Full text of DOI:10.1111/1468-0289.00174

Economic History Review, LIII, 4 (2000), pp. 677–705
The cost of apparel in seventeenth-
century England, and the accuracy
of Gregory King1
By MARGARET SPUFFORD
n 1980, Schuurman wrote in his introduction to a volume on probate
I
inventories—which to him, rather startlingly, were a ‘new source’—
that historians had given unequal attention to the four basic needs of the
human species, procreation, nutrition, shelter, and clothing.2 This was,
and still is, undoubtedly true. Demographers have dealt exhaustively with
‘procreation’; specialists in vernacular architecture have done a great deal
on ‘shelter’ in England; ‘nutrition’ has at last received some attention;3
but ‘clothing’ has been something of a Cinderella in seventeenth-century
history. It has been neglected for a variety of reasons, the most significant
of which is that there has not been a source for the clothing of ‘ordinary
people’, ‘the common sort’ below the level of gentry. Probate inventories,
which so frequently give a sum for ‘his clothing and money in his purse’
together, let us down here. Values for clothes alone in inventories, never
mind specifications and prices of individual garments, do exist, but are
very rare.4 They are also, of course, the resale values of used clothes.
Wills are a much better source, but are slow to mine, and are useless
for pricing since they give no values.
All in all, ‘costume history’ is at present only a historical handmaid
among mainline historians. However, the situation has started to change
dramatically. Lemire’s work on the cotton trade and the consumer,
followed by her wider study of dress, culture, and commerce, reflects on
the state of the clothing trade after 1660.5 Shammas meditated on pre-
industrial consumption, including that of clothing, in 1990, and has
since written a provocative article on the decline of textile prices before
industrialization, a fall which ought to have affected the price of clothes.6
Moreover, Styles is preparing a major monograph on clothing which will,
again, be focused on the period after 1660. Things are looking up and
we can begin to hope for the integration of clothing history into mainline
1 I thank the Pasold Fund for a grant to photocopy these documents, and the Leverhulme Trust
for a generous grant to work on them. Of my research assistants constructing the database, I
thank Mrs Nesta Evans, in particular for her assiduity, and Mrs Sue Stearn, especially for her
computing skills.
2 Van der Woude and Schuurman, eds., ‘Probate inventories’.
3 See Dyer, Standards of living, in particular ch. 6 on the peasantry, where he considers clothing,
drawing his material from maintenance agreements.
4 Weatherill, ‘Consumer behaviour’, p. 297.
5 Lemire, Fashion’s favourite; idem, Dress, culture and commerce.
6 Shammas, Pre-industrial consumer; idem, ‘Decline of textile prices’.
Economic History Society 2000. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden,
MA 02148, USA.

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history. Two difficulties remain. Few costume historians read this journal,
and few economic historians read Costume. The cultural divide continues.
A greater problem is presented by the relative paucity of source material
before 1660. This article attempts to address the importance of a ‘new’
source, the probate accounts, to see whether they will fill this near-
vacuum of information on the clothing of non-noble, non-gentle groups
in society.
The subject matters. ‘Clothing’ in Polynesia might, perhaps, have only
a symbolic value, connected with sexuality, for large portions of the year.
But in north-western and continental Europe clothes are vitally important
to survival. The simple exercise of keeping warm is indeed one of the
basic needs of the human species. We need to know how ‘ordinary
people’ in the past achieved this, and what proportion of the domestic
budget of families was spent on this exercise of keeping warm, and
achieving a reasonable degree of personal comfort. The definition of
‘comfort’ versus ‘necessity’ is difficult. For example, detailed accounts of
Overseers of the Poor reveal the provision of two shirts and two shifts.
So the need to change the garments next to the skin was not regarded
as a luxury: basic cleanliness was a need.
For the social levels below the gentry, those people who do not have
their portraits painted, there is just one late-seventeenth-century indicator.
In 1688, Gregory King drew up a table he called the ‘Annual consump-
tion of apparell’, which has been fully discussed by Harte.7 It lays out
the annual new additions to the stock of clothing in the country. (We
can never know, of course, how many items of old clothing people had.
If any of us listed additions to our wardrobes, this year, we would be
assuming a ‘core’ of clothes we already have, which we would not state.)
We do not know much of King’s motivation for compiling this table,
or the methods he used to do so. From some of the other material we
have on his life, we know he was a polymath, obsessed by figures,
eclectic, and interested in almost everything, from the speed of men and
horses running, to the ‘number of People in the World anno 1695’, and
the total amounts of gold and silver coined in 1659-88. He drew on his
own observations for his vast generalizations. He had spent two and a
half years working in the parish of Eccleshall in Staffordshire as a young
man. Every day, he rode past the hovels of the very poor on the commons,
and it is impossible to believe this first-hand experience of the poorest
rural parish we yet know of in the 1660s did not influence his calculations
in 1688 of the 300,000 ‘Day Labourers and Outservants’ in rural employ-
ment, who decreased the wealth of the kingdom.8 Among his papers in
the Public Record Office, next to ‘Considerations for a scheme to Raysing
3 millions on Woollen Manufactures’ is an estimate for a fine calico
gown for Mrs King.9 It is a very grand gown since it is to be embroidered
with 230 ‘great flowers’ at 2d. each, and 230 small ones at three farthings
7 Harte, ‘Economics of clothing’, pp. 277-96.
8 Spufford, Poverty portrayed, pp. 7-8, 16, 18-19.
9 PRO, T64/302. The items in this bundle are not numbered.
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each, by a ‘Mrs Mince’. She will embroider at the rate of 13 flowers a
day and will take 160 days, or 183 if she takes Sundays off. Six months’
work was to cost the King family over £4, so it was well worth doing
the sum. King even sketched the flowers. We know his own budget for
annual household expenditure, with a total of £10 for clothes allotted to
his wife.10 He was, therefore, certainly aware of the extravagance involved.
We also know that he undertook more practical and extensive purchases.
He spent £10 in the 1690s at the shop of Ralph Minors, a mercer of
Lichfield.11 Lichfield was King’s home city. We do not yet know much
about those who, in the domestic environment, did the shopping for
clothes and fabrics, but the debt lists of petty chapmen in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries show that the purchases of fabric and ready-
made clothes in the sixteenth century were by no means confined to
women. We are pinning a nineteenth- or twentieth-century stereotype
onto the past if we assume the purchase of clothing was a feminine
responsibility. All but one of the customers of William Davis, who ran a
shop in Buckinghamshire in 1588, were men, as were three-quarters of
the customers of Richard Trendall in Norfolk in 1595, and half those of
James Pilkinton of Lincolnshire in 1635.12 So King’s purchases in Lich-
field were by no means unusual. We also know King was an acute
observer, heavily influenced by his environment, so it is reasonable to
assume that prices in Lichfield, the city where he grew up and which he
visited regularly, and in metropolitan London, where he lived, will have
had a great influence on his thinking and the figures he produced
for clothing.
