, a ‘Perewig’ is clearly not just an ornament for the head, or a status symbol, but a means to disguise the venereal disease resulting from promiscuous liaisons, and to continue them using this disguise. Whereas the ‘classical’ convention included the specific fashions of the wig and cravat amidst depictions of drapery, as if to include them within an ideal form of dress, here the wig as a symbol of decency is shown to be potentially unstable. In so doing, this ballad taps into older critiques of the wig, made after it first came widely into use for men in the mid-​1640s.75 For example, moral tracts of the 1650s criticised wigs for, variously, hiding venereal disease caught from visiting prostitutes, appearing effeminate and being ‘as unlawfull as forraign attire’.76 The New Courtier was printed in 1678–​80 (when the Press Act lapsed), but it was probably first written in about 1668,77 in the aftermath of the bawdy-​house riots,78 during widespread suspicion of the Court for both Catholicism and libertine behaviour; as such, The New Courtier drew on the old-​ style fashion critiques of the Interregnum to make clear the more sober ideal of government it mourned.79 Those who published the later version of The New Courtier may have hoped that the ballad’s outrage, originally expressed at the side-​changing deceptions of Restoration courtiers, would also resonate with audiences around the anxious times of the Exclusion Crisis. The New Courtier’s themes of urban life, social deception and the pursuit of women were developed further in ballads of the mid-​1680s, which increasingly satirise men’s display in general, and expand their focus beyond just gentlemen of the court. Within a decade or so, ballads such as A Groatsworth of Mirth for a Penny (fig. 4.7),80 The Subtil Miss of London,81 The Crafty Miss of London (fig. 4.8)82 and The Town-​bully’s Bravery,83 recount the adventures of well-​dressed men pursuing young women for sex, situations in which both parties deceive each other as to their social status and personal intentions. However, where the New Courtier-​type ballads envision cynical successes for the protagonist, in later ballad satires it is the main male characters who come off worse in the end. For example, A Groatsworth of Mirth sees ‘Will the Barber well Fitted’ when the girl he hoped to seduce robs him of his wig. Contrasting woodcuts mobilise these themes of seduction and attack, one illustrating a couple holding hands and another showing people on horseback with sticks raised, as if in pursuit or alarm. In the Subtil Miss, the ‘Ranting Hector’84 wears (we are told) a velvet coat and sword, until his eponymous ‘miss’ drugs him, takes ‘His Hat, Wigg and Cravat, his Shirt Shoes & Hose’, puts him in women’s clothes and sends him ‘in a great Chest by water to Gravesend’. The ballad’s woodcuts neatly summarise this comic disaster with

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Fig. 4.7  A Groats-​Worth of Mirth for a Penny, 1686, PB 3.207. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge.

an image of a well-​dressed man holding hands with a woman, placed next to a cut depicting a ferryman rowing people across water. In similar fashion, the Crafty Miss (fig. 4.8) deludes and denudes her client by swapping clothes with him and making off, thus acquiring the money and watch stored in his breeches and leaving him with only her ‘Ribbons and Laces’. As will be discussed below, the larger of the two woodcuts to this ballad underscores the theme of stealing. The Town-​bully’s Bravery opens with the anti-​hero’s boasts of ‘rich Array’, ‘golden Trimming’, predatory affairs and pick-​pocketing, but closes with his capture and transportation ‘up Holbourn-​hill’ to an ‘ignominious death’.85 That the woodcut here is frequently employed to represent King William in patriotic ballads, underscores the grand appearance of the ‘Town-​bully’. Yet it also creates a striking intra-​textual contrast between an image already associated with the monarch, and the very large and prominent title phrases of ‘Highway Hector’, ‘Lewd Life’ and ‘Ignominious Death’. In all these ballads,

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Fig. 4.8  The Crafty Miss of London, 1672–​96, Douce 1(39a). The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

then, male protagonists’ pursuit of fashionable clothing is portrayed as a personal disaster. In keeping with other ballad satires (and in contrast to the ‘classical’ ideal), the sartorial thefts described in these ballads draw attention to the commodity re-​sale value of fashionable garments and wigs as well as the desirability of fine clothing. They also draw upon the commonplace experience of everyday life. Old Bailey records from the last quarter of the seventeenth century abound with accounts of clothing thefts and frequently list the exchange value of stolen wigs and clothes.86 Even household burglers were conceived of as clothing thieves: the Canting Dictionary describes a ‘Budge’ as ‘one that slips into an House in the Dark, and taketh Cloaks, Coats, or what comes next to Hand, marching off with them’. Where men in the ‘classical’ convention were associated with powerful fighting forces, and even the king, here, they are implicitly connected to the ignoble setting of the criminal courts. Contrary to the well-​covered, martial figures of the ‘classical’ style, who appear to gesture triumphantly across vanquished cities, men in these satires

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are defrocked. Indeed, they are often defrocked by the very characters of whom they hope to take advantage. If ‘classical’ images of armoured bodies symbolised masculinity as impenetrable, martially brave and politically active, then satires of fashionable men place them within the feminine convention of soft, bared, passive figures, with stories of exposed bodies, dressing in women’s clothes, and being physically incapacitated by imprisonments, executions or entrapments. As such, these satires caution against an alternative, ‘abject’ masculinity that is vulnerable, effeminate and politically debased –​an ‘in-​between’ being, neither fully ‘manly’, nor actually female.87 Moreover, the male protagonists are in a double bind because, while their punishment for indulging in luxurious fashion and low-​life intrigues is to be stripped of their clothes, it is nonetheless a requirement of social interaction that they be covered. Elaborating on Kenneth Clark’s well-​known distinction between ‘naked’ and ‘nude’ in art, Anne Hollander suggests that, ‘the naked figure always appears to have some connection with actual garments, usually contemporary; the nude implies drapery’.88 In these terms, ballad satires envisage the removal of men’s clothes squarely in the realm of nakedness. Nude male bodies do not appear frequently in ballads. Woodcuts that do portray them tend to convey spiritual moments, such as the risen Christ,89 or to illustrate ballads about death.90 As such, male nudity in ballads implies –​ if not quite abjection91 –​certainly a person removed from everyday sociality, a state unlikely to be desirable to ballad audiences. In these satirical ballads, then, the shame of losing fashionable clothing implies that it would be better for these protagonists to have retained this clothing, rather than rid themselves of it, as the ‘classical’ or ‘drapery’ convention would seem to imply. The compromise implicitly required of men in these satires, therefore, is that they tread a vigilant line between appropriate, ‘masculine’ dress, and excessive, luxurious, ‘feminine’ fashion.

WIGS: SUBJECT OR ABJECT This delicate equilibrium is epitomised by the importance accorded to the wig-​covered head in each of the satirical narratives discussed above. Although male head wear is not the obvious focal point of satire, it appears as the barometer of its action. Functioning dually, the wig is a sign of masculinity when worn, but a symptom of abasement when it is removed. For example, the Town-​bully wears ‘the newest Fashions which any Gallants use’, so that no-​one will suspect him of thievery, but his most carefully described

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garment is his ‘Campaign-​wig, of Flaxin-​hair’, which he presumably loses when he faces execution in the final stanzas;92 Will the Barber is beaten by the friends of his victim, but the climax of his punishment is the loss of his wig; likewise the nadir of the Ranting Hector’s shame is the moment his wigless bald head is wrapped in an old woman’s ‘coyf’, or linen cap. Finally, the disguised friar first provokes the schemes of his ‘Crafty Miss’ when, dancing (otherwise) naked, ‘His Wigg did flye off, and she did see his bald Pate’. Thus, satirical ballad wigs are, like those that appear in engravings in the early eighteenth century, objects in the narrative that ‘constantly pose the threat of excess and, particularly, of effeminacy … crucial to conformity but simultaneously capable of subverting its own orthodoxy and being presented as a site of danger both actual and symbolic’.93 In its equivocal presentation of wigs, then, late-​century ballad satire differs from the older, literary discourses of the Civil War period, which deployed hair as a sign of both gender and political allegiance, and condemned wigs as an immoral luxury94 or (like The New Courtier) a disguise for venereal disease. In these later ballads, the wig is evidently a requirement of formal social interaction, connoting a ‘socialised masculinity’. Yet the dangers besetting its deportment also indicate the wig’s potential to be a vehicle for serious social critique. In this sense, ballad stories of wig loss participate in a much older tradition of cuckold ballads, which, in deriding insufficient husbands, could play a didactic, even ‘regulatory’ social function, reinforcing patriarchally gendered standards within the household.95 Such wig satires precede the long-​lived representations of the wig in late seventeenth-​and eighteenth-​century art and literature, in which wig problems symbolise the loss of masculine potency.96 By emphasising the re-​sale value of wigs to those who steal them, ballad satires underscore the wig’s commodity status –​the very aspect of fashion that the ‘classical’ convention ostensibly suppresses. Where the ‘classical’ convention covertly affirms the commodity while denying its power to construct the individual, these satires emphasise the power of the commodity to shape the person. Male protagonists who are forced to recall the financial value of their wigs are thus deprived of the right to enjoy the wig’s symbolic social value as a validation of masculine status –​and consequently find themselves beyond the pale of social interaction. The wig in these ballad representations can therefore be seen as a kind of index of social participation: when shown firmly perched on the head, it signalled a kind of socialised masculinity (a resolution of the complex and contradictory hair symbols of gender and political allegiance);97 when removed from the head, the wig signalled a loss

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of secure gender identity, an opting-​out of cultural participation and descent into ‘grotesque disorder’.98 In this respect, in each of the ballad satires just mentioned, there is, in Hallett’s phrase, a ‘spectacle of difference’ between the ideal of the ‘classical’ man (whose elite masculinity is constantly expressed by a wig and cravat, regardless of his otherwise apparent disavowal of fashion), and the ‘delinquency and abjection’ of men who pursue fashion too far and end up embroiled in the low-​life of urban London.99 Thus, while the military, nation-​serving exertion of the ‘classical’ man allows a limited but nevertheless fashionable appearance, the privately-orientated male fashion consumer endangers his masculinity, his financial capital and finally renders himself abject –​socially unrecognisable –​ by having his clothes stolen from him altogether. This view of fine clothing might suggest that ballads presented fashion as unequivocally problematic for men. A similar view is certainly put forward by David Kuchta, who argues that the fashionable consumption of clothing was imagined as a ‘feminine’ occupation after the Glorious Revolution, as a contrast to modest men whose renunciation of fashion confirmed their legitimacy as the ‘natural’ rulers of the country. According to Kuchta, this development was merely the triumph of the kind of court criticisms made throughout the seventeenth century, which saw all fashionable display as effeminate and dangerous.100 Yet the logic of ‘renunciation’ for men was not as simple as this, because while the significance of fine clothing might be denied, men could not dispense with fashion altogether. While outward forms might be denied or downplayed, they could never be avoided. As we have noted, men had to get dressed, after all, and the wigs and cravats worn by even the most ‘renounced’ man were, to some extent, both expensive and fashionable. There were of course changes in the fashion for wigs, and they could get dirty or unkempt, but a wig was nevertheless still a nod to fashion by comparison with going wigless. Therefore, while there is certainly a new sense that fashion consumption for men can be dangerous, this is by no means a logic of complete renunciation. Rather, as ballad satires make plain, a certain amount of fashion is a prerequisite of proper social interaction.

PICTURING ‘SATIRICAL’ MEN The place of fashion in these ballad satires of men is therefore not obviously the primary subject of the sheet; rather, it is incorporated into the

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story as an essential ingredient of ideal masculinity. Only the misuse of it threatens to reduce men to helpless effeminacy. This is evident in the way that the ballads are illustrated. On the sheets Groatsworth of Mirth, Subtil Miss and Crafty Miss, one might expect to see comic woodcuts of wigs that ‘flye off’, dancing friars or men dressed in petticoats; but in fact, despite all the wig-​loss and clothing theft narrated in ballad texts, male abjection is not immediately evident from the ballad images. Fashions for men are usually shown as totally incorporated into their image, rather than separable from it. If wig-​loss was a characteristic trope of satire on men in other forms of literature and visual art, why should ballads have treated this theme only verbally, and not visually? There may be several explanations for this. First of all, as considered in Chapter 3, the woodcut form in ballads presented a problem of subtlety. Images of men in women’s clothes required a degree of visual detail to convey both masculine and feminine characteristics in such a way that the image would not be mistaken for that of a woman. Ballad-​type woodcuts were not reliably able to do this. Yet there were possibly symbolic as well as practical reasons for this lack of illustration. Since men’s wigs were incorporated within the ‘classical’ ideal, they could not be visually singled out for ridicule, because they already signalled that moderate masculinity upon which the satires depended for their force. Instead, images of wigs in these satires are shown firmly placed on the head, representing the ‘normative, more respectable, ideal’ which provided the foundation for ‘disreputable but fascinating narratives’ in the lyrics.101 Rather than showing fashionable men at the humiliating moment of their ‘punishment’ at the end of each narrative, these ballads create an intra-​textual tension between the fully clothed, apparently respectable men in the woodcuts, and the denudations described in the texts. This is particularly evident in ballads such as The Extravagant Youth (1684–​5),102 or A Looking-​Glass for Lascivious Young Men (fig. 4.9)103 which mock profligate young male heirs as ‘prodigal sons’.104 A Looking Glass for Lascivious Young Men explicitly recasts the New Testament ‘Prodigal Son’ as a late-​century ‘spark’ returning home after a spell of loose living. The largest woodcut depicts him being shaken in a huge sieve by his ‘honest’ parents, to see what he has been up to. This motif, probably of Dutch origin, is first securely dated in an emblem book of 1628,105 featuring a young man surrounded by six people: out from his sieve tumble two swaddled babies, two pipes, a cup, cards and dice. In contrast, the English ballad woodcut reduces the community of ‘sievers’ to the spark’s two parents and, significantly, adds clothing to the objects that tumble out of the sieve. Fashionable accessories are thus visually associated with vice, along

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Fig. 4.9  A Looking-​Glass for Lascivious Young Men, 1689–​92, PB 2.72. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge.

with whoring and gambling: the image shows a swaddled ‘young Bastard’, a deck of cards and ‘A whole magazine of Dice’ tumbling out together with two ‘Lac’d’ cravats and ‘A pair of frings Gloves’. Here, fashionable consumption threatens relations, not between the ranks of rich and poor, but between generations and specific individuals: the ‘Lascivious’ young man must confess to the ‘Honest Old Man’ his father and be sifted by ‘The Old Folks’. Luxury is imagined as threatening not a person’s obedience to the monarch, or parliament’s legislation on permissible display, but personal obligation to parents. Excess is less a crime of social pride and more a lack of personal prudence or living beyond the family’s means. In common with other late seventeenth-​century ballads, this story emphasises an individual’s significance, rather than collective or hierarchical social meaning. The ballad woodcut dramatises this conflict through its depiction of dress:  the prodigal’s sprightly feathered hat, laced cravat and long coat in the king’s new fashion of the late 1660s, contrast with his father’s old-​ fashioned short doublet and plain collar that recall styles of the 1630s. The

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two other woodcuts on the sheet create a similar contrast:  a clean-​shaven younger man dressed in fashions of the 1680s –​a full wig, sword, pagoda sleeves and high buckled shoes –​gestures towards a bearded man, whose short hair and long, furred gown recall the Jacobean era. But prodigal ballads do not mock extravagance alone. They also deride fashionable young men who are descended from newly rich farmers and tradespeople instead of the nobility. While their ancestors have made every effort to acquire land, houses and money, these ‘sparks’ are the first in their family with the freedom to spend. Their supply of money does not arise from their own labours but from the labour of others: they have transformed their occupation from being workers in trades to being consumers. But instead of criticising this social mobility as a decay of the nobility, as ballads of the 1620s might have done, these later ballads suggest that flouting the old hierarchies and responsibilities is fuel for satire rather than serious lament. Although their grandparents wore leather and spun wool, the new gallants in fine clothes know that spending power, not social hierarchy, matters now: No matter for my Pedigree ‘Tis like a many more Sir, I am Gallant and will be ‘tis Money Men adore Sir.106 Prodigal ballads, therefore, describe young men who have spent their parents’ money and ruined themselves on luxury and excess. The ExtravagantYouth laments that the protagonist’s dress reveals how he has overspent his father’s wealth, moving from martial to beggarly associations: ‘My Silks flourisht like to a Navy of Flags, /​But now they are worn and torn to Rags.’ However, this young man’s fate is not a cautionary tale for social upstarts: rather, he is an ‘Example’ to other ‘Young Gallants’ who might be tempted to overspend. It is personal excess, not social forgetfulness, that is the focus of the ‘prodigal’ theme. Despite the inelegant punishment meted out to the ‘Lascivious Young Man’ by his parents, the ballad retains a vision of masculine respectability.107 Although he loses cravats and rings through the sieve, the fashionable spark remains above them, fully clothed and still wearing a cravat. In the woodcuts beside this, a well-​dressed, elegantly posed young man doffs his hat to an older man in a sign of respect, who in turn reaches out his arm as if in acknowledgement. Satire of men’s risk of over-​consumption is thus made explicit, but without visually destabilising the ‘classical’ image as an ideal.

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This ballad is unusual in the level of correlation between images and lyrics, as well as having relatively detailed and clear woodcuts. However, even the more frequently repeated woodcuts found in other satirical ballads capture this tension between the ideal of classical, invulnerable masculinity, and the moment of incapacitation, feminisation and loss. For example, both The Subtil Miss and The Crafty Miss carry an image of a man in hat, wig, large-​ ribboned cravat and a coat with high horizontal pockets. The man stands beside a woman wearing a black hood, mantua, laced petticoat and fan. At first glance, the couple appear to be holding hands, but in fact the woman’s left hand is poised immediately above the man’s coat pocket, as if ready to steal its contents. Pickpocketing motifs were probably already well-​known as an expression of contempt for male power. In 1672, reports of Dutch printed pictures described mocking portraits of Charles II ‘surrounded by some ladies of pleasure, bussied in picking his pockets’. These images were ‘most noticed, and talked of’ and even considered to be a motive for the Third Anglo-​Dutch War.108 While the woodcuts discussed above emphasise the way that clothing’s construction could leave the wearer vulnerable to pickpocketing, others emphasised clothing as a boundary at the exchange of sexual favours: the right-​hand woodcut in The Crafty Miss (see fig. 4.8) shows be-​ruffed figures, the man wearing sober long robes suggestive of old age, while the woman’s hand is apparently hidden in his breeches. Similarly, the man who at first seems to hold a woman’s hand in A Groatsworth of Mirth for a Penny (see fig. 4.7) may in fact be groping beneath her petticoat through the side pocket-​ opening.109 Like the pickpocketing scene, here the image is equivocal: while the woman’s right hand visibly restrains her partner, her left hand points suggestively with her fan, as if to propose a tryst in the countryside –​a custom which ballads frequently celebrated.110 It may be that ballad publishers used these figures to advertise a level of bawdy in the ballad lyrics. Certainly, just as the characters appear to be on the threshold of moral decision, so ballad audiences had to imagine for themselves what would happen in the moments after the depicted scene, and satire was created in the ‘spectacle of difference’ between the clothed and seemingly respectable figures in the woodcut images and the nakedness and folly described in the texts. In each of these satirical ballads, then, sexual intrigues, financial greed, deception and fashion are intimately connected.Yet such critiques depend for their force upon the ‘classical’ ideal, which visually implied that men ought to be engaged in formal, public –​even military –​activities, and that their fine clothing should be apparent within a limited degree. As British garment

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and textile manufactures multiplied and prospered, satires on male dress represented the risks of overdressing as effeminacy and moral decline, while underlining the importance of engaging with fashion to a limited extent. This was in contrast to the perceived symbolic order in France, where, it was widely understood, the French king took an active role in promoting and exporting French fashion manufactures through his minister Jean-​Baptiste Colbert.111 As fashion in England was increasingly understood to be an economic commodity like any other, divorced from any reliable expression of social hierarchy, male political agency was increasingly represented by an equilibrium of engagement with, yet restraint in, fine apparel. This helps to explain ballads’ interchangeable use of the terms ‘fop’ and ‘gallant’, to refer to fashionable men.112 Though each ‘type’ pursues fashion and women, each is ludicrously unsuccessful in their sexual exploits, as well as their desire to appear finely dressed. Unlike contemporary stage fops, ballad gallants and fops are heterosexually voracious, but their efforts are laughable and they are certainly made ‘effeminate’ by having the sartorial markers of masculinity, like wigs and other items of masculine dress, removed from them. If, as Susan Staves argues, the longer-​term trajectory of the stage fop was to become less and less an object of anxiety or reprobation,113 this is clearly not yet the case with ballad gallants. Fops and gallants in ballads care excessively for clothing, which is still problematic enough to bring on humiliating retributions and to cast doubt, by implication, on their desirable masculine qualities of self-​reliance and intelligence, required for serving the nation.114 Fine clothing remains a central, if volatile, element in creating masculine social civility.

MASCULINITY, FASHION AND THE DEFENCE OF THE NATION By engaging both intra-​textually and inter-​textually with ballads, this chapter explored how ballad images of and texts about dress created particular associations for masculinity. Like the tune titles listed on each ballad, ballad images could direct the tone of the lyrics and yet be reused with more than one text to produce different effects  –​just as woodcuts of King William on horseback could be deployed in both a ‘classical’ and a ‘satirical’ way. In discussing the ‘classical’ representation of male figures in ballad imagery, we have seen that certain elements of men’s fashion –​most prominently wigs and cravats –​were retained on otherwise draped or martially dressed figures.

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However, in ballad satires, these items are not ridiculed, as one might expect. Rather, fashion’s symbolic significance is threatened only when it is pursued excessively, or for ‘selfish’ reasons. Indeed, satirical representations of men in ballads built upon the ideals of the classical convention: their force depended upon their divergence from the ‘classical’ visual and textual motifs of body coverage, limited fashion, and military and political engagement on behalf of the nation. In this sense, the two conventions shared the same masculine ideals: to be denuded of fashion is to become abject, beyond the pale of society. Men’s fashion in ballad satire is a matter of careful balance. Although fine dress is a social necessity, too much of it implies an excess of private passion, a lack of concern with the nation’s good and a threat of effeminacy. Thus, satirical ballads which focus on men’s fashions foreground men who do not serve their country but themselves, and who take up not just fine clothing but also ‘bad company’ and prostitutes. Classical and satirical representations of men appear as binary opposites, but fashion consumption is, in fact, crucial to them both. Founded on the incorporation of elements of fashion and martial attire within the ‘classical’ ideal, this uneasy balancing act preceded eighteenth-​century representations of male fashion as both essential to civility and yet potentially ruinous to masculinity. As we will consider in Chapter 5, both these conventions in ballads were expressed in very different ways in the representation of women.

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5 CLASSICAL IDEALS AND SATIRICAL DEVIATIONS, PART II Female Bodies, Feminine Fashions and Economic Benefits The ‘classical’ and ‘satirical’ conventions found in ballad images of men towards the end of the seventeenth century are also evident in ballad pictures of women, but expressed in different ways. Where ‘classical’ depictions of men focus on body coverage, ‘classical’ representations of women emphasise exposure, often revealing fully bared breasts. This motif was quite rare in painted portraits and engravings, but ubiquitous in ballads. To understand what significance this convention could have had for contemporary viewers, we examine the ‘discursive contexts’ for baring breasts in both life and representations that relate inter-​textually to fantasy, to actual contemporary issues, and to texts and images of bared breasts outside the ballad medium.1 After this inter-​textual study, we investigate the intra-​textual ballad contexts in which the motif appears, an exercise which sheds light not only on representations of women but also on the semiotic nature of ballad images. Following this, we turn to ‘satirical’ representations of fashionable women, which  –​contrary to the denuded ‘classical’ pictures  –​emphasise the importance of clothes, illustrating and discussing dress in considerable detail. Focusing on fashion satires of the 1680s and 90s, we examine how ballads envisioned new kinds of fashion consumption, and the ways that this consumption could both injure and benefit the nation.

‘CLASSICAL’ FEMININITY: BARED BREASTS Chapter 3 explored how ballad woodcuts tracked developments in painted portrait conventions in the 1670s and 80s, which revealed more of the female than the male body. For example, we saw that Lely’s portrait of Princess Mary

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(or at least her head) appeared in ballads with a degree of accuracy as to the drapery and hairstyle of the original, but her bare neck contrasted clearly with pictures of men that showed necks covered up. However, the ‘translation’ of portrait conventions into ballad woodcut was never a direct one. In some cases, certain styles could be rendered differently, or taken to more extreme lengths. In the ballad An Excellent Sonnet of the Unfortunate Loves of Hero & Leander (1684–​ 95, fig. 5.1),2 the text is laid out like a playbook and three woodcuts depict human figures, arranged beneath the title like dramatis personae. The left-​hand cut shows a seated man, crowned and bearing orb and sceptre, presumably representing the ‘aged father’, who separates the ill-​fated lovers of the story.3 In the middle cut, Hero is shown bare-​breasted, with full, curled hair and what appears to be the edge of a loose smock arranged around her décolletage. On the right, Leander is represented at a similar size and shape to Hero, also draped in indistinct, voluminous robes, with full curls of hair. However, where Hero’s image immediately projects a sense of openness, looseness and physicality, Leander’s seems closed and hidden, with skin

Fig. 5.1  An Excellent Sonnet of the Unfortunate Loves of Hero & Leander, 1684–​95, PB 3.322. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge.

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almost totally covered by garments and hair. The most obvious distinction between the two is of course the display of Hero’s breasts. The ‘Hero’ image in Hero & Leander can be traced back to Peter Lely’s portrait of Charles II’s mistress, Louise de Kéroualle, painted in 1671 (fig. 5.2a).4 Lely painted Kéroualle as a shepherdess, exposing her figure with a distinctive low ‘v’-shaped décolleté, loose shift and drapery. In 1678, Gerard Valck made a full-​length mezzotint copy (fig. 5.2b),5 possibly capitalising on Kéroualle’s notoriety as a dangerous French influence at court during the time of the ‘Popish Plot’,6 while a year earlier, Abraham Blooteling had copied part of this portrait in a bust-​length mezzotint (fig. 5.2c).7 Both Blooteling’s and Valck’s images –​altering the original, or perhaps following another version of Lely’s painting –​show a lock of Kéroualle’s curled hair hanging down the proper right of her neck. Blooteling’s bust-​length, although it leaves out various details of the drapery and eliminates jewels at the arm and shoulder, preserves the shape of the portrait’s face, hair, décolletage and the central jewel below the breast. By retaining these details, Blooteling did not just capture

Fig. 5.2a  Peter Lely, Louise de Kéroualle, 1671, oil on canvas. From the Collection at Althorp.

