Today (19 June) marks the 460th birthday of James VI of Scotland and I of England, the first monarch to unite Great Britain under one crown. He’s had a big year: 2025 was the 400th anniversary of his death, and saw a parade of events and books reassessing his reign and legacy. But amidst all this hoopla, no one has been asking the really big questions: would our dear friend King Jimmy have favored Scotland at the men’s World Cup, or England? Was he even a football fan?
Most football histories would answer that second question with an obvious and emphatic ‘no’. The oft-quoted evidence comes from the king’s own treatise on how a monarch should govern and live, Basilikon Doron. First published in 1599 and addressed to James’s young son and heir Henry, it promotes certain sports and activities for princes and courtiers, like running, dancing, fencing and tennis. But it explicitly debarred from the court ‘all rough and violent exercises, as the football, meeter [better] for lameing than making able the users thereof.’ The hostility seems clear enough: football was a dangerous and uncouth sport that men of good breeding should avoid. Yet the king’s actions did not always match his words.
After acceding to the English throne (1603), James and his court enjoyed football games on multiple occasions. Two different times in August 1612, the royal household constructed special ‘standings’ at the Earl of Southampton’s Beaulieu Palace, Hampshire so James and his retinue could ‘see the play at footeball’. One year later, two more sets of stands were built, probably in Beaulieu again, for the king and queen to ‘see the Footeball playe’.1 Notably, these are the earliest references in history (as far as I’m aware) to purpose-built football stands, however temporary they may have been. James would take in a game again in 1615, when the minister of Bishop’s Canning, Wiltshire presented a ‘football match of his own parishioners’ who could have ‘challenged all England’ in the sport.
Perhaps the King of Scots did take all this English football as a challenge for the mastery of what he called in Latin pila Scotica quae pede propellitur [a Scottish ball propelled by the foot]. Ahead of the visit to his northern realm in 1617, James ordered the Earl of Mar to ensure that ‘the football and the rowbowles and sutche manlye exerceisses maye be practysed and exercised befor his Majesties cumming to Scotland, that theis pepill heir [i.e. the English] maye see the owld exerceisses of that cuntrye [Scotland]’. Evidently, James’ attitude towards football was not entirely negative. Complicated might be a better word.
If James’ was not above watching football, he may still have wanted elites to avoid playing football themselves. The Wiltshire players were rustics. But we don’t know if the Beaulieu ones and those from the Scottish progress were non-elites or courtiers, though court spectacles usually centred the latter. Regardless, there’s no doubt football had become popular among the nobility and knightly classes by the Jacobean and Caroline periods. We find courtiers like Sir David Cunningham of Auchenharvie (Ayrshire) playing the game in London 1629, or lords like Emanuel Scope (later earl of Sunderland) and Lord Willoughby together in an even-sided match earlier in the century.2 Artist and poet Henry Peacham even claimed in hisArt of Drawing (1606) that it was a natural and proper pursuit for a lord to ‘play at footeball with his men’.
Interestingly, in a later expanded edition (1612) Peacham replaced this positive reference to football with a possiblly less controversial line: ‘play at tennis with his page’. That same year, he also published the famed emblem book Minerva Britanna, which includes a depiction of football not as a lordly pastime, but as a game of ‘country swaines’, like those from Bishop’s Canning [see picture below]. Over the previous decade, Peacham had been in perennial pursuit of royal patronage. He produced several manuscript books of emblems, each dedicated either to King James or Prince Henry, and based on the king’s Basilikon Doron. Considering the views expressed in this advice book, Peacham’s shifting treatment of football may reflect an enduring unease about its value and suitability for elites. For some it was manly and martial, but for others it remained a rude and rustic ‘friendly kind of fight’ prone to ‘broken banis [bones]’. Certainly there was truth to the latter: after all, Cunningham and Scope were both badly injured while playing. Nonetheless, by this time there was an emerging view among the leisured classes, that at least in their refined hands (or feet), football could be a net positive.
Henry Peacham’s ‘The country Swaines, at football here are seene’, in Minerua Britanna (London, 1612), 81. Source: The Fellows’ Library, Winchester College.
These approving early modern sentiments represent a striking about-face to the contempt and indifference with which medieval elites regarded the sport. Football had been subject to repeated English and Scottish royal bans during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and during this period we have little to no evidence of the warrior classes participating in the sport. This all changed during the sixteenth century, with the royals leading the way. Henry VIII owned football boots (1525), while the household of James IV (James VI’s great-grandfather) purchased footballs (1497). Famously, James’s mother, Mary Queen of Scots beheld a match while under house arrest at Carlisle Castle (1568), when ‘about twenty of her retinue played at football before her the space of two hours, very strongly, nimbly, and skillfully, the smallness of their ball occasioning their fair play’.3 Indeed, Scottish nobility and lairds seem to have been particularly taken with the beautiful game from the mid-sixteenth century onward.
It’s not certain why this shift occurred, but I have a few theories. Firstly, medieval martial sports like the melee, tourney, and joust became less common and relevant as warfare changed. ‘Those who fought’ may have turned to bellicose football as an increasingly attractive proving ground for virility and valor. Secondly, the Renaissance brought new ideas of what a gentleman, courtier and prince should be: not just a warrior but a cultivated body and mind. As the warrior classes turned into the leisured classes, athletic exercises and pastimes like ball games became the ‘work’ of the day, so to speak. Thirdly (and most importantly, I think), the nobility and gentry increasingly favored school and university education for their children over private tutelage at home, as state bureaucracies and legal systems expanded and humanism spread.
Being collectives of playful youths, educational institutions have been central (deliberately or inadvertently) to the history of football from the earliest records through to the modern codes. It therefore follows that elite interest in the sport would rise alongside elite rates of institutional education in Britain. Tellingly, football seems to have been quite popular among medieval clergymen and lawyers, those who were the main products of schools and universities before the early modern period. Scotland’s ‘educational revolution’ was particularly precocious, as the Education Act of 1496 required ‘all barons and freeholders who are wealthy [to] put their eldest sons and heirs into school’ and some degree of university. This early initiative may help explain why football was already so popular among Scottish lords and gentry (moreso than in England) by the time James inherited the English throne.
Front page of the Declaration of Sports (London, 1618). Image: Anchora Blog.