King’s table of 1688 listed types of garment in various groups (which
Harte numbered 1-44; see below, tables 4 and 5) and estimated the total
quantities and values of each type. He also estimated the value of a
single item of a type. For instance, he estimated that 12 million pairs of
new shoes were sold in 1688, with a total value of £1 million. The value
of each pair was 1s. 8d. In total, 77 million items of apparel are recorded
in his table, worth a total of £10,992,500. We are therefore not talking
about an unimportant or inconsiderable amount of money. Even the
value of King’s 3 million hats was put at £387,000. In another of his
exhaustive and exhausting studies, King estimated that food cost an
‘average’ person 51 per cent of his annual income of £7, whereas
clothing cost him 25 per cent, one-half and one-quarter of his income
respectively.13 Clothing clearly loomed large among the expenses of living.
Indeed, Weatherill has stated, on the basis of her examination of house-
hold account books, King’s own seventeenth-century domestic budget,
and a set of calculations of expenditure, that clothing was ‘the second
10 Harte, ‘Economics of clothing’, tab. I, p. 283.
11 I am greatly indebted to Dr Anne Tarver who gave me this information from Ralph Minors’
account books (Lambeth Palace Library, 1704, Ff2, inside cover) which she is preparing for
publication, and to Nesta Evans who put me in contact with her.
12 Spufford, Great reclothing, pp. 69, 72-3, 76.
13 Harte, ‘Economics of clothing’, p. 291.
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largest expenditure after food and food production’.14 This makes it all
the more unfortunate that there were no figures for the expense of
clothing a family available to Woodward for his Men at work.15
The trouble with Gregory King’s figures for clothing is that thus far it
has been impossible to check them, for lack of a source to put against
them. For instance, all Weatherill’s sources come from a later period.
Now, however, we have a source.
I
The third and last document in the probate series, which has been little
known until now, is the probate account. The testamentary series of
documents ought to run as follows: will (or letters of administration);
probate inventory; probate account. The surviving accounts are very rare
compared with wills or inventories, but Peter Spufford has recently
finished an index to over 30,000 accounts, excluding those in the Preroga-
tive Court of Canterbury.16 The largest numbers to survive are in Lin-
colnshire and Kent. Each of the accounts opens with the ‘charge’ value,
which was the same sum of the value of movable goods which had
belonged to the dead person as that found at the foot of the probate
inventory. They can therefore be readily comprehended, because we have
all become familiar with the totals at the foot of probate inventories, and
the sort of economic status they indicate. The important thing about the
probate accounts, in the context of clothing, is that where there were
minor children, the executor, or most likely the executrix (since normally
the widow was executrix) ran the account on until the children were put
out to service, apprenticed, or came of age. Her expenditure on the
children in that year, or those years, is duly listed, often in great detail.
Among the expenses are new clothes she bought for the child, or
materials, thread, and other costs involved in making up a garment for
the child, such as tailoring.17 Unfortunately, the expenditure is not broken
up annually, nor is there any indication of the clothes in the child’s
wardrobe at the opening of the account, so it is impossible to work out
exactly how long clothes lasted. Even so, the accounts give us more
information than ever before. Accounts which contained information on
children’s clothing were duly flagged in Peter Spufford’s index of accounts
(as were items such as lists of debts, the costs of medicines for a dying
14 Weatherill, ‘Consumer behaviour’, pp. 298, 299, 309.
15 Woodward, Men at work, ch. 7 and app. 2.4, p. 282, on the cost of feeding a family in 1540-
1699. Boulton, ‘Standard of living in London’, suffers from the same lack. Woodward’s book is in
part a scrupulous examination of the finances of labourers and building craftsmen, and of the
household budgets of these people, including the cost of feeding their children. These men were at
times hard put to it to feed their families, never mind clothe them.
16 Spufford, Probate accounts.
17 It is important to emphasize that the accounts record the retail purchase price of new clothing,
or the fabric used, and the cost of making up, if the garments were made away from home. When
a value for a garment was totally out of line with the other values for the same garment, the out-
of-line value has been discarded, in case it represents a value for ‘making over’ the garment from
someone else. Such entries were not at all common. The rare entries for specific garments in probate
inventories, on the other hand, record the value of used, or second-hand clothing.
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testator, rents owing, and so on), and we have done further work on
these documents.18
Table 1. Expenses of orphaned children
No. of children
%
Type of expenditure
Clothes only
Board and clothes
Board, schooling, and clothes
Schooling and clothes
748
687
116
47
43
7
47
3
Total
1,598
100
Source: probate accounts
In the first instance, this work has shown Weatherill to be correct:
expenditure on clothing, in the maintenance of children, was indeed the
second largest item, after food, in their upkeep. We looked at the sums
spent on 1,598 children from 780 families who had lost at least one
parent. The expense of board and lodging was not put down at all for 795,
or almost exactly half, of these children, as table 1 shows. Presumably, the
executrix, who was normally their mother, did not claim these expenses.
She did, however, put down the expense of clothing them. All of the
expenditure claimed on these children at home was on their clothes. The
other half of the children, for whom a note was made of the expense of
board and lodging, or ‘tabling and diet’ as it was frequently called, had
widely differing levels of expenditure recorded for them, on both board
and clothing. Most of them had relatively tiny sums spent on their
clothing, but for 300 of these children at least 10 per cent of the
expenditure was on clothes, as figure 1 shows. At least 20 per cent of
the expenditure on 185 of these children was on their clothes, while
more than half the expenditure was on the clothes of at least 50 of them.
Sadly, only 10 per cent, or 163 of all these 1,598 children, had sums
spent on their education. The picture we already have of an abrupt
cessation in the schooling of orphaned children is thus maintained.19 Yet
despite this immediate and obvious economy, new clothes were purchased
in some quantity for all children lodged with their mothers, and half of
those who were boarded out. Even the rest were not unfamiliar with the
feel and experience of a new garment.20 The wide range of sums spent
on these children’s clothes bears out the variations on spending shown
18 There were 23 accounts in the database with no charge values. Some other accounts had no
precise date given. Yet another small group had values for ‘suits’ of clothes, but not for individual
items. These were suitable for some purposes, but not others. The existence of these groups explains
the fluctuating totals of accounts in various figures and references. However, the groups are too
small to invalidate any conclusion.
19 See the case of Arise Evans (and its discussion) and of Thomas Chubb, Josiah Langdale,
William Crouch, Benjamin Bangs, and William Edmundson in Spufford, ‘First steps in literacy’,
pp. 420-2, 425, 428-9. They were all precipitated down the social ladder on the deaths of their
fathers. It was usual to have to leave school.
20 The charge values (inventory totals) of the dead parents of these children are examined below,
pp. 689, 690.
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2 0 0 0 S o c i e t y H i s t o r y E c o n o m i c
f f u o p s r d t a r e m a r g
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the cost of apparel in seventeenth-century england 683
in King’s calculations from the lowest income groups spending ‘almost
£3’ in a year on their families to the highest, ‘about £1000’.21 The
barefoot child dressed solely in second-hand clothes and rags came from
the non-inventoried section of the population. As noted above, King
based many of his observations on real life, and was well acquainted with
an exceedingly poor area, Eccleshall in Staffordshire.22 Even after that
experience, he reckoned that only one in 40 boys and one in 30 girls
went barefoot. We know that John Croft, an unmarried day labourer,
who was the poorest inventoried man in seventeenth-century Eccleshall,
with goods worth in all just over £2, thought of his shoes as precious.