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Fig. 5.2b  Gerard Valck, Louise de Kéroualle, 1678, mezzotint. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

Kéroualle’s facial likeness, but also referred to Lely’s original court portrait and –​exploiting mezzotint’s capacity for rendering shine and softness –​ recalled the sensuous undress of the original image. It is evident, however, that a dramatic change took place when Louise de Kéroualle’s bust appeared in ballad woodcuts. Kéroualle’s décolletage has been arranged much lower on the body, while at the same time the breasts have been restationed higher up, so as to reveal them almost entirely. This image was reused in many other ballads, as well as contemporary woodcut-​illustrated publications, such as Mary Holden’s The Womans Almanack published in 1688. What is one to make of this motif? In European art, the exposure of one breast has long been associated with ‘self-​forgetful female zeal –​heroism, devotion, sacrifice’. In seventeenth-​century Western art in particular, a ‘new interest in the bosom’ has been observed, with an increasing emphasis on pleasure rather than maternity.8 However, as a motif in visual iconography, the full exposure of both breasts in art has received little attention in art history.9 In discussions of seventeenth-​century English portraits, fully bared

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Fig. 5.2c  Abraham Blooteling, Louise de Kéroualle, 1677, mezzotint. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

breasts tend to be interpreted iconographically as a reference to famous courtesans of Charles II’s court, such as Louise de Kéroualle and Nell Gwynn.10 However, in ballads, specific interpretations are difficult to make because, once appropriated, portraits of individuals become general or stock images, used for a variety of identities. Moreover, as Sheila O’Connell and Angela McShane have respectively observed, sober dress often appears in illustrations of bawdy ballads,11 whereas bared breasts often adorned ballads about queens and mothers.12 One ballad of 1685 exceptionally names Louise de Kéroualle and Nell Gwynn as its two protagonists, but illustrates the conversing women with images of two very well-​covered female figures.13 Clearly, then, in ballad woodcuts, neither bared nor covered breasts had absolutely secure connotations –​a fact which makes it all the harder to explain the dramatic proliferation of ballads featuring bare-​breasted women in the later part of the seventeenth century.

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An early depiction of bared breasts in ballads can be found in A Proverb Old (c.1625),14 where the female figure’s bodice appears so constructed as to reveal her breasts, although it is not a dominant feature within the sheet. The motif did not become commonplace until the 1670s, from which time bared breasts were depicted so frequently and so prominently that their appearance seems to have become a matter of course. The use of bared-​breast woodcuts for a wide variety of ballad stories has been used as evidence for the desultory and careless use of iconography in ballads, lending weight to the argument that ballad images are mere space-​fillers. Furthermore bared breasts have been described as merely ‘semipornographic’ attention-​grabbers or ornament for the text.15 This conclusion accords with both William Sanderson’s and Samuel Pepys’s contemporary descriptions of women in informal or ‘careless’ clothing in portraiture, since in both cases they assume that (regardless of how bared the breasts) the loosely arranged style is innately sensual and the woman, by implication, available for visual if not physical delectation.16 However, such a view presumes that a printed image could only have one fixed meaning and ignores the history of image reuse in print as discussed in Chapter 2. The practical requirements of ballad publishers meant that images simply had to attract audiences and work with many different stories. Moreover, one must consider the significance of the cultural transmission of the drapery style from painting to woodcut. Who bared their breasts? Ballads tend to depict bared breasts as rounded, and in a high position on the female torso. As Angela McShane points out, such morphology implies that the body has been shaped by wearing firm stays around the torso.17 Given that most surviving seventeenth-​century stays are made of whalebone and encased in precious fabrics, much dress-​historical work has concluded that these body-​contouring garments would have been the preserve only of wealthy women.18 Such evidence might therefore suggest that the bared breasts depicted in ballads would have been perceived as symbols of the social elite. However, evidence from clothing practices is equivocal, because surviving dress and dress records from the lower end of the social spectrum suggest that most, if not all, women would have had access to stays, and that stays could be made of cheaper, highly durable materials like leather, as well as expensive whalebone and silk.19 This in turn suggests that stays were considered a sartorial necessity for all women, rather than a privileged fashion for a few.20 Writing in 1653, John Bulwer described

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stays as a practical means to preserve ‘nature’ rather than to achieve a fashionable shape: lest the heavy Breast should sag down too low, because a woman goes alwaies upright, they [the breasts] are knit and tyed by their whole Basis or Bottom to the bonie part of the Chest.21 Bulwer sees stays as a means both to preserve the existing structure of the body –​operating according to the ‘Law of Nature’ –​and also to supply an artificial support, without which the breast will ‘sag down too low’. Together with the evidence for ownership of stays well below the level of the elites, Bulwer’s statement suggests that the ability to ‘knit’ the breasts to the body, creating a high (and therefore more easily exposable) bust, was associated less with fashionable display than with physical health and possibly youth.22 If the stays that helped ‘produce’ the bared breasts were not exclusive to wealthy women, we can turn instead to look at contemporary accounts of baring breasts, and what kind of associations were made with the practice. The anecdotal evidence would suggest that, throughout the century, such exposure was deliberately made upon occasion –​though we can only surmise proof of an actual practice of baring the breasts from a few quite scattered references, in various texts and images of the period.23 However, as we shall see, the visual and textual evidence for breast-​baring does not offer a straightforward answer. At the opening of the century, James I’s wife Anne of Denmark continued Elizabeth I’s fashion for very low décolletage that, by textual accounts, may have wholly revealed the breasts,24 but her painted portraits show only expansive décolletage.25 By contrast, full breasts are frankly depicted in Inigo Jones’s female costume designs for court masques up until the 1640s.26 In Henrietta Maria’s court, such costumes were usually designed for named characters who personified abstract virtues according to the ideals of Platonic love:  in this context, bared breasts could be seen as a symbol of Divine Poetry, or the beauty of the courtier’s inner being.27 For example, Inigo Jones modelled a costume for ‘Divine Poesy’ on Cesare Ripa’s emblem for ‘Poesia’ of 1603, whose voluminous starry robe is structured so low as to reveal both bared breasts.28 Around 1650, Peter Lely also depicted the character of ‘Poetry’ as bare-​breasted in his painting The Concert.29 It cannot be proven whether or not Jones’s designs were precisely followed in three dimensions, let alone worn, because none of the actual costumes has survived. However, it is worth considering the possibility that bared breasts may have helped to emphasise the distinction between cross-​dressed male actors who played women on the public stage before 1660, and the real elite

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women who played female characters in private masques.30 Bared breasts in a restricted court theatre setting could draw attention to the gathering’s elite exclusivity, where arcane communication was shared amongst a privileged few. Furthermore, within the context of the masque and its neo-​Platonic ideals, an elite woman who bared her breasts did so within an environment that was disposed to interpret the exposed, elite female body (within certain bounds) as a sign of transcendence and even deity. Where these courtly designs (whether made up precisely into costumes or not) were designed to be seen by a restricted, courtly audience, by contrast, printed texts that debated breast-​baring were aimed at audiences which could include the non-​courtly. Here, what becomes apparent is that baring breasts was not a matter to be mentioned neutrally in passing, but a topic for comment or critique. According to John Bulwer, for example, baring the breasts contravened ‘Nature’ (in contrast to the practice of using stays, which assisted it), since it created ‘a refrigeration of the originall of the Nerves’.31 Later in the same work Bulwer turned to moral concerns over the practice and denounced: That upstart impudence and innovation of naked breasts, and cutting or hallowing downe the neck of womens garments below their shoulders, an exorbitant and shamefull enormity and habit … they seem to have some tacite designe to provoke lustfull appetite, and to invite the cheapening32 eye of Carnall Chapmen.33 Bulwer accuses breast-​baring women of prostituting themselves for money, putting the practice beyond the moral pale. In 1654 Thomas Hall published a diatribe against ‘painting, spots, naked backs, breasts, arms’; his first argument against naked breasts is that they are ‘temptations and known provocations to uncleanness’ and openly flout ‘the seventh Commandement’ against adultery.34 Bared breasts could thus be condemned for presenting a sexual temptation to men, regardless of the context of their display. The problem with these critiques (and others like them) is that it is rarely clear, in phrases such as ‘Naked Breasts and Shoulders’,35 whether they refer to low décolletage or to full breast-​baring. Charles North gave an unusually definite description in a letter to his father in 1667, when he described the appearance of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle at the theatre, as: all the pageant now discoursed on: Her brests laid out to view in a play house with scarlat trimd nipples. Her intrado was incognito else a triumphall charriott with 12 horses & another with 8 white bulls was prepard.36

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Shortly after this date, Pepys and Evelyn noted Cavendish’s unusual dress in their diaries, but it is not clear whether Pepys referred to her exposed breasts when he recounts ‘I have often heard her described … naked necked, without anything about it.’37 Cavendish’s display was clearly out of the ordinary, but despite North’s emphasis, it is still not clear whether her exposure created ‘pageant’ because she had emphasised her nipples with red pigment, or because she had, as a noblewoman, displayed and emphasised her body to commoners’ eyes in the public space of a playhouse. Almost twenty years later, the Ladies Dictionary of 1694 marshalled arguments much like Bulwer’s, to argue very specifically against the practice: nothing discovers lightness so much as to make strange Eyes familiar with the knowledge of your Breast … Dainty Nipples … why doe ye so labour to tempt and take deluded eyes? … Must Nature in such ample measure shew her bounty, and you recompence her love with lying snaires to purchase fancy?38 Sometimes, however, it seems that writers may be referring to complete exposure by using an adverb such as ‘fully’, as for example in the epigram by John Mennes Of Womens Naked Breasts: In open shops flyes often blow that flesh Which in close safes might be kept longer fresh. They but invite flesh-​flyes, whose full spread paps Like roadways lie between their lips and laps.39 Women exposing their breasts could thus be likened to a pedlar selling his wares, proffering the body’s sexual charms as if for sale. Certainly it appears that there was enough of a practice of baring breasts to encourage a literature condemning it as sexually immoral. On the public Restoration stage, female actors were a novelty; attention to bared breasts emphasised them both as a sexual attraction and a celebration of the real women who were now playing female roles. Play scripts written after 1660 increasingly referred to sexual encounters which, though not actually enacted on-​stage, required actresses to wear dishevelled and revealing clothing to represent prior sexual activity.40 Such texts also suggest that actresses’ breasts became a focal point for action: John Lacy’s The Dumb Lady (1672) presents a jealous husband who defends his wife from the advances of a pretended doctor, who tries to handle his wife’s breasts. The husband

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remonstrates, ‘Her pulse beats not thereabouts, Sir: hands off, for she’s my wife, Sir’, while the stage directions for the doctor note ‘His hands upon her breasts still’.41 Several other plays of the late seventeenth century offer similarly ‘hands-​on’ stage directions and verbal attention to bared female breasts.42 It may be that breast-​baring was considered more allowable for actresses than other women, but, interestingly, what most attracted contemporary appreciation were the ‘breeches roles’ in which actresses displayed their legs.43 All the same, the breast motif may have become a hallmark of ballads because of their strong association with the stage. Ballads had long been connected to the playhouses of London, being sold in their vicinity and often replicating their stories. After the Restoration, publishers particularly emphasised the relationship between ballads and the theatre, advertising ‘new play-​ house’ tunes titles such as An Excellent New Play-​House Song, and parts of many ballad lyrics borrowed from current and recent plays.44 As we saw in Hero & Leander (see fig. 5.1), images of bared breasts could be seen in the context of ballad dialogues that were printed to reflect the layout of play texts. If bared –​ or highly visible –​female breasts may have been an intriguing new feature of the post-​Restoration stage, perhaps it is no surprise that they should also be popular in post-​Restoration ballads. While it is impossible, therefore, to be confident about precisely when and how women bared their breasts in seventeenth-​century England, anecdotal evidence and satire suggests that it was certainly a recognised practice. It is unlikely to have been seen in public spaces outside court culture or the stage, without being criticised as sinful. Bared breasts in ballads could therefore refer to a sartorial practice that elicited much comment and critique, the better to attract buyers. But an imaged motif is a more complicated matter than simply its associated practice, since on a ballad it relates primarily in an intra-​and inter-​textual manner to other images and texts. Images of bared breasts appear in many and diverse ballads with very different themes. To these we now turn, aiming, in Jobling’s phrase, ‘to decode both the words and images in tandem’45 in order to discover the variety of associations such imagery might evoke. Ballad breasts: love and devotion At present there is no known seventeenth-​century ballad text in which the practice of breast-​baring is discussed; yet, as we have discussed, images of bared breasts are ubiquitous in ballads from the 1670s.46 In de Certeau’s terms, within the bricolage of the ballad layout, bared breasts were for the

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publishers a ‘decision’ that was obviously thought successful, since it was repeatedly made over the span of around three decades. This popularity suggests ballad publishers had to hand a motif they believed worked well with their existing woodblocks, appealed to audiences and fitted with a large number of narratives and other images. In the absence of any easily systematisable discourse within which to place the image of bared breasts, however, it will be important to analyse the variety of contexts in which ballads depicted the motif. Seeing the image as a chosen element of a collaged ensemble of word and image, and exploring the principal themes it was selected to illustrate, may help to show at least some of the meanings it had for those who bought and looked at ballads. One of the earliest ballads to feature bared breasts in an obvious way is The Pensive Prisoners Apology in 1675 (fig. 5.3).47 An oval woodcut frame closely

Fig. 5.3  The Pensive Prisoners Apology, 1675, PB 2.80. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge.

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encircles the face and chest of a female figure with large patches on the forehead and left cheek of the face. The impression of bared breasts is created by two sets of concentric circles placed immediately beneath a pearl necklace, with possibly a narrow lace collar below. The oval frame beside this depicts a male figure wearing a hat, long flowing hair, a lace cravat and a coat or vest, worn open to show a loose shirt underneath. Where the male figure is defined by plentiful coverage of the body, and the strong v-​shapes created by his hair, wig and open coat, the female figure, whose head is somewhat closer to the viewer, is defined by the series of curvilinear marks created by the curls in her hair, the rounded pearls in her necklace and her exposed breasts. The male figure’s abundant clothing reveals only the face, but the image of the female body has no clear indication of any textile garment. Yet her appearance is not uncomplicatedly naked: Joanne Eicher and May Ellen Roach-​Higgins’s classic definition of dress –​‘an assemblage of body modifications and/​or supplements’ –​is clearly evident in the black patches scattered around her facial features and the intricate arrangement of dangling hair curls.48 This ‘dressed’ hair suggests that the exposure of the breasts is a deliberate aspect of the ‘dress’ represented. In contrast, ballads that depict the naked female body with loose, straight, uncurled hair almost always narrate scenes of violence and female abjection.49 Bared breasts in ballads usually appear as if the result of deliberate, rather than accidental, exposure. If one only relied on evidence for breast baring in practice, this display, together with an overtly artificial appearance, might imply moral laxity. In fact, the text of the ballad is a mixture of two morally unexceptional themes: its opening two and final stanzas are adapted from Richard Lovelace’s 1642 love poem ‘To Althea, from Prison’,50 while the rest of the ballad concentrates on the themes of spiritual freedom and pious contempt for the world.51 Thus the prisoner first imagines lying ‘tangled’ in ‘divine Althema’s hair, but soon addresses ‘his Fellow Prisoners wheresoever’, mixing religious with classical imagery as he favourably compares the freedom of the soul, to bodily and worldly restrictions: They lock my body within the doors but cannot lock my soul: My Muses too and fro doth run above and beneath the sky The greatest Potentate under the Sun oft wants such Liberty.

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Developing the theme still more explicitly, the prisoner describes his freedom as the result of religious devotion: Christ above, the Lord of love, which for mankind did dye, None but he can pardon me nor work my liberty. In contrast to the patched female face, the ballad furthermore praises the ‘spotless soul being innocent’. Hence the exposed woman appears, if anything, as the character ‘divine Althema’. Yet the figure’s exposed breasts may also have connoted the bodies of courtesans at the Caroline court, whose portraits –​with deep décolletage –​were circulating in print by the 1670s.52 This image of courtly beauty would therefore have been ideally suited to the fantasy of a loving ‘Althema’, an element of the ‘bricolage’ used to construct the themes of desire and unattainability in the ballad. Furthermore, it appears in the context of a ballad text which conflates romantic love and religious love as antidotes to the world’s cruelty, describing them as freedom compared with those who, ‘Having too much they scrape for more … Which makes me think they live in thrall’. In the neo-​Platonic terms of Charles I’s court, as we have seen, the beauty of female flesh was associated not only with courtly display, but also with the expression of ‘inner’ beauty of the soul. It seems that the dual associations of profane and sacred devotion were later available for breasts depicted on ballads too.53 Perhaps bare-​breasted images were symbols of a corrupt court, representing what the ballad story condemned. Yet, it is equally conceivable that the marked lack of clothing seen on the female body –​removed first by the bust-​length format, and second by the baring of the breast –​could become, within the context of the lyrics, a symbol of virtue and honesty. Admittedly, the interpretation of bared breasts that we have drawn from this ballad as an example cannot be absolutely proven from the ballad itself. However, we can pose the possibility that the intra-​textual relationship (between a ballad image of bared breasts and the text in which it appears) can suggest a meaning that can be traced in earlier or contemporary images, particularly in print. As Anne Hollander argues, the allegorical deployment of bared breasts was part of a widespread artistic vocabulary of symbols in European art.54 In the Jacobean and Caroline courts, bared breasts were depicted within allegorical compositions and miniature portraits, designed for limited and

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elite consumption.55 For example, Honthorst’s large-​scale The Seven Liberal Arts Presented to Apollo and Diana in 162856 shows the Duchess of Buckingham with bared breasts in her role as the personification of Grammar. Allegorical depictions of bared breasts were also widely available in contemporary English printed images, such as the title page designed by Ralph Markland for the book Vienna in 1628, in which a princess is depicted receiving a flaming heart from a bare-​breasted allegorical figure.57 Allegorical virtues associated with bare breasts were also disseminated in Continental prints, which inspired many embroideries made by young women throughout the seventeenth century.58 One English mid-​to late-​seventeenth-​century embroidery depicts a bare-​breasted figure of Charity, possibly following a design by Crispin de Passe the elder.59 Bared breasts could thus potentially symbolise world-​refusing romantic love, a virtuous renunciation of outward forms, Platonic inner beauty and maternal devotion. This addition to the ‘vocabulary’ of ballad images was therefore distinctively thematic and yet relatively supple, able to support a variety of associations for the ballad text. Ballad breasts: sexuality If some ballads mobilised the bared female body as a symbol of love and beauty, divine or otherwise, others referred to more down-​to-​earth particulars: the sexual activity or otherwise of the female protagonist. The Young-​Mans Labour Lost tells the story of a ‘fair Maid’ who ‘would not yield’ to the sexual advances of her lover (1678–​80; fig. 5.4).60 Their dialogue is set out like a play, with answering stanzas, while their persons are represented by the contrasting images of a bare-​breasted woman and a man covered to the chin in a buttoned coat and plain collar. The bust-​length format here allows us to observe the eyes of the two protagonists. The female figure stares straight ahead at the beholder, but the gaze of the male figure is turned toward her. This creates a strong intra-​textual connection between the two separate woodcuts, but also emphasises the female figure as a site of visual and sexual interest. The guiding gaze of a nearby, fully clothed, male figure further highlights the erotic connotations of the exposed female breasts.61 Referring to Kenneth Clark’s distinction between realistic, erotic ‘nakedness’ and a more generalised ideal of ‘nudity’ in art, Hollander argues nakedness will connect to identifiable contemporary garments, whereas, ‘the nude implies drapery’.62 However, she goes on, when recognisable garments are pictured alongside drapery, connotations of both the erotic ‘naked’ and the ideal ‘nude’ are brought into play. Here, the fair Maid wears face patches, a controversial contemporary fashion,63 and a recognisable bodice (instead of ‘allegorical’

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Fig. 5.4  The Young-​Mans Labour Lost, 1678–​80, Roxburghe 4.81. © The British Library Board.

draped textiles) around her bare breasts. On Hollander’s argument, one might expect a bawdy theme to the ballad, but in fact the song declares the fair Maid’s virtue to be unassailable. It tracks the unsuccessful efforts of a ‘Young-​ man’ to woo the maid, who in her turn declares, ‘I am not resolv’d to wed, /​Nor yet to loose my Maiden-​head’, and finally admonishes, ‘So Maids … Let no false young-​man you deceive … Scarce one in twenty proveth just’.64 Even when combined with face-​patches, then, using bared breasts to illustrate youthful virtue was not unfamiliar in printed images by the early 1680s. Indeed, an earlier, emblem-​style broadsheet suggests that bared breasts were already an established, traditional way to express virginal innocence. Which of these Fower, that Here You See, in Greatest Daunger You Thinke to Be (1623) shows four vulnerable figures being accosted by four pairs of predators. In the upper register of fig. 5.5, the top right-​hand scene depicts ‘A Maide, between two Friers’, with two habited men vying for the attentions of a woman, whose bodice is constructed and laced to reveal her breasts.65 Yet, rather than being a sign of immodesty, this seems merely to emphasise

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Fig. 5.5 Broadside, Which of These Fower, That Here You See, in Greatest Daunger You Thinke to Be, 1623. By kind permission of The Society of Antiquaries of London.

her vulnerability: indeed, the maid reproves the friars’ advances, lamenting: ‘Now in what perill standes a Maide, in shrieft betweene two Friers? /​ That only make the Church a Cloake, to couer foule desires.’ Since each of the other vignettes uses long-​standing traditional symbols of predators/​prey (such as goose/​foxes), this suggests that the bare-​breasted maid was also a known figure of vulnerable innocence. Bared breasts appear to symbolise the virginity of elite or mythical women in a print of c.1660, which depicts a variety of inn-​signs, including ‘The Maiden head’ (fig. 5.6).66 Both the ‘Kings head’ and the ‘Queens head’ depict bust-​length portraits quite recognisable as Catherine of Braganza and Charles II. Catherine is shown wearing a wide lace collar of the kind

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Fig. 5.6  Anonymous designs for inn-​signs, c.1660, engraving. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge.

made famous in her portrait by Dirk Stoop67 and a curled ‘hurlebrelu’ hairstyle –​a combination of elements from different painted portraits used in other cheap printed images of her.68 By contrast, the ‘Maiden head’ image bears a much looser relation to contemporary portraiture, the figure’s spiky crown bearing no resemblance to contemporary royal images and her long flowing hair recalling masque paintings of the early seventeenth century. In context of these inn signs –​by definition required to be clear and easily recognisable –​bared breasts appear as an attribute of archetypal or noble virginity. As well as illustrating stories about maidens, bare-​breasted ballad cuts were also used for stories about honourable married women –​even queens. In 1689, ballad publisher William Thackeray used the same motif from The Young-​Mans Labour Lost to illustrate a new sheet to celebrate the arrival from the Netherlands of Mary of Orange early in the year, The Princess Welcome to England (fig. 5.7).69 Like The Young-​Mans Labour Lost, there is only one female portrait on the ballad and only one female protagonist in the text, which suggests that the image is meant to represent Mary. Where the earlier ballad depicted a man beside this image, as if to represent the maid’s interlocutor, here the female figure is placed alongside an image of a ship, as if to evoke Mary’s journey ‘while she did from Holland sail’ and her arrival ‘to the Shore’ of England.

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Fig. 5.7  The Princess Welcome to England, 1689, PB 2.256. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge.