James’s interest in regulating sport and recreation, however, extended well beyond his court and its courtiers. His most significant intervention into the recreational lives of common folk kicked off during his return journey from Scotland in 1617. As he progressed through Lancashire he became embroiled in a controversy between Puritan magistrates and defenders of traditional Sunday recreations. In the dispute over whether sports and games should be allowed on the sabbath, James sided with the traditionalists, producing what became known as the King’s Declaration (or Book) of Sports. Published in 1618, this document would prove an enduring flashpoint in the culture wars (and civil wars) of decades to come.
Yet it was not a blanket defense of all Sunday recreations: above all, divine service should be observed with no interference, and only certain recreations were approved for after service. Others, like bear-baiting or bowling, were explicitly banned on Sundays (and really any day) as unlawful games. Strikingly, football was absent from both lists. This seems a glaring omission considering it was one of the most common sports cited in contemporary sabbath-breach cases, and certainly in terms of team sports. Football had even been explicitly targeted in a 1614 Parliament act against Sabbath abuses, though the bill never became law. Technically, football remained an ‘unlawful game’ and as such was not allowed by the Declaration. Yet the king’s silence left some wiggle room for interpretation; it may suggest he held a soft spot for the ‘manly exercise’ of the ‘Scottish ball’.
Whether for courtiers or commoners, James remained ambivalent about football. Neither fully fan nor foe, he was a footy frienemy. That being said, James would have loved the World Cup. He had a penchant for spectacle and sport, and could be quite adept at harnessing these for statecraft. No doubt, he would have FIFA kissing his ring and awarding him Rex Pacificus prizes. Between his two teams in the running this year, James’s heart would be with Scotland, but he would relish England’s greater resources and odds of glory – just as he coveted the power of the English throne. Above all, though, he’d seize the opportunity to further his ultimate ambition: to unite his two kingdoms symbolically and practically. But if he thought his Book of Sports was controversial, it would be nothing compared to a Team GB scheme.
Dramatic Records in the Declared Accounts of the Treasurer of the Chamber, 1558-1642, ed. David Cook and F. P. Wilson (Malone Society Collections VI; OUP, 1962), p. 109. ↩︎
National Records of Scotland, GD237/25/1, Letter from Sir David Cunningham to the laird of Robertland, 1629 June 8. ↩︎
Letter from Sir Francis Knollys to Lord Burghley, 15 June 1568. Printed in John Daniel Leader, Mary Queen of Scots in Captivity: A Narrative of Events from January, 1569, to December, 1584, Whilst George Earl of Shrewsbury was Guardian to the Scottish Queen (London, 1880), no. 7.s ↩︎
It’s a historic time for Scottish football: the men’s national team has qualified for the World Cup, ending a near three-decade drought. And there’s a distinct possibility a club outside the ‘Old Firm‘ could win the top Scottish League for the first time since 1985. The erstwhile dominance of Celtic and Rangers has me wondering: what is the oldest ‘firm’ in the history of Scottish football? I don’t mean this in the modern sense of oldest surviving or earliest documented football club. Rather, what is the oldest evidence we have of Scottish organizations or institutions supporting football in a sustained way, and how did they do so?1
The answer takes us back to medieval or pre-Reformation Scotland, and specifically the 1530s, when Perth’s trade incorporations (i.e. guilds), and St Andrews’ city government and university were all sponsoring football in some sense. I’ve written at length about the Perth guilds in my thesis, so this essay will focus on institutional patronage in St Andrews. It’s a good opportunity to consider how premodern football was organized and played, and its complicated relationship with authority.
Football – as a broad family of games where a ball is contested via foot and/or hands and usually advanced to goals – has deep roots in Scotland. Unfortunately, the country’s relatively sparse medieval records make it difficult to assess just how deep, or to illuminate the early game’s nature. Our oldest Scottish references date to the fifteenth century, when official prohibitions suggest that football was already popular among the rural populace and university students. As the slide below shows, the crown, Parliament and other authorities didn’t much approve of the sport.
Around the turn of the sixteenth century, St Andrews University and its constituent faculties and colleges deemed the game ‘dishonest and dangerous’, threatening to expel or excommunicate students who played. But considering this hostility, it’s perplexing to find the bursar of the university’s Arts Faculty purchasing footballs: for 6 pence and 8 pence Scots in 1535 and 1537 respectively (roughly equal to a building labourer’s day wage at the time). An entry in the Faculty’s act book dated to 19 February 1537 sheds further light on the curious sponsorship (translated from the original Latin on the slide below). It records the minutes of a faculty congregation which discussed, among other things, disorder caused by football play the week prior on Shrove Tuesday, the pre-Lent Carnival (known as Fastern’s E’en in Lowland Scotland). By digging into the dense and sometimes confusing details of this act, the bursar’s payments, and some other comparative and contextual evidence, we can piece together the story of Scotland’s oldest firm.2
Let’s summarize what we know. During the 1530s and presumably earlier, the provost (mayor) of St Andrews – or the city bailies (bailiffs) on his behalf – customarily provided one football each to the three main colleges of the university on Shrove Tuesday for play in the fields outside the city. For some undeclared reason, in 1537 (and based on the bursar’s accounts presumably 1535 too) the Faculty of Arts’ Dean (instead of the burgh provost) furnished the football for one of the colleges called the Pedagogy. But then on the day of play, the Faculty’s Beadle (a type of officer) ended up confiscating that same ball, causing a ‘great schism’ in the fields. Prompted by this particular disorder, and the ‘many ills’ the football had engendered in the past, the Faculty decided to withdraw their tacit or direct support for the tradition: Arts students should no longer receive a ball from the burgh hereafter.
St Andrews and Shrovetide Sport
To make sense of all this, we need to start with the institutions involved. The provost and his two baillies were the elected leaders of the burgh council. This was the city government made up of select burgesses/freemen (merchants and craftsmen who were members of the city’s ‘freedom’ with its special economic and political privileges). The colleges in question were St Leonard and St Salvatore, and the Pedagogy – a quasi-college run by the Faculty of Arts. Like at Oxford or Cambridge today, these colleges were semi-autonomous educational institutions responsible for the housing and teaching of students. Teachers, curricula and exams were organized under faculties, with Arts being the lowest and largest, acting as a prerequisite for the three higher faculties of Medicine, Law and Theology. Faculties and colleges all came under the unifying authority of ‘the University of St Andrews’ which had been incorporated under a foundational charter from the pope in 1413. The sixteenth-century map below summarizes when and where the institutional players in this football drama emerged over the course of the university’s first century.3
We can deduce that the Shrove Tuesday football tradition changed over the years, merely by looking at when the colleges had been founded. St Leonard’s had only come into existence about two decades prior to the 1537 incident. Before this time, the burgh presumably only had two footballs on its Shrovetide gift list. Or perhaps the whole tradition was a quite recent innovation. For several reasons, however, I think the custom stretched back into the fifteenth century, and was simply adapted as the university grew and changed.