He left all his own clothes, two coats, a waistcoat, and a pair of breeches
to a male cousin, and his shoes to a female cousin. The non-inventoried
section of the population may well have included building labourers.
Woodward writes that in sixteenth-century Worcester the probate records
of building workers amounted to only 2.1 per cent of the total body of
records, while only 1.0 per cent of inventories sampled in a national
survey for the period 1675 to 1725 were for labourers.23 Perhaps the
children of building workers at the bottom end of the spectrum were
among that section of the population which did go barefoot.24 But King
had had ample opportunity, in this very poor area, to base his calculations
of the proportion of barefoot children on observed facts.
So what were these accounts like? That of John Fleetwood of Wiltshire,
presented in 1674, was unusual. The expenses, which are usually listed
jumbled together, had been roughly sorted into separate categories: the
funeral expenses, bread, cheese and cake; 2s. 6d. for writing the inventory
and supplying the appraisers with ale; the expenses of proving the will;
rent; house expenses including masonry repairs and re-thatching; and the
expenses of his two little daughters Margaret and Joan. The latter ran
for nine years, from 1665. Margaret had been apprenticed to one Hugh
Godwin, in Bristol, and her schooling, clothes, and even pocket money
had been paid to her both before, and surprisingly, after, the apprentice-
ship. The apprenticeship itself cost £4 2s. 6d. She had also had ‘delivered
to her when she went to Bristoll in money 10/-’ and further sums were
sent to her, so she was not left penniless. £1 was spent on ‘her aparill
when she went to her Master’. Before the apprenticeship, the jumble of
entries included:
It. pd for a pair of shews
It. pd for Schooling
2s. 6d.
1s.
2s. 6d.
3s.
8s. 4d.
1s.
It. pd for Making a Westcoate
It. pd for Coyfes aprons & sleeves
It. pd for A Hatt
It. pd for a pair of stockings
21 Discussed by Harte, ‘Economics of clothing’, pp. 291-3, tabs. 4, 5, and commentary.
22 See above, p. 678.
23 Woodward, Men at work, pp. 244-9, citing Dyer, City of Worcester, and Weatherill, Consumer
behaviour.
24 Woodward, Men at work, pp. 247-8.
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After the apprenticeship some of the entries were:
It. pd for a Westcoate Cloth
7s. 6d.
13s. 6d.
2s. 6d.
5s. 10d.
It. pd for a stuff peticoate & Maken
It. pd for an apron, neckcloth & 1 pr of shewes
It. pd for a sarge Westcoate triming & Makeing
So the entries ran on, through two pairs of ‘bodies’, more shoes, stockings,
and linen cloth, to a ‘goune & triming’ at as much as £2 16s. 2d. and
for ‘making her goune & peticoate, 9s., near the end of the list of her
expenses. The possession of a gown often seems to make superior claims.
Margaret’s sister Joan had not been apprenticed. Neither did she ever
get a gown. She was boarded out: the account for her included
£42 10s. 0d. ‘for 8 yeares and a halfes dyett at £5 per year’. In that time
she had had 12 pairs of shoes, at prices between 2s. 6d. for a pair ‘bought
in the Markett’ and 2s. 8d. Apart from the shoes, the account for Joan
is less detailed than that for her sister, dealing more in generalizations
including ‘for a shewte of Apparill £2’ and ‘for a garment 2s. 2d.’,
although some entries were more specific such as ‘for a Westcoate Cloth
4s. 9d.’ ‘for Making the Westcoate 1s.’ and ‘for triming of itt 1s.’. There
were also 2 yards of red cloth costing 4s. 9d., 5d. spent on lace to go
with it, and two petticoats at 8s. each. Joan, like her sister, had 1s. spent
on her schooling, and her brief tuition was not wasted for she could
read, or she would not have had a Bible bought for her at 5s. 6d. She,
too, had pocket money to spend. Over the page, however, precisely and
unemotionally conveyed in the dry listings of the accounts, is detailed
‘The Accompt of Wt Wase Layd out for Jone Fleetwood in her sickness
and at her funerall the 22 of October 1674’.25 The entries include:
It. pd. the Apothycary for fisick
14s. 4d.
£1 10s.
£1 15s.
4s. 10d.
It. pd. to Wm. Stephens for Wine for her funerall
It. pd. to Joseph Willis for Cake
It. pd. to Jonathan Head for Gloves
It. pd. to ye Widd. Arnotte for attendance in her sicknesse 1s. 3d.
It. pd. ye sexton
4s. 4d.
7s.
1s.
4s. 6d.
It. pd. John Lealy for ye Coffin
It. pd. for ye hearscloth
It. pd. to Thos. Naish for a horse to Bristoll and ye
Messenger [to fetch her sister?]
It. pd. to Mr King for dyett & horsemeate for her
Relacions which came to Her funerall
It. pd. to Wm Head for 2 gravestones for her
It. pd. Thos. Brookes for beare for ye funerall
12s. 11d.
?
10s. 6d.
So the shadow of Joan Fleetwood slips away from us, and still all that
we really know of her is that she had, and could probably read, the Bible
and liked red cloth decorated with cheap lace, and shoes which were
25 The expenses of proving her will at Sarum were listed, so she was 18 years old.
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definitely expensive.26 Judging from the number of people paid to sit
with her, she also took a long time to die.27 Her relatives cared enough
about her to come to her funeral. She had the honour, which was still
unusual in the 1670s, of gravestones at her head and feet. Apart from
this document, and these stones—if they survive—this girl’s existence is
marked only by an entry in a baptismal register, another in a burial
register, and a will. But the source is a very rich one. In many ways, it
is much better to have only one document like this.28 The temptation of
itemized lists of this type, and indeed the obligation, is to produce at
least elementary statistics that will give the reader an idea of the ‘normal’
as against the ‘exceptional’, which may have been stumbled on by
mistake.29 The inevitable problem, though, is that once the historian has
viable statistics and adequate samples, he or she also tends to lose all
sense of individual people.
II
The format for computer analysis of the information on clothing in these
probate accounts took a long time to devise, but at last we have results
for all record offices except Lichfield and Preston. Unfortunately, these
latter two supply fewer than 20 more examples. Altogether, 812 of the
accounts in the database contained the exact prices of 8,974 garments
purchased or made for minors between 1573 and 1701.30 Even in the
absence of King’s estimated millions of garments, this is nevertheless a
very tolerable sample. Unfortunately, though, the survival of documents
is geographically highly uneven, with single examples only for the counties
of Gloucestershire, Shropshire, and Suffolk. Only Kent, which has 495
accounts, is adequately represented: West Sussex with 73 and Lincolnshire
with 63 are second and third. Some questions are therefore unanswerable.