The song Princess Welcome offers no perjorative context for bared breasts, as might be expected if the motif were only seen as a reference to notorious court mistresses. The overall tone of the text is in fact fervently loyal to the princess. Even the tune –​‘The Cannons Rore’ –​generally appears on patriotic ballads in praise of English triumphs. Furthermore, the ballad layout contains the image of a bared body within the context of a song of praise for humble clothing, a symbol that bespeaks purity and greatness of purpose: We have had a Papist Queen, But another may be seen In Attire far more mean, yet none can discommend her;

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For we find humility In a Royal Dignity, Speaks her evermore to be the Church and Faiths Defender. In direct contrast to the old sumptuary legislations, this song implies that Protestant royalty needs no external decoration to proclaim its position. As we saw in Chapter 2, in the 1620s Patient Grissel could demonstrate Grissel’s worth by describing her investment in queenly robes. By contrast, here in 1689 –​when the ideal human subject is considered no longer expressible by the economic commodity of clothes –​the new queen’s ‘mean’ attire, visualised with a bared body, is praised for the way it proclaims her religion and royal virtues. Unlike the ‘Papist Queen’, Protestant Mary wears ‘mean’ attire because her innate ‘Royal Dignity’ needs no rich clothing to express or create it. There is thus no overt ‘disjunction’70 between the bare-​breasted female body –​ with its possible associations of divine virtue and virginity –​and Princess Mary’s role as the ‘Church and Faiths Defender’. Indeed, in this instance, bared breasts may have connoted the personification of Charity mentioned above, a chastely maternal, emblematic figure that was frequently portrayed wearing draperies and/​or with bared breasts. At least three ballads of this period depict a draped female figure with three clinging children, with texts referring to ‘Beggers that st[and] on the High-​way craving … Charity’.71 Thus, although it has been argued that the exposure of the breast was first made political in eighteenth-​century France,72 it seems that seventeenth-​century ballads were already deploying Mary II’s bare-​breasted image to refer to her political attractions for England. Though ‘dress’ in its widest definition is inescapable, within this image, Mary’s suitability for rule is strikingly emphasised by the presentation of her body, rather than by the quality or style of her clothing. Paradoxically, then, at the very same time that many ballads declared the importance of the production and proliferation of fashion as a means of advancing the economy of Protestant England, The Princess Welcome presented the new queen’s body as a more potent signifier of her status than her clothes. Although in reality Queen Mary was an avid consumer of fashion, as her wardrobe accounts attest,73 this bare-​breasted image, together with the ballad’s textual description, suggests that her significance to the country rests hidden within her and is therefore not

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Fig. 5.8  The Maulsters Daughter of Malborough, 1684–​98, PB 3.70. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge.

expressible in fine garments. Her apparent disregard of the commodity of clothing underscores that her ‘inner’ identity as queen needs no physical expression to prove it. Having now established that ballads used the bare-​breast motif to signify praise-​worthy women, we turn now to consider its use in comic contexts. It was, as we will explore, flexible enough to use in association with ribaldry or the lower sorts. For instance, The Maulster’s Daughter of Malborough features the ‘Louise de Kéroualle’ cut beneath the humourous subtitle, A Pleasant Discourse … about the Weary Burden of a Troublesome Maiden-​head (1684–​98, fig. 5.8).74 The lyrics are narrated by a young woman who desires ‘a lusty young Man’ to relieve her of virginity, and her anxious mother who wishes

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her to wait. The mother threatens to resolve matters by removing her daughter’s fashionable clothes: If you are so pomper’d, I’ll pull your courage down By hard and painful labour, strip off your silken gown, With your Toppings rich and gay, to the Field this very day I’ll send you packing, cloath’d in Sacking, then perhaps you may Leave off your longing for a young Man. This logic of moral denial is refuted by the daughter, who merely imagines that ‘in the Field /​Young Batchelors will tempt me, and I perhaps may yield’. Quite unlike the Patient Grissel narrative, the daughter successfully laughs off the ‘pomper’d’ effect of luxurious silk clothing as of minimal importance, and eventually her mother agrees to marry her to a farmer.75 The Maulsters Daughter is a good example of how a variety of meanings could be mobilised from one image within a ballad sheet. On the one hand, the bared breast motif on this ballad may have been used as a visual expression of the ‘troublesom Maiden-​head’ or virginity of the Maulster’s Daughter, like the cuts discussed above. Yet on the other hand, it could have been an appropriate expression for the unfilial determination and feisty sexual desire of the fifteen-​year-​old protagonist. Despite the Maulster’s daughter’s decidedly non-​noble background, it is possible that the original association and dissemination of this image as a royal mistress portrait-​ type would have made it useful to publishers, who wished to mobilise the theme of female sexual freedom and unconcealed sexual allure, in a variety of social contexts. Bared breasts could furthermore symbolise sexual vice and avarice; Advice to the Ladies of London76 used the motif to accompany lyrics urging the ‘Ladies of London’ to find wealthy older husbands who finance a comfortable life while indulging themselves with younger ‘lusty Gallants’. That such vices were already strongly associated with displays of bare breasts is clear from the evidence of earlier and contemporary depictions of prostitutes. The same year Honthorst painted a bare-​breasted Duchess of Buckingham as ‘Grammar’ for the English king and queen, his Brothel Scene of 162877 showed a prostitute baring both breasts. He painted several similar bare-​breasted prostitutes in the 1620s and 30s.78 Though it is uncertain how far such imagery was seen beyond the Netherlands, the morally negative association of bared breasts was certainly available on the English print market. In 1635 George Glover’s

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engraving entitled ‘Lust’ showed a bare-​breasted woman with a frank description that connected her exposed and fashionable female body with vice: Bare brest, loose habitt, the knee crost discloses With neate silke stockings, garters and blowne roses79 Wine, and Tobaco smoake, where these are found, LUST taints ye mind, Nor is the body sound.80 As late as 1698, a playing card engraved after a design by Francis Barlow depicted a prostitute with fully bared breasts.81 The bared-​breast motif in ballads could thus be associated with a wide variety of themes, from sober spirituality, virginity and queenship to court whores, low-​born characters and female sexual agency in general. What these themes have in common is that they all refer to the spiritual or sexual virtue –​or vice –​of the female protagonist. The exposed female body in ballads thus offered the ballad publisher a distinctive means to refer to female characters. Its visual resonance had great semiotic flexibility, making it financially viable as a woodblock for a variety of different ballads. The image was also a clever investment in a topical trend, since the market success of the mezzotint from the late 1670s had fuelled the already increasingly wide demand for printed images of courtly women in more or less revealing undress. However, where engravings and mezzotints had followed painted conventions of undress quite closely, ballads simplified and amplified the convention so that it was frequently translated as fully bared breasts. In this way, the female ‘classical’ body, rather than specific items of clothing, became a new marker for female characters in ballads, and the symbolic freight of female figures was expanded to include vulnerability, sexuality and spirituality. Yet, for all this, ‘classical’ images of women in ballads prompted other types of representation, even quite contradictory ones, which, as we will see, further complicate this picture of femininity.

SATIRE ON FASHION In the late seventeenth century, ‘top-​knot’ was a term used loosely to refer to woman’s headdress made with lace, ribbon or a mixture of the two.82 The largest woodcut on Advice to the Maidens of London (1685–​8, fig. 5.9),83 depicts a woman at the point of arranging just such a headdress. She stands in a seemingly grand interior, before a large draped

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Fig. 5.9  Advice to the Maidens of London, 1685–​8, PB 4.365. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge.

toilet table and an elaborately framed mirror. She wears stays, a mantua, a double-​fringed petticoat and a patch on her left cheek, all elements of fashionable dress in the mid-​1680s when this sheet was printed. Raising both hands to her coiffure, she draws attention to its folded ribbons and the lace lappets that hang down upon her shoulders. The image is clear, of good quality and possibly copied from an imported print, such as a French fashion plate.84 Where the sieve image in A Looking-Glass (fig. 4.9) emblematises the dangers posed by fashionable life in general, Advice to the Maidens does not make any immediately obvious point either for or against the fashion. Indeed, it creates a strong emphasis on the relationship between the figure of the woman and her clothing. Where ballads carrying ‘classical’ images do not explicitly describe or reference these pictures in their accompanying texts, ballad satires of women and fashion demonstrate a close and very obvious intra-​textuality. Advice to the Maidens is a typical ballad satire of women’s clothing, in that it gives central importance to specific details of dress and creates obvious

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textual associations with them. Touching the ribbons in her hair with both hands and gazing at herself in the mirror, the central female figure is both transfixed and physically engrossed by her own clothing and appearance. The remaining ribbons on the toilet table suggest she may continue riveted to her own reflection for some time. Yet while this motif might imply vanity, there is no reference to such a vice in the text. Its presentation of female fashions takes a different direction, prodding the audience to connect fashionability with women, rather than inviting a detached critique of female fashion consumption. This effect is created by other images and texts in the ballad. An oval frame contains the figure of a man gesturing with one hand toward the dressing woman. His eyes are also evidently turned toward her  –​similarly to the arrangement in Young-​Mans Labour Lost (see fig. 5.4) –​ as if to underscore that the ballad narrative offers a male assessment of fashionable women, as well as a voyeuristic appreciation of them. Immediately below this oval, the ballad opens with the phrase, ‘Now you young females that follows the Mode’. The title confirms this link between women and fashion, with the prominent words ‘Maidens’ and ‘Fantastical TOP-​KNOTS’ placed immediately above the images. Such an overdetermined association between women and their own clothing, and men as commentators upon them, is typical of all surviving ballads which focus on top-​knots. Unlike ballad satires on men, naming and illustrating fashionable garments is crucial for the layout of these sheets. Women are depicted as profoundly connected to fashion. Ballad satires of women thus form one half of a visual dispute, between the ideal of the ‘classical’ female, whose relationship to fashion is at best suppressed, and the economic reality of fashion as a commodity, whose widespread consumption is necessary to the country’s prosperity. As such, satirical ballads are by no means wholly negative or critical about female fashion. Indeed, they transform the ancient tropes of luxury (discussed in Chapter 2), in which finery was feared to corrupt the lower orders of society and cause social disintegration. The new vision of luxury is that consumption across the social hierarchy could be a valuable way to promote the country’s prosperity. This is particularly evident in ballads about ‘top-​knot’ headdresses. Advice to the Maidens is one of a group of eight ballads in the Pepys collection, printed in the 1680s and early 1690s, which focus specifically on this female fashion. While ballads about weavers (as discussed in Chapter 2) unequivocally praise female fashions for promoting the success of their ‘callings’, top-​knot ballads revel in ambiguity and contradictory messages about fashion: some sheets declare its benefits, others rail against its dangers. However, all of

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Fig. 5.10  The Somersetshire Wonder, 1690s, PB 4.362. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge.

them address women specifically and with plenty of humour. Critical ballads The Somersetshire Wonder (fig. 5.10),85 and A Fair Warning for Pride (fig. 5.11)86 focus on the dangers of pride in ‘women and maidens’, while The Maidens Resolution,87 The Womens and Maidens Vindication,88 and The London Ladies Vindication (fig. 5.12)89 all ventriloquise women as spirited defenders of their right to dress in accordance with fashionable taste. Where ‘classical’ representations of women ostensibly repudiate or deny the importance of fashion, these satires overtly emphasise its power and importance. Each of the aforementioned ballads represents a top-​knot, either in a prominent illustration, or in a large capitalised word in the title, or both. Each ballad shifts the envisioned ideal of the typical consumer from being a member of the elite (of either sex), to being a female (of any rank). Compared with the satirical depictions of men analysed in Chapter 4, it is evident that men and women receive very different treatment as subjects for satire on fashion.90 These trends, to increase demarcation between the sexes, to conflate social differences within each sex, and to emphasise women’s affinity to

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Fig. 5.11  A Fair Warning for Pride, 1690s, PB 4.310. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge.

fashion, were taken to the extreme as satires imagined lower-​sort women and prostitutes as fashion consumers. Advice to the Maidens states that top-​knots are popular with ‘Billingsgate Women’,91 ‘Wenches that cryes Kitchin-​stuff’, and ‘Wanton Misses of the Town’, while insinuating that these women skimp on the basic hygiene of undergarments to afford to buy them.92 They even imply that, in order to preserve the distinction of rank, elite women must renounce fashion. A Fair Warning further suggests that the ‘better’ sorts of people will give up fine clothing when they see non-​elite women indulging in it, so that fashion consumption will end up being a pastime left to the lower sorts, and ‘Most Gentry’ will resolve ‘for the future themselves to demean’. For the same reason that the queen’s ‘mean’ clothes were praised in The Princess Welcome to England, here, socially elevated people are imagined to show their good taste by demeaning their display in order to express their ‘inner’ nobility. In part, ballads may have referred to humbler types of women as fashion consumers because they were, in reality, better able to buy fashionable garments. The materials to make top-​knots, particularly ribbons, had certainly become cheaper and more accessible to a wider group of women.93 Indeed

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Fig. 5.12  The London Ladies Vindication, 1690s, PB 4.363. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge.

the top-​knot fashion was represented elsewhere as one which crossed the bounds of wealth and social class, and was worn by female workers. James Wright complained in 1693 that the playhouse was peopled by ‘Orange-​ Wenches, with Commodes an Ell high’.94 The (likely exaggerated) large scale of the commode is described as a sign, not of wealth, but of exorbitancy: a physical excrescence which echoes the excess of the vulgar ‘wenches’ who parade the playhouses without restraint. Fashionable women of the lower sorts seemed to be leading perceptions that fine clothes were sliding down the social scale. Some ballad satires attempted to devalue the social meaning of fashion by envisaging its extravagant proportions relegated to the territory of the farmyard. The Somersetshire Wonder (see fig. 5.10), shows a top-​knot on the head of a calf, and A Fair Warning for Pride (see fig. 5.11) depicts an incongruously

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fashionable foal; in keeping with the ‘classical’ image of the unclothed woman, both sheets imply that this decoration on animals’ heads is as needless and ‘excessive’ as decorating a woman’s head. As well as being simply funny, such ballads also invoke the venerable cheap-​print tradition of the monstrous birth,95 and emphasise both unnaturalness and exorbitance. The calf top-​knot in The Somersetshire Wonder –​its laced layers and lappets so clearly depicted –​is ‘near Half a yard high’, while the foal’s ribbons in A Fair Warning are extravagantly ‘Gaudy’, being ‘Of several Colours, full seven indeed’, each one made of flesh and bleeding to the touch. In taking the place of the female body that usually wore the top-​knot fashion in reality, these animals symbolise the way that fashionable display threatens social disintegration –​ the ‘wonders’ and ‘sad Judgements’ sent ‘from Heaven’ to warn of pride. As composite animals in human dress they also disturb ‘identity, system, order’: they are abject figures that confront us with ‘those fragile states where man strays on the territories of animal’.96 Although the print tradition of monstrous births went back centuries, the animal/​top-​knot relationship was a recent craze in the wider print market and it is likely that ballads exploited this. Images of top-​knotted cats, owls, apes, bears and dogs, together with satirical verses, appeared in engraved images and on delftware from the late 1680s.97 Unlike traditional monstrous birth ballads, these prints called on women to see the folly of their fashion, by showing it worn by animals, and by anthropomorphically imagining each animal taking delight in wearing it: ‘Top Knots and Night Rails You adore’, acknowledges one broadside, ‘But see by Whom they now are wore’.98 Such ballads portray fashion as excrescent, animal-​like and outlandish –​and yet, even in excess, it does not appear fundamentally harmful to women (as it is for men). Such playful, vivid depictions of the ‘dangers’ of feminine fashions were ideal for attracting ballad audiences, addressing anxieties about social change and at the same time transforming them into matter for enjoyable entertainment. The gendered politics of fashion satire As we have now seen, while ‘classical’ images of draperies and bare-​breasted woman disavowed the importance of specific fashionable garments, the graphic artists who illustrated late seventeenth-​ century ballad satires of women seized upon the details of fashion and gave them central significance. This accords with David Kuchta’s argument (mentioned in Chapter 4), that fashion was increasingly represented as ‘feminized’ in the long eighteenth century, symbolically relegated to the sphere of the non-​political,

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non-​governing, non-​male ‘other’. As the court and nobility strove to construct and assert national stability in the wake of the Great Fire in 1666 and after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, Kuchta argues, modesty increasingly became ‘a claim to power’. In part, this may have been a symbolic way of defying fears of French and Catholic influence in the country, both of which were associated with lavish dress.99 A Whiggish ideology of modest masculinity thus replaced the old symbolic order that sanctioned elite masculine splendour –​yet this new approach required ‘its negative of feminine luxury in order to function’.100 As a vice, luxury has almost always been personified as feminine:101 but what was new toward the end of the seventeenth century was the idea that a lavish consumption of luxury goods could signify a personal unfitness for government, as opposed to the old assumption that it should signal a birth-​ right sanction to rule. As mentioned in Chapter 4, while this feminine gendering of fashion consumption was more complicated than perhaps Kuchta allows, undoubtedly ballads depicted fashionable clothing increasingly as trivial and associated with women. Belittling fashion in print allowed male audiences to enjoy imagining its folly as a particularly feminine attribute (and by extension an affirmation of masculine superiority and power), even though fashion was in fact incorporated firmly into ‘classical’ representations of masculinity. Matthew Prior alludes to this in his spoof dialogue of 1687, The Hind and the Panther Transvers’d, in which two mice discuss (as if they were men) printed images of animals in fashion:102 bayes : Did

you ever take notice, Mr. Johnson, of a little thing that has taken mightily about Town, a Cat with a Top-​knot? johnson : Faith, Sir, ‘tis mighty pretty, I saw it at the Coffee-​House bayes : ‘Tis a trifle hardly worth owning; I was t’other day at Will’s103 throwing out something of that Nature; … I think I have one here in my Pocket; would you please to accept it Mr Johnson? As a burlesque of Dryden’s serious religious dialogue, The Hind and the Panther, this exchange mocks Dryden’s use of animals as interlocutors on theology, as well as exploiting the term ‘cat’, which was contemporary slang for a prostitute. Yet it also conflates satire of his literary conceit with satire on current fashions in women’s clothes and print, imagining both female fashion and ephemeral printed pictures as ‘trifles’, insignificant but amusing ‘little things’ that ‘take’ around the town. Like the engraved pictures of cats and owls, this exchange not only associates female fashion with animals but

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also commodifies it for male amusement in the overwhelmingly masculine world of the coffee-house.104 Within this locale, men could deal in and observe a wide variety of commodities represented in print, yet remain at a distance from actually handling the objects themselves. In many ways, this reflected the increasing use of the coffee-​house as a site of business transaction outside the New and Royal Exchange. Paper agreements, rather than actual commodities were trafficked between men, and business was conducted in a manner which excluded the participation of women.105 Thus satirical printed images situated fashion as something outside the masculine realm and projected it out onto women and animals. Like women and animals, fashion could be imaginatively excluded from the confines of the coffeehouse, and yet inspected, traded and enjoyed within it, as a representation in print. Despite the highly diverse audiences that ballads attracted, they also promoted this concept of fashion as a separate, feminine sphere. For example, The Women and Maidens Vindication of Top-​Knots imagined an all-​female ‘Parliament’, meeting in order to discuss fashion. A  female ‘Speaker’ gives an oration against the ‘Poet’ and ‘Paper of Verses’ which have criticised top-​knots, and the assembled women pass a law to ‘impower’ women to wear the fashion. The woodcut illustrating this parliament was originally used to illustrate an earlier comic pamphlet, The Parlament of Women,106 which is placed beside a much-​used image of Queen Elizabeth I  –​denoted by her circular ruff, orb and sceptre  –​often deployed on ballads about female power and/​or virginity.107 This satire of female political power was based on ancient Greek and fourteenth-​century antecedents,108 and the perceived impossibility for women to take part in politics. Also like its narrative precursors, however, the ballad emphasises the value of individuals who act in favour of the common good, as opposed to private gain. As the Weaver’s Wife exclaims to the gathered women, ‘By Ribbons there’s thousands good livings gain’. What, the ballad seems to ask, could better support the nation’s well-​being than the women’s fashion for wearing top-​knots? As discussed in Chapter 2, the argument for fine dress as a provider for income to others found increasing traction with late seventeenth-​century English audiences. Even the anonymous book, Englands Vanity or The Voice of God against the Monstrous Sin of Pride, admitted in 1683 that following fashion was permissible ‘for a good Lady (that has money enough)’, since she could provide ‘twenty honest Salesmen [with] their dinners every day from the allowable advantages of her Dress’. Thus, even overt extravagance was merely ‘the

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Herauld (in his Gaudy Coat) that Proclaimes [the female wearer’s] Goodness and Charity’.109 Bernard de Mandeville famously expressed similar ideas in his early eighteenth-​century realpolitik writing, where he praised the vices of prodigality, luxury and pride as employers of the poor.110 By consuming fine clothes, then, women of all social sorts participate in, and construct, a socially fluid world –​justified by the fact that female fashion consumption must flourish in order to promote the nation’s good. Newly conceived of as an emphatically feminine activity, fashion consumption was thus associated in ballads with all-​female parliaments and all-​ female courts, and well-​dressed, low-​born women ‘tripping’ around London and its environs for pleasure. This satire underlined the urban, mobile quality of the female fashion consumer and created a strong contrast with the idealised ‘classical’ female body, which, as Monteyne has pointed out, is by implication a body confined within safe bounds indoors, or away from the city.111 Economically and sexually active –​like the pedlars discussed in Chapter 1 –​ such women seem diametrically opposed to the abstracted contexts, allegory and exclusive intimacy evoked in drapery portrait images. Yet even though these ballads make the typical connection between economic independence and whoredom,112 this does not remain unambiguously in the realm of satire, but is subsumed within a comic genre that praises economic, not moral, benefits. While they highlight both the socially problematic and economically beneficial nature of commodities, then, ballad satires on fashion keep sight of its fascination and allure to consumers. Each of the pro-​top-​knot ballads suggests that women care passionately for their fashions, as the protagonists declare, for example, ‘Top knots we’ll have, and Top knots we’ll wear’, or, ‘Top-​knots, I  tell you, we prize and adore’. Far from seeking military or political clout, female protagonists seek fashions that will, as The Maidens Resolution suggests, gain or keep husbands and lovers. As the narrator of The London Ladies Vindication explains, ‘Like Beautiful Angels we strive to appear /​ The Hearts of our Husbands in order to cheer’. Fashion also helps female shopkeepers to sell wares through illicit affairs because, ‘when our husbands are out of the way’, ‘what Huffing young Gallant will stay /​If that a fine Delicate Wife was not there?’. While we have no evidence for whether men or women authored these ballads, their message is clear: women’s consumption of fashion has important benefits, both for themselves and for others. In these ballads, then, the traditional argument against fine apparel, charity for the poor, is largely usurped by a celebration of fashion consumption.

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Since poorer women declare they help themselves to a better life by means of fashion, the purchase of fine clothes is even framed as a new agent of beneficial economic change for the nation, worth paying the price of any social and moral drawbacks it may foster. Fashionable women in these satirical ballads are therefore portrayed as simultaneously beneficial to the nation’s economy and yet degrading to its moral order. Fine garments are objects of commodity exchange, exorbitant and even unnecessarily luxurious: women of all social sorts love to consume them and gain sexual power over men as they do so. This is tension is particularly evident from the oval woodcut in The London Ladies Vindication (1690s, see fig. 5.12), which is a reverse copy of the female image in Alexis Loyalty (see fig. 4.1), discussed in Chapter 4. Its laurel-​leaf frame, drapery and generous display of décolletage make it appear a typically ‘classical’ female portrait. With the exception of a few details (such as a blank background, some hair curls, four florets added to the frame), the image in London Ladies is very similar to Alexis Loyalty and would have reminded viewers of engravings after portrait paintings in general, even if they could not identify a sitter. However, four very prominent face patches are what most significantly transform this otherwise typically ‘classical’ drapery portrait. Black face-​patches aroused a great deal of comment in the period. As noted above, face-patches were associated with moral ambiguity and even sickness (as a covering for sores).113 Like ballads, they were small in size, but prominent; ephemeral, and yet highly controversial. Where the small roundels in the Princess Welcome and Young-​Mans Labour images combined bare breasts and patches, those woodcuts did not depict ‘classical’ drapery and none were framed in this obviously classical manner. Here, however, the patches added to an existing portrait-​type frame to create a visual competition between the economic and morally controversial associations of fashion and the elevated, ‘timeless’ connotations of the classical convention. This contrast demonstrates just how vulnerable the ‘classical’ female body was to a variety of contradictory interpretations, and how richly it rewarded ‘satirical’ inversion.

FEMALE BODIES, FEMININE FASHIONS AND ECONOMIC BENEFITS As we have seen, ballad publishers appropriated two very different gendered conventions in their representation of women  –​a mainly visual ‘classical’ style, and the more strongly intra-​textual ‘satirical’ approach. Woodcuts’

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visual resonances imagined not just new distinctions between the sexes, but also increasing polarisation within representations of women. Towards the end of the seventeenth century, the ‘classical’ convention in ballads associated the exposed bodies of women with ‘inner’ qualities of ‘private’ love, courtly status, sexual activity and spiritual devotion. In contrast, the satirical top-​knot debates proposed that women had a part to play in promoting the nation’s public prosperity by consuming fashion, and that this was worthwhile despite any social or moral turmoil it might produce. Ballad satires of fashionable women thus kept in play both the social drawbacks and the economic benefits of proliferating female fashion, while at the same time implying that luxury consumption was a particularly feminine pursuit. As the Epilogue will explore, these trends helped to shape future debates about dress in print.

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EPILOGUE

The last years of the seventeenth century, and the early years of the eighteenth, saw significant new developments in the production of ballads and clothing. Ballads changed shape and format, and were directed by publishers and authors to new kinds of audiences. Meanwhile, fashions for printed cottons utterly transformed the textile markets. Yet print and dress continued to be fundamentally linked, both in ballad representations and as physical commodities, in ways shaped by the developments of the final years of the seventeenth century. Samuel Pepys was clearly aware of changes in ballad production when he assembled ballads for his library collection. The title page to his first volume of ballads declares: My collection of Ballads … continued to the year 1700. When the Form, till then peculiar thereto, vizt. of the Black Letter with Picturs, seems (for cheapness sake) wholly laid aside, for that of the White Letter without Pictures. The publishers’ turn to white-​letter ballads ‘for cheapness sake’ may have been an effort to contend with the increasing variety of printed commodities on offer at the turn of the century. More news and comment was on offer in various formats, which meant more pressure on the ballad to find its own niche in the market. After the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695, printing houses could be set up anywhere in the country, which brought fresh competition for the London ballad-​printers who had previously enjoyed a near-​monopoly on production. In the year the Licensing Act lapsed, new tri-​ weekly newspapers appeared; provincial newspapers were published after 1701 and the first successful daily paper, Daily Courant, launched in March 1702.1

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Publishing in white-​letter was cheaper, because it used less ink than black-​letter; this would have helped ballads to compete in the ever-​burgeoning market, at least in terms of price. There is certainly a preponderance of white-​letter ballads in collections of eighteenth-​century ballads. Thus, the traditional half-​sheet folio black-​letter ballads went into rapid decline, though some of the old woodcut pictures continued in use.2 Many sheets in the Bodleian Library that were printed the first decades of the eighteenth century are white-​letter editions of previous black-​letter ballads.3 Another cost-​cutting measure was the new ‘slip’ ballad, which developed in the last years of the seventeenth century.4 A single-​column text format allowed three ballads –​made of narrow strips of paper –​to be cut out of a single half-​sheet folio.5 Just as when ballads were cut down in size in the mid-​seventeenth century, this physical reduction lowered the key production cost of paper, which after 1712 became more expensive thanks to new taxes.6 This may help to explain Daniel Defoe’s contention in 1722, that ballads had ‘suffer’d deeply’ and experienced ‘a sensible Decay’.7 These troubles may have been exacerbated by the greater censorship of ballads enforced after Queen Anne’s death in 1714, when anxiety about Jacobite insurrection surrounded George I’s accession to the throne. There were also changes in the way ballads were marketed and perceived: publishers realised they were now selling ‘tradition as much as novelty’.8 By the 1720s, the black-​letter ballad form was developing in two different ways. While some old black-​letter texts were reprinted in white letter format with newly made woodcuts, others were self-​consciously promoted as ‘old ballads’. This latter approach aimed to reframe the ballad in light of a literate culture of politeness. For example, in 1711, Joseph Addison explicitly portrayed the ballad medium as if it were a newly discovered source of innocent rural delight: when I enter any House in the Country … I cannot for my Heart leave a Room, before I have thoroughly studied the Walls of it, and examined the several printed Papers which are usually pasted upon them. The last Piece that I met with upon this Occasion gave me a most exquisite Pleasure … the old Ballad of the Two Children in the Wood, which is one of the darling Songs of the common People, and has been the Delight of most Englishmen in some Part of their Age … This Song is a plain simple Copy of Nature, destitute of the Helps and Ornaments of Art … There is even a despicable Simplicity in the Verse; and yet because the Sentiments appear genuine and unaffected, they are able to move the Mind of the most polite Reader with Inward Meltings of Humanity and Compassion.9

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Offering the ballad as an unaffected, humane and ‘natural’ antidote to alleviate the perils of artistic over-​sophistication, Addison implicitly flattered his ‘polite’ audiences for their urbanity. Defending the ‘old Ballad’ against the imagined disbelief of his readers, Addison’s praise embodies a new kind of self-​consciousness concerning the ballad form, which printers were quick to exploit in new kinds of publication. Single ballads had long been sold in collected text editions,10 but in the early years of the eighteenth century, publishers began to exploit ballads not just as a record of responses to historical events, but also as troves of historical interest in their own right. The prefaces to the three successive volumes of A Collection of Old Ballads (1723–​5) demonstrate a progressively increasing defence of the ballad form. In the first volume (which reprinted the ballad Patient Grissel, discussed in Chapter 2), the anonymous author praised ballads minimally for their ‘Antiquity’ and excused the project by saying ‘I never pretended to give … anything other than an old Song’. By the third volume, however, the author excused the disparagements expressed in previous volumes, confessing, ‘our old Songs I think ought to be preserv’d, and some of them are really valuable’.11 The black-​letter ballad as a medium was thus transforming and dividing: while decreasing size and cheaper print format implied devaluation, the ‘old ballad’ vogue suggested ballads were being newly appreciated for their own historical and cultural importance.