For one, Shrovetide sports are documented at the university from its earliest years. In 1415 the Faculty of Arts allowed the grammar schoolboys their old customary privilege of Shrovetide cockfighting, as long as these bloodsports were restricted to three days, rather than three weeks (!). No mention is made of football then, but cockfighting, football and Shrovetide were a package deal in many medieval communities. In twelfth-century London, scholars held cockfights on Shrove Tuesday morning, and played a ball game in the afternoon, while the great and good of the city looked on with approval. Likewise in the fifteenth-century Norman town of Abbeville, the schoolboy who won the Shrovetide cockfight helped the mayor preside over the ball game.4 It’s therefore quite possible that students and the burgh council were already involved with football back when the university was founded.
Certainly, by the end of the century, football was popular enough to prompt university, faculty and college bans. But where would that leave any established Shrovetide matches? While football was technically an unlawful game, many authorities in medieval and early modern Britain made an exception on Shrove Tuesday and other important festivals. South of the border, for example, Durham priory regularly banned football among its tenants during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Yet in 1492 the prior explicitly allowed certain villages to play the game on two days of the year: Plough Monday and Shrove Tuesday.5
Reasons for Institutional Support of Football
Why would those in power make such exceptions? Tolerating or even sponsoring football on established occasions could give officials a degree of control over a rowdy game – a chance to channel students’ festive energies into approved and supervised outlets. But as I’ve written elsewhere, institutional interest in football often went beyond a desire for social control. This was especially true for civic institutions, like the burgh government of St Andrews. Many urban craftsmen and tradesmen in medieval and early modern Britain were deeply invested in football, whether as players or patrons. Some within this burgeoning middling sort found great value in the sport, despite its illegal stature and violent nature. It could be a marker of a freeman’s status – both a privilege and obligation – to facilitate football, and thereby provide entertainment and ‘manly exercise’ for the ‘commonwealth’. We see the currency of football as a common good and right of the people of St Andrews in a 1553 contract between the burgh council and the Archbishop. It allowed the Archbishop a rabbit warren in the common links (pictured below), but reserved to the community ‘all manner of right and possession’ on the commons, including ‘playing at golf, football, shooting at game, with all manner of other pastimes as ever they please’.6
St Andrews Old Course. Once the common links of the city used for resources, and recreations like football as well as golf. It is likely where the Shrove Tuesday football took place in the medieval burgh. Image credit: UK Golf Guy.
Freemen who did not uphold football could be punished severely, like the maltman from Rutherglen (near Glasgow) who had his goods seized in 1626 because he didn’t join the rest of the burgesses on the town green for the annual Fastern’s Eve match. There’s a seriousness about football here that I think modern fans would recognize, although you won’t get fined for missing the derby these days! And I think this seriousness is key to understanding the 1530s incident. When the provost stopped giving a football to the Pedagogy, he seems to have continued giving ones to the two rival colleges. I suspect the Arts Faculty stepped in to make sure their associated college received proper due as befitted its equal status and privileges, something all three colleges guarded fiercely. Moreover, receiving the provost’s football gifts and participating in the Shrovetide sport likely reaffirmed symbolically the city and university’s important (yet sometimes fraught) relationship. The Faculty may not have approved of football themselves, but exclusion from a longstanding and laudable Shrovetide custom would be a dishonour on many counts. This prompts the question: why did the burgh slight the Pedagogy by withholding their ball, and why did the Dean’s substitute ball end up causing controversy? Context is key here.
Since its founding in the early fifteenth century, the Pedagogy had been chronically underfunded. Periodic attempts over the century to re-found it as a proper college with adequate endowment and buildings had failed. After 1533, the Pedagogy and its buildings were in such decay that student enrollment plummeted. While St Salvator’s and St Leonard’s were graduating around thirteen students a year, the Pedagogy could claim zero. Something was finally done in February 1538, one year after the Faculty pulled out of the Shrovetide football. The Pedagogy was re-founded as the properly endowed St Mary’s College.7 With this context in mind, I hypothesize that the burgh stopped giving the Pedagogy a customary ball once it became clear there was no coherent student body to accept it; the Faculty tried to save face for a few years by purchasing their own balls before withdrawing support for the custom entirely. This theory tracks with the Arts bursar’s accounts, which span before and after the 1530s, but only show football purchases in 1535 and 1537.
We don’t get any specific details on how the St Andrews football games were played, but we can speculate based on the ball distribution, location, and comparative examples. Historians have assumed the game was either intercollegiate or between city and university. These are reasonable assumptions. We can find examples of town vs gown Shrovetide matches in early modern Cambridge and Oxford. In the late fifteenth century, rivalry between the Pedagogy and St Salvator’s led to bloodshed, while about a century later St Leonard’s and St Salvator’s students were ordered to take recreation in different fields to avoid conflict.8 However, based on the fact that each college received their own ball, it seems more likely to me that the games were intra-collegiate: students played their own college peers. We find this structure later in the century at Cambridge, where football was allowed but only within colleges, never between them.9 Similarly at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the University of Aberdeen’s Marischal College propagated weekly football matches within the college student body. Students were further divided based on their year, and there were complicated rules for how new balls should be supplied when the ones in play inevitably burst (see slide below).
It’s often assumed that premodern football was a bloody free-for-all with uneven throngs of players, indeterminate boundaries, and no rules. But not only could this cross-country style of play exhibit sophisticated tactics and rules in its own right, it was also not the sport’s only form.10 From post-Reformation Scotland we can also find examples of small and even-sided games, defined playing areas and goals, passing and goal keeping. Play at the Aberdeen schools and colleges had some of these features, and if the St Andrews Shrovetide football was intra-collegiate and confined to the links it may have looked similar. Certainly, university officials (normally hostile to football) were more likely to tolerate play of this more structured form.
