A Tudor Suit - Round Hose for an Apprentice

Recently, I completed a full suit of clothes for a Tudor apprentice. That is to say, I made the doublet, hose and pourpoint for a young man portraying an apprentice to a sword school at Kentwell Hall in Long Melford, Suffolk.

Every year, Kentwell Hall put on an extended living history display from the Tudor period - a different original year is re-enacted each time and this time it was 1588. My customer, Sam, is new to Kentwell and, in fact, new to re-enacting so he had no suitable clothing at all when he was accepted by the Kentwell organising team. He decided that he needed to buy most of the items required and could make a few simple things himself. I was asked to make his doublet and hose (breeches) for the outfit. This was going to be interesting as I had only made a few 16th century items for family and not for the kind of close scrutiny you get in a living history environment like Kentwell Hall!

The Research

First came the question of rank - Sam’s not mine! As an apprentice, he would be from a working family; the concept of working class and middle class did not yet exist but there were social strata then, just like now. There were poor/homeless people with limited means of support and no hope of bettering themselves. They were lucky if the parish council or alms houses gave them food and shelter instead of driving them off for another parish to look after. No apprentice ever came from that background.

Then there were the labourers and manual trade workers - many of whom were apprenticed and would have worn simple clothes made to last as long as possible and only replaced when necessary. They would have received little or no pay other than bed and board in the master’s house and free training in the trade in exchange for very hard work and long hours.

Then again there were the skilled tradesmen - clockmakers, jewelers, tailors, merchants and so on. Apprentices to these trades came from “well to do” families living in modest houses and would have had new clothing every six months which would have been worn almost every day until replaced six months later. There are written records of such six monthly replacements of clothing for household servants, soldiers and others “in service” so it is likely that families did the same for themselves. You could well imagine such an apprentice starting his new career with a new set of clothes, well made and sturdy but not fancy or made from luxurious fabric. In addition, there are records that many such apprentices were given new clothing regularly as part of the apprenticeship agreement, for example on Lady Day.

More wealthy merchants, who wore clothes bordering on those of gentry, would have sent their sons to a different family to be fostered and learn how to run large businesses rather than to an apprenticeship, think of the young man that Thomas Cromwell fosters and gives his name, Richard Cromwell, in the book Wolf Hall.

So where would the sword school at Kentwell Hall fit into this range of options. The other people on this station are well dressed and wear wool and silk. They offer to train the sons of gentry-folk to use a sword properly but they themselves are not gentry. I decided that “skilled tradesman” was probably the right look. Good well made clothes with a bit of interest value but nothing showy or flash - no silk but a little more colour than the normally recommended “sludgy grey, brown or cream”.

The second question was suitable styles. For this I gratefully consulted the really useful guides put out each year by the Kentwell Hall organising team. These guides are adjusted to suit the specific year being portrayed so that each costume maker does not have to do the same level of research that the Kentwell team do. This time it was simple doublets, with hose (breeches) ending above the knee and very baggy around the legs. The guides also have pattern and sewing instructions but these are aimed at the novice or near novice costume maker and rely on draping the patterns on the actual body - not a thing I could do since Sam lives on the south coast of England and I live in Edinburgh! We managed one fitting by proxy; my wonderful son took the toiles to an event both he and Sam were at and came back with lots of photos and detailed fitting errors. Yes, I did offer him a post as an assistant tailor but since he wanted paying, it was not to be.

With all this information, Sam’s measurements and some good ideas, I offered him a choice of available and affordable fabrics and he chose madder red with black fleck for the hose and mustard yellow with a black fleck for the doublet. I think these colours go really well together.

Newly arrived fabric

Doublet pieces cut out

Round Hose

In this post, I will concentrate on the hose design and production. In the next post I will look at the doublet in more detail, touching in passing on the pourpoint.

In the past I have made 17th century soldier’s breeches, 16th century Venetians and Viking nether hose. All of these have two things in common - they come down below the wearer’s knee and the don’t have cod pieces or cod flaps. The specific instruction for 1588, and you can see this if you look at paintings of the time, is for the hose to be very loose around the thigh, to end above the knee on the thigh and have a cod flap. That length allows very little in the way of error - too short and you get hot-pants; too long and you get standard breeches.

I looked through my pattern books and finally found just the thing. In “Clothes of the Common People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England: A User Manual” by Stuart Peachy there is a pattern for “Round Hose”, a 1580’s style of hose that bags out above the knee and is then caught in on a knee band. The key difference between these and other styles is lots of tiny darts that pull the the excess fabric in around the thigh at the bottom without any pleats that add bulk. They also need some encouragement to hold that round shape, so the lining is cut a little shorter than the outer, thus pulling the knee band up and forcing the outer fabric out. These are not the flashy Pluderhose or padded paned hose of the wealthy from a decade earlier. They are much simpler and consistent with an apprentice of the time.

I had an image in my mind, but unfortunately the pattern in the book was a little generous in its dimensions, and even scaled to Sam’s slender figure they were enormous! Except in one crucial aspect - the inner thigh length was tiny, pulling the toile inside leg up very close to the crotch. In the photos below, the cod flap has been pulled up too high at the front due to all the extra fabric in the pattern, making it look a bit like a nappy, but you can see the fit is not right at all. That was after I took a lot of the length between waist and crotch out from the pattern already but you can see that there is too much length there still and not enough in the inside leg.

Adjusting the Fit

There was only one opportunity for a fitting on the breeches. Now I had to make them for real. There is limited time between Kentwell Hall announcing the year that they will be re-enacting and the actual event. Not many times during that period would Sam and I be in the same place. So I had to use the information from this fitting to adjust the pattern and make the final hose.

There are not many style options on these hose, the only ones that I made were to make the cod flap smaller than the toile version and to use a black tape binding on the hose fronts, rather than turn in and stitch the lining to the outer. This last choice was to limit bulk as the original pattern has a clever cod flap “launching” section, which came with no instructions on use. You can see it at points A and B on the pattern above. The way I chose to use it required the fabric to fold over itself twice and this would have been very bulky with a traditional edging.

Having made that choice, I bound the flap in black too to match the front edges. The photo below shows the hose complete except for the front edge binding and you can see how the cod flap joins on to the spur of fabric from the back panel (A on the pattern) and is edged with the spur of fabric from the front panel (B on the pattern). You can also see the darts by the knee that give them the name “round hose”. The second photo shows the front and cod flap once the binding is on. Quite neat and smart and gives a strong joining point for the flap.

Round hose nearly complete

Round hose and cod flap

Here are the completed hose in action. You can see that I over-compensated in the inside leg length and not quite enough on the body length, since the crotch is a little low. Next time I would also shorten the lining even more to pull up the outer wool and make it bag out more. On the whole, though, I am very happy with the result and so is Sam (secretly I don’t think he fancied the hot-pant version!)

The Cod Flap

A final word on the flap. The shape of the two sides of this came from a combination of sources - the Kentwell maker notes being one. However the stiffening and attachment were less well described in the sources. So this version is made from two layers of tailors canvas, cut with the curve shape of the outer layer and pad stitched together with a slight curve as well. This was attached to the outer wool around the edges and then the lining was applied. It was all bound with the black twill tape and seems to hold its shape well while still being soft enough to move and flex as the wearer moves.

Next week I will look at the construction of the doublet, which has tailored shoulders, hand made buttonholes and a lacing strip to hold the hose up when not wearing the pourpoint.