NEW KINDS OF DRESS Contemporary with these shifts in ballad production, the ‘calico crisis’ of the early 1700s was a significant development in the textile and clothing trades, demonstrating how ballads and dress continued to be linked in both new and traditional ways. In many respects, the crisis appears to be a retrenchment in the representation of dress in print: ballads and other prints reverted to calls for social hierarchy to be observed in dress, for social morality to prevail, and for wool to be worn by all for the benefit of the nation. Yet, on several counts, this apparent outcry against fashion freedom was not a simple regression to the fashion debates of the early 1600s: in fact, it was deeply indebted to those of the 1680s and 90s. In the key events of the calico crisis, and the role of print and dress within it, we can identify many of the characteristics that had developed within ballad representations of dress over the course of the seventeenth century.

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Printed calicoes presented a new challenge to the textile and print markets at the end of the seventeenth century because they reconfigured the potential of textile production to respond to and create fashion. As noted briefly in Chapter 1, calicoes were pure cotton fabrics introduced into England from India at least as early as the mid-​sixteenth century.12 They became a notable presence in the early seventeenth, not long after the East India Company was incorporated in 1600.13 Printed, painted and stained cottons were fundamentally important to the success of cotton fabrics in Europe, in particular because they offered a substitute for silks after 1678 when French imports were banned. Crucially, decorated cottons shared the lightness, softness and brightness of silk and yet –​unlike silks –​could be easily washed.14 Furthermore, vibrant motifs could be cheaply applied to cotton via printing, allowing more consumers to enjoy the sorts of design previously restricted to expensive techniques like brocade weaving or embroidery.15 At first, such cottons were worn informally at home, just before bed or on rising; they were perfectly adapted to the fashion for loose indoor gowns, and were also used for interior decorations.16 As early as September 1663, Pepys bought his wife ‘a chintz, that is, a painted Indian calico, for to line her new study, which is very pretty’. Two months later, he received ‘a very noble parti-​coloured Indian gowne’ for his wife as part-​payment from a colleague.17 Cottons presented a particularly complex challenge to fashion producers and to economic policy at the turn of the seventeenth century. Although they embodied the fruits of vigorous British imperial expansion, cottons were imports which intruded upon goods produced at home. Other imported goods, like tobacco and sugar, were allowed free rein to succeed in English markets because they did not directly compete with native industries; calicoes, by contrast, threatened to oust other kinds of textile (like wool and silk) from the market. The director of the East India Company stressed that cotton imports from India could replace European ones and thereby save English money,18 but there was little market in India for British goods, which meant loss of national bullion. Although Indian goods could compensate for this by being resold on European markets, East India Company goods still appeared to harm trade.19 Parliament’s response to this controversy appeared quite opposite to its late seventeenth-​century promotion of fashion. In 1696 the first bill against Indian textiles appeared in the Commons and, by February 1700, an Act against ready-​made silks and decorated calicoes was passed in the Lords and Commons.20 Yet the 1700 Act heralded a new era in the interrelationship of print and dress, not because it was a blow to the proliferation of fashion

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Fig. E.1 Sections from anonymous linen panel, c.1670–99, woodblock printed and painted. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

goods, but because it turned out to be a spur to new innovations.21 With the continued import of plain calicoes –​and no penalties meted out for wearing coloured ones –​English woodblock printers very quickly developed their own techniques for printing plain calicoes and reselling them. Although Indian textiles were being hand-​coloured in England by the late 1670s, by 1702 printing techniques had been so perfected that the trade in English-​ decorated calicoes was considered just as harmful to the silk and wool trades, as imported ones had ever been before the Act.22 Even when Indian-​printed calicoes were imported, London was dictating many designs by the second half of the seventeenth century.23 Thus, the woodblock relief printing that had produced ballad pictures of dress on paper for well over a century now took on new significance as a fabric-​staining technique, creating fashionable designs for clothes and interiors.24 A surviving painted and woodblock printed linen hanging depicts bust-​length figures bearing a remarkable likeness to woodcut ballad imagery (fig. 6.1).25 Furthermore, printing on cloth allowed English producers to respond to and create markets for new fabric designs, faster than was possible when printing was done in India. Unlike other light decorative fabrics, such as linen and silk, printed cotton was by far the quickest to respond to fashion, since it did not require setting up a loom.26 By 1711, calico printers estimated they sold a million yards of printed calico annually, three-​quarters of which was designed for clothing.27 However, cotton’s Indian origin created resentment as a foreign commodity and it competed unfavourably with national weaving industries. Yet, as the printers themselves argued in 1720,28 calico’s

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proliferation was due to the ingenuity of English workers, who created new designs and benefitted from their own innovations. Printed cotton was thus a hybrid commodity, which could neither be totally condemned as a threat to the nation, nor praised as an unequivocal benefit to the English economy.

CALICO RIOTS AND CALICO BALLADS The Spittle-​fields Ballad, or the Weavers Complaint against the Callico Madams, summed up weavers’ attitudes to the calico debates: In the Ages of old, When of Silver and Gold, Instead of Bank Notes, we had plenty … Then the Nation was made Very rich by her Trade, When each Lady wore Silks, if she had ’em. But in Country or Town Now no Lass will go down But a taudry Callico Madam … Now our Trade is so bad That the Weavers run mad, Thro’ the want of both Work and Provisions … Then well may they tare What our Ladies now wear, And as Foes to their Country upbraid ’em … … now we’ve a Chince For the Wife of a Prince, And a Butterfly Gown for the gay Dame, Thin painted old Sheets For each Trull in the Streets, To appear like a Callico Madam.29 Reprinted in 1721, this ballad was almost certainly written in response to the calico riots of the summer of 1719, when women wearing printed calico in London were regularly assaulted by groups of weavers who did indeed ‘tare /​What our Ladies now wear’, actually ripping off their gowns, or ruining the fabric with nitric acid.30

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The calico crisis, and the printed literature surrounding it, reveals how the textile and print trades responded to fashion issues in a manner which both harked back to older critiques of dress and developed the new debates arising during the latter decades of the seventeenth century. Ballad publishers would have been pulled in two competing directions at this time, since the pedlars who continued to sell ballads were also sellers of calicoes,31 while the weavers, whose part the ballad-​writers had taken in the 1680s and early 90s (and whose Company clearly recruited the help of the print trade) were vigorously opposed to them. Although the 1722 Act aimed to prohibit the proliferation of fashion, we might expect to see a number of ballads which, like the seventeenth-​century ‘fashion-​producer’ ballads and ‘top-​knot’ ballads, protested in favour of calico fashions, or at least aired the critiques in a playful manner. Yet currently, no known group of surviving ballad sheets addresses the calico crisis. Those references to calico that do survive are typically in the ‘collected’ ballad song texts which emerged with increasing frequency in the early 1700s. In 1719, the Weavers Company recruited Daniel Defoe to write for newspapers and periodicals on their behalf: Defoe duly apologised for the public disturbances but defended the cause of the weavers.32 There was at least one other ballad printed against the ‘callico madams’ in 1719,33 probably more. Shortly afterwards, Defoe suggested, ‘even the solicitations for the late Callico Bill were introduced with the Ballad of a Callico Madam’.34 Presumably it is possible that the ballads of the ‘callico madams’ were also commissioned by the Company, as the press, as well as petitioning, was increasingly harnessed to effect political and economic change. The surviving evidence is, however, of an overwhelming support in print for the banning of calico.35 The Spittle-​fields Ballad looks back nostalgically to an era when ‘each Lady wore Silks, if she had ’em’, echoing the arch praise of earlier top-​knot ballads that commended a woman wearing silk ‘if she hath wherewith to affort it’. Spittle-​fields mourns the loss of hard value in gold and silver coinage, lamenting that both paper money and the new ‘taudry’ calicoes make merely a surface show of value.36 A comic play at London’s Royal Theatre (1703) had already identified and mocked this relatively new, promissory quality to both money and fashion, which permitted ‘strange Trollops in Callicoe Gowns of no Fortune’, to make ‘a good figure in an old Sheet printed black and white’.37 Paper money, printed cotton and prostitutes were united in their flimsy ability to create the impression of high social value. As historian Giorgio Riello observes, cotton unsettled ‘established ideals of durability and worth’, as well as the way people valued textiles.38

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Yet  although Spittle-​fields clearly attacked current fashions, it also built upon the debates of the late seventeenth century, in that it lamented, rather than celebrated, the decline in fashionable display. Here ‘thin painted old sheets’, worn by both high and low alike, symbolise the nation’s decline in prosperity. Instead of reverting wholesale to the old social-​hierarchy arguments, the ballad develops its attack upon a logic of fine clothing: where silks had demonstrated the wealth of the nation, calicoes merely demonstrate a decline in economic display. The 1721 Act explicitly cited the importance of both the wool and the silk trades, and the ballad also mentions that both were opposed to calico.39 This suggests the fierce competitors of the seventeenth century had now united in opposition to a common enemy. It also suggests that the economic success of the native and Huguenot silk weavers in the late seventeenth century had allowed them to become symbolically incorporated within the economic concept of the national good. However, it seems extraordinary that the combined forces of the wool and silk trades, so apparently worthy of protectionism, received it so very much later than they had originally desired. The first bill against calicoes was presented in 1696: its delay sparked riots the following year. Yet, despite disturbances and petitioning, the first successful bill against wearing (rather than just importing) coloured calicoes only came into effect at the end of 1722. Presumably, the delay in producing a really comprehensive anti-​calico bill was due, at least in part, to the more overt economic commitments which had become part of late seventeenth-​century fashion debates. With the national economy increasingly viewed as an autonomous machine, the profits of the East India Company were difficult to dismiss since their cotton cloth imports –​and particularly profits from their re-​export as printed calicoes –​presented a legitimate counter to the protectionism desired by English weavers. Such perspectives found support elsewhere too. In 1714, Bernard Mandeville’s pro-​luxury poem The Fable of the Bees argued that, while fashions in dress may have been a ‘strange ridic’lous Vice’, they were also ‘The very Wheel, that turn’d the Trade’.40 As John Eagleston informed the House of Lords in 1720, drapers would suffer just as much, if calico were banned, as the weavers would if it were not.41 Together with the economic benefits of calicoes to English calico printers, and the burgeoning number of prosperous (and politically powerful) merchants in the two East India Companies,42 the 1722 bill can be seen as a reluctant final solution to accommodate a newly competitive ideal of the national good.

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Just as the calico crisis and its literature drew upon late seventeenth-​century connections established between fashion, the economy and the national good, it furthermore drew upon printed debates of that period, in that it focused pre-​eminently upon the fashion choices of women. Calico ballad texts deplore the ‘callico madam’ and, in reality, it was women’s bodies that weavers attacked in the summer of 1719. The rhetoric of anti-​calico pamphleteering, too, was firmly focused on the purchasing habits of women –​in particular, female servants.43 Calico was thus framed, and fought against, as a feminine fashion. In the secondary literature, this fact has largely been taken for granted. However, the gendered bias of the calico crisis should also be seen in light of the way late seventeenth-​century ballads and print culture so markedly associated women with fashion consumption. After all, calico was not a fashion exclusive to women. Men wore plain calico necklinen, shirts and handkerchiefs, and printed calico for informal gowns and nightcaps.44 Even if men’s calicoes were worn in less visible situations than women’s outdoor gowns, male consumption of calico was publicly acknowledged in early advertisements. In 1709, the Tatler announced a sale of ‘Mens Morning Gowns of All Sorts, Silks, Callico’s and Stuffs’; its location in ‘Nandoe’s Coffee House’, made the association of men with calico consumption even more explicit.45 Furthermore, rooms in wealthier houses were decorated with painted cotton wall hangings, which typically meant male approval (if not commissioning) of calicoes: Samuel Pepys was clearly involved in buying and organising his wife’s new calico-​lined study.46 Unlike the print propaganda, the 1721 Act against calico made no gender-​specific references.47 The anti-​calico rhetoric was therefore highly selective in targeting female consumers of calico: it blamed women for calico consumption and ignored consumption by men. In chastising women for fashion consumption in print and in reality, the weavers’ attitudes reveal both change and continuity in debates taking place after the late seventeenth-​century ballads already discussed in this book. Placing women centre-​stage as those primarily responsible for driving fashion, the weavers ignored the obvious fact that most women were dependent upon men for their incomes and expenditures. Yet this bias bears out the cultural imperative evident in seventeenth-​century ballad satires and print culture, to associate women strongly with fashion consumption and to play down the importance of fashion to men. The eighteenth-​century calico ballads and calico tracts thus drew on the pre-​ existing late seventeenth-​ century tradition of satire about fashionable women, which targeted fashion consumption as a peculiarly feminine

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activity. Although the calico ballads adopted a more serious tone than the light-​hearted ridicule evident in earlier top-​knot ballads, their social morality was not addressed to specific social ‘sorts’, as it was in the early and mid-​seventeenth century, but  –​as seen in late seventeenth-​century ballads –​it was addressed to women. Apparently outdated laments about the poor in calico ballads did not ask elite consumers to remember their dependents, but asked women to remember workers in the clothing trades, just as late seventeenth-​century ballads had done. Early eighteenth-​century ballads and print culture voiced an antipathy towards female calico consumers, which stands in stark contrast to the covertly pro-​fashion ‘classical’ ballad images and the overtly pro-​fashion ballad satires of the late seventeenth century. Evidently, when the benefits of fashion’s widespread proliferation had revealed themselves to be as unreliable as fashion itself, the weavers still hoped they could turn back its tide. Acceptance of fashion as a force of its own had clearly not yet taken deep root, either amongst the weavers or within print publishing: at this stage, producers sought governmental intervention, instead of assuming their own responsibility to diversify or innovate. Despite such opposition, the logic of fashion –​the proliferation ballads had once espoused –​proved triumphant nevertheless: light, printed fabrics continued to flourish and ‘slip’ ballads continued to represent and illustrate dress in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. After a dip in consumption, printed calicoes continued to be worn well after the official ban in 1722, and the native linen/​cotton weaving industry supplied close alternatives to imported calico.48 The Act which prohibited the wearing of decorated pure cotton was not repealed until 1774, but nevertheless colourful printed cottons, linens and cotton-​mix fabrics prospered mid-​century, as surviving sample books attest.49

FASHION AND POPULAR PRINT IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND The multilayered relationship between ballads and dress – which evidently flourished in the early eighteenth century and beyond – had been firmly established over a century earlier. As Chapter 1 showed, ballads and dress were linked together in multiple ways at the stages of production, distribution and consumption during the seventeenth century, and ballads exploited this link in order to promote their sales. Since ballads were dependent upon

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the success of travelling pedlars who bought them in London and resold them across the country, the promotion of pedlars’ wares and London’s appeal were both important themes in ballad texts, and ballads were an appropriate medium for discussing fashion and promoting its increasingly free circulation. Indeed, as Chapter 2 demonstrated, ballad stories increasingly affirmed the proliferation of fashion even beyond the limits of sumptuary hierarchy and social morality, shifting focus away from the right to consume and onto workers who benefited from consumption. This movement was deeply connected with other changes in the period, including contemporary developments in theories of the economy and trade, changes in religious law and practice, attitudes to social hierarchy and conceptions of the nation’s ‘public good’. This suggests the overall increases in consumption noted by scholars towards the end of the seventeenth century –​developments which pre-​existed the ‘consumer revolution’ of the eighteenth –​were not just experienced, but self-​consciously charted in ballads and potentially understood by a wide audience at the time. The question of whether these ideas were supported in ballad images required a particular focus on the relatively neglected subject of ballad woodcuts. By situating ballad pictures in relation to earlier visual traditions of manuscript illustration and the book trade, Chapter 3 explored the publisher’s selection of woodcuts as a meaningful act of bricolage, tailored to work in intra-​textual relationship with the text. Thanks to their inter-​textual associations with other visual images, and particularly those on the burgeoning market for print separates, ballad pictures also emerged as allusive mobilisers of meaning. The more an image was familiar from other ballads or other media, the more associations it might have accrued for the audience, and the greater its potential for visual resonances. At the same time, tapping into topical trends or novel imagery created fresh attraction for buyers. The reuse of older pictures, together with the development of new ones, allowed the marketable attractions of tradition and newness to be combined and recombined in a variety of ways on different sheets. In this way, woodcuts provided a wealth of inter-​textual visual resonances that could be delimited and interpreted within the intra-​textual set-​up of the sheet. Ballad imagery was thus a meaningful, flexible and intensely associative mode of communication in seventeenth-​century England. Taking this approach, it becomes clear that new attitudes to fashion and to the human subject were expressed in ballad images that translated elite portraiture conventions into woodcut, and appeared to separate the

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representation of the human subject from its moorings in sartorial expression. Developing portrait-​style busts, ballads decreased the space given to the depiction of clothing but paid increased attention to the idea of the inner state of the individual. Adopting ‘classical’, as opposed to older, ‘heraldic’ conventions, reduced the details of specific fashionable garments in favour of presenting ostensibly ‘timeless’ meanings. However, by appearing to play down the importance of dress items for constructing identity, these images in fact supported ballad texts’ affirmation of its proliferation as an economic benefit. Using these insights to explore the depiction of men and women in ballads, it became apparent that ballad images created visual resonances with ballad texts, to attach meanings to gender identities. The ‘classical’ convention created new kinds of division between depictions of men and women in ballads, and also set up an opposition between ‘classical’ and ‘satirical’ modes of depicting fashion and the body. The masculine ideal was well-​covered and associated with formality, martial activity and defending the nation, but notions of a ‘masculine renunciation’ of fashion were complicated by the fact that ‘classical’ ballad images of men clearly incorporated significant elements of fashion within them. As such, satirical ballads ridiculed the overly fashionable man (as opposed to the merely fashionable man), and did not visually deride fine male dress:  instead, they demonstrate an increasing incorporation of civility into conceptions of masculinity, a trend usually associated with the eighteenth century. By contrast, while ‘classical’ depictions of women drew from courtly imagery and portrayed them as uncovered, vulnerable, informal, sensual and devoted, the opposite, ‘satirical’ approach envisioned a fundamental relationship between women and fashion. This, even while it threatened the correlation between dress and social ranking, was imagined to benefit the nation’s economy. As such, fashion was implicitly envisaged as a feminine, rather than an elite, privilege. Thus, while seventeenth-​century ballads physically tracked the circulation of dress commodities, their texts and images closely followed its changing position in contemporary English visual and commodity culture. Ballads were an ephemeral print commodity linked to the book trade, an art form connected to the trade in printed pictures, and a staple of the pedlar’s pack. As such, they translated the commercial issues, artistic conventions and social ideals current in wider culture that related to the clothed body, into one of the most widely accessible print media of the period. As we have seen, ballads reveal important shifts in attitude to retailing, fashion, social rank, religion, economy, commodities, human identity and gender –​and they do so in a way which is profoundly linked to the logic of clothing.

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NOTES

Introduction 1 PB 3.290. 2 Jones 2001, p. 159. 3 From 1770, The Lady’s Magazine was one of the first publications in England regularly to produce fashion journalism. Nevinson 1967, p. 87. 4 Eicher and Roach-​Higgins 1992, p. 15; Riello and McNeil 2010, pp. 1–​14. 5 Harte 1991, p. 288. 6 Breward 1995, pp. 100, 105. 7 On ownership of the Pepys Ballads: Weinstein 1994, pp. xiii–​xiv; on the approximate numbers given to ballad collections: McShane 2011, p. xxi; on black-​letter ballads in the Pepys collection: Shepard 1962, p. 59. 8 McShane 2011, pp. xliii–​xlvii provides an excellent overview of collections. 9 PB 2.305. 10 Plomer 1907; Blagden 1954, pp. 161–​80; Franklin 2002, pp. 327–​52; McShane 2011. 11 North 2012, p. 40. 12 Adapting Paul Jobling’s approach to twentieth-​ century fashion magazines, Jobling 1999. 13 Emulating Anne Hollander’s approach to historical painted portraits, Hollander 1993, though here accounts of dress as an embodied experience will be touched on, cf. Entwistle 2001. 14 Chartier 1987; Burke 1978; Freist 1997; Fox 2000; Capp 1979. 15 See Hunter 2010; Murphy and O’Driscoll, 2013; Aston 2001; Clayton 1997; Griffiths 1998; Walsham 2008; Scribner 1981; O’Connell 1999; Luborsky and Ingram 1998; Driver 2004; Knapp 2003; Jones 2010; Monteyne 2007; Pierce 2008. 16 On ballads as songs, see Simpson 1966; Marsh 2004, and the 2015–​18 AHRC research/​performance project, ‘Hit Songs and Their Significance in Seventeenth-​ Century England’. 17 For example, Würzbach 1990, p. 9. 18 Franklin 2002, 2013; McShane Jones 2004b; McShane 2010; Watt 1991. 19 Fumerton and Guerrini 2010 and Murphy and O’Driscoll 2013 contain contributions on the subject.

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20 Inspired by Jobling 1999, p. 6. Jobling uses the words ‘intratextual’ and ‘intertextual’, but here the terms are hyphenated, to help the reader distinguish more easily which one is being used. 21 Chartier 1987, p. 11; Rubin 2002, p. 90. 22 Rollins 1922; Ebsworth 1878. 23 For example, Day 1987. 24 As this study drew to its close, the Bodleian Library launched its ballad image-​ matching project, which looks set to offer fruitful insights into ballad illustration in future. 25 Spufford 1981; Spufford 1984; Appadurai 1988.

1 Commodities of Print and Dress 1 Roche 1994, p. 4. 2 Ribeiro 2005, pp.162–​6, 183; Fox 2000, pp. 346–​7. 3 There seems to be no strict nomenclature, but seventeenth-​century ballad texts tend to use ‘pedlar’ more than any other name. 4 Spufford 1981, p. 121. 5 Rubin 2002, p. 90. 6 Appadurai 1988, p. 13. 7 Spufford’s pedlar inventories for this period list good amounts of kersey, drugget and cloth, various types of wool. Spufford 1984, pp. 90, 27, 211, 214. 8 1635, PB 1.76–​7. 9 Peachey 1991, pp. 2, 5, 8. 10 Kerridge 1985, pp. 5–​8; Van der Wee 2003, pp. 397–​472. There were also many wool mixes, such as serge and bays; Priestley 1991, p. 193. 11 Hentschell 2008, pp. 1–​15. 12 Van der Wee 2003, pp. 452–​3. 13 Hentschell 2008, p. 166. 14 Spufford 1984, 94. 15 The Virgins Constancy, 1678–​88?, PB 4.55. 16 Rothstein 2003, pp. 528–​61. 17 Lacey 1987, pp. 187–​92. 18 Plummer 1972, p. 9. 19 For example, three immigrants were encouraged to introduce new silk weaves to England, CSPD James II, 1687–​9, 9 March 1688. 20 Rothstein 2003, pp. 542–​9. 21 In this period, ‘cotton’ could also refer to a kind of woollen cloth (such as ‘Manchester Cotton’), but here we focus on the imported cotton fibre and its textiles. See OED ‘cotton’. One ballad mentions ‘cotten for shoes’, but this may refer to woollen cloth: The Sorrowful Lamentation of the Pedlars and Petty Chapmen for the Hardness of the Times, 1685–​8, PB 4.298; an earlier ballad mentions ‘raw silk and cotton wool’ as imports for poor people to spin: L. P., The Sea-​mans Compass, 1623–​61?, Euing 325. 22 I am grateful to John Styles for discussing this point with me. 23 Dannehl and Cox 2003, ‘Calico’. 24 Lemire 2009, pp. 214–​18.

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25 Styles 2007, p. 112. 26 Riello 2009, p. 266; J. F. 1696, p. 4. 27 Riello 2009, p. 266. Lemire 2009, pp. 214–​21, Lemire 1991, p. 19. 28 A Brief History of Textiles in England 1999, p. 7. 29 Between 1664 and 1684, the East India Company increased its imports of cotton to 83 per cent of its total income. Lemire 2003, p. 191. 30 Dannehl and Cox 2003, ‘Calico’. Lemire 1991, pp. 25–​6. 31 Lemire 2005, pp. 117–​18. 32 Spufford 1984, p. 90. 33 Lemire 2003, p. 188. 34 Jenkins 2003, p. 396. 35 Hemp (also a bast fibre plant) was a cheaper, lesser-​quality alternative to linen, produced and used similarly to flax. Dannehl and Cox 2003, ‘Linen’. 36 Clarkson, 2003, pp. 478–​90. 37 Excellent examples are at the Museum of London, the V&A, and the Royal Armoury, Stockholm. Arnold 2008, pp. 9–​13; J. F. 1696, p. 1. 38 Lemire 2003, p. 189; Lemire 2005, pp. 92–​7. 39 Lemire 2003, p. 190. 40 It is rare for unadorned, low quality clothing from this period to survive; this doublet was preserved by being hidden in the wall cavity of a house. Stanton 1995. 41 Portraits and diary entries throughout the seventeenth century bear this out. On 19 October 1662, Pepys resolved, ‘my great expence shall be lace-​bands, and it will set off anything else the more’. 42 Clarkson 2003, p. 475. 43 The Dorset-​shire Damosel, 1671–​1702?, PB 3.272. 44 Arnold 2008, pp. 4, 5. 45 Gaskell 1972, p. 57. 46 Evelyn 1959, p. 652. 47 A weaver’s reed is part of the loom, a comb-​like set of evenly spaced wires fastened between two parallel horizontal bars and used for separating or spacing the warp threads, and (in Evelyn’s sense) for beating the weft firmly into place. 48 This was roughly 16 × 13 inches. 49 Gaskell 1972, pp. 59–​60, Shorter 1971, p. 14. 50 Clapperton 1934, pp. 114. 51 Gaskell 1972, pp. 59–​60. 52 Evenden and Freeman 2011, pp. 30, 6–​32. 53 Shorter 1971, pp. 23–​31, 242. Spufford 1981, p. 100. 54 Addison referred to them as ‘Those poor Retailers, whom we see so busy in every Street’. Addison, 1712. 55 Anon., A Poore Scholar’s Thred-​Bare Suit: Described in a Petitionary Poem to His Patron, 1663. 56 Addision 1712. 57 Mayhew 1861, vol. 2 pp. 104–​105. 58 Clapperton 1934, p. 122. 59 Hind 1935, p. 64. On embroidery and emblem books, see Ribeiro 2005, pp. 72–​ 8; on textile decoration and art engravings, see Brooks 2004; on the circulation of designs via engravings, see Wells-​Cole 1997. 60 Vinciolo 1587; 1971, p. v. 61 Levey 1983, pp. 1–​2.