On the other hand, it is possible there was just one free-for-all game where the balls were tossed up in turn. This was how the civic-sponsored Shrove Tuesday game worked in Chester during the 1530s.11 Plus, the Faculty act technically refers to a ‘game’ in the singular (ludo) which followed the receiving of the balls, though this could also be translated as the more ambiguous word ‘play’. Perhaps the provost even gave out additional balls to other civic institutions (beyond the colleges) which went unmentioned in the Faculty records. Later in the century, for example, the Glasgow burgh council annually bought six footballs for their town’s own Fastern’s Eve festivities, though no rhyme or reason was ever given for such a specific number (see slide above). But again, I think the events narrated in the Faculty’s act support the intra-collegiate hypothesis. If the Pedagogy’s ball was just one of a series to be played by everyone in the fields, it’s not clear why it specifically should prompt disorder and confiscation. There was obviously something controversial about who should possess this particular ball. I suspect that without a substantial Pedagogy student body to play with the Dean’s football, students from the other colleges tried to claim it for themselves. When the Arts Beadle intervened, the students were not pleased.
The Faculty of Arts used this incident as pretext for withdrawing support from the Shrovetide game, at least ‘so far as concerned it’. This wording speaks to the Faculty’s limited jurisdiction in the matter. Although the congregation couched the decision as in the best interests of the whole university, the Faculty only held power over its own students and the Pedagogy. They could not stop the burgh from offering the footballs, nor the other colleges from accepting them. This makes it even more likely the single game referred to in the act was the Pedagogy’s game, something the Faculty had some say in, rather than a general free-for-all. It’s also a reminder that Shrovetide football may have continued in St Andrews long after the Faculty signaled its disapproval. If the 1553 contract concerning access to the common links (mentioned above) is anything to go on, the burgh council remained sympathetic to football for some time, as did many civic institutions in Scotland.
The burgh and university’s differing attitudes towards football point to an ongoing and underlying ideological debate about the premodern sport’s social value (see slide above): was it a manly exercise of good fellowship and community worthy of patronage, or an unprofitable waste of time, health and property to be prohibited? This St Andrews case shows how complicated this sort of cost-benefit analysis could get. When the Faculty’s ledger finally swung fully to ‘unprofitable’, it cited the ‘many ills’ and disorder football brought to the university. But it was perhaps just as much (or more) about avoiding further embarrassment over the derelict state of their Pedagogy and its lack of students. After all, the Faculty had only just gone out of their way to keep the Pedagogy involved in the custom. Clearly, football held a value that was difficult to quantify or ignore, something which prompted educational and civic institutions throughout premodern Scotland to invest.
As we know, universities and cities (schoolboys and workers) would continue to shape the development of Scottish football into the modern era. The story of the ‘oldest firm’ shows just how deep that heritage goes. And for just how long Scottish football has been ‘more than a game’.
Roger A. Mason, ‘University, City and Society’, in K. Stevenson and M. Brown (eds.) Medieval St Andrews: Church, Cult, City (Boydell & Brewer, St Andrews Studies in Scottish History, 2017), pp. 268–297. ↩︎
On Shrovetide sports in St Andrews see David Ditchburn, ‘Religion, Ritual and the Rhythm of the Year in Later Medieval St Andrews’, in K. Stevenson and M. Brown (eds.) Medieval St Andrews: Church, Cult, City (Boydell & Brewer, St Andrews Studies in Scottish History, 2017), p. 105. For Shrovetide cockfighting and football in Britain see chapters 1 and 2 of my thesis. The Abbeville reference is to the football-like ball game of ‘cholle’ or soule. See John Brand, Observations on Popular Antiquities: Chiefly Illustrating the Origin of Our Vulgar Customs, Ceremonies and Superstitions, 2 vols. ed. Henry Ellis (1811 edition), vol 1, p. 66. ↩︎
Durham University Special Collections, DCD-Halm.Rolls, 1492 Spring, Billingham and Cowpen Bewley. ↩︎
I hope to write soon on college football in Tudor and Stuart Cambridge. ↩︎
On the sophisticated tactics of traditional cross-country football games see Hugh Hornby, Uppies and Downies: The Extraordinary Football Games of Britain, (Swindon: English Heritage, 2008). ↩︎
See chapter 2 of my thesis for details on the Chester game. ↩︎
On Shrove Tuesday 1270, the monks of Beaulieu Abbey in the New Forest rewarded their lay manorial workers with pancakes, with the youngest employees also receiving a feast of beef, cheese and ale in the great hall of the abbey’s infirmary. This is the earliest known evidence of Shrove Tuesday pancakes in England.
The general origins of this tradition are familiar: medieval Europeans used up their meat and dairy in anticipation of the Lenten fast and its many prohibitions, gradually developing a festival of joy and raucous play, known by various food-related names like Carnivale (leaving off meat), and Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday).
Yet the practices of medieval Beaulieu Abbey hint at another layer of meaning baked into the foods of Shrove Tuesday: a power to inform social relations, convey privileges to certain members of premodern society and even symbolise radical action.
I suppose that he who would gather the best May-Deaw, for Medicine, should gather it from the Hills.
Francis Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum (1626)
Yesterday, I climbed Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh at daybreak to gather May-Dew – an old tradition that from what I could see has mostly fallen into abeyance. For those not in the know, May-Dew is the moisture that collects around dawn during the month of May, but especially on May Day. According to folklore, the dew can convey (variously) luck, beauty and health for the coming year, usually through direct contact with the skin.
These last two ideas about beauty and health first show up on record in the late medieval and early modern period, when, as Francis Bacon’s quote suggests, the medicinal properties of May-Dew were taken quite seriously. To give this old tradition a proper 21st century treatment, here’s a Top Ten List of the Medicinal Uses for May-Dew, pulled from sixteenth and seventeenth-century sources.
May Day morn atop Arthur’s Seat
Before beginning, we need to know the proper way to gather and prepare May-Dew so that it works effectively. Fortunately, the German surgeon, botanist and alchemistHieronymous Brunschwig lays this all out in detail in his Liber de arte distillandi de simplicibus, published in 1500 and translated into English in 1527 as The vertuose boke of distyllacyon of the waters of all maner ofherbes.
Hieronymous Brunschwig’s Liber de arte distillandi de simplicibus, 1500 (Wikimedia)
According to Brunschwig, one must rise before the dawn on a night in the ‘myddest of maye’ when the moon is almost full and it has not rained. You should find a pasture or field ‘where as growe many flowres’. It should be far from ‘watery places’, but the nearerto ‘the montaynes the better’. Once there, ‘drawe a great linyn clothe’ over the field, wringing the dew out into a glass until you have enough for your purposes. Then, ‘strayne the dew thrughe a fayre lynyn clowte [cloth]’ before distilling it in a glass and setting it out for 30 days in the sun. Now it’s ready to cure what ails you.