For instance, it will never be possible to assess whether there was any
pronounced regional variation in prices of clothing. Even Lincolnshire,
where the accounts were more detailed on clothing than those of the
Archdeaconry of Chichester, did not produce enough examples for a
satisfactory regional comparison to be made with Kent.
As figure 2 shows, probate accounts generally started to survive from
the 1570s, and became much more common in the 1620s.31 They peaked
in the 1630s, but then disappeared almost entirely in the 1650s. However,
26 For the price of shoes, see below, p. 698.
27 Erickson has investigated the costs of nursing and care given to seventeenth-century children,
and found there is no difference in the amounts spent on boys and on girls: Erickson, Women and
property, p. 50.
28 The amount that can be done with a single probate account is illustrated by Edwards, ‘Farm
and family’.
29 The volume of work done on British probate inventories is illustrated by the publication, as
long ago as 1983, of Overton, Bibliography. His own substantial work since then has continued to
be based on them. In due course, the probate accounts should yield the same volume of results.
30 Information on nearly 30,000 other garments in these same accounts was discarded when it
was lumped together, or otherwise imprecise.
31 Only accounts with clothing references from the 801 records used so far, covering 1,598
children, have been graphed.
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Figure 2. Number of probate accounts by year, 1560-1708
Note: All record offices except Lichfield and Preston; total number of accounts = 801

the cost of apparel in seventeenth-century england 687
they reappeared from the Restoration until the uninspiringly titled ‘Act
for the Reviveing and Continuance of severall Acts of Parlyment’ under-
mined a large part of their function in the 1680s.32 Even so, they were
never as numerous in this latter period as they had been in the 1630s.
King’s table of 1688 came, therefore, at the end of a period of renewed
accounting after 1660. To compare his values for specific items of
clothing, the median and average values of the same items have been
calculated from the set of accounts dating from the 1660s to the early
eighteenth century only, although the total numbers of garments are for
the whole period, not just 1660 onwards.
Figure 3. Textile price index, 1550-1700
Source: Phelps Brown and Hopkins, ‘Seven centuries’, app. c., textile col., pp. 51–4
The inflation in textile prices, which, as figure 3 shows, had been
nearly continuous from the 1570s until the 1670s, warns against compar-
ing King’s values of 1688 with the prices per item of clothing over the
whole period for which we have analysed accounts. Indeed, comparing
the period before 1660 with the years 1660-1700 the price of a basic
outfit of clothes for a boy and a girl rose by 56 per cent and 13 per
cent respectively, as table 2 shows.33 The decision to compare only the
prices from the period 1660-1700 with King’s seems entirely justified.
The ‘new’ source of the probate accounts provides far more individual
32 Spufford, ‘Long term rural credit’.
33 The difference between the sexes is probably accounted for by the fact that the boy under
consideration has been given a coat, doublet, and breeches in his imaginary wardrobe, while the girl
has only a waistcoat and petticoat for outer wear. It is possible that before the civil war a boy
normally had only a coat and breeches, rather than three garments.
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Table 2. Increase in price of an outfit over time (all counties)
Average price
% increase
Median price
% increase Number in
sample
early
s. d.
latea
s. d.
early
s. d.
latea
s. d.
early latea
Boy’s outfit
Hat
Coat
2
6
2
4
3 11
1
1
5
5
1
7
3
10
3
8
5 11
2
2
8
7
7
2
51.7
64.9
72.0
78.2
51.1
20.0
94.1
2
4
1 11
3
4
1
1
3
6
2
8
2 11
6 11
4
1
2
6
9
11.1
94.4
52.2
84.1
14.6
12.5
87.5
124
50
140
91
40
186
35
16
30
10
18
57
Shirt
Jerkin/doublet
Breeches
Stockings
Shoes
8
0
4
4
7
6
6
8
5
0
9
329 103
Total
£1 2
6
£1 16
8
63.0
19
0
£1 9
6
55.3
960 269
Girl’s outfit
Headwear
Waistcoat
Shift/smock
Petticoat
Stockings
Shoes
1
3
2
8
1
1
2
8
1
1
1
1
1
4
2
5 11
1
2
9
5
3
50.0
20.5
8.0
−26.8
23.1
115.4
0
3
1 10
6
1
1
7
5
1
3
1
6 11
1
2
1
6
5
85.7
2.4
−22.7
6.4
16.7
116.7
26
60
66
34
40
25
20
56
6
0
0
116
119
296 135
4
4
2
2
Total
17
2
18
0
4.9
14
4
16
3
13.4
683 310
Note: early = before 1660; late = 1660-1700
prices for textiles than were available to Shammas, who essentially
depended on 27 retailers’ accounts for the period 1578-1738. These
retailers provided her with an average of six mean prices for each fabric
for each of her periods. Not only do prices derived from probate accounts
survive in much greater numbers, as table 3 indicates, but they can also
be used in the knowledge that they were the actual purchase prices paid
by the customer. Strikingly, there was an extremely broad range of prices
for each fabric throughout the period. The choice of fineness, quality,
and cost for the customer was very wide indeed. The median of these
prices has been taken, rather than the mean, but even so this may still
not be representative where the number of examples is smaller. The
findings for the period after 1660 are therefore less certain, since there
are fewer accounts for those years, and, therefore, fewer examples. How-
ever, there is more certainty about the middle period, 1610-60. In those
years, the prices of lockeram, holland, fustian, frieze, russett, kersey, and
‘cloth’ all increased, some—including fustian and frieze—dramatically.34
After 1660, when fewer examples are available, the median prices for
34 This rise in prices seems completely contrary to the conclusions drawn by Shammas, ‘Decline
of textile prices’, pp. 483-4, which indicates a similar decline in the cost of clothes, and idem, Pre-
industrial consumer, tab. 4.8, p. 97. At this point, the difficulty can only be indicated. It would, of
course, be solved if the labour costs involved in making up rose, while the price of fabrics dropped.
However, my database of prices of material indicates that such a simple solution is not adequate,
because the range of prices for each material for which there is enough evidence is huge. The lowest
prices in the range dropped for some fabrics, but the highest prices did not, and the medians did
not necessarily change at all.
Economic History Society 2000

the cost of apparel in seventeenth-century england 689
lockeram, linen, stuff, kersey, and even ‘cloth’ all fell. The price of
holland, however, rose dramatically. Further work needs to be done to
resolve this conflict in the evidence, which can only be mentioned in
passing here.
For the purpose of comparison, the major drawback to the garments
itemized in the probate accounts is, of course, that they are all for
children. King’s average figures for the value of a particular item of
clothing included clothing for children: he reckoned that 27.6 per cent
of the population were under 10. Our information certainly covers this
group. Of King’s population, 38.3 per cent were under 15.35 His figures
have been corrected by Wrigley and Schofield, who estimate that only
31.3 per cent of the population were aged 14 or under.36 Even so, we
ought to be dealing with the type and price of the clothes of nearly one-
third of the population, if only we were not besieged by yet another
problem. Few children were put into service, or apprenticed, at under
15: Wrigley and Schofield suggest that ‘very few children left the parental
household before the age of 10’ and that only a few children left for
service between the ages of 10 and 15. Moreover, they indicate that
as many as two-thirds of adolescents aged between 15 and 19 lived
at home.37
Unfortunately, we are dealing, in these probate accounts, with children
who had lost at least one parent, and who are therefore likely to have
left home earlier than usual, to be placed out in service or apprenticed.