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NOTES TO PAGES 18–27

62 See Eastop 2001, pp. 79–​83. 63 Appadurai 1988, pp. 13–​17. 64 More than ten Commons bills tried to suppress them between 1675 and 1695. Spufford 1984, p. 10. 65 Thirsk and Cooper 1972, pp. 417–​18. 66 Cox and Dannehl 2007, pp. 50–​1. 67 Spufford 1984, pp. 16–​18. 68 Thirsk and Cooper 1972, pp. 423–​5. 69 Spufford 1984, pp. 23–​31, 33, 149; ballads tend to portray pedlars as male. 70 Fontaine 1996, p. 10. 71 See List of Abbreviations. 72 Possibly 1692/​3, PB 4.326. 73 Narcissus Lutrell quoted in Thirsk and Cooper 1972, pp. 140–​1. 74 Cf. evidence in Spufford 1984, Watt 1991, and Fox 2000. 75 Cox 2000, p. 60. 76 The City and Countrey Chapmans Almanack (1684), n.p. 77 The City and Countrey Chapmans Almanack (1691), n.p. 78 O’Connell 1999, p. 19. 79 Watt 1991, p. 75–​7. 80 The Contented Pilgrim, 1672–​96, PB 2.45. 81 Myers, Harris, and Mandelbrote 2007, p. 26. 82 Fontaine 1996, p. 29. 83 Muldrew 2001, pp. 84–​5. 84 The ballad The Pedlar and His Pack was registered with the Stationers’ Company at this time, but has not survived. Spufford 1984, p. 6. 85 1687, PB 3.155. 86 The Wonderful Praise of Money 1685, PB 4.256. 87 Clark 2002, p. 114. 88 McShane 2008, pp. 19–​44. 89 Franklin 2013, p. 176. 90 Watt 1991, p. 148. 91 Würzbach 1990, p. 22. 92 1620. PB 1.238–​9. 93 ‘Commodity’ could refer to female genitalia or prostitution. Monteyne 2006, p. 431. 94 1675–​96?, PB 4.334. 95 1685–​8, PB 4.263. 96 Muldrew 2001, pp. 84–​5. 97 Spufford 1984, pp. 88, 154, 168, 204, 226. 98 Collins and Ollerenshaw 2003, p. xxiii. 99 Act 4, scene 4. 100 Act 1, scene 1. 101 Spufford 1981, p. xix. 102 1685–​88, PB 4.298. 103 See OED, and Arnold 2008. 104 Ribeiro 2005, pp. 125–​7, 249. 105 Points were tapes with a metal tag or ‘aglet’ that tied garments such as bodices and doublets together on the inside, though they could also be used as decoration externally.

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106 Quoted respectively from The Pedler Opening of his Packe, The Sorrowful Lamentation of The Pedlars and Jolly Jack of all Trades. 107 Dannehl and Cox 2003. Spanish needles were strong thick steel needles. ‘St Martins’ implied ‘false’; such jewellery would not have contained the pure silver or semi-​ precious stones mentioned earlier. OED. 108 Spufford 1984, pp. 88. 109 Ibid., p. 102. 110 Ibid., p. 89. 111 c.1692–​3, PB 4.326. 112 A ‘blade’ may refer to a gentleman’s sword; in Pepys’s Diary and OED quotations for the period, the word carries connotations of good social standing, energy and wit. 113 1625, PB 1.444–​5. 114 Marcellus Laroon’s engraving, A Merry New Song of 1688, depicts a similar method of selling ballads, as rolled-​up tubes carried in the singers’ pockets. Laroon’s engraved series of London street characters in 1687 was called The Cryes of the City of London Drawne After the Life, a title thought to be accurate. See Shesgreen 1990, p. 28. 115 Franklin 2002, p. 329. 116 Riello and Parthasarathi 2009; Lemire 2009. 117 O’Connell 1999, pp. 10–​11. 118 McShane 2011, p. xxvi. 119 Spufford 1984, p. 79. 120 Letters between Dudley North and his wife in the early 1660s contain many commissions for fashion errands in London. Bodleian North MS c. 4 f.115. 121 For example, nearly 10 per cent of ballads in the Pepys collection refer to London, of which over half name the city in their title. 122 I am grateful to Angela McShane for discussing this point. See also Withington 2005, p. 200. 123 Wrightson 2003, p. 136. 124 See Edward Dering’s comments, c.1670, in Thirsk and Cooper, 1972, p. 85. 125 PB 1.210–​11. 126 1685–​8, PB 4.273. 127 Mun 1664, p. 16. 128 1685–​8, PB 4.274. One indicator of a ballad’s popularity is the survival of ‘answering’ ballads, which suggests the first ballad proved lucrative enough to tempt the same (or a different) publisher to hazard a reply. 129 Ribeiro 2005, pp. 252–​5. 130 Pepys 4 May 1662, 26 September 1666. 131 Pierce 2008, p. x. 132 Monteyne 2007, p. 11. 133 Freist 1997, pp. 2, 4. 134 Steele 1684, p. 28. 135 Monteyne 2007, p. 27. 136 Baxter 1696, pp. 3–​4. 137 Milton 1644, pp. 16–​17. 138 Rous 1856, p. 82. 139 Monteyne 2007, pp. 16, 18. 140 Ibid., quoted from The Original and Growth of Printing. 141 James II, 1686.

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NOTES TO PAGES 36–44

142 Cox and Dannehl 2007, p. 50–​1. 143 On 27 February 1697 the newspaper Post Man and Historical Account quoted the name of the ballad; a surviving copy shows it was a complaint against Window Duty, imposed to pay for recoinage. See The English Prophet, 1697, Crawford Collection 237. 144 ‘Flying Post or The Post Master’, (5 September 1700), p. 2. 145 Fox 2000, p. 174. 146 Monteyne 2007, p. 19. 147 Sekora 1977, pp. 23, 32, 44. 148 de Vries 1993, p. 107. 149 Thirsk 1978, p. 175. Lemire 2005, p. 113. 150 Eicher and Roach-​Higgins 1992, p. 13 151 Berg and Clifford 1999, p. 67. 152 This may explain why dress is discussed relatively little in scholarship on early modern consumption, by comparison with objects such as jewellery and furniture. Weatherill 1996, p. 113. 153 Spufford 1984, p. 99. 154 Welch 2011, pp. 14, 25; Snook 2011, pp. 22–​8. 155 Vanhaelen 2003, pp. 58–​9. 156 Spufford 1984, pp. 5–​6. 157 Watt 1991, p. 6. 158 Hind 1935, pp. 76–​85. 159 Globe 1985, p. 12. 160 Clayton 1997, p. 23. 161 Spufford 1981, p. 48. 162 Brome 1660a. 163 Act 4, scene 6. 164 Parkes 1612, p. 5. 165 Fox 2000, p. 405. 166 Barbon 1690, pp. 64–​5. 167 Appadurai 1988, p. 57. 168 Harms, Raymond and Salman 2013, p. 10. 169 Lipovetsky 1994, p. 31. 170 Monteyne 2006, p. 416.

2 Ballad Comment on Dress 1 Jobling 1999, pp. 2, 3, 90. 2 See facsimile in Day 1987, p. 151. 3 McShane Jones 2004a, p. 105. 4 Walsham 1999, p. 41. 5 Manley 1995, p. 69. 6 McShane Jones 2004a, pp. 17–​18. 7 Weber 1996, p. 134. 8 For example, the Wood collection. There was a period of ballad registration in 1656–​7.

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9 1624?, PB 1.34–​5. 10 Thomas Dekker’s 1603 play Patient Grissil accords similar social significance to dress; Jones and Stallybrass 2000, pp. 220–​44. 11 A 1750 edition imitates the 1620 ballad motif of spinning, its popularity attested by surviving copies in the Roxburghe, Huntington, Crawford and Douce ballad collections. 12 This study favours the terminology of ‘sorts’ over ‘class’, based on Wrightson 1994, pp. 28–​51. 13 Ribeiro 2003, p. 84. 14 ‘Bysse’ is a type of fine linen; ‘Pall’ is a general term for fine cloth, see OED. 15 Parliament 1806, pp. 1242–​3, 1250. 16 PB 1.142–​3. Michell was convicted of unlawfully prosecuting silk-​men, though this aspect to the crime does not appear in the ballad. 17 Pierce 2008, pp. 78–​81. 18 McShane Jones 2004a, p. 105. 19 Corfield 1989, pp. 64–​79; on nightcaps see Arnold 2008, p. 12. 20 McCoy 1989, p. 13. 21 Although the Bible was read in churches each Sunday, its text was largely fixed after the Authorised Version of 1611. Hence the focus here upon contemporary cultural commentary. 22 The 1559 Act of Uniformity stipulated fines for non-​attendance at church. In 1549 the Book of Common Prayer was first published; Elizabeth I, James I and Charles II each reissued it, with little alteration, within a year of accession. Its Thirty-​Nine Articles of faith required obedience to the Homilies. 23 See full text of the Homilies at http://​www.anglicanlibrary.org/​homilies/​index.htm. On the cultural influence of Church liturgy see Maltby 1998, p. 30; Targoff 2001, pp. 9–​12. 24 Go 2009, pp. 629–​35; on the Homilies’ influence, see Borot 2001; Hentschell 2002, pp. 553–​4. 25 Borot 2001, p. 171. 26 Sekora 1977, pp. 23, 32. 27 Ibid., p. 61. 28 Ibid., pp. 56–​62. Peck 2005, p. 7. 29 Hunt 1996, p. 120. 30 Elizabeth I 1559; Aughterson 1998, p. 165; Ribeiro 2003, p. 67. 31 Sekora 1977, p. 57. 32 See Harte 1993, pp. 801–​16; Hunt 1996; Harte 1976. 33 First issued in 1569 as Christian Prayers and Meditations in English French, Italian, Spanish, Greeke, and Latine. 34 Day 1608, pp. 3v, 9r. 35 Ribeiro 2003, pp. 30–​41. 36 Aughterson 1998, p. 164. 37 Peck 2005, p. 93. 38 PB 1.160–​1. 39 Stone 1958, p. 54. 40 PB 1.166–​7. 41 Manley 1995, pp. 484–​5.

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42 Wrightson 2002, p. 185. 43 Magnusson 1994, p. 85. 44 Woollens comprised 92.3 per cent of London’s domestic export trade in 1640. Wrightson 2002, p. 237. 45 Magnusson 1994, pp. 60, 99. 46 From the somewhat misleadingly titled The Maintenance of Free Trade (1622), quoted in Magnusson 1994, p. 85. 47 Wrightson 2002, p. 182. 48 Magnusson 1994, p. 85. 49 Hentschell 2002, pp. 553, 559. 50 Ibid., p. 546. 51 Stevenson 1984, p. 6. 52 See for example, The Downfall Of Pride. Riband-​Cod-​Pieces, Black Patches, And Whatsoever Is Antic, Apish, Fantastick, And Dishonourable To A Civil Government, 1654–​6, Don. B. 24(13). 53 PB 4.315. 54 Brotton 2006, p. 210. 55 Freist 1997, p. 23. 56 Burke 1988, p. 49. 57 McShane Jones 2004a, p. 283. 58 Puritans are defined as ‘the hotter sort of Protestants’, whether members, or ‘dissenters’ from, the established Church; Coffey and Lim 2008, p. 4; Spurr 2008, p. 90. 59 Watt 1991, p. 103. 60 Walsham 2008, p. 289. 61 Hentschell 2009, pp. 571–​95. 62 Beer 2008, p. 176. 63 Peters 2005, pp. 1–​3. 64 In 1653 the Quaker George Fox urged the protectorate against the ‘wantonness’ of ballads and ‘jesting books’. Peters 2005, p. 56. 65 The Puritan Richard Baxter described how he wrote ‘single Sheets’ to reach those unwilling or unable to read longer treatises; Baxter 1696, p.  116. See also Watt 1991, p. 78. 66 McShane Jones 2004a, pp. 177–​82. 67 Quoted in McShane Jones 2004a, p. 54. 68 Ruffs symbolise an utterly bygone era, worn by ‘Women of Old’, in the ballad The Maidens Resolution, 1685–​9, PB 4.366. 69 Hunt 1996, p. 120. 70 On Quaker attitudes to visual culture and dress, see Pointon 1997. 71 Pepys 2 October 1660. 72 Spurr 2008, p. 92. 73 Halasz 1997, p. 4. 74 Monteyne 2007, pp. 12–​13. 75 Spurr 2008, pp. 90–​3. 76 Walsham 2008, p. 288. 77 McShane Jones 2004a, p. 14; Weber 1996, pp. 133–​4. 78 Monteyne 2007, p. 13. 79 Collinges 1675, p. 8. 80 Taylor 2007, pp. 70–​82.

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81 Jones and Stallybrass 2000, p. 10. 82 Taylor 1641; Ellinghausen 2008, pp. 114–​17. 83 Fox 1690, p. 1. 84 Reay 1980, pp. 62–​3. 85 ‘[N]‌o King, however incompetent or ungodly, came in for direct ballad criticism in the seventeenth century.’ McShane Jones 2004a, p. 33. 86 For a summary of contributions to this historiography, see Peck 2005, pp. 10–​14. 87 Wrightson 2002, p. 335. 88 Manley 1995, p. 115. 89 Quoted at length in Manley 1995, pp. 115–​16. 90 Stevenson 1984, p. 7. 91 Shesgreen 2002, pp. 21–​3; see also Shesgreen 1990. 92 For example, W. Turner, Turners Dish of Lentten Stuffe, 1612, PB1.206–​207; A Merry Nevv Catch of All [t]‌rades, 1620, PB 1.164–​5. 93 For example, The Shoo-​makers Travells, 1624, Wood 401 (69); see also listings in Rollins 1924. 94 1658–​64, Wood E 25(47). 95 ‘Tradesman’ is used here but the term ‘artisan’ would also be today’s parlance; see Harris 1987. 96 Their lace and spurs suggest that the woodcut was first used to illustrate an instance of well-​dressed men beating flax, and is used here to evoke an atmosphere of hard work. The reuse of ballad woodcuts is discussed further in the next chapter. 97 These ballads were printed shortly after the Royal Society gave new attention to histories of trades, though apparently its members did not succeed in communicating with tradespeople. Ochs 1985, pp. 129–​58. 98 L[awrence] P[rice], PB 1.442–​3. 99 On this tradition, see Jones 2010, pp. 357–​9. 100 Retired shoemakers became cobblers; for simplicity, ‘shoemaker ballad’ refers to ballads about both. Eleven of the series are in the Pepys collection, one is Roxburghe 2.424. 101 McShane 2010, pp. 207–​28. 102 Ibid., p. 219. 103 1678–​80, PB 4.230. 104 Richard Rigby, The Cobler’s Corrant, 1683, PB 4.321. ‘St Hugh’s Bones’ was a traditional term for shoemakers’ tools. 105 Beer 2008, p. 176; Spurr 2008, p. 96. 106 Richard Rigbey [sic], A New Song in Praise of the Gentle-​craft, 1684–​95, PB 4.233. 107 Anderson 2006, p. 7. 108 For example, there are ten distinctly tailor-​themed ballads in the Pepys collection, three in the Roxburghe collection and four in the Bodleian collections. 109 1681–​ 4, PB 4.282. The OED’s ‘tailor’ entries indicate that sitting cross-​ legged was associated with tailors from at least the early seventeenth century until the mid-​twentieth. 110 See, for example, Q. G. van Brekelenkam’s painting The Tailor’s Workshop (1661, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam). 111 A ‘Goose’ was a smoothing iron; a ‘lap-​board’ placed over the tailor’s crossed legs made a flat work-​surface; a ‘yard’ was a measuring-​rod, but also a slang term for the penis.

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112 Harris 1997, p. 203. 113 1672–​96, Douce 2(215b). 114 Williams 1994, p. 1359. 115 Pepys 17 July 1667. 116 See ‘tailor’ and ‘cabbage’ entries in OED. 117 By comparison, weaving required long hours of energetic work at a loom; shoemaking required considerable strength to manipulate new leather into shape, which may explain why shoemakers became cobblers when they were older. 118 c.1689–​92, PB 4.276–7. 119 In contrast, women were unlikely to work in shoemaking due (like staymaking), to the strength required to manipulate materials. The Weavers’ Company expressly prohibited women from working at looms. Plummer 1972, p. 61. 120 Lemire 1997, pp. 52–​4. 121 See entries for ‘Hell’ in Canting Dictionary and ‘cabbage’ in OED. 122 Pierce 2008, pp. 169–​98; McShane 2008, pp. 34–​8. 123 1685–​95, PB 4.280. 124 See, for example, L. P., The Quakers Fear, 1656, Wood 401(165). 125 Peters 2013, pp. 214, 226. 126 Cf. the biblical command, ‘let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil’ (Gospel of St. Matthew 5:37); see also Peters 2005, pp. 2–​9. 127 Wrightson 2002, p. 208; Stevenson 1984, p. 136. 128 One exception is A Wench for a Weauer, 1630, PB 1.252–​3. Three ballads of the 1670s depict weaver characters, but without reference to details of their work. 129 The largest black-​letter group is in the Pepys collection. 130 Harris 1987, p. 201. 131 Rothstein 2003, p. 541; A Brief History of Textiles in England 1999, p. 7. 132 For example, in March 1688, three French men received a patent to make types of silk which had previously only been woven in France. CSPD James II, vol. 3. 133 Plummer 1972, pp. 146–​51. On why black-​letter ballads did not specifically name Huguenots, see McShane 2007, pp. 604–​25. 134 PB 4.356. 135 Worshipful Company of Weavers 1689, p. 1. 136 The entire population was estimated at five million. Barry and Brooks 1994, p. 63. 137 Harris 1987, p. 204. 138 See reference to New Draperies in Chapter 1, p. 00. 139 Plummer 1972, pp. 163–​8. 140 A Brief History of Textiles, p. 7. 141 1685–​8, PB 4.355. 142 Ribbons were particularly fashionable in men’s dress in the early 1660s, but gradually less so after 1666; ribbons for women’s headdress became popular in the late 1670s. Ribeiro 2005, pp. 224–​34. 143 Walsham 1999, p. 327. 144 Collinges 1675, p. 1. This was reprinted in 1695, and into the eighteenth century until 1780. 145 Ibid., p. 3v. 146 Ibid., p. 7v. 147 Ibid., pp. 11, 29.

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148 Peck 2005, pp. 92–​9, 357. 149 Ibid., p. 97. 150 Magnusson 1994, p. 67. 151 Ibid., pp. 11–​12. 152 Ibid., pp. 60–​1; Mun 1664. 153 Barbon’s pamphlet Coinage, 1696, quoted in Berry 1994, p. 123. 154 Barbon 1690, p. 33. 155 Berry 1994, pp. 125, 114. 156 Thomas Mun lamented, ‘Fashions … greatly wast[e]‌our wealth’; Mun 1664, pp. 180–​1. 157 Quoted from North’s Discourses of Trade, 1691, in Berry 1994, p. 115. 158 Wrightson 2002, p. 251. 159 Journal of the House of Commons, 13 August 1689. 160 Worshipful Company of Weavers 1689. Subsequent citations are all from this petition. 161 Journal of the House of Lords, 19 August 1689. 162 A New Coppy of Verses of the Weavers Loyal Resolution, 1689, PB 5.138. 163 Magnusson 1994, p. 95. 164 See Weatherill 1996 and Peck 2005, pp. 10–​14. 165 Sekora 1977, p. 79. 166 Later expanded; see Mandeville 1714, pp. 8–​9.

3 Ballad Pictures: Conventions of Clothes and the Body 1 Pointon 1993, p. 84. 2 Ballad pictures exhibit huge stylistic variety. Numerous aspects of ballad illustration merit further attention, particularly their visual relationship to playbooks, early costume books, late-​century fashion plates, playhouse culture and public executions. 3 For example, Würzbach 1990, p. 9; Simpson 1966, p. x. 4 For example, A Most Notable Example of an Vngracious Son, 1624, PB 1.42. 5 Watt 1991, p. 6. 6 Derrida 1997, pp. 144–​5. 7 16 May 1648, p. 19. Quoted in Williams 1987, p. 199. 8 Franklin 2002; McShane Jones 2004a; McShane 2010. 9 McShane Jones 2004a, pp. 74–​5. 10 Knapp 2003, p. 55. On the precedent for reusing images in books, see Evenden and Freeman 2011, pp. 193–​4. 11 Franklin 2002, p. 329. 12 de Certeau 1988, pp. xviii–​xx. 13 Dugaw 1989, pp. 17–​18. 14 Freist 1997, pp. 132–​9; Scribner 1981, pp. 1–​10. 15 O’Connell 2007, p. 76. 16 Jobling 1999, pp. 6, 83–​100. 17 Cf. emblems, Graham 2005, p. 85. 18 Jobling 1999, pp. 6, 90–​4. Mark Hallett describes a similar phenomenon in eighteenth-​century graphic satire as ‘inter-​referentiality’ in Hallett 1999, p. 8. 19 Aston 2001, pp. 106–​30.

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20 PB 1.28–​9. 21 Painting by Robert Johnson, PB 1.352–​3. 22 Drayton 1612; 1622. 23 Hind 1952, p. 258. 24 European woodcuts on paper date from the 1420s, after the technique was imported and developed from Chinese textile printing. Parshall and Rainer 2005, p. 39. 25 Though woodcut briefly became an art form in its own right, thanks largely to Albrecht Dürer’s work c.1490s–​1520s. Griffiths 1998, pp. 31, 212. 26 Globe 1985, p. 29. 27 Clayton 1997, p. 16. 28 Pierce 2008, p. 29. 29 Knapp 2003, p. 55. 30 Ibid., p. 71. 31 For example, by ‘lowering’ some parts of the relief so that it catches less ink. 32 Knapp 2003, p. 54. 33 O’Connell 1999, p. 42. 34 Landau and Parshall 1994, p. 23. 35 Ibid., p. 29. 36 Griffiths 1998, p. 13. 37 Landau and Parshall 1994, p. 22. 38 1625, PB 1.254–​5. 39 Cynthia is a name for the hunting goddess Artemis/​Diana. 40 See A Lovers Complaint, 1615, PB 1.358–​9; The Beggers Intrusion, 1620, PB 1.216–​17 (which present rare examples of bust-​length ballad figures before 1650); and Wit Bought at a Dear Rate, 1670, PB 4.249. 41 Knapp 2003, pp. 248, 38. 42 Knapp 2005, p. 152. 43 Luborsky 1987, p. 74. See also Watt 1991, p. 149. 44 Luborsky 1987, p. 74. 45 Aston 2001, pp. 110, 130. 46 See Chartier 1987, p. 6. 47 Gaudio 2012, pp. 404–​407. 48 Luborsky and Ingram 1998 is a key resource here. 49 Driver 2004, pp. 67, 75. 50 Watt 1991, p. 149. 51 Franklin 2002, p. 335; McShane 2010, p. 211. 52 McShane Jones 2004a, p. 105. 53 Watt 1991, p. 79. 54 PB 1.110–​11. 55 Watt 1991, p.  79. Although this two-​part format usually denotes a pre-​Civil War ballad, it was revived in a group of 1680s ballads which portrayed particularly long-​ lived legendary or religious themes. While some adapted the layout to the later, smaller-​sized sheet, some are as large as the earliest ballads and in such cases, it is principally the publisher’s imprint which confirms a later date for the sheet. For ballad dating based on publisher’s imprints, see Cyprian Blagden 1954, pp. 161–​80. 56 PB 1.378–​9. 57 Driver 2004, p. 75.

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58 The second figure from the right is also seen in Thomas Nashe’s book Have with you to Saffron Walden, 1596, n.p. 59 PB 1.232–​3r. 60 O’Connell 1999, p. 19. 61 L. P., 1656, Crawford 904. 62 c.1655–​60, Wood E 25(37). 63 Wood E 25 (49). 64 4o Rawlinson 566(102). 65 Douce 1(83b). 66 For discussion of this topic in a contemporary context see Miller 2010, pp. 12–​41. 67 PB 3.17. 68 PB 3.111. 69 Kelly Feintstein-​Johnson argues that ballad publishers created woodcuts in ‘matched pairs’ whose arrangement on ballad sheets created a variety of conventional meanings. Feintstein-​Johnson 2012, pp. 54–​7. 70 PB 2.80. 71 PB 2.26. 72 PB 4.46. 73 Ribeiro 2013, p. 184. 74 Nicholas Hilliard’s MS, The Arte of Limning, c 1600, quoted in Chirelstein 1990, p. 45. 75 Coombs 1998, pp. 7, 17. 76 Chirelstein 1990, p. 45. 77 Rutherford and Grosvenor 2013, pp. 19–​176. 78 Possibly influenced by artists from the Low Countries. Hearn 2012, pp. 37–​8; Hearn 2015, pp. 11–15. 79 Hind 1935, p. 76. 80 Pointon 1993, pp. 7, 62, 65. 81 Pace 1986; Corbett and Lightbown 1979, p. 43. 82 Griffiths 1998, p. 21. 83 Pointon 1993, p. 54. 84 Hind 1952, vol. 2, p. 8. 85 Griffiths 1998, p. 115. 86 When the courts of Star Chamber and High Commission were abolished in July 1641, press censorship effectively ended. Greg 1956, p. 13. 87 Ricraft 1646. 88 On topicality, see George 2005. 89 Turner 2010, p. 149. 90 Quoted in Jones 2010, p. 9. 91 Globe 1985, preface, n.p. 92 Douce 1 (83b). 93 By Francis Hawkins (1652; 1661). 94 Quoted from the MS The Arte of Limning, c.1600, in Chirelstein 1990, p. 46. 95 Strong and Murrell 1983, pp. 119–​31. 96 Hearn 2012, pp. 28–​39. 97 Chirelstein 1990, pp. 39, 47–​8; Hearn 2014, pp. 220–​35. 98 Cooper 2012, pp. 199–​200. 99 Hamling 2014, pp. 88–​92.