TOP TEN MEDICINAL USES FOR MAY-DEW
1. Acne
May-Dew’s curative properties are most often associated with the face and head, and this is evident from the earliest references. Brunschwig explains that May-Dew is useful ‘whan a body hath an unclene hede & spottes in the face’. Wash the face with distilled May-Dew at morning and night, let air dry, and ‘than it wyll go awaye’.
2. Rosacea
According to Brunschwig, the same May-Dew treatment could also cure ‘Guttam roseam’ – a skin condition involving red discoloration of the face, which seems to describe the modern rosacea. He explains that the condition could come from overheating, but also ‘frome hote blode and frome the lyuer’. Since it was sometimes associated with the onset of leprosy, it was not something to write off.
3. Wrinkles
The final use Brunschwig suggests for May-Dew is more cosmetic than strictly medicinal – ridding the face of wrinkles. Washing with the distilled liquid at morning and night should ’causeth a fayre & clene face’.
‘Water of the Maye dewe’ in Hieronymous Brunschwig, The vertuose boke of distyllacyon of the waters of all maner of herbes, translated by Laurence Andrew, 1527 (Early English Books Online).
4. Small Pox Scars and Redness
Similar to the cures above, Simon Kellwaye wrote in A Short treatise of the small pockes (1593), that May-Dew could help with the ‘rednes of the face and hands after the pockes are gone’.
5. Sore Eyes
Hugh Plat’s Delightes for ladies to adorne their persons, printed in 1602, recommends May-Dew for a variety of cosmetic and medicinal treatments. In a section on ‘How to gather and clarifie May-dewe’, which broadly repeats Brunschwig’s advice, he adds:
‘Some commend May-dew gathered from Fennell and Celandine, to be most excellent for sore-eyes’.
‘How to Gather and Clarifie May-dewe’ in Hugh Plat, Delightes for ladies to adorne their persons, tables, closets, and distillatories with beauties, banquets, perfumes and waters, 1602 (Early English Books Online)
6. Lesions
Printed in 1659, The Queens closet purportedly contains ‘incomparable secrets in physick, chyrurgery, preserving, and candying &c. which were presented unto the queen’, including a method ‘To take away Freckles or Morphew’. A morphew was a skin lesion, but it was nothing that a little May-Dew and tartar couldn’t fix!
Take four spoonfuls of May dew, and one spoonfull of the Oyl of Tartar, mingle them together, and wash the places where the freckles be, and let it dry of it self, it will clear the skin, and take away all foul spots.
7. Gout
In his Natural History of Wiltshire,published in 1691, antiquarian John Aubrey extolled the virtues of May-Dew for relief of gout, something corroborated in contemporary medical treatises.
Maydewe is a very great dissolvent of many things with the sunne that will not be dissolved any other way: which putts me in mind of the rationality of the method used by Wm. Gore, of Clapton, Esq., for his gout, which was to walke in the dewe with his shoes pounced; he found benefit by it.
Aubrey sought further confirmation by telling this story to a surgeon in Shoe Lane, London, who replied that it was indeed ‘the very method and way of curing’ used on Oliver Cromwell for the same ailment.
8. Tooth Ache
May-Dew was also an essential ingredient in Robert Boyle’s remedy ‘for the tooth ach’. Printed in hisMedicinal experiments, or, A collection of choice and safe remedies (1693), it involved sprinkling the dew over a mixture of herbs before putting a few drops of the solution into the afflicted’s ear whilst they chewed some bread.
‘For the Tooth-ach’ in Robert Boyle, Medicinal experiments, or, A collection of choice and safe remedies for the most part simple and easily prepared, useful in families, and very serviceable to country people, 1693 (Early English Books Online).
9. Weak Back
Although there aren’t known records of this for the early modern period, by the nineteenth century some believed May Dew could strengthen weak backs, particularly those of sickly children. Jamieson’s Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language, published 1808, put it this way:
Great virtue is ascribed to May-dew. Some, who have tender children, particularly on Rude-day [3 May], spread out a cloth to catch the dew, and wet them in it.
10. Pretty Much Anything
Beyond specific ailments, May-Dew was a key ingredient in many recipes, both medicinal and alchemical. For example, the Thesaurus & armamentarium medico-chymicum – written by Adrian von Mynsicht in the early seventeenth century and translated into English in 1682 – called for ‘water made of May-dew gathered from the standing Wheat’ to facilitate his recipe for ‘Pearls Trochiscated’. Apparently, this powerful concoction could cure just about any problem, psychological or physical:
It is a most excellent Comfortative in all affects of the Heart, as Pain, Sorrow, Trembling, Pulsation, Palpitation, defects of the Mind, &c. Also in pains of the Head, Vertigo, Epilepsie, Apoplexy, Palsie, Contractures, resolution of the Nerves, Convulsion, Phrensie, Melancholy, Madness, Gout, and Gouty pains in the Joynts, Consumption, Blasting, the numbness and decay by Age, Stone, Dropsie, Scurvy, French Pox, and Feavers, &c. It purifies the Blood; it comforts all the Senses, Brain, Memory, and Heart, and preserves the whole body sound….
Etc., etc., etc.
And there you have it. If you’ve got a problem, May-Dew’s probably got you covered.
MAY-DEW AND MANNA FROM HEAVEN
Early moderns clearly respected this liquid’s efficacy, and the power the festive year could give them to influence their own lives. It wasn’t just a superstitious practice of the ‘folk’, either. Hieronymous Brunschwig, Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle – these were leading thinkers and experts of their respective days. Even the Royal Society commissioned Some observations and experiments upon May-dewin the 1660s. While the division between folklore and learned knowledge certainly increased in the eighteenth century, such a divide was not necessarily so pronounced before this: folk practices could often be grounded – at least in part – in the prevailing learned theories of the day.
Francis Bacon’s own theory about May-Dew, quoted at the top, connected the substance to contemporary discussions on ‘manna’, the Biblical food which nourished the Israelites during their forty years in the desert. At the end of the seventeenth century, Thomas Pope Blount compiled some of these theories, including Bacon’s, into a section called ‘Observations concerning manna’ in his Natural History (1693). Since manna was described in the Bible as arriving with the dew in the night, it was often called the ‘Dew of Heaven’. According to Blount, the substance still collected and congealed on plants and trees. It could be (and was) harvested and used for ‘physick’. Though more plentiful in hotter climes – where dew collected thick throughout the year – it could be found in England too: ‘In those hot Countries it Coagulates, with us it is liquid’.