As a result, the data on expenditure on clothing from these accounts are
likely to be slanted towards younger children.38 It is difficult to estimate
the amount of skewing this produces. However, the probate accounts are
not those of paupers, who might commonly be out aged eight or younger,
and they also contain a few reassuring details about the clothing of young
adults: for example, a girl in Lincolnshire had a ‘Wedding Smock’ made
for her, costing as much as 10s. 10d. compared with the normal shilling
or two. So she was marriageable, and not all the ‘children’ for whom we
have clothing details were very young. But we nevertheless have to allow
for the fact that the clothing expenses in this source are mainly for
younger children and that the cost of each item of clothing will be lower
than King’s. These executrixes simply had to supply less material for a
child’s body than for an adult’s.
After listing these warnings, it comes as a relief to underline the very
positive and useful fact to the historian investigating the clothing of lower
social groups that the majority of this sample of accounts come from
families with a ‘charge’ value, or total probate inventory value of movable
35 Harte, ‘Economics of clothing’, pp. 286-7.
36 Wrigley and Schofield, Population history, pp. 217-18 and tab. A3.1, p. 528, estimates that 31%
of the population in 1686 was aged 14 or under.
37 Wrigley et al., English population history, p. 210; Wall, ‘Age of leaving home’, tab. 2, p. 190.
38 Sharpe, ‘Poor children as apprentices’, pp. 254-6. The same volume of Continuity and change
contains Mayhew, ‘Life-cycle service and the family unit’, which establishes that many orphans were
apprenticed within weeks of their parents’ death, and Ben-Amos, ‘Women apprentices’, which
demonstrates that in the seventeenth century, nearly two-thirds of female apprentices were orphans
(p. 233).
Economic History Society 2000

690
margaret spufford
Table 3. Price information by material type by time period (d. per yd.)
Canvas
Lockeram
Linen
Holland
Cotton
Fustian
Linsey woolsey
Up to 1610
Average
Median
Min. price 1 yard
Max. price 1 yard
Range
12.2
11.7
6.9
16.1
11.4
8.6
16.8
17.1
8.0
27.7
20.6
15.4
82.3
13.9
8.3
8.0
13.1
12.0
9.6
14.0
14.0
14.0
14.0
14.0
6
25.7
32.2
30.9
47.2
28.0
6.9 to 25.7 8.6 to 32.2 8.0 to 30.9 15.4 to 82.3 8.0 to 47.2 9.6 to 28.0
Instances
36
9
11
29
23
25
1610-1660
Average
Median
Min. price 1 yard
Max. price 1 yard
Range
14.2
9.4
1.7
13.0
12.9
11.1
17.1
12.0
12.1
8.0
24.0
22.3
17.1
32.0
15.8
13.3
12.0
24.7
23.8
20.0
4.0
10.2
10.2
4.4
39.1
14.2
72.0
16.0
1.7 to 39.1 11.1 to 17.1 8.0 to 14.2 17.1 to 32.0 12.0 to 24.7 4.0 to 72.0 4.4 to 16.0
Instances
13
9
10
6
4
15
2
After 1660
Average
Median
Min. price 1 yard
Max. price 1 yard
Range
13.7
13.7
13.7
13.7
13.7
1
14.0
11.1
10.3
22.3
12.6
11.3
5.3
45.2
38.0
20.6
89.1
16.0
16.0
16.0
16.0
16.0
1
14.8
20.0
4.5
N/A
22.0
20.0
10.3 to 22.3 5.3 to 22.0 20.6 to 89.1
4.5 to 20.0
3
Instances
8
31
19
All periods
Average
Median
Min. price 1 yard
Max. price 1 yard
Range
12.7
11.7
1.7
14.4
11.9
8.6
13.4
12.0
5.3
33.5
27.4
15.4
89.1
14.2
9.9
8.0
17.1
13.3
4.0
13.5
14.0
4.4
39.1
32.2
30.9
47.2
72.0
20.0
1.7 to 39.1 8.6 to 32.2 5.3 to 30.9 15.4 to 89.1 8.0 to 47.2 4.0 to 72.0 4.4 to 20.0
50 26 52 54 28 40 11
Instances
goods, of under £100 as figure 4 (p. 696) shows. Just under two-thirds
of the accounts, 519, were of people with goods in this range, and 353,
or 44 per cent, had movable goods worth less than £50. Very few indeed
of our accounts came from estates worth £300 or more, the normal
bottom of the range for inferior gentry. We are all familiar with median
or average values of movable goods, for gentry, yeomen, husbandmen
and labourers. The fullest survey based on 2,879 inventories from 14
counties39 shows the gentry with an average of over £300, the yeomanry
with an average of £207, a considerable drop to the husbandmen with
an average of £76, and a further drop to the labourers with an average
of just under £30. These probate accounts, therefore, come from the
bottom group of members of rural society with inventoried wealth: our
information shows what clothing was thought suitable for the sons and
daughters of yeomen, but preponderantly husbandmen, craftsmen, and
39 Cressy, Coming over, p. 121; idem, Literacy and the social order, pp. 137-40. See also the medians
of labourers’, husbandmen’s, and yeomen’s inventory values in Spufford, ‘Limitations of the probate
inventory’, pp. 155, 161, 165, and idem, Contrasting communities, pp. 37-41. Labourers’ goods in the
1660s had a median value of £15, husbandmen’s of £30, craftsmen’s of £40, and yeomen’s of £180.