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100 Levey 1983, p. 25. 101 Falling collars were not widely worn until the late 1620s; Levey 1983, p. 23. 102 PB 3.97. 103 Pepys 2 October–​13 November 1663. 104 Corfield 1989, pp. 64–​79. 105 Pepys 8 October 1666. 106 By the early 1670s contemporaries observed a reversion to more lavish decoration, but the main elements of this new fashion –​coat, vest (or waistcoat) and breeches –​ did remain remarkably constant; today’s three-​piece suit is a version of it. Kuchta 2002, pp. 58, 64, 82, 87–​9. 107 Hollander 1993, p. 53; see also Doy 2002, pp. 18–​57. 108 Hearn 2009, pp. 12–​13. 109 Sanderson 1658, p. 39. 110 Gordenker 2001, pp. 53, 71. 111 Ribeiro 2005, pp. 265, 274–​6; Dethloff 2001, p. 32. 112 Chirelstein 1990, pp. 47–​8. 113 Foucault 1994, pp. xxi, 41–​52. 114 For example, Cornelius Johnson (1593–​1661), William Dobson (1610–​46), John Michael Wright (1617–​94), Willem Wissing (1656–​87). 115 Gordenker 2001, p. 71. 116 Ibid., p. 69. 117 Solkin 2015, p. 13. 118 Ibid., p. 35. 119 Addison 17 July 1711. 120 Ribeiro 2005, p. 223. 121 Possibly influenced by kimonos exported from Japan after 1609; Gordenker 2001, p. 73; Ribeiro 2005, pp. 274, 280–​2. 122 Evelyn 4 October 1683. 123 See Sanderson 1658, p.  37. A  ‘petticoat’ usually described an underskirt, worn beneath a gown, but it could refer to a woman’s unboned indoor jacket or warm under-​bodice, or ‘waistcoat’. ‘Morning dress’ referred to a T-​shaped loose gown worn indoors. 124 Pepys 20 December 1665. 125 Pepys 30 March 1666. ‘Indian’ because imported via the East India Company. 126 However, Bakhtin’s purpose in describing the ‘classical’ body is to focus on the opposite concept of the ‘grotesque’. Bakhtin 1984, pp. 27–​32, 303–​67. 127 Griffiths 1998, p.  21; Globe 1985, preface, n.p.; Turner and Depauw 2002, pp. lix–​lxi. 128 Hearn 2009, p. 193. 129 Globe 1985, p. 3. 130 Turner and Depauw 2002, pp. lvii–​lxiii. 131 Griffiths 1998, pp. 217–​18. 132 Sharpe 2001, p. 21. 133 Monteyne 2013, p. 9. 134 Pointon 1993, p. 84. 135 Three impressions are at the National Portrait Gallery. 136 Gordenker 2001, p. 18.

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137 Ibid., p. 25. 138 A similar trend has been observed in contemporary poems about paintings. Pace 1986, p. 3. 139 Pointon 1993, p. 62. 140 It is tempting to connect the mentalist/​dualist ideas published in Descartes’s Discourse on Method in 1637 and Van Dyck’s increasingly reductionist approach to depicting clothing, particularly since Van Dyck’s patron Sir Kenelm Digby helped circulate Descartes’s Discourse in England and published on Cartesian ideas. On Digby’s philosophical patronage, see MacDonald 2003, p. 329. 141 ‘To my worthy friend Mr Peter Lilly’, Lovelace 1649, p. 62. 142 Dethloff 2001, p. 34. 143 ‘Individual’ was first used for single human beings in 1628. Fisher 2006, pp. 17, 167. 144 Ibid., pp. 159, 165, 170. 145 Jones and Stallybrass 2000, p. 11. 146 Ibid. 147 Ribeiro 2005, pp. 272, 277. 148 Evelyn 1661, pp. 13–​14.

4 Classical Ideals and Satirical Deviations, Part I: Masculinity, Fashion and the Defence of the Nation 1 On seventeenth-​ century ideals of Commonwealth and ‘the public good’, see Wrightson 2002, p. 250. 2 Fletcher 1995, pp. 322–​3. 3 Harvey 2002, pp. 218–​19; Shepard 2005, pp. 287–​9. 4 Shepard 2005, pp. 290–​4. 5 Harvey 2005, pp. 302, 306–​307; Shepard 2005, p. 294; Fletcher 1995, p. 323. 6 Hallett 1999. 7 Shepard 2005, p. 293. 8 Fletcher 1995, pp. 331–​4. 9 PB 3.180. 10 Kneller’s original painting is unknown. Griffiths 1998, p. 206. 11 Such closeness suggests the image copies, or shares a source with, the print. A possible copy after the White portrait at the National Portrait Gallery, NPG D18573, creates a simplified frame whose style appears in the ballad. 12 Levey 1983, pp. 31–2. 13 Ribeiro 2005, p. 307. 14 Royal Society portraits appear as an exception to this rule; Stewart 1983. 15 Pepys 19 October 1662. 16 Blount 1674, p. 166. 17 See the unpublished second edition of Evelyn’s Tyrranus, or the Mode. Kuchta 2002, p. 209 n.25. 18 Linen was believed to absorb dirt from the body and protect clothes from bodily grease. Vincent 2003, pp. 52–​5. 19 For example, Samuel Cooper’s miniature of Frances Teresa Stuart, c.1664, Royal Collection.

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20 For example, Jean Dieu de Saint Jean’s fashion plate, Femme de Qualité en Stenkerke et Falbala, 1693, V&A. 21 One notable exception is the woodcut copy of an engraved portrait of the famous cross-​dresser, Mary Frith, or ‘Moll Cut-​Purse’ 1662, National Portrait Gallery D28530, used to illustrate The Maidens Frollicksome Undertaking to Press Twenty Taylors (1689–​92), PB 4.276, though it shows no wig or cravat. The ballad describes ‘Moll’ as the tailors’ chief ‘presser’ into military service. 22 The New Scotch-​Jigg 1678–​88, PB 3.18. 23 Ribeiro 2005, p. 203. 24 Pepys 2 October 1663. 25 Pointon 1993, pp. 112, 121. 26 De Marly 1982, p. 23; Ribeiro 2005, p. 336. 27 Ibid., pp. 323–​4. 28 Patterson 2009, pp. 17, 52, 60. 29 Gordenker 2001, p. 21. 30 For example, his portrait of John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester, c.1677, V&A, showing Wilmot wearing a steel cuirass, a wig, a cravat and a large drape of red silk across his body. 31 For example, An Unknown Officer, c.1645 (Tate Gallery, London); Sir William Compton, c.1643 (Private Collection). 32 Rare historical examples of women entering the army appear to relate to a desire to avoid separation from husbands or lovers, rather than fight for the nation. Fraser 2002, pp. 237–​44. 33 Or for example the male bust in A Louers Complaint, cf. Hill 1571, p. 117. 34 On Civil War print output, see Williams 1987. 35 Shepard 2005, p. 287; Harvey 2005, p. 308. 36 Several ballads printed between 1658 and 1674 portray men whose armour harks back to pre-​Civil War styles, for example, Wood 401(3), Wood E 25(11), Douce 1(92b), Douce 1(118a) and 4o Rawlinson 566(185). One rare buff coat may be depicted in A Noble Dewel, 1660, Wood 401 (99). 37 PB 2.214. 38 PB 3.338. 39 Several ballads represent Monmouth’s exploits or execution, for example, Monmouth Routed, 1685, PB 2.239. 40 As many as one in seven able men, according to Smith 2011, p. 48. 41 McShane Jones, 2004a, pp. 120–​6. 42 Some ballads praise individual women for joining the armed forces (Dugaw 1989), but they tend to imagine such women as loyal lovers following soldier sweethearts, rather than successful soldiers who defend their country. 43 Such ballads may have been used to encourage new soldiers to overcome their anxieties about going to war. McShane Jones 2004a, pp. 124–​5. 44 PB 2.279. 45 For example, an orange tree symbolises William in the anonymous 1688 engraving, England’s-​Memorial, British Museum 1855,0114.192. 46 PB 2.305. See also King Williams Triumph, 1690, PB 2.300. 47 For example, Lely’s Frescheville Holles and Robert Holmes, 1672, and Kneller’s Admiral Edward Russell, c.1693, both at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich.

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48 PB 2.318. 49 Colley 2005, p.  53 argues that martial Protestantism was vital for forging British identity after 1688. 50 For example, King Williams Triumph noted above. 51 PB 2.303. 52 PB 2.327. The frequency with which this mounted image appears in ballads naming William III suggests ballad buyers would have been encouraged to associate the image with him. 53 ‘Pagoda’ sleeves are large turned up cuffs on the arms of the coat. 54 McShane Jones 2004a, pp. 96, 124–​5. 55 See similar arrangements on King William’s Courage, 1690, PB 2.335 and The Royal Dialogue, 1691, PB 2.330. 56 OED, ‘naked’. 57 Here William is in direct contrast with effeminate tailors (discussed in Chapter 2) who are mocked in ballads for being unwillingly ‘pressed’ into action. 58 Schwoerer 1989, p. 738. 59 Ibid., pp. 726–​30. 60 Laqueur 1990, pp. 150, 152, 159. 61 Ibid., p. 152. 62 For example, Harvey 2002, pp. 202–​206. 63 Fisher 2006, pp. 2, 13–​17; Fletcher 1995, p. 385. 64 Fletcher 1995, pp. 395–​6. 65 It is unclear whether William’s propaganda campaigns directly attempted to influence black-​letter ballad-​publishing. McShane Jones 2004a, p. 393. 66 Among many examples, see the cuckold-​themed ballad Rock the Cradle John 1635?, PB 1.404–​5. 67 Englands Miseries Crown’d with Mercy, 1683, PB 2.225. 68 Stallybrass and White 1986, pp. 100–​24. 69 Hallett 1999, p. 9. 70 Roxburghe 1.476–​7. 71 The ballad’s self-​consciously learned vocabulary may suggest it was aimed at an educated audience. However, its overtly theatrical lyrics, and the performance they imply –​such as, ‘here (as on a stage) I’ll show the postures’ –​may also have encouraged popularity with illiterate buyers. 72 By H[umphrey C[rouch], Don. B. 24(13). 73 Evelyn recounted his shock at ‘the wiccked folly vanity & monstrous excesse of Passion’ displayed at Court, ‘which ought to be an example of Virtue’, 6 January 1662. 74 1678–​80, PB 2.222. 75 Ribeiro 2005, p. 203. 76 Hall 1654, p. 14; Price 1656, p. 7. 77 Earlier date estimated on the basis of its similarity to an MS of 1668; McShane 2011. 78 Harris 1986, p. 542. 79 Other ballads to discuss the Court at this time include The New Projector, 1662, Luttrell 2.169; Your Humble Servant Madam, 1662, Roxburghe 3.248–​9. 80 1686, PB 3.207. 81 1685–​8, PB 3.253. 82 Douce 1(39a).

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83 1690–​1702, PB 2.164. 84 Canting Dictionary defines a ‘Hector’ as a ‘Whoremaster’. 85 Canting Dictionary lists ‘Town-​bull’ as another phrase for ‘Whoremaster’. 86 See numerous examples at the Old Bailey Proceedings Online. One typical case is a man ‘tryed for taking from the person of Robert Fletcher, on the Kings highway, a Beaver Hat and Perriwig, value 4 l.’ May 1687, trial of Robert Dale (t16870512-​27). 87 The ‘abject’ is defined as ‘what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-​between, the ambiguous, the composite’ in Kristeva 1982, p. 4. 88 Hollander 1993, p. 157. 89 For example, A Most Godly and Comfortable Ballad of the Glorious Resurrection of Our Lord Iesus Christ, 1684–​6, PB 2.20–​1. 90 For example, The Dead Mans Song, 1685, PB 2.8–​9. 91 Kristeva defines ‘the utmost of abjection’ as a ‘corpse, seen without God’; ballads depicting the naked male form almost always refer to Christ or God. Kristeva 1982, p. 4. 92 Campaign wigs were associated with battle, tied up for travelling. Holme 1688, II, ch. 18, no. 118. 93 Pointon 1993, p. 121. 94 See Fisher 2006, pp. 129–​45. 95 Foyster 1993, pp. 7–​9. Though, conversely, cuckold-​themed ballads might be performed so as to subvert, as well as uphold, patriarchal ideals. Clark 2002, p. 119. 96 Pointon 1993, pp. 117–​25. 97 In addition to the perceived tonsorial divide between Roundhead and Cavalier, there were many printed debates about ideal hair length for women and men. Fisher 2006, pp. 145–​57. 98 Pointon’s phrase for eighteenth-​century male portraiture is equally applicable here. Pointon 1993, p. 112. 99 Hallett 1999, pp. 9–​10. 100 Kuchta 2002, pp. 56, 64. 101 Hallett 1999, p. 13. 102 PB 2.92. 103 PB 2.72. 104 See these titles in the Roxburghe, Crawford and Harvard collections; also The Dispairing Prodigal, 1692, PB 4.313; Thomas Jordan, The Prodigals Resolution, 1679, PB 4.240. 105 Jones 2010, pp. 194–​6. 106 The Extravagant Gallants Resolution, 1687, PB 4.249. 107 The same is true of the images on The Extravagant Youth. 108 McWard 1672, pp. 8–​9, quoted in Jones 2010, p. 118. 109 Small openings in petticoat seams allowed access to the pocket beneath; Burman and Denbo 2006, p. 19. 110 Sex out of doors is a popular ballad subject, often alluded to by referring to its effect on female dress: a ‘green gown’. 111 The Fop Dictionary defined ‘Colbertine’ as a fashionable lace, ‘of the Fabrick of Monsieur Colbert, Superintendent of the French Kings Manufactures’, see Evelyn and Evelyn 1690; Jean-​Baptiste Colbert indeed passed many laws to promote consumption of French clothing, particularly between 1661 and 1683. Harte 1993, p. 185.

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112 Black-​letter ballads tend to use the word ‘fop’ as a synonym for ‘gallant’, but white-​ letter ballads (which, as discussed, tended to address more restricted, educated audiences) use ‘fop’ as an adjective or noun as a synonym for ‘deceptive/​deceiver’. 113 Staves 1982, pp. 414–​16, 422. 114 Carter 2001, p. 143.

5 Classical Ideals and Satirical Deviations, Part II: Female Bodies, Feminine Fashions and Economic Benefits 1 Cf. Jobling 1999, p. 2. 2 PB 3.322. 3 The classical myth of Hero and Leander was adapted to include this familial interference. 4 Oil on canvas, Althorp House, Northamptonshire. 5 Various impressions are at the National Portrait Gallery and the British Museum. 6 Stedman 2013, pp. 98–​107; Solkin 2015, pp. 30–​1. 7 Various impressions are at the British Museum. Blooteling’s mezzotint may have been made after Lely’s original drawing. 8 Hollander 1993, pp. 199, 205–​206. 9 For general treatments, see Miles 2008, and Yalom 1998. 10 MacLeod 2001, pp. 50–​61. 11 O’Connell 2007, p. 70. 12 McShane Jones 2004b, p. 41. 13 The Dutchess of Portsmouths Farewel, 1685, Luttrell 2.168. 14 by M[artin P[arker], PB 1.386–​7. 15 Pritchard 2008, p. 174. 16 Sanderson 1658, p. 37. 17 McShane Jones 2004b, p. 45; cf. Hollander’s argument that the unclothed body in Western art is always depicted according to the shape of current fashion; Hollander 1993, p. 91. 18 For example, Steele 2001, p. 13. 19 Surviving stays made of leather (e.g. Worthing Museum, 1976/​444), together with historical accounts of stays, suggest they were very widely available and worn; MacTaggart and MacTaggart 1973, pp. 20–​8. 20 Sorge-​English 2011, p. 177. 21 Bulwer 1653, p. 312. 22 Witches and devils were traditionally portrayed with long hanging breasts, perhaps to suggest age; Hollander 1993, p. 98. 23 This study found no instances of surviving gowns or stays in English collections that had been obviously cut in such a way as to reveal the breasts. 24 In 1617, the Venetian ambassador described her ‘bosom bare down to the pit of her stomach’, McManus 2002, p. 127. 25 See Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger’s portrait, c.1612, National Portrait Gallery. 26 Orgel and Strong 1973, pp. 140, 153, 190, 203. 27 Ribeiro 2005, p. 136.

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28 Ripa 1603, p. 431. 29 The Courtauld Gallery; Campbell 2012, pp. 112–​19. 30 McManus 2002, pp. 122–​3, 131. 31 Bulwer 1653, p. 345. 32 Possibly a play on both seventeenth-​century meanings, that is, bargaining/​buying as well as lowering the price or value; OED, ‘cheapen’. 33 Bulwer 1653, p. 543. ‘Chapman’ could mean either a retailer or a purchaser in the seventeenth century, OED. 34 Hall 1654, p. 107. 35 Boileau 1678. 36 North 13 April 1667. In the MS, ‘all’ is inserted above the line of writing, suggesting that, in afterthought, Charles wanted to indicate entirety. 37 Pepys 26 April 1667; Evelyn 18 April 1667. 38 N.H. 1694, p. 309. 39 Mennes 1654, n.p., epigram 20. 40 Howe 1992, pp. 43–​9. 41 Lacy 1672, Act 2 scene 1. 42 For example, William Wycherley’s The Plain Dealer, 1676; Aphra Behn’s The Roundheads, 1682; or Charles Hopkins’s Friendship Improv’d, 1699. 43 Wilson 1958, pp. 67–​86. 44 McShane Jones 2004a, p. 64. 45 Jobling 1999, p. 91. 46 McShane Jones 2004b. 47 PB 2.80. Its text was first published in 1656; I am grateful to Angela McShane for advice on this. See also McShane 2011, pp. 95–​6. 48 Eicher and Roach-​Higgins 1992, p. 15. 49 For example, The Whipster of Woodstreet, 1690, PB 2.190. 50 Lovelace 1642, pp. 97–​8. 51 The Pepys ballad collection contains this ballad within a section entitled, ‘Devotion and Morality’. 52 MacLeod 2001, pp. 53–​6. 53 The same pair of ovals are used to play a similar role in other ballads on similar themes, for example, Content and Rich, c.1684–6, PB 2.26. 54 Hollander focuses on the single bared breast, with brief (and inconclusive) discussion of the ‘double-​breasted effect’. Hollander 1993, pp. 186–​207. 55 McManus 2002, p. 130; Chirelstein 1990, pp. 58–​9; Ribeiro 2005, p. 136. 56 Oil on canvas, Royal Collection. Judson and Ekkart 1999, pp. 107–1​08. 57 Mainwaring 1628. 58 Morrall and Watt 2008. 59 Brooks 2004, pp. 13, 62–​3. 60 Roxburghe 4.81. 61 On the effects of unclothed and clothed bodies depicted in proximity, see Hollander 1993, p. 178. 62 Ibid., p. 157. 63 Their dubious moral associations appear in Woolley 1673, pp. 224–​5. 64 The same image was used in another ballad on a similar theme, The Disdainful Virgin Led Captive, 1680–​90?, Roxburghe 4.41.

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65 Malcolm Jones speculates bared breasts here are evidence of an assault, but the bodice shows no sign of disarray or misalignment compared to the rest of the dressed body. Jones 2010, p. 148. 66 Ibid., p. 9. 67 1662, oil on canvas. National Portrait Gallery. 68 For example, a palm-​sized, engraved double portrait of Charles II and Catherine of Braganza, c.1662, NPG D11128. 69 PB 2.256. 70 See discussion of this term in Chapter 3. 71 For example, The Merry Beggars of Lincolns-​Inn-​Fields, 1685–​8, PB 4.252. 72 Yalom 1998, pp. 105–​23. 73 Ribeiro 2005, pp. 288, 292–​3. 74 PB 3.70. This image is used with another ‘lower sort’ protagonist in The Love-​Sick Maid, 1675–​1725, Douce 1(133b). 75 The OED defines ‘pomper’ in this period as indulgence of the flesh. 76 D’Urfey 1685–​8, PB 4.85. 77 Whereabouts unknown; Judson and Ekkart 1999, cat. 255. 78 Ibid.; for example, cat. 224, 193, 292. 79 ‘Blowne Roses’ could mean the large ‘shoe rose’ decorations on her shoes, or perhaps lost virginity. 80 From The Seven Deadly Sins, engraving, published by William Webb, British Museum. See brief discussion in Jones 2010, p. 39. 81 Published by William Warter. From Malcolm Jones’s collection; ibid., p. 232. 82 Another term was ‘frelange’; de Marly 1975, pp. 61–​9. For a survey of ‘top-​knot ballads’, see McShane and Backhouse 2010. 83 PB 4.365. 84 The prominent initials ‘I.M.’ may relate to the owner or maker of the woodcut. The same initials appear in the ballad The Extravagant Youth, 1684–​5, PB 2.92. This study found only one French fashion plate to correlate with confidence to a ballad woodcut: Jean Dieu de Saint Jean’s Dame en Habit de Chambre, 1674 (e.g., Museum of London), cf. The Maids Complaint, 1681–​4, PB 4.50 and Thomas D’Urfey, The Joys of Vertuous Love, 1685–​8, PB 4.93. 85 1690s, PB 4.362. 86 1690s, PB 4.310. 87 1685–​9, PB 4.366. 88 1685–​6, PB 4.367. 89 1690s, PB 4.363. 90 Monteyne 2006, p. 430 makes a similar point about Hollar. 91 A London fish-​market, famous for foul language and abuse, OED. 92 Linen undergarments were thought to help cleanse the body of dirt. Vincent 2003, p. 55. 93 Cf. the engine loom and weavers’ complaints discussed in Chapter Two. 94 Wright 1693, p. 93. A ‘commode’ wire supported a tall laced and ribboned frelange headdress. OED defines an English ell as about 45 inches. 95 Kitch 2005. 96 Kristeva 1982, pp. 2, 4, 12. 97 Ballads share with delftware and domestic embroidery (among other applied arts) both a visual ‘vocabulary’ and stylistic traits. Jones 2010, pp. 217–​18.

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NOTES TO PAGES 183–194

98 Anonymous, The Alamode Dress, c.1688, woodcut. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington. 99 Kuchta 2002, p. 85. 100 Ibid., pp. 124–​5. 101 Sekora 1977, p. 44. 102 Halifax and Prior 1687, p. 11. 103 Will’s coffee house opened in Covent Garden in 1671. Richardson 2000, p. 149. 104 Although women did enter coffeehouses under specific conditions, in ideal and reality it was largely a masculine sphere. Cowan 2001, pp. 146–​9. 105 Monteyne 2007, pp. 62–​3. 106 The Parlament of Vvomen, 1640. 107 Cf. the ‘Elizabeth-​effect’, whereby the late queen’s image is mobilised to symbolise female political agency in seventeenth-​century women’s writing. Suzuki 2002, pp. 231–​3. 108 Church 1893, p. 205; Chaucer 2008, p. 994. 109 ‘A Compassionate Conformist’, 1683, pp. 22–​3. 110 Mandeville 1714. 111 Monteyne 2006, pp. 430–​2. 112 Cf. Grantham Turner 1995, pp. 419–​39. 113 Ribeiro 2005, p. 209.

Epilogue 1 Black 1987, pp. 12–​13. 2 McShane 2011, p. xxvi. 3 For example, News from Hide-​Park, 1711–​32, Douce 2(166a), replicates one of the woodcuts, the overall layout, the tune and (in white-​letter) the lyrics of News from Hide-​Park, 1681–​4, PB 3.257. 4 The Madden collection comprises the largest known group of slip ballads. McShane 2011, p. xxvi. 5 McShane 2008, p. 28. 6 Plomer 1922, p. viii. 7 13 October 1722, reprinted in Defoe 1869, p. 58. Defoe writes in the guise of a ballad-​maker: it seems this comment about ballad decline is not part of his overall satire. 8 Franklin 2002, pp. 339–​41. 9 Addison 7 June 1711. 10 For example, Brome 1660b. 11 Philips 1723–​5, p. iii. 12 Lemire 2009, pp. 214–​18. 13 Mukerji 1983, p. 182; Lemire 2009, p. 221. 14 Styles 2007, p. 132; Mukerji 1983, pp. 189–​90. 15 Riello 2013, p. 130–​1. 16 Lemire 1991, p. 16. 17 Pepys 5 and 21 November 1663. 18 Lemire 1991, pp. 22, 27.

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225

19 Mukerji 1983, p. 205. 20 Lemire 1991, pp. 26–​31. 21 Riello 2013, p. 124. 22 Lemire 1991, p. 32. 23 Styles 2007, p. 112. 24 Cf. the origins of woodblock printing on paper, believed to have begun as a method for printing textiles; Hind 1935, p. 64. 25 V&A T.17–​1914; Howell Smith 1924, p. 28. 26 Lemire 2010, p. xvii. 27 Plummer 1972, p. 295. 28 The Case of the Printers of Callicoes and Linens. 29 Reprinted in Ward 1721, p. 87. 30 Plummer 1972, pp. 293–​6. 31 Lemire 1991, p. 19. 32 Plummer 1972, p. 299. 33 Quoted in Plummer 1972, p. 297. 34 Defoe 1869, p. 59. Since these ballads only surive in reprinted editions, they do not appear in the ESTC. 35 See contemporary comment in Lemire 2010, vol. 1. 36 OED suggests the word ‘taudry’ dates from the 1670s, when calico printing began in London. 37 Thomas Braker, Tunbridge-​Walks, quoted in Lemire 2011, p. 52. 38 Riello 2013, p. 116. 39 Smith 2007, p. 34. 40 Mandeville 1714, p. 9. 41 The Callico Quaker’s Speech to the Honourable House of Lords. 42 In 1698 a new East India Company was incorporated. 43 Smith 2007, pp. 30–​44. Presumably female servants, if single, had relatively autonomous control over their own income. 44 Lemire 2010, vol. 1, xi. 45 15–​17 November 1719. 46 Pepys 5 September 1663. 47 Smith 2007, pp. 34–​5. 48 Ibid., p. 35; Lemire 2010, vol. 1, p. xvii. 49 Styles 2007, pp. 114, 127.