Blount was building on the ideas of Bacon, who argued that the best manna could be found in Calabria, at the tip of Italy’s boot. Based on the harvesting practices there, where manna was gathered from trees in the mountains but not the valleys, Bacon thought that, in its descent from heaven, manna collected first in the highland areas, and dissipated before it could reach the plants of the valley. He drew the conclusion that it would ‘not be amiss to observe a little better the Dews that fall upon Trees, or Herbs, growing on Mountains’.
Echoing Brunschwig’s advice about collecting ‘nearer…the montaynes’, Bacon suggested the best May-Dew for medicinal purposes would come from the hills, presumably because it mingled with manna from heaven, or was perhaps manna itself. This may also explain the importance of May in this equation, at least in the minds of these thinkers. Since May is the month in northern climes when weather turns warm and dews increase (but do not evaporate too quickly), it would be the best opportunity to soak up powerful manna.
Theorizing aside, I can now say from experience that it was not easy to find and gather May-Dew at the top of Arthur’s Seat (there’s far more of it on the lowland Meadows). But perhaps this is really the point: the greater the challenge, the greater the reward, the more powerful the May-Dew.
Oh, I could write a sonnet about your Easter bonnet…
Irving Berlin, Easter Parade (1933)
Built around Irving Berlin’s song of the same name, the classic musical Easter Parade begins and ends with the famed titular event, as the who’s who of early twentieth-century New York City stroll down Fifth Avenue in new bonnets, top hats, suits and dresses. The movie actually has little to do with Easter or its parade (similarly, this post has little to do with the movie!), but it does convey the pageantry of the occasion in an unparalleled way, through Berlin’s music, Judy Garland’s singing, Fred Astaire’s dancing, and superb costuming. The last aspect in particular highlights the centrality of new clothing and fashion to this Easter tradition.
Judy Garland and Fred Astaire steppin’ out onto Fifth Avenue in their new threads. Easter Parade (1948).
According to Leigh Eric Schmidt (1994), the Fifth Avenue parade developed as a distinct event in the late nineteenth century, out of a ‘hybridized commingling of faith and fashion’. By the time the movie musical was released in 1948, the event had become a major cultural touchstone for American celebrations of Easter, but also a source of controversy. To some, it was both result and epitome of ‘schlokified’ Christianity – faith consumed by consumerism. Schmidt traces such criticisms, visible from the early days of the parade, but argues persuasively against these mono-causal (and cynical) views. Though certainly co-opted and perpetuated by NYC fashion retailers, the Easter parade was for many a ‘modern synthesis of piety and display’ – aided and abetted by churches and embraced by churchgoers as a material manifestation of spiritual and seasonal renewal. Not only this, it tapped into deep roots of European Christian tradition.
Easter cover from The Saturday Evening Post, 1912. Source.
Indeed, analogous and antecedent traditions of Easter finery aren’t hard to find, but they are especially well documented for the British Isles. Folklorists Peter Opie, Iona Opie and Moira Tatem (1964; 1996), have collected several examples illustrating the connection between Easter and clothes, ranging in date from present day to the Elizabethan era.
In the 1960s and 70s, newspapers in urban areas such as London and Bath ran advertisements like, ‘Only 2 weeks to Easter—It’s lucky to wear something new!’. In the 1950s, a boy from Dumfries, Scotland communicated a similar idea, with the twist that new Easter clothes were not so much good luck as they were a ward against ill fortune:
On Easter Monday if you do not have on something new it is supposed to be bad luck for you.
According to various nineteenth and twentieth-century accounts, this bad luck could take bizarre forms: crows pecking out your eyes, bird droppings splattering you, dogs spitting in your face, and other pleasantries. This description of Norwich in the 1850s is prototypical:
Rustics returning from Tombland fair … carry new hats, not on their heads, but in boxes, &c. They are worn for the first time on Easter Day; and by so doing, the bearer is secured from any bird’s dropping its ‘card’ upon him during the ensuing year. Indeed, it is very unlucky not to wear some new … clothing on Easter Day.
These localized and oddly specific warnings were variations on a theme equating Easter attire with good or bad fortune, first expressed in the eighteenth century, in an edition of the parody almanac PoorRobin: ‘At Easter let your clothes be new Or else be sure you will it rue’. This in turn seems to have grown out of an even more general social imperative. Direct allusions to this idea can be traced back as far as the 1590s, and they proliferated in the seventeenth century. In Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, for example, Mercutio teases Benvolio: ‘Did’st thou not fall out with a Tailor for wearing his new Doublet before Easter?’ (Opie and Tatem, 1994).
Although the old imperative (and certainly the luck component) are no longer commonplace, other aspects of the Easter finery tradition still survive in the modern world. Today, many individuals and families switch to their summer wardrobes around Easter season, especially in northern climes where temperatures are only just starting to become reliably warm. For devout Christians, Easter Sunday service remains a perfect occasion to debut nicer items from this wardrobe, some of which may have been given as Easter gifts. From a religious point of view, Easter clothes make sense as the epitome of one’s ‘Sunday best’. Since Christ’s death and resurrection are the defining events of the Christian faith, their commemoration represents the height of the ecclesiastical year – the Sunday of Sundays.
Attempts to trace the origins or rationale behind Easter finery have usually alighted upon this second (religious) explanation. Leigh Schmidt, for example, offers that distinctive clothes for Easter – as for other sacred occasions like baptisms, weddings, and funerals – had long served as ‘material markers of holiness and celebration’. Turning to early modern sources, we find some evidence for this general practice, but slightly less evidence for pious motives behind it.
In one fictitious dialogue penned by Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1671), a knight complains of his wife’s expensive ‘Bravery’ (i.e. her finery), professing that if she would wear her ‘Silk-Gown’ only on ‘Sundays and Holy-days, (I mean, only at such Good-times as Christmas, Easter, Whitsuntide, or so)’, the garment would last them seven years and save much expense. The knight’s grumbling gives us enough to know what we might suspect, that it was customary to dress finely on sacred occasions. Writing a few decades later, however, the preacher Robert South expressed the opinion that ‘bravery’ had come to supplant, rather than honor, the original purpose of Easter (1694):
There is a great Festival now drawing on; a Festival, designed chiefly for the Acts of a joyfull Piety, but generally made only an occasion of Bravery. I shall say no more of it at present, but this; That God expects from Men something more than ordinary at such times, and that it were much to be wished, for the Credit of their Religion, as well as the Satisfaction of their Consciences; that their Easter Devotions would, in some measure, come up to their Easter Dress.