Economic History Society 2000

the cost of apparel in seventeenth-century england 691
Table 3. (continued)
Friese
Bays/Baize
Russett
Stuff
Kersey
Broad cloth
Cloth
Up to 1610
Average
Median
Min. price 1 yard
Max. price 1 yard
Range
20.1
15.1
7.0
22.9
23.1
9.8
23.7
24.0
4.8
47.3
40.0
18.0
87.6
96.0
68.0
30.4
17.1
6.9
N/A
68.6
36.0
53.3
141.3
102.0
124.0
7.0 to 68.6 9.8 to 36.0 4.8 to 53.3
18.0 to 141.3 68.0 to 102.0 6.9 to 124.0
Instances
22
16
46
19
10
36
1610–1660
Average
Median
Min. price 1 yard
Max. price 1 yard
Range
42.0
30.2
24.0
72.0
36.0
36.0
28.0
44.0
32.1
31.2
18.7
46.0
42.6
43.7
28.0
55.0
47.3
42.5
24.0
80.0
90.0
90.0
90.0
90.0
90.0
1
35.6
28.6
12.5
81.6
24.0 to 72.0 28.0 to 44.0 18.7 to 46.0 28.0 to 55.0 4.0 to 80.0
12.5 to 81.6
17
Instances
7
2
5
4
18
After 1660
Average
Median
Min. price 1 yard
Max. price 1 yard
Range
21.7
17.3
12.3
21.6
25.1
12.8
32.0
32.4
25.6
14.2
66.2
66.0
5.0
32.1
17.8
6.0
N/A
N/A
40.0
110.0
140.0
128.0
12.3 to 40.0
4
12.8 to 32.0 14.2 to 110.0 5.0 to 140.0 6.0 to 128.0
Instances
7
12
6
21
All periods
Average
Median
Min. price 1 yard
Max. price 1 yard
Range
25.3
16.0
7.0
23.9
23.1
9.8
24.5
24.0
4.8
29.3
28.0
12.8
55.0
43.7
39.3
14.2
80.2
84.0
5.0
32.1
24.0
6.0
72.0
44.0
53.3
141.3
140.0
128.0
7.0 to 72.0 9.8 to 44.0 4.8 to 53.3 12.8 to 55.0 14.2 to 141.3 5.0 to 140.0 6.0 to 128.0
29 22 51 11 49 17 74
Instances
Source: probate accounts
labourers. It is immediately apparent that, despite their relative poverty,
these children did not live just in second-hand clothes and rags. This is
information which has, until now, been completely inaccessible and unob-
tainable.40
III
It proved possible to organize the mass of detail from probate accounts
on seventeenth-century clothing in the way in which King had analysed
the value and price of clothing in 1688, and thus check, to some extent,
the accuracy of his analysis. The King table of 1688 was used, as
amplified by Harte,41 and yet further amplified here in tables 4 and 5.
40 See Harte, ‘Economics of clothing’, p. 288. It should be emphasized that the present article
deals only with new clothing, since this was what was bought for children and adolescents. Of course
it was added to their existing wardrobes, and to family hand-downs, but no mention is made here
of the very important second-hand market.
41 Harte printed the list of King’s on which this table is based, adding his own numbers: Harte,
‘Economics of clothing’, pp. 293-4.
Economic History Society 2000

Table 4. Numbers of types of garments in database, 1560-1709: comparison with King’s estimated numbers
From King
No.
In all counties
In Kent
No.
In Lincolnshire
Earliest
occurrence
Year
Latest
occurrence
Year
%
No.
%
%
No.
%
1 Hat of all sorts
2 Caps of all sorts
3 Perruques
4 Coats
5 Campaign coats
6 Cloaks
7 Doublets or wastcoats
8 Breeches
9 Drawers or linings
10 Stockings of wool, leather or silk
11 Socks of linen and woollen
12 Stockings of cotton and thread
13 Shoos
14 Shoostrings and buckles
15 Boots, shassoons & gambades
16 Spatterdashes
17 Spurrs
18 Swords
19 Canes, walking staves & saddle whips
20 Belts & girdles
3,310,000
4.3
2.1
0.1
1.3
0.1
0.0
1.3
1.3
0.7
13.1
0.1
0.1
15.7
7.9
0.1
0.1
0.3
0.1
0.5
0.1
500
62
2
5.6
0.7
0.0
2.3
0.0
0.2
4.7
2.8
1.6
15.4
0.1
0.1
25.1
0.3
0.2
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.7
277
36
2
5.6
0.7
0.0
2.3
0.0
0.1
3.4
2.8
0.9
15.3
0.0
0.1
26.6
0.1
0.2
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.0
1.0
40
6
6.3
1.0
0.0
4.0
0.0
0.2
4.4
2.9
0.8
15.1
0.0
0.0
23.3
1.3
0.6
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.2
1573
1578
1683
1560
1709
1703
1683
1703
1,600,000
100,000
1,000,000
66,000
210
112
25
10,000
16
425
251
148
1384
5
7
165
135
44
1
1599
1573
1573
1595
1560
1608
1597
1570
1624
1618
1625
1608
1665
1703
1703
1703
1709
1626
1684
1703
1698
1700
1625
1640
1,000,000
1,000,000
500,000
10,000,000
80,000
100,000
12,000,000
6,000,000
100,000
100,000
200,000
100,000
400,000
100,000
28
18
5
753
95
5
3
1303
6
2248
23
20
147
8
4
11
1
2
60
47
1
1577
1694

21 Gloves & mittens
22 Bands & crevats
23 Shirts & smocks
8,000,000
4,000,000
10,000,000
200,000
4,000,000
100,000
100,000
1,000,000
50,000
10.5
5.2
13.1
0.3
5.2
0.1
0.1
1.3
0.1
2.6
0.1
2.6
0.3
1.3
1.3
0.5
2.6
0.3
0.1
3.9
155
322
942
42
1.7
3.6
10.5
0.5
0.3
0.0
0.5
0.4
0.1
3.6
0.0
2.6
1.7
7.1
2.0
0.3
0.0
0.1
0.1
3.9
0.0
1.3
0.0
0.1
62
207
461
32
1.3
4.2
9.4
0.7
0.1
0.0
0.3
0.5
0.0
3.9
0.0
2.1
1.9
8.3
1.9
0.4
0.0
0.1
0.0
4.2
0.1
1.6
0.0
0.0
12
19
97
2
1.9
3.0
15.4
0.3
0.0
0.0
0.3
0.0
1.0
1.4
0.2
0.5
3.3
5.1
2.9
0.2
0.0
0.2
1.0
3.3
0.0
0.2
1576
1577
1560
1576
1588
1703
1701
1703
1699
1703
24 Sleeves & ruffles
25 Pocket handkerchers
26 Night gowns & dust gowns
27 Girdles & shashes
28 Frocks, trouses safeguards etc
29 Muffs
30 Hoods, dressing & commodes
31 Tours & locks
32 Neck handkerchers & tuckers
33 Gowns & manteaus
34 Petticoats & wastcoats
35 Bodyes & stays
27
3
41
34
6
319
1
232
152
641
178
26
1
5
6
353
4
117
2
17
25
2
1574
1576
1670
1576
1685
1576
1574
1573
1578
1601
1648
1619
1684
1574
1671
1576
1665
1593
1648
1701
1670
1703
1685
1703
1701
1701
1709
1701
1648
1665
1685
1709
1701
1700
1665
1630
6
9
1
2,000,000
40,000
190
2,000,000
200,000
1,000,000
1,000,000
400,000
2,000,000
200,000
50,000
3,000,000
101
91
409
94
20
1
3
21
32
18
1
36 Pattens & clogs
37 Suits of nightcloaths
38 Masks, fans & busks
39 Tippets & palatines
40 Aprons & night rayls
41 Ribbands
42 Silk laces etc
43 Gold & silver lace etc
44 Point lace etc
3
1
6
21
206
3
78
1
6
2
Total
77,106,000
8974
100
4906
100
630
100
Note: No. of accounts = 828
Sources: King’s table of apparel of 1688 and probate accounts

Table 5. Estimates of garment prices between 1660 and 1700: comparison with King’s values
Total value:
King
Cost per item
£
%
King
s. d.
All counties
Kent
Median
Lincs
Median
s. d.
Average
s. d.