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PRINCIPAL BALLAD COLLECTIONS CONSULTED Ashmole, Douce, Firth, Rare Books (Don.), Rawlinson and Wood Collections, Bodleian Library, Oxford. Bagford, Luttrell and Roxburghe Collections, British Library, London. Crawford Collection, National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh. Euing Collection, University Library, Glasgow University. Madden Collection, University Library, Cambridge University. Pepys Collection, Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge University. Please see Ballad Index for titles of surviving ballad sheets cited.

SELECT PRIMARY SOURCES, PUBLISHED IN LONDON (UNLESS OTHERWISE STATED) ‘A Compassionate Conformist’. Englands Vanity or The Voice of God Against the Monstrous Sin of Pride, 1683. Addison, Joseph. The Spectator 85–​98, 119, 367 (7–​22 June, 17 July 1711, 1 May 1712). A Directory for the Publique Worship of God. Together with an Ordinance of Parliament for the Taking Away of the Book of Common Prayer, 1645. A Poore Scholar’s Thred-​bare Suit: Described in a Petitionary Poem to His Patron, 1663. Bailey, Nathan. The Universal Etymological English Dictionary, 1731. Barbon, Nicholas. A Discourse of Trade, 1690. Baxter, Richard. Reliquiae Baxterianae, 1696. Biblia: The Bible,That is, the Holy Scripture of the Olde and New Testament, translated by Miles Coverdale, Marburg?, 1535. Blount, Thomas. Glossographia, or, A Dictionary, 1656, 1674. Boccaccio, Giovanni. The Pleasant and Sweet History of Patient Grissell, 1640. Boileau, Jacques. A Just and Seasonable Reprehension of Naked Breasts and Shoulders, translated by Edward Cooke, 1678. Brandon, Richard. The Confession of Richard Brandon the Hangman, 1649. Brome, Alexander. Bumm-​foder, 1660a.

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—​—​—​. The Rump, 1660b. Bulwer, John. Anthropometamorphosis: Man Transform’d, 1653. Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, Charles II, 1860. Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, James II, 1960. Cavendish, William. The Triumphant Widow, 1677. Certain Sermons or Homilies Appointed to Be Read in Churches in the Time of Queen Elizabeth of Famous Memory. Oxford, 1683. Chamberlain, John, ed. Queen Elizabeth’s Progresses.Volume IV, Part I, 1821. Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry Dean Benson. Oxford, 2008. Chettle, Henry, William Haughton and Thomas Dekker. Patient Grissil: A Comedy, 1841. Collinges, John. The Weavers Pocket-​book, 1675. Constitutions and Canons Ecclesiastical of the Church of England, 1604. Davies, John. A Scourge for Paper-​Persecutors, 1625. Day, Geoffrey, ed. The Pepys Ballads. Cambridge, 1987, 5 vols. Day, Richard. A Booke of Christian Praiers, 1608. Day, Richard, and John Day. Christian Prayers and Meditations in English, French, Italian, Spanish, Greeke, and Latine, 1569. Deacon, Elizabeth. A Remarkable Account of the Penitent Carriage and Behaviour of the Whip-​Makers Wife, 1689. Defoe, Daniel. The Complete English Tradesman. Edinburgh, 1839. —​—​—​. Daniel Defoe: His Life, and Recently Discovered Writings, ed. William Lee, 1869, 3 vols. della Porta, Giambattista. Natural Magick, 1658. Drayton, Michael. Poly-​Olbion, ed. John Selden, 1612; 1622. Earle, John. Micro-​cosmographie, 1628. Ebsworth, Joseph Woodfall, ed. The Bagford Ballads. Hertford, 1878, 2 vols. Elizabeth I, Queen of England. The Brief Content of Certayne Actes of Parliament Agaynst Thinordinate Vse of Apparell, 1559. Elstrack, Renold. Baziliōlogia a Booke of Kings, 1618. Evelyn, John. The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. Esmond Samuel De Beer, 1959. —​—​—​. Tyrannus or the Mode, 1661. —​—​—​. Sculptura: Or the History, and Art of Chalcography and Engraving in Copper, 1662. Evelyn, Mary, and John Evelyn. Mundus Muliebris … Together with the Fop Dictionary, 1690. Fiennes, Celia. Through England on a Side Saddle, 1888. Fletcher, Andrew. A Discourse of Government with Relation to Militia’s. Edinburgh, 1698. Flying Post, or The Post Master, no. 832 (5 September 1700). Fox, George. The Inward and Spiritual Warfare, 1690. —​—​—​. The Works of George Fox. Philadelphia, 1831. Gent, B. E. A New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew, 1699. H. N. The Ladies Dictionary, 1694. Haec Vir: Or,The Womanish-​man, 1620. Halifax, Charles Montagu, and Matthew Prior. The Hind and the Panther Transvers’d, 1687. Hall, Thomas. Comarum Akosmia, the Loathsomnesse of Long Haire, 1654. Hic Mulier: Or,The Man-​woman, 1620. Hill, Thomas. The Contemplation of Mankinde, 1571. Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan, 1651. Holloway, John, and Joan Black, eds. Later English Broadside Ballads, 1975, 2 vols. Holme, Randle. The Academy of Armory. Chester, 1688. J. F., The Merchant’s Ware-​House Laid Open, 1696.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My first thanks go to Aileen Ribeiro, who introduced me to the History of Dress at the Courtauld Institute. During the PhD which forms the basis of this book, I was most fortunate in my supervisors David Solkin and Rebecca Arnold; I am heartily grateful for their rigorous and challenging approaches, which were matched only by their unfailing kindness and generosity.  Thank you to Sheila O’Connell and John Styles, to Philippa Brewster and David Campbell at I.B.Tauris, and to Kate Reeves, for all their excellent comments, help and advice. For assistance during visits to collections of print and dress, I would like to thank: Beatrice Behlen and Hilary Davidson at the Museum of London; Miles Lambert at Platt Hall, Manchester; Lisa Little at Carrow House, Norwich; Kate Loubser at Worthing Museums and Art Galleries; Phillipa Grimstone, Jane Hughes, Richard Luckett and Catherine Sutherland at the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge; Lesley Miller, Susan North, Jane Rutherston and Suzanne Smith at the Victoria and Albert Museum; Danielle Sprecher at Ipswich and Colchester museums; and Kate Heard, Sue Stanton and the staff of the Print Room at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Thanks to Philip Sykas at the Manchester School of Art for advice by email. I  have appreciated the efficient and friendly help given by the staff of the Bridewell Library, the British Museum Print Room, the Courtauld Library, London Metropolitan Archives, the Bodleian and Oxford University Libraries, the Rare Books reading room at the British Library and Cambridge University Library. For invaluable virtual help, I thank Kris McAbee at the English Ballads and Broadsides Archive; indeed, this project would hardly have been feasible without the EBBA. For opportunities to test out ideas and to explore research interests, I am grateful to Evelyn Welch and the Early Modern Dress and Textiles Network; to my students at the Oxford University Department for Continuing

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Acknowledgements

Education and at New York University in London; to Katie Scott, Joanna Woodall and the members of the Courtauld Early Modern Workshop; to Mark Hallett and Sarah Victoria Turner at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art; to Karin Dannehl and Laura Ugolini at the Centre for the History of Retailing and Distribution; to Michelle O’Callaghan at the Early Modern Research Centre, Reading University; to Kelly Feinstein-​ Johnson and Anna Kirk, fellow students of ballads and dress respectively; and to Angela McShane and Elizabeth Currie at the V&A/​RCA. My thanks to Michael Hunter, for including me in the British Printed Images project. Various scholars kindly made time to talk with me, of whom I especially thank: Giles Bergel, Mary Brooks, Alexandra Franklin, Karen Hearn, Christiana Payne, Dinah Reynolds and Charlie de Wet. Previous degrees in English Language and Literature, and in History of Art, prepared me well for this study; thanks to Anna Beer, Geraldine Johnson and Julian Thompson at Oxford University. Most particular thanks to Angela McShane: the original PhD simply could not have been written without her pioneering research and very gracious support. For research funding, I am grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Thriplow Charitable Trust (administered by the Courtauld Institute), the Pasold Research Fund, the Sir Richard Stapley Educational Trust and the Harvey Fellows. My thanks to the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, for a generous publication grant to illustrate this book. I am so thankful for my friends. Love and thanks to Sara and Tom, Sharon and Mark, Naomi and Hugo, Natasha and Paul, Joanne and Rod, Claire and Richard, Trudy and Wilson, Cat and Rick, Emma and Gregory, Becca and Olly, and Gillie for warm friendship and hospitality. In Oxford, Phil and Rachel, Emily and Michael, Al-​Hassan and Emily, Judith, Ross, Tilly, Tamsin, Bobby and Claire, Joanna and Luke were all cheering and wise at the right times. Special mention is due to Emily B, Nancy and Emma M-​C, for their outstanding generosity, good company, and pointing the way forward. In London, joyful thanks to Jemimah, Naomi P, Sue, John and Lizzie, Tora and Matthew, and Emily and Jonathan. Most recently, thank you to the Bandura family, for all-round encouragement. I am deeply grateful for my family in China and Ireland, and for my other parents in Canada, whose love and kindness have been close, even across the miles. Above all, I thank Stephen, who has walked with me and loved me this whole way, and is so much fun to live with.

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Finally, I thank my mother and my father for their constant support and loving interest, even in the face of overshadowing uncertainties in their own lives: As for me, I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last He will take His stand upon the earth. Even after my skin is destroyed, yet from my flesh I shall see God.

248

INDEX OF BALLAD TITLES Advice to the Ladies of London 178 Advice to the Maidens of London 179, 180, 181–​3 Alexis Loyalty 128, 129, 130–​2, 134, 189 An Excellent Sonnet of the Unfortunate Loves of Hero & Leander 159, 160–​3, 167 Any Thing for a Quiet Life 100, 101, 111 Batchelers Resolution, A 101, 102,  111–​12 Beggers Intrusion,The 214n.40 Britains Vallour 218n.36 City Rambler,The 23, 31 Cobler’s Corrant,The 211n.104 Coblers New Prophesie,The 66, 67, 68 Content and Rich 107, 222n.53 Contented Pilgrim,The 206n.80 Country Lass,The 1, 2 Crafty Miss of London,The 146, 147, 148–​52, 155 Crafty Scotch Pedlar,The 19, 28, 29 Dead Mans Song,The 220n.90 Deserued Downfall of a Corrupted Conscience,The 47, 48, 49–​50 Disdainful Virgin Led Captive,The 222n.64 Dispairing Prodigal,The 220n.104 Dorset-​shire Damosel, The 14 Downfall of Pride,The 144, 210n.52 Down-​Right Dick of the West 33–​4 Dublins Deliverance 138–​9 Dutchess of Portsmouths Farewel,The 221n.13 Englands Happiness Reviv’d 135, 136, 137 Englands Miseries Crown’d with Mercy 219n.67

English Courage Undaunted,The 134 Extravagant Gallants Resolution,The 220n.106 Extravagant Youth,The 152, 220n.107, 223n.84 Fair Warning for Pride, A 182, 183, 184–​5 Famous Flower of Serving-​Men,The 103, 104, 109 Forsaken Lovers Resolution 112, 113, 114, 120 Good Shepheards Sorrow for the Death Ef [sic] His Beloued Sonne,The 88–​92, 93, 94, 98, 107, 134 Groats-​Worth of Mirth for a Penny, A 146, 147, 148–​52 Historie of the Prophet Ionas,The 88, 91 Honour of a London Prentice,The 218n.36 Jolly Jack of All Trades 23–​4, 25, 27–​8,  30–​1 Joys of Vertuous Love,The 223n.84 King William’s Courage 219n.55 King Williams Triumph 218n.46, 219n.50 London Ladies Vindication,The 182, 184,  188–​9 Londoners Answer to Down-​Right Dick of the West, The 34 Looking-​Glass for Lascivious Young Men, A 152, 153, 154–​6 Love-​Sick Maid,The 223n.74 Lovers Complaint, A 214n.40, 218n.33 Lovers Invitation,The 105, 107, 114, 115 Loyal Subjects Prayers for King Williams Good Success Over His Enemies in Flanders,The 137

249

INDEX OF BALLAD TITLES Mad Crue, A 29, 30 Maidens Frolicksome Undertaking To Press Twenty Taylors, The 71 Maidens Resolution,The 182, 188, 210n.68 Maids Complaint,The 223n.84 Maulsters Daughter of Malborough,The 177, 178 Merry Beggars of Lincolns-​Inn-​Fields,The 223 Merry Nevv Catch of All [t]rades, A 211n.92 Merry Tom of All Trades 61, 62, 63, 66 Monmouth Routed 218n.39 Most Delicate, Pleasant, Amorous, New Song, A 94–​6, 97, 98 Most Excellent and Vertuous Ballad of the Patient Grissell, A 45, 46–​51, 54, 176, 178, 193 Most Godly and Comfortable Ballad of the Glorious Resurrection of Our Lord Iesus Christ, A 220n.89 Most Notable Example of an Vngracious Son, A Nevves Good and Nevv 33 New Courtier,The 145–​6, 150 New Projector,The 219n.79 New Scotch-​Jigg,The 218n.22 New Song in Praise of the Gentle-​craft, A 211n.106 News from Hide-​Park 224n.3 Noble Dewel, A 218n.36 Pedler Opening of His Packe,The 23, 24, 26–​7, 29, 31 Pensive Prisoners Apology,The 107, 168, 169–​70 Phantastick Age,The 144 Pitties Lamentation 53 Pleasant Song of the Valiant deeds of Chivalry, A 218n.36 Princess Welcome to England,The 174, 175, 176–​7, 183, 189 Prodigals Resolution,The 220n.104 Proverb Old, A 163 Quakers Fear,The 212n.124 Rock the Cradle John 219n.66 Round Boyes Indeed 64, 65, 66 Royal Dialogue,The 219n.55 Royal Farewel,The 139, 140–​2

249

Sea-​mans Compass,The 204n.21 Shepheard and the King, The 11 Shoo-​makers Travells,The 211n.93 Sir Walter Rauleigh His Lamentation 98, 99 Somersetshire Wonder,The 182, 184–​5 Sorrowful Lamentation of the Pedlars,The 26, 27, 29–​32, 204n.21 Souldiers Prayers,The 4, 136–​7, 138,  139–​40 Spanish Ladies Love,The 218n.36 Springs Glory,The 103 Subtil Miss of London,The 146, 152, 155 Taylors Vindication,The 69–​70 Times Alteration 52–​3, 54, 55–​6 Tobias Observation 21–​2, 38 Town-​bully’s Bravery,The 146–​7, 149 Trades-​men’s Lamentation, The 57 Trap, or,The Young Lass 106 Turners Dish of Lentten Stuffe 211n.92 Unbelieving Maiden,The 104, 106–​7, 114, 127–​8, 130 Virgins Constancy, The 11 War-​Like Taylor,The 68, 69, 71–​2 Warning and Good Counsel to the Weavers, A 73, 74, 75 Weavers Request,The 75, 76, 77–​8, 80 Wench for a Weauer, A 212n.128 What Is That to You 104, 112 Whipster of Woodstreet,The 222n.49 White-​Chappel Maids Lamentation,The 134–​5, 136 Wit Bought at a Dear Rate 214n.40 Womens and Maidens Vindication,The 182, 187 Wonderful Praise of Money, The 22 Yea & Nay the Quaker, Deceiv’d 72 Young Man’s Tryal,The 104 Young-​Mans Labour Lost,The 171, 172, 174, 181, 189 Young-​Womans Complaint,The 102, 103 Your Humble Servant Madam 219n.79

0 5 2

INDEX

For black-​letter ballads cited, please see the separate Index of Ballad Titles abject 149, 151–​2, 157, 169, 185, 220n.87, 220n.91 accessories see dress Act of  Toleration, 1689 58 Act of Uniformity, 1662 58, 209n.22 actors 133, 164, 166 Acts and Monuments 89 Addison, Joseph 16–​17, 192–​3 advertising 21–​2, 26–​7, 64, 106, 108–​9, 155, 199 ‘Against Excesse in Apparell’ 49–​52, 58, 67, 79 alehouse 2, 64, 66; see also inn signs almanacs 19, 20, 89, 94, 161 Anabaptists 34 animals bird 66 calf 184–​5 cat 186 horse 22, 29, 135–​6, 140, 185 Anne, queen of Denmark 164 Appadurai, Arjun 10, 40 aristocracy see sorts, social armed forces 71 army 134–​8, 140, 218n.32, 218n.42, 218n.43 navy 129, 135 armour 46, 89, 98, 127–​9, 133–​140, 149, 218n.36 Arundel, Duke of 89 Ashmole, Elias 108 Aston, Margaret 88, 95 Atkyns, Richard 36

bagpipe 36 Bakhtin, Mikhail 118, 216n.126 ballads ‘answering’ 34, 69, 207n.128 audiences appeals to 22, 41, 78, 97–​8, 122–​5, 146, 185 breadth, character of 2–​3, 22, 49, 55, 61, 78, 98, 109, 165–​8 changing 191 expectations of 85 interests, tastes of 73, 149, 187 male 186 understanding of 49, 55, 95, 120, 129 collections 3–​6, 43, 191, 203n.7, 203n.8, 226 historiography 5, 6 images 1, 5, 23, 68, 84–​125 qualities 84–​125, 126–​9, 134, 152–​5, 159, 161 reuse 84–​125, 192, 201 see also portraits; print layout 84–​125, 139, 167, 175, 181, 214n.55, 224n.3 lyrics 43–​83, 105, 135, 144, 152–​5, 167, 219n.71 publishers 1–​7, 20–​2, 33, 60, 85–​97, 103, 112, 125, 167–​74, 191–​7 sellers 9–​42, 90, 197, 200, 207n.114 slip 192, 200 tunes 1, 25, 98, 156, 167, 175

1 5 2

INDEX Baptists 59 Barbon, Nicholas 40, 42, 78–​9 Barebone, Praise-​God 40 barefoot 53 bast fibre 13, 205n.35 baton 136, 139–​40 Baxter, Richard 35, 210n.65 beauty 23, 122, 133, 164, 170–​1 bed-​chamber 70–​1, 117, 194 beggars 50, 53, 176 Berg, Maxine 37 Bible, The 49, 59, 77, 88–​90, 94–​6, 209n.21 Bishops’ Bible, The, 1572 88 Blooteling, Abraham 160, 162, 221n.7 Blount, Thomas 131 bobbin 31 Boccaccio, Giovanni 45 Bodleian Library, Oxford University 3, 6, 192, 204n.24 body arms 66, 102, 136, 154, 160, 165 breasts 109, 120, 128, 158–​79, 189, 221n.22, 221n.23 eyes 107, 128, 165–​6, 171, 181 feet 29, 47, 53 head 47, 107–​14, 120–​3, 130–​8, 149–​51, 159, 169, 179–​85; see also dress: items of; hair knees 75, 112–​13, 179 legs 89, 167, 211n.111 waist 29, 114 Book of Esdras 88, 90 Booke of Christian Praiers, A 50, 51 books conduct 109, 142 devotional 50–​1 illustration of 29, 94–​8, 102, 108 pattern 17, 86, 200, 205n.59 pedagogical 38 point of sale 19, 26 popular 26, 32–​5, 38, 77, 89, 94 seditious 36 trade in 16, 21, 94 trade links with ballads 88–​98 Borsseler, Pieter 106, 115 Braganza, Catherine of 13, 106, 115, 142, 173, 223n.68 bricolage 87, 127, 167, 170, 201 Brilliana, Lady Harley 14

251

British Library, London 3 broadcloth see wool broadlooms 12, 74 broadsides 2, 109, 173, 185 brush 31 Buckingham, Duchess of 171, 178 bullion 52, 55, 194 Bulwer, John 163–​6 Bunyan, John 59 bysse 49, 209n.14 cabbage 70–​1 calico see cotton ‘calling’ 35, 60–​1, 67–​9, 76–​8, 181 cambric 25, 27 Cambridge 3, 32 Canting Dictionary,The 19, 70, 148 Catherine of Braganza 106, 115 Catholicism, Roman 66, 80, 138, 146, 186 see also Pope; Popish Plot cavaliers 145, 220n.97 cavalry 134, 138 Cavendish, Margaret 165–​6 Cavendish, William 25 censorship 35–​7, 109, 119, 192, 215n.86 chapmen see pedlars Charing Cross 34 Charity, personification of 171, 176 charity, virtue 53, 145, 188 Charles I, king of England, Scotland and Ireland 36, 49, 53, 57, 75, 83, 114, 123, 170 Charles II, king of England, Scotland and Ireland 13, 58, 59, 73, 113, 114, 117, 132, 142, 145, 155, 160, 162, 173, 209n.22, 223n.68 chiaroscuro 89 children 19, 38, 75, 176, 192 China 11, 31 chintz 194 Chirelstein, E. 111, 116 Christ, Jesus 149, 170, 220n.89, 220n.91 church 34, 44, 49, 57–​9, 83, 112, 173, 176 cities 9, 23, 29–​36, 53, 60, 88, 137, 148, 188; see also London Clark, Kenneth 149, 171

2 5

252

INDEX

classical literature 49, 55–​6, 79, 116 Closterman, John 118 cloth see wool clothiers 11, 79 coaches 53 cobblers see shoemakers Cockayne Project 11, 78 coffee, coffee-​houses 39, 186, 187, 199, 224n.103, 224n.104 coifs see dress: items of: caps Collection of Old Ballads, A 193 Collet, Ann and Mary 95 comb 31, 205n.47 comedy see humour commodities 4–​42, 82, 90, 119–​27, 144–​50, 156, 176–​7, 181, 189, 195–​202 Common Prayer,The Book of 49, 57, 209n.22 Commons, House of 13, 19, 50, 57, 79, 81, 194 Commonwealth 40, 47, 217n.1 consumption historiography of 61 of dress 12–​13, 32–​42, 78, 81–​3, 125 by men 126, 143–​5, 151–​4 by women 158, 181–​90, 199–​200 of print 32–​40, 106, 119–​22, 185–​7, 201–​2 Contemplation of Mankinde, The 95 Cooper, Tarnya 111 copyright 6, 86 coral 27 Coriolanus 39 costume books 213n.2 costume, theatre 133, 164 cotton 12–​13, 27, 191–​200 countryside 23, 29, 32, 155 court, royal 12, 34, 98, 151, 160, 170, 186 patronage of 88, 107–​09, 116, 164–​65 portraiture for 109, 116–​28, 132–​33, 137, 161–​2, 170 Restoration period 75, 145–​46, 170 Courtaine-​Drawer of the World 39 Coverdale Bible, 1535 88, 90 credit 21, 22, 29, 74 Cries of London 61, 62 ‘cries’ tradition 31, 34, 61, 62, 66 crime  19, 47; see also stealing Crispianus 64

Crispin 64 Crompton’s spinning mule 13 Cromwell, Oliver 145 Cross, Thomas 109, 110 cross-​dressing 94–​5, 109, 132, 164, 218n.21 cuckolds 70, 71, 72, 142, 145, 150, 219n.66, 220n.95 cultural history 5–​6, 9, 41, 204n.21, 204n.5 Cumbria 28 Cynthia, goddess 95, 214n.39 Dahl, Michael 117 Davenant, Charles 82 Day, Richard 51 de Certeau, Michel 87, 167 de Kéroualle, Louise 117, 160, 161, 162, 177 de Passe the elder, Crispin 171 de Saint Jean, Jean Dieu 218n.20, 223n.84 death 12–​13, 36, 88, 93, 147, 149 Decameron, The 45 Declaration of Indulgence, 1687 58 décolletage 115, 127, 130–​5, 140–​2, 159–​89 Defoe, Daniel 192, 197, 224n.7 Dekker, Thomas 61 delftware 185, 223n.97 Descartes, René 116, 217n.140 Dethloff, Diana 123 diamond 11, 33 dice 152–​53 Digby, Kenelm 217n.140 Discourse of Trade, The 40 disease 16, 146, 180, 189 Dissenters 34, 58–​60, 72, 78, 210n.58 Dobson, William 134 drapers 18, 198 drapery see representation dress definition of 2, 169, 176, 203n.4 items of bodices 135, 163, 171–​2, 206n.105 bodkins 26, 27, 70 boots 112, 139 bracelets 27 breeches 29, 37, 66, 71, 75, 111–​13, 133, 142, 147, 155, 167, 216n.106

3 5 2

INDEX dress: items of (cont.) slops 29, 111 venetians 111 brooch 115 buckles 37, 154 buff coats 134, 218n.36 buttons 171 caps 47, 53, 66, 133, 150 cassock 29, 134 cloaks 111, 113, 148, 173 coats 71, 113–​14, 128–​55, 169, 171, 188, 216n.106 collars 15, 18, 27, 128 bands 27, 131, 205n.41 cravats 17, 114–​18, 128–​33, 135–​40, 143, 146, 151–​6, 169 falling 112, 216n.101 laced 29, 118, 122, 130–​1, 169, 173 plain 153, 171 rebatos 27 ruffs 27, 52, 58, 111, 130–​1, 155, 187, 210n.68 standing 111 wide 112, 128, 173 cuffs 29, 118, 219n.53 doublets 14, 17–​18, 37–​8, 111–​14, 153, 205n.40 fans 111, 112, 155 farthingales 101, 111 feathers 29, 46, 111, 112, 139, 153 fur 111 gloves 25, 27, 153 gowns 30, 94, 98, 112, 196, 220n.110 calico 194, 196, 197, 199 furred 154 Indian 118, 194 kirtle 46 mantua 114, 128, 155, 180 night-​gowns 117, 118, 133, 194, 199 russet 34 satin 72 silk 178 structured 30, 115 velvet 46 headwear caps 46, 53, 66, 150 commodes 184, 223n.94 hats 29, 46–​7, 64, 75, 101, 111–​13, 139, 146, 153–​5, 169