Richard Stafford similarly seized upon the custom as a timely metaphor for spiritual renewal in his Easter sermon, rather than an appropriate pious act in and of itself (1698):
There is an Old, Common and Proverbial Saying, That People should have somewhat new upon them at Easter. Which tho it be commonly understood of Cloaths and Garments, yet there is some Divine and Serious Truth contained therein, and to be gather’d from it…now at this time our Thoughts are taken up with the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the Dead, we should also examine and prove our selves, whither we be risen with him; and then question further, and look about, or rather from within our selves, whither we have any thing new on us, or rather within us.
Clergyman and poet Joseph Beaumont, on the other hand, had little trouble tying pious purpose and motivation directly to the custom, referencing it in his poem Psyche (1648) to describe the revelation of Jesus after his resurrection:
But chiefly at the Angels Presence They
Were seiz’d with their intoletable Fright:
His shining Roabs were glorious as the Day,
And partners with the driven Snow in white;
For ’twas his Easter Suit, the Suit he had
To honor this bright Feast on purpose made.
And yet the Lustre which kept Holiday
Rejoycing in his delicate attire,
Could not such wealthy floods of rays display
As streamed from his aspects fairer fire,
For in the Majesty of his sweet face
A spring of living lightning bubling was.
The analogy to the natural world found in the last line was taken further by other authors, some making a three-way connection between Easter clothes, resurrection, and spring’s awakening.
Christ dazzling all in his Easter Suit. Pieter Lastman, The Resurrection (1612). Source: Wikipedia Commons
Henry Grenfield wrote of spring as the time when Earth’s ‘Divers-colour’d Easter-Cloaths appear…with new Life they grow, / A Resurrection in Effigie show’ (1686). Nicholas Hookes used the spring metaphor for more secular reasons, in an ode to his sweetheart, Amanda (1653):
Look at yon flower yonder, how it growes
Sensibly! how it opes its leaves and blowes,
Puts its best Easter clothes on, neat and gay! Amanda’s presence makes it holy-day:
Clearly, preachers and poets could put Easter finery to work for the diverse purposes of their pens. It’s more difficult to get at what early moderns actually thought of the custom in day-to-day life. Thankfully, Londoner Samuel Pepys provides a helping hand here, giving several descriptions of the traditional practice in his diary(1660-1669).
In 1662 he wrote:
(Easter day). Having my old black suit new furbished, I was pretty neat in clothes to-day, and my boy, his old suit new trimmed, very handsome. To church in the morning, and so home…
And similarly the next year:
(Easter day). Up and this day put on my close-kneed coloured suit, which, with new stockings of the colour, with belt, and new gilt-handled sword, is very handsome.
Most of Pepys’s entries about Easter clothes, however, revolved around provisions for his wife, Elizabeth. In 1662, he spoke with Elizabeth as early as Shrove Sunday (9 February) about the £20 he ‘had long since promised her to lay out in clothes against Easter for herself’. Twenty pounds was a huge sum at the time, and in other years Pepys complained profusely and often about the cost of his wife’s Easter finery. When Elizabeth received her newly laced gown about two weeks before Easter in 1664, Samuel opined: ‘[it] is indeed very handsome, but will cost me a great deal of money, more than ever I intended, but it is but for once’. Apparently, this passive aggressive grace did not survive the next morning…
Lay long in bed wrangling with my wife about the charge she puts me to at this time for clothes more than I intended, and very angry we were…
Despite this, the couple were ‘quickly friends again’, so that Elizabeth later chatted happily ‘of her clothes against Easter’. The big day finally arrived a week later, though it did not go as planned:
(Lord’s day). Lay long in bed, and then up and my wife dressed herself, it being Easter day, but I not being so well as to go out, she, though much against her will, staid at home with me; for she had put on her new best gowns, which indeed is very fine now with the lace; and this morning her taylor brought home her other new laced silks gowns with a smaller lace, and new petticoats, I bought the other day both very pretty.
Due to Samuel’s bad bout of flatulence (no joke), the long-suffering Elizabeth had to wait until Easter Tuesday to make her debut.
The Pepys family were not exactly the seventeenth-century norm, being from what historians might term the upper crust of the ‘middling sort’. Nonetheless, the dynamics between husband and wife were true to form in many respects, especially concerning Easter clothes. One contemporary piece called The modern and genteel way of wooing and complementing (Phillips, 1699), described a fictional proposal where the doter promised his beloved to ‘come up every year after Easter to buy thee Pins, Gloves and Ribbands, and a new Gown’. Similarly, in a dialogue ‘between a proud Woman and her Husband about Apparrel’ (Parker, 1682), the wife complained that, though she’d received ‘a pair of hose & shooes at Easter’, she’d had nothing since, and it was almost Midsummer.
In all of these examples, literary and literal, it was the responsibility – an expectation – of the husband as head of household to provide new clothes to wife and children at Easter. This particular aspect of the tradition points to its deeper origins in the medieval period.
From as early as the twelfth century, and probably reaching back further, members of great medieval households, be they servants or family, were typically entitled to the benefits of board, bed, and ‘livery’ – clothes or money/materials needed to make them. Livery was usually doled out only a few times a year. Just as now, winter, spring and summer warranted different attire, and the major festive occasions marking their turning points (e.g. All Saints, Christmas, Easter and Whitsun) were logical times for distribution (Woolgar, 1999; Wild, 2012) .
Social and religious aims were also interwoven into these material practicalities. For medieval lords and ladies, distributing festive livery was an act of largesse, a visible sign of their generosity to, and acceptance of, those within their household (their familia). The quality of the clothing likewise broadcasted the lord’s wealth and status, while its heraldry staked his ‘claim’ to that particular servant. In the words of Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybras (2000):
Livery was a form of incorporation, a material mnemonic that inscribed obligations and indebtedness upon the body. As cloth exchanged hands, it bound people in networks of obligation.
Clothing given at Christmas and Easter within households often came alongside other offerings such as feasts and monetary rewards – these were voluntary gifts nonetheless duly expected at such seasons (and which gradually became codified) in exchange for loyal service throughout the year (think of today’s Christmas bonus). Such markers of generosity and good house-keeping could also double as pious charity in these holy settings. One story connected to the tenth-century Saint Oswald of Worcester, for example, tells of his kind treatment of twelve poor men, to whom he ‘at Easter…gaue new cloathes, and retayned…in his hall as…principall guests for certaine daies’ (Porter, 1632). During the medieval period, then, Easter clothes could be at once a pious expression of charity, a reciprocal sign of the benefits and obligations of household membership, and a practical necessity for the onset of warmer weather.