No. of
garments
Average
s. d.
Median
s. d.
Average
s. d.
s. d.
1 Hat of all sorts
2 Caps of all sorts
3 Perruques
387,500
80,000
100,000
3.5
0.7
0.9
2 3
1
2
1
6
6
9
2
3 9
1 2
6
54
6
2
3
4
1
1
3
2
2 11
1
6
5
3
1
6
7
3
1
1
2
4 Coats
1,000,000 9.1
20
8
7 5
13
7
6
6
7
5 Campaign coats
6 Cloaks
100,000
40,000
750,000
500,000
100,000
1,000,000
1,000
10,000
1,000,000
50,000
100,000
10,000
10,000
50,000
20,000
0.9
0.4
6.8
4.5
0.9
9.1
0.0
0.1
9.1
0.5
0.9
0.1
0.1
0.5
0.2
0.0
3.6
7 Doublets or wastcoats
8 Breeches
9 Drawers or linings
10 Stockings of wool, leather or silk
11 Socks of linen and woollen
12 Stockings of cotton and thread
13 Shoos
14 Shoostrings and buckles
15 Boots, shassoons & gambades
16 Spatterdashes
17 Spurrs
18 Swords
19 Canes, walking staves & saddle whips
20 Belts & girdles
21 Gloves & mittens
15
10
4
2
4 11
1
1
9
2 3
6
2 3
1 5
5
12
19
3
5
1
1
1
3
6
1
1
1
5
2
9
1 11
1
6
3
8
7
6
9
6
3
7
6
10
6
3
2
6
2
148
2
1 8
2
1
2
2
1
1
268
2
4
6
2 6
2 6
10
2
5
2
8
1
5
9
4
1 10
4
5
20
10
2
15
15
5,000
400,000
1
1
1
2
6
1 2
8
1
41
1
2
7
1
2
7
8
1

22 Bands & crevats
23 Shirts & smocks
24 Sleeves & ruffles
200,000
1,250,000 11.4
1.8
1
2 6
2
6
6
9
1 6
2 5
1 5
1 8
30
105
3
1
2 11
2
4
5
2
3
2
4
5
9
5
9
9
2
2
2
1
100,000
200,000
100,000
10,000
200,000
10,000
400,000
4,000
200,000
200,000
1,000,000
400,000
30,000
100,000
10,000
5,000
450,000
100,000
10,000
100,000
200,000
0.9
1.8
0.9
0.1
1.8
0.1
3.6
0.0
1.8
1.8
9.1
3.6
0.3
0.9
0.1
0.0
4.1
0.9
0.1
0.9
1.8
8
8
5
25 Pocket handkerchers
26 Night gowns & dust gowns
27 Girdles & shashes
28 Frocks, trouses safeguards etc
29 Muffs
30 Hoods, dressing & commodes
31 Tours & locks
32 Neck handkerchers & tuckers
33 Gowns & manteaus
34 Petticoats & wastcoats
35 Bodyes & stays
4
2
4
4
4
3
1
9
3
1
3 5
3
1 8
6
2
39
3
4
9
6
3
4
3
3
2
20
20
8
1 6
7
6
19 8
5 7
3 4
1 1
10
15
75
40
4
12 11
3 10
19
3
3
6
3
29 6
5 11
4
10
5
2
8
9
3
15
12
4
6
5
9
2
1
6
36 Pattens & clogs
2
4
9
6
37 Suits of nightcloaths
38 Masks, fans & busks
39 Tippets & palatines
40 Aprons & night rayls
41 Ribbands
42 Silk laces etc
43 Gold & silver lace etc
44 Point lace etc
1
1
1
1
1
3
7
4 8
1 7
4
51
1
1
3
3
4
1
8
3
3
1 11
1
1
8
1
2
2
3
Total
10,992,500
967
Note: Data taken only from accounts dated between 1660 and 1700.
Sources: as tab. 4

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Figure 4. Accounts by charge value
Note: No. of accounts with charge value = 805.
Source: probate accounts
The fluidity of terminology that applies to clothing and changes in fashion
presented some problems. For example, references to ‘cloaks’ were found
in the accounts from 1599 to 1665. They were categorized in King’s
table of 1688 as male dress, but were so unimportant that they made
up less than 0.1 per cent of the garments in the table. However, by the
eighteenth century ‘red cloaks were universal for adult country women’.42
In our own time a woman’s ‘suit’ may also have recently been described
as a ‘costume’, or a ‘coat and skirt’. In the period covered by the
accounts from the 1570s on, we were forced to lump together ‘jerkins’
and ‘vests’ with King’s ‘doublets’ and ‘wastcoats’ to form one heading,
as was the case with ‘stockings’, ‘hose’, and ‘socks’. This could lead to
the accusation of forcing clothing into the Procrustean bed of King’s
table, which lists fashions and clothing under the nomenclature and in
the terminology of 1688. It is to be hoped that the situation has not
been distorted too much and garments have not been mis-identified.43
The tables are complex at first sight. The number of a particular type
of garment as estimated by King is shown in the first column of table
4, and for each the percentage of the total number of garments has been
calculated. The second column contains the numbers and percentages of
all 8,974 individually priced garments found in the accounts covering all
counties. The third column shows numbers and percentages of 4,906
garments from Kent, the county with the largest group of accounts
recording clothing. The fourth column shows numbers of 630 garments
42 Information from Dr John Styles.
43 I am particularly indebted to Miss Anne Buck and Dr Ann Saunders for their patient help
here, but would like to stress that they are in no way responsible for any remaining errors.
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from Lincolnshire and the percentage of each. After that, the county
numbers were too small to be useful.44
In table 5 King’s total value for each type of garment is given, followed
by the percentage again. Then King’s own price for a single one of these
garments is shown, followed immediately by the median and mean values
for the same type of single garment calculated from the accounts for all
counties. Because of the inflationary situation between the 1570s and
1680s (see figure 3) these calculations are based on the prices for just
under 1,000 garments purchased or made up for children between 1660
and 1700. The local breakdowns for Kent and Lincolnshire have been
added; this was as far as regional differences could be tested. We antici-
pated that prices would be lower in Lincolnshire, and so they were in
some cases, but this was by no means universally true: the median coat
for a child in Lincolnshire would be more expensive than in Kent,
for instance.
In King’s master table for 1688, ‘five items of clothing accounted for
half the value of the total of £11 million’. The discussion here will centre
on these key garments. ‘A million pounds or more was spent on coats
for men, stockings, shoes, shirts and smocks, and petticoats and waist-
coats. As many as 12 million pairs of shoes were acquired new in 1688,
10 million pairs of stockings and 10 million shirts and smocks.’45 Coats
and petticoats, and also waistcoats, were more expensive and King esti-
mated that about a million of each were sold.