253 hoods 26, 27, 155 ribbons 75, 179–​89, 212n.142 top-​knots 179–​189, 190, 197, 199 veils 14 wigs 71, 112, 128–​33, 138–​40, 146, 149–​55, 169 hooks 37 hose 93, 146; see also dress: items of: breeches jerkin 14, 15, 29 jewellery 33, 38, 107–​8, 115, 120, 160, 207n.107 necklaces 112, 115, 169 pearls 75, 115, 127, 169 lace 14, 17, 26, 37–​8, 111, 220n.111 bobbin lace 27, 31, 112 headdresses 179, 180, 223n.94 lappets 180, 185 neckwear 118, 122, 129–​30, 169, 173, 205n.41 needle lace 17, 27, 111–​2 Venetian 130 loose gowns see dress: items of: gowns: night-​gowns mantle 140 patches 144, 169–​72, 180, 189 petticoats 46, 94, 114, 135, 152, 155, 216n.123 fringed 180 laced 155 silk 46 pins 19, 27 pockets 155, 186, 220n.109 points 25–​7, 37, 144, 206n.105 rings 11, 27, 33, 34, 154 sashes 134 scarves 27 shifts 13–​14, 17, 117, 128, 160 shirts 13–​14, 66, 117, 131, 146, 169, 199 shoe roses 111, 179, 223n.79 shoe-​strings 53 shoes 64, 66, 146 buckled 184 flat 29, 66, 111 heeled 111 plain 22 sleeves 29, 112 pagoda 139, 154, 219n.53 smocks 117, 133, 159

4 5 2

254

INDEX

dress: items of (cont.) spectacles 20 spurs 29, 47, 94, 98, 112, 139 stays 115, 163–​5, 180, 221n.19, 221n.23 stockings 37, 179 stomacher 128 swords see weapons tape 11, 19, 27, 38, 74–​5 underclothes see dress: items of: shifts/shirts/smocks vests 71, 113, 131, 169, 216n.106 waistcoats 216n.123 ‘King’s new fashion’ 113–​14, 131, 153 livery 53 mourning 12 ‘plain’ 30, 46, 66, 71, 78, 114 repair of 17, 65–​6, 73 sale of 9–​10, 18–​21, 23–​31, 38–​40, 148–​50, 187–​8, 195–​9 seasonality 80 surviving 4, 14, 15, 18, 163, 205n.37, 205n.40, 221n.19, 221n.23 ‘timeless’, representation of 115–​19, 129, 189, 202 ‘undress’ 115–​17, 120–​2, 133, 161, 179 see also cotton; lace; linen; regalia; ribbons: ribbon-​weavers; sewing; shoemakers; silk; spinning; sumptuary laws; tailors; weavers; wool Driver, Martha 96 Dryden, John 186 Dumb Lady,The 166 Durer, Albrecht 214n.25 Eagleston, John 198 East India Company 13, 55, 79, 194, 198 economic treatises 33, 52, 55–​7, 78–​82 Edict of Nantes, 1685 73 Edinburgh 32 Edward VI, King 49 effeminacy 71, 114, 127, 139, 146–​52, 156–​7 Eicher, Joanne 169, 176 eighteenth century 141, 176, 185, 188 consumption 37, 61 cottons 13, 37, 81, 191–​200 visual arts 133, 143, 150, 157

Elizabeth I, queen of England and Ireland 18, 49–​52, 81, 111, 164, 187 emblems 17, 87, 152, 164, 172, 176, 205n.59, 213n.17 embroidery 17, 38, 50, 93, 111, 171, 194, 205n.59, 223n.97 engine loom 75 Englands Vanity 187 ephemerality 4, 38–​9, 41–​2, 186, 189 ermine 140 Europe 141, 161, 170, 194 Evelyn, John 108, 124, 220n.111 diary 15–​16, 117, 131, 166 Exclusion crisis 146 exportation 2, 11, 44, 55, 198, 210n.44 Fable of the Bees,The 198 factotum figures 96 farming 10, 19, 53, 154, 178, 184 fashion, definition of 2, 3 fashion plates 132, 180, 213n.2, 218n.20, 223n.84 see also dress: seasonality femininity 109, 126, 149, 151, 158–​190, 199–​202 Fisher, Will 123, 124, 142 Flanders 31, 137 flax 14 food 23, 33, 77 foolscap 16 fops 156, 220n.111, 221n.112 Foucault, Michel 116 fourteenth century 13, 50, 187 Fox, George 60, 210n.64 Foxe, John 89 France 16, 31, 71, 73, 80, 176, 212n.132 Franklin, Alexandra 5, 85–​6, 98 Freist, Dagmar 87 Frith, Mary 218n.21 fullers 11 furnishings, interior 1, 13, 22, 39, 192–​9 fustian 13 Galenic theory 141 gallants 75, 149, 156, 178, 184, 188, 221n.112 gambling 153 Gascoigne, George 61 George I, King 192 gifts 11, 12, 27

52

INDEX Globe, Alexander 109 Glorious Revolution 7, 64, 135, 151, 186 Glossographia 131 Glover, George 178 Glover, Thomas 109 God 4, 35, 49, 59–​60, 67–​8, 77, 220n.91 gold 52–​3, 111, 118, 147, 196–​7 goose, tailor’s 68, 211n.111 gossip 35, 37 Gravesend 146 gray see wool Gray’s Inn 34 Griffiths, Anthony 89 Grumbling Hive, The 82 Gwynn, Nell 162 Haec Vir, or the Womanish Man 94, 96, 98 Hague, The 20 hair 26, 112, 121, 127, 150 men 71, 112, 127, 132, 145, 154, 169, 220n.97 women 30, 111, 181, 220n.97 curled 75, 114–​15, 120, 127, 159–​60, 169, 189 hurlebrelu 174 long 112 loose 169, 174 half-​sheet folio 103, 105, 192 Hall, Thomas 165 Hallett, Mark 127, 143, 151, 213n.18 Hamling, Tara 112 hammer 15, 66 hawkers see pedlars Hayls, John 117, 118 headwear see dress: items of health 16, 38, 79, 83, 131, 136, 164 ‘hell’, tailors’ 71 hemp 10, 14, 62, 205n.35 Henrietta Maria, Queen 122, 164 Henry, Prince of Wales 88–​9, 91–​4, 107, 134 Hentschell, Roze 56 heraldry 49, 111 heralds 47 Hero, character 159–​60, 167 hierarchy, social 34, 45–​51, 56–​9, 64–​80, 156, 181, 193–​201 Hilliard, Nicholas 107, 111 Hind and the Panther,The 186

255

Holbein, Hans, the Younger 107 Holden, Mary 161 Hole, William 88 Hollander, Anne 115, 149, 170–​2, 203n.13, 221n.17 Hollar, Wenceslaus 40, 108, 109 Holy Spirit 72 Homilies, Church of England’s 49–​50, 57–​8, 77, 124, 209n.22 honours, inflation of 53 hornbooks 38 hospitality 53, 144 Hugh, Saint 64 Huguenots 12, 73, 198, 212n.133 humour 16–​17, 20–​3, 70–​2, 94–​5, 143 and men 23, 33, 71, 146–​52 and women 1, 177–​88, 197 hunting 46, 95 identity locus of 110, 116–​24, 127, 143, 202 national 11, 219n.49 see also abject; femininity; masculinity immigration 12, 68, 71–​4, 198, 204n.19 importation 16, 50, 52, 55, 194 cotton 13, 194–​5, 200, 204n.21 print 180, 214n.24 silk 11, 46, 50, 54–​5, 216n.125 India 13, 31, 194–​5 see also East India Company individual, concept of 59, 68, 77, 118–​19, 123–​5, 150–​3, 202, 217n.143 infantry 135–​8 inn signs 173, 174 interlining 14, 17 inter-​textuality 6, 56, 88, 98, 133, 158, 167, 201, 213n.18 Interregnum 34, 44, 57–​9, 72, 107, 145–​6 intra-​textuality 6, 98, 106, 126, 140–​7, 152–​8, 170–​1, 180–​9, 201 Ireland 136, 138, 140 itinerant vendors see pedlars Jacobites 192 James Duke of York after Godfrey Kneller 128–​31, 132

6 5 2

256

INDEX

James I, king of England, Scotland and Ireland 18, 49–​53, 78, 83, 88, 114, 164 James II, king of England, Scotland and Ireland 36, 58, 123, 128–​9, 132, 134 Jesuits 34, 66, 68 Jobling, Paul 43, 64, 87–​8, 167, 203n.12, 204n.20 Jones, Ann Rosalind 123–​4 Jones, Inigo 164 journeymen 74–​5 kersey see wool Knapp, James 95 Kneller, Godfrey 117–​19, 128, 132, 217n.10, 218n.47 knight 46–​7, 67, 98 Kuchta, David 151, 186 L’Estrange, Roger 36 lace, printers’ 92, 101; see also dress: items of lace-​makers 17, 79 Lacy, John 166 Ladies Dictionary,The 166 lap board, tailor’s 68, 71, 211n.111 Laqueur, Thomas 141 Laroon, Marcellus 61, 207n.114 Laud, Archbishop 57 laundering 13, 16, 131, 194 lawn 27 Leander, character 159, 160, 167 leather 66, 112, 154, 163, 212n.117, 221n.19 leisure 1, 29, 66, 68, 78, 83 Lely, Peter 116 painted portraits 117, 123, 133, 160, 164, 218n.7 prints after 119–​20, 121, 158, 159, 161, 162 lever ceremony 117 Licensing Act see print: Licensing Act limning 88, 107–​8, 111 Lincolnshire 32 linen 10, 15, 39, 195, 200, 217n.18 bleaching 14 canvas 14, 17 clothing 15, 27, 112, 118, 121, 128–​35, 140, 150, 199; see also dress

named types 24, 209n.14 paper production 14–​18, 39, 41 printed panel 195 production of 13, 14 tapes 27 literacy 2, 38, 60, 85–​90, 210n.65, 219n.71 liturgy, church 57–​8, 209n.23 Lombart, Pierre 119 London 53, 151, 197, 200 clothing industries 60, 74, 195–​6, 207n.120, 210n.44, 225n.36 ‘cries’ of 61, 207n.114 Great Fire 40, 113, 114, 186 places in Billingsgate 33, 183, 223n.91 Charing Cross 34 Holborn 147 London Bridge 21 Newgate 33 Smithfield 4, 21 St James’s 34 St Paul’s 9, 57 Strand 34 Tyburn 33 Vauxhall 34 Westminster 21, 36 playhouses 133, 144, 164–​7, 184, 197, 213n.2 print markets in 42, 119 print production in 1, 7, 20–​1, 31, 41, 58, 191 print sale in 9, 18, 21 riots in 68, 73, 75 ‘Season’ 53 subject in ballads 31–​5, 42, 146, 178–​9, 182, 188, 207n.120 see also coffee, coffeehouses Lords, House of 57, 79, 81, 194, 198 Louise de Kéroualle, Abraham Blooteling 160–​1, 162 Louise de Kéroualle, Gerard Valck 160, 161, 162 Louise de Kéroualle, Peter Lely 160, 161–​2 love 4, 11–​12, 107–​8 in ballads 105, 113, 135, 140, 159, 166–​71, 190 see also Neoplatonism Lovelace, Richard 123, 169

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INDEX Low Countries 11, 20, 38, 81, 116, 137, 155, 215n.78 Luborsky, Ruth Samson 95 luxury in ballads 144, 149, 150–​4, 178, 181, 189–​90 concept 38, 49, 55–​6, 58 debates 77–​9, 82, 114, 186, 188, 198 goods 12, 21, 37–​40, 52–​4, 79–​82, 116, 186 Magdalene College, Cambridge 3 Malynes, Gerard 55, 56, 78 Mandeville, Bernard 78, 82, 188, 198 markets, street 20, 223n.91 Markland, Ralph 171 marriage 13–​14, 34, 46, 71, 109, 140–​3, 150, 166, 174–​8, 185 Mary I, queen of England and Ireland 18 Mary II, queen of England, Scotland and Ireland 80, 83, 120, 121, 140–​2, 158, 174–​6 Mary of Modena, after Samuel Cooper 128–​30, 131 Mary of Modena, Studio of Willem Wissing 128–​9, 130 masculinity 126–​57, 186–​7, 202 masque, court 3, 116, 122, 164–​5, 174 McShane, Angela 5, 43, 64, 85, 98, 135, 162–​3 measures, tailor’s 68 Mennes, John 166 Mercurius Britanicus 85 mezzotint 119–​20, 121, 122, 128, 131, 160, 161–​2, 179 Michell, Sir Francis 47, 209n.16 Middle Ages 11 Middleton, Thomas 3 military see armed forces milk-​maid 32 Milton, John 36 mirror 180–​1 Misselden, Edward 78–​9 mistresses, royal 117, 160, 162, 175, 177–​8 Modena, Mary of 128–​9, 130, 131 money banking 40 currency 17, 21, 196–​7 economic policy 52–​5, 79–​83, 194

257

recoinage 79, 208n.143 spending 29, 34, 37, 53, 66, 154, 187 stealing 147 see also consumption; credit Monmouth, Duke of 134, 218n.39 Monteyne, Joseph 35, 37, 40, 119, 188 morality 2, 4, 43, 181, 189 religious 40–​4, 49–​51, 66, 72 sexual 123, 146, 150, 155–​6, 165–​9, 178 social 33–​5, 51–​7, 68, 78–​9, 133, 199 moveable type 86, 94, 98, 137 Muldrew, Craig 21, 23 Mun, Thomas 78, 79 music 1, 25, 36, 85, 98, 156, 167, 175 mythological characters 64, 111–​6, 124, 164, 171, 173 Cynthia 95, 214n.39 Hero and Leander 159–​60, 167,  221n.3 nakedness 69, 77, 128–​35, 140–​2, 149–​55, 165–​9, 171; see also body: breasts narrow ware 12, 74–​5; see also ribbons narrow-​weavers 12, 74–​5 nation, concept of 67 anxiety about 39, 49, 56, 196 benefits to 31, 193 economy of 50–​52, 56–​7, 60, 73, 78–​83, 124, 198 and femininity 186–​90, 202 loyalty to 11, 53–​6, 66–​7, 81 and masculinity 126–​57 prestige of 14, 52 symbols of 11, 14, 114 National Library, Scotland 3 needle lace see dress: items of needles 27, 207n.107 Neoplatonism 122–​3, 133, 164–​5, 170–​1 New Drapery 11 New Exchange 33–​4, 187 Newgate see London: places in news 3, 19–​21, 32–​9, 40–​7, 73, 109, 127, 191–​7 Nine Years’ War 71 nobility see sorts, social

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258

INDEX

Norfolk 27, 74 North, Charles 165–​6, 222n.36 North, Dudley 79, 207n.120 Norwich 60, 77 O’Connell, Sheila 32, 87, 162 old age 20, 52, 150, 153, 155, 211n.100, 221n.22 Old Bailey 148, 220n.86 Oliver, Isaac 88, 107 Orange, Princess Mary of see Mary II, queen of England, Scotland and Ireland organzine 12 Oxford 3, 32 painting 20, 118, 130, 160 portraits 38, 84, 107, 111–​20, 125–​34, 140, 158, 163–​89 see also Cooper; Dahl; Dobson; Hilliard; Van Honthorst; Kneller; Lely; miniatures; Oliver; representation; Steen; Van Dyck; Wissing pall 46, 209n.14 paper 6, 9–​10 in clothing 17–​18, 41 in the printing press 92–​3, 195 production 13–​18 reuse 39 sizes 1, 103, 192 see also print; printing presses parchment 17 parergon 85 parishes 33, 49 Parlament of Women,The 187 Parliament 18–​19, 48–​9, 57, 75–​83, 153, 194 all-​female 187–​8 parting-​knife 66 passementerie see parchment Patient Griselda 45 pattern books 17, 41, 86 pawn 14 Peck, Linda Levy 78 Pedlar Selling Spectacles Outside a Cottage, A 20, 21 pedlars 7–​11, 18–​21, 32–​41, 166, 188, 197–​200, 204n.3 packs 10, 22–​32, 38, 41, 202

representation in ballads 21–​31 Penington, Judith 117 Pepys, Elizabeth 34, 70, 194, 199 Pepys, Samuel 3 ballad collection 3–​4, 43–​4, 181, 191, 203n.7, 207n.121, 211n.100, 211n.108 collections 3, 108 diary 3, 34, 58, 70, 117, 131, 163–​6, 194–​9 portraits 117, 118 perfume 38 petitions 4, 18–​19, 44, 78–​81, 197–​8 Pierce, Helen 34 Pilgrim’s Progress 59 pincers 66 pipes 29, 39, 152 plague 16 plague see disease plain speech 59, 72 Platonic love see Neoplatonism playbooks 159, 213n.2 playhouses see London playing cards 31, 90, 152–​3, 179 plays 3, 24–​5, 35, 39, 61, 70, 133, 164–​70, 171, 197, 209n.10 poets 16, 39, 60, 123, 164, 187 Pointon, Marcia 84, 108, 120 politeness 126, 192–​3 politics 21–​2, 34–​44, 56–​64, 75, 109, 127–​35, 141–​3, 185–​9 see also Parliament; petitions; protests Poly-​Olbion 88, 92, 94 pomanders 38 Pope, The 80, 135 Popish Plot 64, 119, 160 portraits engraved 92, 106, 121, 131–​2, 161–​2 miniatures 88, 107–​11, 170 painted 107, 111, 118, 130, 160 see also painting; representation poverty 1, 16–​21, 27–​8, 46, 50–​5, 82, 144–​5, 188–​9, 205n.84 prayer 19, 49–​51, 57, 59, 77 preachers 34–​5, 40, 57, 59 press, the 36–​7, 57–​9, 109, 119, 146, 197, 215n.86; see also L’Estrange pressing, for war 71, 135, 218n.21, 219n.57 Princess Mary of Orange 120, 121

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INDEX print intaglio 89, 91, 94 engraving 17, 39, 106, 119, 127–​30, 132, 150, 158, 174, 179, 185–​9, 205n.59 for books 88, 89, 108–​9, 110 ‘cries’ 61 techniques 89, 91–​4 etching 40, 62, 89, 94, 108 Licensing Act, 1695 4, 16, 32, 36, 58, 191 relief woodcut 4, 5, 22–​3, 39, 84–​125 in ballads 85–​88, 201 in books 88–​98 on fabric 195, 214n.24 techniques and effects 89–​94, 128, 134, 152 woodblocks 29, 86–​98, 103, 109, 139–​40, 168, 179, 195; see also reuse see also ballads printing presses 91–​4, 98, 137 Prior, Matthew 186 prophesying 66 prostitution 1, 33, 146, 153, 157, 165, 178, 178–​9, 183–​8, 197 Protectorate 57, 210n.64 Protestantism 124, 210n.58, 219n.49 in ballads 66–​7, 70, 80–​1, 126, 138, 176 and Huguenots 73 and print 35, 57 protests 36, 68, 73–​5, 146, 196–​200; see also petitions; politics publishers see ballads: publishers; books punishment 36, 149–​152, 154, 169–​70, 213n.2 Puritans 57–​60, 66–​8, 72, 210n.58 putti 140 Quakers 58–​60, 72, 78, 210n.64, 210n.70 Queen Elizabeth’s Prayer Book 50, 51 rags 16–​17, 39, 145, 154 Raleigh, Walter 99 rank see sorts, social recycling see reuse Reformation, English 107

259

Reformation, Protestant 35, 81, 108 refugees 12; see also Huguenots regalia 69, 139–​40, 159, 174, 176 Regency Act 141 religion see Christ; church; God; Holy Spirit; Pope; prayer; Protestantism; Catholicism, Roman; sects Renaissance 108 repair see dress: repair of representation ‘classical’ 114–​26, 200, 202, 216n.126 men 126–​43, 156–​7 women 158–​79, 181, 185–​90 conventions of drapery 133, 146, 171 in ballads 119–​22, 125, 128, 149, 159 in portraiture 114–​19, 123–​4, 131–​3, 160, 188–​89 heraldic 110–​12, 123, 144, 202 Restoration, The 7 and dress 79, 113 and plays 166–​7 and print 36, 44, 59, 73, 141–​5, 167 and religion 34, 58 and social change 57–​61, 123, 146 reuse of materials 10, 14–​18, 39, 41 of woodblocks 86–​8, 95–​8, 103, 125, 156, 161–​3, 201 ribbons and ballads 127, 144–​7, 155, 179–​87 fashions for 37, 75–​6, 179, 212n.142, 223n.94 and pedlars 11–​12, 25, 38–​9 ribbon-​weavers 12, 74–​6, 79, 187 weaving 74–​6, 79, 187 see also narrow-​ware; narrow-​weavers Ridding, Richard 11, 12 Riello, Giorgio 197 Rigby, Richard 64–​5 riots see London: riots in Roach-​Higgins, Mary Ellen 169, 176 robes of state see regalia ‘Roman’ dress 124 Roman typeface see white-​letter text rope 14 Rous, John 36

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260

INDEX

Royal Exchange 33–​4, 187 Royal Theatre 197 Royalist 57, 70, 145, 211n.85, 220n.97 rubbing-​clout 66 russet 34, 46 Ruthven, Maria 117 Rye House Plot 142 sailcloth 14 Saint George for England 55 Saint Hugh’s Bones 66, 211n.104 saints 107, 115 Samuel Pepys 117, 118 Sanderson, William 115–​17, 163 satire 7, 60, 94–​5, 127, 143, 167 in ballads 63–​4, 70–​2, 144–​58, 179–​90, 199–​200 save-​alls 31 scissors 31 Scotland 3, 19 Scribner, Robert 87 scripture see Bible seams 38, 220n.109 seasonality see dress sects 34, 57–​9 Selden, John 3, 4 sermons 35–​6, 44, 49, 56, 58, 76; see also Homilies, Church of England’s servants 25, 28, 53, 199, 225n.43 Seven Liberal Arts Presented to Apollo and Diana, The  171 sewing 12, 14, 39, 66, 108 sexual innuendo 23, 66, 70–​1, 109, 155–​6, 166, 177–​9, 189, 220n.110; see also morality Shakespeare, William 24, 39 shearmen 11 shears 39 sheep 10, 11 shepherds 11, 60, 116, 160 ships 38, 99, 174 shoemakers 60–​4, 68, 70 shoes see dress: items of shopkeepers 18–​19, 188 sieve 152, 154 silhouette 112–​13, 116 silk 12–​14, 15, 27, 38, 111 garments 14, 15, 17, 46, 50, 71–​2, 80, 154, 163, 178–​9, 194–​9

importation 11–​12, 50, 52, 54–​5, 124, 194 organzine 12 production 10, 11–​12, 52, 78 tram 12 weavers 12, 73–​5, 78–​9, 198, 204n.19 see also ribbons silkwomen 12 silver 26–​7, 52–​3, 196–​7 singing in ballad texts 22, 26, 29, 32, 64–​6, 175 of ballads 1, 36, 98, 193, 197 ‘cries’ 207n.114 sixteenth century 12–​13, 21, 27, 44, 73, 95–​6, 194 printing in 45, 57, 89, 95–​6, 100, 102 soldiers 3, 135, 140, 218n.42, 218n.43; see also armed forces sorts, social lower 27, 36, 61–​6, 78, 109, 163, 177, 183–​4 and luxury 49–​50, 181 middling 109, 112 mixed 125, 188–​9, 199 nobility 5, 34, 46, 52–​7, 64, 77, 82, 109, 120–​4, 133, 145, 166, 174 terminology 209n.12 Spain 31 Spectator, The 16 spinning 1, 11–​14, 27, 46, 204n.21, 209n.11 Spitalfields 73, 196–​7 Spufford, Margaret 9, 27, 38 St Paul’s Cathedral, London 9, 57 Stallybrass, Peter 123–​4, 143 Stationers’ Registers 61, 206n.84 Staves, Susan 156 stealing 19, 62, 71–​2, 147, 150, 155 steel 27, 207n.107, 218n.30 Steel Glas, The 61 Steele, Richard 35 Steen, Jan 20, 21 Stent, Peter 109, 119 Stevenson, L. C. 56 stitching-​awl 66 Stoop, Dirk 174 Suffolk 11

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INDEX sugar 194 sumptuary laws 4, 7, 50–​2, 58, 76–​80, 83, 176 supplement 85 swords see weapons tailors 14, 34, 39, 60–​3, 68–​72, 211n.108 tape see dress: items of Tatler,The 199 Taunton 11 taverns see alehouse tax 18–​19, 36, 81, 192, 208n.143 Taylor, John, ‘The water poet’ 60 textiles see cotton; laundering; linen; silk; wool Thackeray, William 174 theatres see London: playhouses thimble 68 Third Anglo-​Dutch war 155 Thomson, Richard 120, 121 tickling sticks 66 tobacco 38–​9, 109, 194 topicality 72, 109, 179, 201 Torbay 135 tracts, religious 35, 44, 56–​60, 72–​8, 146 trade, international 2, 16, 31–​3, 55, 73, 79–​82, 124 trades, terminology of 61–​2 see also East India Company; shoemakers; tailors; weavers Triumphant Widow, The 25 Turkey 31 University Library, Glasgow 3 Unthanke, tailor 34, 70 Valck, Gerard 160, 161 Van Dyck, Anthony 115–​9, 122–​3, 133, 217n.140 Van Honthorst, Gerrit 171, 178 vellum 107 velvet 14, 15, 46, 54, 146 Venice 31 Venus 115, 145 Vienna 171 violence 36, 68, 73, 75, 169, 196 Virgin Mary, The 115 virginity 11, 115, 172–​9, 187, 223n.79 vocation see ‘calling’

261

war 19, 66–​7, 71, 80–​1, 127–​31, 135–​42, 155, 218n.43; Civil War 7, 34, 44, 57–​61, 109, 134, 150 see also armed forces warp 12–​13, 205n.47 Watt, Tessa 38, 97, 100 weapons gun 94 swords 47, 64, 94, 134–​9, 146, 184 weavers 11–​12, 57–​63, 72–​81, 187, 196–​200 Weavers, The Worshipful Company of 80, 212n.119 Weavers Pocket-​book, The 77 Weber, Harold 44 wedding see marriage weft 12, 205n.47 whalebone 163 Which of these Fower 172, 173 white-​letter text 4, 22, 81, 105, 191–​2 White, Robert, engraver 128, 132 Whitehall 88 wholesale wigs 71, 74; see also dress: items of: headwear William III, king of England, Scotland and Ireland 80, 83, 117, 134–​42, 147, 156 Winters Tale, The 24 Wissing, Willem 128, 130 Womans Almanack,The 161 woodcut see print: relief woodworm 23, 86 wool 10–​18, 46, 50–​7, 74, 79–​80, 113–​4, 154, 195–​8, 204n.7 broadcloth 11, 53 gray 46, 53 kersey 11, 204n.7 workshops 57, 59, 64, 70 Wright, James 184 Wrightson, Keith 61, 209n.12 xenophobia 19, 68, 73 yard, tailor’s 68 York 33 York, Duke of see James II, king of England, Scotland and Ireland Youths Behaviour 109, 110

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