Clothes

I am looking for some information on clothes of the time, especially the sort of thing that would have been worn by ladies and the queen and nobles. Dresses, headcoverings, underwear, anything. I know dress from early periods but imagined it had changed quite a bit by now. Did they start wearing hennins in this period? And what about fashion in general - were there any weird trends?

A good description of women's clothing of this period is at this website:

http://www.middle-ages.org.uk/medieval-womens-clothing.htm

I believe most of the clothing described would be for the upper classes. The peasants didn't have as many options.

Tansy: a pretty good book is Mary G. Houston's Medieval Costume in England and France: the 13th, 14th and 15th Centuries. In general, to my eyes at least, early 14c fashion was very attractive, without the rather silly big head-dresses of later eras. For noblewomen, the sideless gown was popular, worn with an undergown usually of a contrasting colour. They often wore their hair kind of rolled up at the sides and held in place, if that makes any sense (it's hard to describe!)

If you google for the Luttrell Psalter, which dates from late in Ed II's reign or early in Ed III's, it's full of great illustrations of clothing of the era, of all social classes. You might like to look at the sumptuary laws from later in the 14th century, too, which give a good indication of the materials etc which people were allowed to wear.

Tansy wrote:

I am looking for some information on clothes of the time, especially the sort of thing that would have been worn by ladies and the queen and nobles. Dresses, headcoverings, underwear, anything. I know dress from early periods but imagined it had changed quite a bit by now. Did they start wearing hennins in this period? And what about fashion in general - were there any weird trends?

Ian Mortimer's book The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England has some interesting passages on how fashion changed from the beginning of the 14th century to the end. In addition to the book Alianore mentioned, you might try Stella Mary Newton's Fashion in the Age of the Black Prince.

Hennins were more of a 15th century style, with the long pointy ones being more popular on the Continent than in England, where the truncated ones (like the one in the portrait of Elizabeth Woodville) were more popular. To make things confusing, though, some 15th century illustrations of Queen Isabella like this one below show her and her ladies wearing 15th-century-style fashions--complete with hennin.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/05/Retour_d_Isabelle_de_France_en_Angleterre.jpg