Fourteenth-century German illumination of the resurrection in Walters Ms. W.148, Homilary, fol. 23v (The Walters Art Museum)
Over the course of the sixteenth century, some aspects of the medieval livery system – such as heraldic markings – began to decline, but its importance to household cohesion and patronage remained. In the royal household of James I of England (r.1603-1625), for example, the King’s Men (Shakespeare’s playing company) received every second Easter ‘a livery consisting of three yards of bastard scarlet for a cloak and a quarter yard of crimson velvet for a cape’ (Jones and Stallybras, 2000). Despite this continuity, a shift seems to have occurred in the early modern period which added to the social dynamics of the medieval custom and perhaps elevated Easter above other occasions (e.g. Christmas, Whitsun) in its symbolic significance to clothes. This shift is neatly suggested in the oldest known direct reference to Easter finery, from Thomas Lodge’s Wits Miserie, printed in 1596 (Opie and Tatem, 1994):
The farmer that was contented in times past with his Russet Frocke & Mockado sleeves, now sels a Cow against Easter to buy him silken geere for his credit.
Thus the old custom of changing to new clothes at times like Easter was no longer purely practical or solely an expression of piety and household economy and cohesion – it was an opportunity to flaunt an individual’s status (not just a lord’s) and even gain more of it in the eyes of peers. Fashion – something that had been largely the provenance of nobility and gentry for centuries – was becoming more accessible to the ‘lower orders’ (Currie, 2017).
By Pepys’s time, Easter was inextricably bound up with the yearly force of fashion. In 1667 his wife informed him of a London wedding which had been held in private because it was right before Lent, ‘and so in vain to make new clothes till Easter, that they might see the fashions as they are like to be this summer…’. In other words, Easter was for the debut of new summer clothes; it would be pointless to tailor them earlier for a wedding or other event because they would not then be in tune with the latest styles.
Multiple contemporary references from Poor Robin’s Almanac, like Lodge’s reference to farmers above, suggest that chasing trends and displaying them proudly come Easter was not limited to genteel and wealthy Londoners. Writing fondly of the tradition among young country folk outside London in 1670:
On Easter Munday after noon,
To Islington do walk up soon.
When Doll is drest up very neat
And full of love as Egg of meat
She casts a simpering look on Dick,
Then Richard he her lips must lick:
Writing less fondly in 1691:
Now shall a whole Shipful of new Fashions come out of the Isle Lunatick, wherewith many young Lasses shall so adorn themselves, that they shall be like to the Cinamon Tree, the bark more worth than all the whole body:
Writing downright snidely in 1685:
In this month against Easter-Holy-days many women shall fall very sick, but more of Modishness than any other Malady; the best remedy for their distemper is to have them to the shop and buy them a new Gown, and by such time as the Taylor hath made it, they will be perfectly recovered; or buy it ready made, and they are well in an instant.
Tangled up in its patronizing patriarchal tones, one can detect in this last quote the same critique of Easter consumerism and vanity visible in the contemporary sermons quoted earlier. Together, these all sound very similar to criticisms of New York’s Easter Parade in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – flippant greed running amok over Christian tradition and piety. Looking at the larger history of Easter finery and clothing, however, shows us that the material, religious, and social were always intertwined in this tradition.
As long as it has been recorded, the giving, receiving and wearing of Easter clothes has served diverse purposes and held different meanings depending on context and circumstance. Despite this relativism, three strands appear continuously woven into the thread of the cultural practice, running through the medieval, early modern, and Victorian periods, down to the present day: people’s material and emotional need to respond to the advent of springtime, their desire to synchronise such practicality with religious devotion, and their drive to creatively embrace the rhythms of the festive year to their social advantage, even using something so simple as a new bonnet.
Edward Phillips, The beau’s academy, or, The modern and genteel way of wooing and complementing after the most courtly manner (London, 1699).
Henry Grenfield, God in the creature being a poem in three parts (London, 1686).
Jerome Porter, The flowers of the liues of the most renowned saincts of the three kingdoms England Scotland, and Ireland written and collected out of the best authours and manuscripts of our nation, and distributed according to their feasts in the calendar (Doway, 1632).
Joseph Beaumont, Psyche, or, Loves mysterie in XX canto’s, displaying the intercourse betwixt Christ and the soule (London, 1648).
Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, Natures picture drawn by fancies pencil to the life being several feigned stories, comical, tragical, tragi-comical, poetical, romanicical, philosophical, historical, and moral (London, 1671).
Martin Parker, A brief sum of certain worm-wood lectures Translated out of all languages into Billings-Gate dialogue (London, 1682).
Nicholas Hookes, Amanda, a sacrifice to an unknown goddesse, or, A free-will offering of a loving heart to a sweet-heart (London, 1653).
Poor Robin’s Almanac, various editions (London, 1670, 1685, 1691).
Richard Stafford, The observation of the three great festivals asserted in the Christian church and that objection answered, from Gal 4. 10, 11., and also the right manner of the observance of them made known, in a sermon, preach’d on Easter-Day (London, 1698). Robert South,Twelve sermons preached upon several occasions(London, 1694).
Samuel Pepys, Diary, ed. Henry B. Wheatley (London: Bell and Sons, 1893), accessed in annotated form on The Diary of Samuel Pepyswebsite.
Secondary
Currie, Elizabeth, ‘Introduction’, in A Cultural History of Dress and Fashion in the Renaissance, ed. Elizabeth Currie (London, 2017). Jones, Ann Rosalind and Peter Stallybras, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge, 2000).
Opie, Iona, and Moira Tatem, ‘EASTER: new clothes’, in A Dictionary of Superstitions (Oxford University Press, 1996) Accessed Online.
Opie, Peter, ‘Proposals for a Dictionary, Arranged on Historical Principles, of English Traditional Lore’, Folklore, Vol. 75, No. 2 (Summer, 1964), 73-90. Schmidt, Leigh Eric, ‘The Easter Parade: Piety, Fashion, and Display’, Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Summer, 1994), 135-164.
Wild, Benjamin, ‘Livery (uniform)’, in Encyclopedia of Medieval Dress and Textiles eds. Gale Owen-Crocker, Elizabeth Coatsworth, Maria Hayward (Brill, 2012) Accessed Online.
Woolgar, Christopher, The Great Householdin Late Medieval England (London, 1999).
