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Nice hat.

thedress

An altar covering in a little parish church in Herefordshire may originally have been a dress worn by Elizabeth I. This is important because no other dress of hers exists.

Or, it probably does, but one hasn’t turned up yet. Clothes (particularly fancy ones) were so expensive in Tudor times that they were frequently re-purposed. And Cromwell sold off all the royal togs in the early 17th C, so before that date we’ve got this one dress (maybe) and Henry VIII’s hat.

Someone researching something totally else ran across the thing and realized it was made of cloth of silver. In Tudor times, only the monarch and immediate fambly could wear cloth of silver. Other stuff was embroidered on it afterwards (one embroidered bear exactly matches one that appeared in a picture book in 1594).

My tame historians are very excited about this.

The best article I found was this one in the Telegraph, but their articles sometimes get stuck behind the paywall. If that happens, here it is in the Mail (the article is old; I think this has drifted to the top of the news because the dress is about to go on display at Hampton Court after extensive refurb).

January 9, 2017 — 9:23 pm
Comments: 12