If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home by Lucy Worsley
Authors: Lucy Worsley
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chamber servant, should act as stylist as well as dresser. ‘Before he goes out’, the chamberlain is advised, ‘brush busily about him, and whether he wear satin, sandal, velvet, scarlet or grain, see that all be clean and nice.’
Not surprisingly, such body servants brushing their bosses in their bedchambers also became close friends. There was a moving scene after Lucius Cary, 1st Viscount Falkland, was killed in battle in 1643. Only his chamberlain could identify his master’s corpse upon the field: ‘they could not find his Lordship’s body; it was stripped and trod-upon and mangled, so there was one that waited upon him in his chamber would undertake to know it from all other bodies, by a certain Mole his lordship had in his Neck, and by that mark did find it’.
On the other hand, the foppish ‘Macaronis’ of the 1780s crept into an unhealthy dependency on their personal servants, seeming to be ‘absolutely incapable of motion, till they have been wound up by their valets … if the valet happens to be out of the way, the master must remain helpless and sprawling in bed, like a turtle on its back upon the kitchen table’.
Our medieval knight wouldn’t have worn underpants as we know them today. Men wrapped the long tail of their shirts between their legs, or else wore something rather like a loose linen nappy. Early drawers begin to appear in the seventeenth century: long silk shorts with a slit in the back to facilitate a trip to the toilet. By the later 1660s, Charles II was wearing silk undershorts. William III, next king but one, had an almost garish taste in underwear. We know he favoured green socks and a red vest, items which remain in the costume collection at Kensington Palace today. Tiny in size for this minuscule king,the vest has no front fastenings. It must have been pinned, or even sewn up, each time he wore it. Neither would have been uncommon in an age before zips.
Meanwhile, sixteenth-, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century female dress quite simply precluded wearing knickers. A huge hooped skirt meant that drawers were impractical if you needed to use the toilet without completely undressing. So ladies went commando, and squatted over a chamber pot when required. This meant that toilets were everywhere and nowhere. The bedchamber, an ante-room, even the street: all were potential places to go. (One could even use a chamber pot in bed, though it was more comfortable if it was ‘warmed, and the rim covered with flannel’.)
With the slimmer, looser, less cumbersome fashions of the Jane Austen or Regency period, though, women began to adopt the male fashion for wearing protective drawers beneath their lighter, diaphanous and potentially more revealing skirts. The earliest knickers had long legs, but even so were considered terribly racy. Lady Chesterfield, writing to her daughter around 1850, described a youth spent wearing ‘skirts that ended one inch above my ankles’, revealing the ‘frilled edges of those comfortable garments which we have borrowed from the other sex, and which all of us wear but none of us talk about’.
Despite their initially saucy reputation, drawers quickly went mainstream. Even Queen Victoria’s ladies-in-waiting got swept up in the craze. Here’s the Honourable Eleanor Stanley in 1859, describing how the Duchess of Manchester, climbing over a gate,
caught a hoop of her cage in it and went regularly head over heels … the other ladies hardly knew whether to be thankful or not that a part of her underclothing consisted in a pair of scarlet tartan knickerbockers which were revealed to the view of all the world in general.
Her use of the word ‘cage’ for the crinoline is particularly striking, because these stiff hooped petticoats devised from steel, string or wood literally encaged women in the sense thatthey restricted free movement. We all need to say thanks to the women who campaigned to end the nonsense of muffling ladies up in voluminous, unwieldy
Not surprisingly, such body servants brushing their bosses in their bedchambers also became close friends. There was a moving scene after Lucius Cary, 1st Viscount Falkland, was killed in battle in 1643. Only his chamberlain could identify his master’s corpse upon the field: ‘they could not find his Lordship’s body; it was stripped and trod-upon and mangled, so there was one that waited upon him in his chamber would undertake to know it from all other bodies, by a certain Mole his lordship had in his Neck, and by that mark did find it’.
On the other hand, the foppish ‘Macaronis’ of the 1780s crept into an unhealthy dependency on their personal servants, seeming to be ‘absolutely incapable of motion, till they have been wound up by their valets … if the valet happens to be out of the way, the master must remain helpless and sprawling in bed, like a turtle on its back upon the kitchen table’.
Our medieval knight wouldn’t have worn underpants as we know them today. Men wrapped the long tail of their shirts between their legs, or else wore something rather like a loose linen nappy. Early drawers begin to appear in the seventeenth century: long silk shorts with a slit in the back to facilitate a trip to the toilet. By the later 1660s, Charles II was wearing silk undershorts. William III, next king but one, had an almost garish taste in underwear. We know he favoured green socks and a red vest, items which remain in the costume collection at Kensington Palace today. Tiny in size for this minuscule king,the vest has no front fastenings. It must have been pinned, or even sewn up, each time he wore it. Neither would have been uncommon in an age before zips.
Meanwhile, sixteenth-, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century female dress quite simply precluded wearing knickers. A huge hooped skirt meant that drawers were impractical if you needed to use the toilet without completely undressing. So ladies went commando, and squatted over a chamber pot when required. This meant that toilets were everywhere and nowhere. The bedchamber, an ante-room, even the street: all were potential places to go. (One could even use a chamber pot in bed, though it was more comfortable if it was ‘warmed, and the rim covered with flannel’.)
With the slimmer, looser, less cumbersome fashions of the Jane Austen or Regency period, though, women began to adopt the male fashion for wearing protective drawers beneath their lighter, diaphanous and potentially more revealing skirts. The earliest knickers had long legs, but even so were considered terribly racy. Lady Chesterfield, writing to her daughter around 1850, described a youth spent wearing ‘skirts that ended one inch above my ankles’, revealing the ‘frilled edges of those comfortable garments which we have borrowed from the other sex, and which all of us wear but none of us talk about’.
Despite their initially saucy reputation, drawers quickly went mainstream. Even Queen Victoria’s ladies-in-waiting got swept up in the craze. Here’s the Honourable Eleanor Stanley in 1859, describing how the Duchess of Manchester, climbing over a gate,
caught a hoop of her cage in it and went regularly head over heels … the other ladies hardly knew whether to be thankful or not that a part of her underclothing consisted in a pair of scarlet tartan knickerbockers which were revealed to the view of all the world in general.
Her use of the word ‘cage’ for the crinoline is particularly striking, because these stiff hooped petticoats devised from steel, string or wood literally encaged women in the sense thatthey restricted free movement. We all need to say thanks to the women who campaigned to end the nonsense of muffling ladies up in voluminous, unwieldy
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