King’s 12 million pairs of shoes with a total value of £1 million made
up his largest single number of items, 15.7 per cent of the whole. Their
value was lower, at 9 per cent of the whole. The 10 million pairs of
stockings, with the 10 million shirts and smocks, both amounted to 13
per cent of the whole output he postulated. Shirts and smocks were more
valuable, however, and were worth 11.4 per cent of the total value of
the clothes. Stockings were, of course, cheaper, and only made up 9 per
cent of the total value. Although ‘only’ 1 million coats were sold, they
were obviously much more expensive, and were also worth 9 per cent of
the total value. The 1 million petticoats and waistcoats were worth
another 9 per cent of the whole value of new clothing.46
As the number of zeros in his table suggests, King’s figures for the
total value of garments were rounded up. Nevertheless, his prices per
item appear to be more accurate, although even they are generally given
in whole shillings or to the nearest 6d., with only a few prices using 2d.,
3d., or 8d.
However, the work we have so far done shows that his main emphases
were right, and that some of his prices per item were right too. Where
there were major differences, quite often they were solved just by con-
44 After the completion of this article, the additional accounts from Lichfield and Preston were
added to the database, but these were not enough to change this judgement.
45 Harte, ‘Economics of clothing’, p. 287. Harte’s article is the foundation for the present study.
46 Buck, Clothes and the child, necessarily concentrates almost entirely on the upper social groups,
but is extremely valuable for its descriptive sections: pp. 31, 82-3, 92, 95, 100-1, 153, 164, 175-8,
178-89, 184 (boys, 1650-1750), 185-92 (girls, 1650-1750).
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sidering the probable differences in size between adults’ and children’s
clothing. On the whole, King’s estimates of price were too high, and my
initial thought that the focus of the accounts on minors’ clothes might
produce lower figures seems justified. Indeed, clothes or accessories that
were either for adults, or indicated superior social status, including wigs,
shoebuckles, spurs, and nightgowns either did not appear in the accounts,
or did so very rarely. Surprisingly, gloves were not mentioned either:
seventeenth-century children, it seems, normally had cold hands.
Shoes, King’s biggest single item, were even more important in keeping
growing children shod than they were to adults, and King’s figures, large
as they are, are too low. One-quarter of the sum spent on children’s
clothing bought new shoes for them and these were in fact the commonest
single item bought in the accounts.47 There is sufficient information on
enough pairs of shoes to be sure about the prices of new shoes for
children in the seventeenth century. King seems to have been entirely
accurate in this case: his notional pair of shoes cost 1s. 8d.; the ‘real’
pairs in Lincolnshire and Kent cost 1s. 9d. and 2s. 5d. respectively. It is
tempting to think the price difference lay in the craftsmanship rather
than the quality of leather.48
Stockings, which made up 13 per cent of King’s total clothing output,
were important in the dressing of children too. In both Lincolnshire and
Kent 15 per cent of purchases for children were of stockings. The prices
were different, though. To King, stockings cost 2s. a pair for wool,
leather, or silk; in comparison, seventeenth-century children’s stockings
cost 10d. in Lincolnshire and 1s. 6d. in Kent. Even cheaper stockings
than these could be found in the shops: Ann Clark, a chapwoman who
ran a shop in Donington in Lincolnshire, had 19 pairs of stockings at
10d. a pair in her shop when her goods were itemized by the appraisers
in 1692. But she also had stockings which were cheaper still: there were
four pairs at 6d. a pair, and even two pairs at 3d., perhaps for babies.
She had two pairs which stood out as ‘extravagant’, in her chapwoman’s
world, at 1s. 1d. each. Thomas Webb, chapman and shopkeeper of Kent,
had in his shop in 1721 three pairs of ‘Womens Clock hose’ at 3s. 6d.
a pair—so Ann Clark’s stockings were not really luxurious at all. But
Thomas Webb also had ‘Womens hose’ at 2s. each, ‘large Ladds hose’
at 2s. each, men’s wool hose at 1s. 4d. each, and even ‘Childrens hose’
at 4.d. a pair. The more one reads of these shopkeepers’ documents, the
more amazing is the range and quantity of different finenesses and variety
available. So the median price of the children’s garments here lies at the
centre of a very large range of prices. It is important to remember that
King faced the same problem and that we do not know whether he was
47 Surprisingly, there were around five times as many new pairs of shoes bought as there were
pairs repaired. Shoe repairs were still very common, though.
48 This is interesting, because Harte, and King himself, believed that the consumption of leather
by adults was higher than that by children: Harte, ‘Economics of clothing’, tab. 2 and discussion,
pp. 284-5. The probate accounts used for this article demonstrate that King was correct in believing
that two pairs of shoes per year were required.
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the cost of apparel in seventeenth-century england 699
estimating means or medians, or indeed what data his calculations were
based on.
This range of larger and smaller, coarser and finer, garments has
constantly to be borne in mind when considering these round figures.
For instance, Robert Amsden of Canterbury had in his shop in 1703:
12 womens damask Mantues at 8s apiece
6 Womens Serge Gownes at 7s apiece
9 Womens Silke crepe Gownes at 7s apiece
9 Womens worsted Gownes at 6s 6d apiece
12 Girls worsted Gownes at 4s 6d apiece
30 smale girls gowns at 3s apiece
16 ditto girls Gowns at 4s apiece
Among petticoats, he had women’s petticoats at 3s. 6d., as well as
‘damask and serge’ at 5s. 6d. apiece and ‘course’ petticoats at 2s. apiece.49
A variety of prices in shops like this can be produced for most of the
garments on King’s list, and he was clearly attempting to average out
the varying figures for different sizes and finenesses.
King priced his 1 million ‘wastcoats and petticoats’, like his ‘coats’, at
£1 each. A waistcoat and a petticoat constituted normal wear for girls:
a front-fastening jacket, with an outer skirt.50 They seem to be ordinary
clothes for the majority of girls, though those with more pretensions may
well have had a gown, or even the latest fashion, a mantua, bought for
them. From the account data, 32 petticoats and waistcoats were bought
for Lincolnshire girls, and another 409 were purchased in Kent. Their
prices, again, covered a wide range, but the medians were 5s. 9d. in
Lincolnshire and 3s. in Kent. Neither was anywhere near King’s value
of £1 each. Once again, the explanation must lie in the lesser amount
of cloth used for children. The marked difference between Lincolnshire
and Kent prices, however, is mystifying.
Smocks and shirts were next-to-the-skin wear. Girls slept in their
smocks, but also wore them as undergarments, or, confusingly, as what
would now be called a petticoat. Between 1650 and 1750, a ‘smock’
became a ‘shift’, though King still used the ‘smock’ terminology.51 His
‘table of apparel’ contained as many as 10 million shirts and smocks,
more than any other garment except shoes. He estimated that they were
worth 2s. 6d. each, a price which the probate account data support.
Children’s shirts and smocks were bought or made up for a median of
2s. in Lincolnshire and 2s. 11d. in Kent. It seems that both these
garments were normally made at home, for unlike other basic garments
on King’s list no shop prices for ready-made shirts and smocks have yet
been found.
The garment we know from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century usage
49 Printed in Spufford, Great reclothing, p. 210.
50 Buck, Clothes and the child, pp. 169, 173.
51 Ibid., p. 191. The figures for ‘shifts’ in the accounts used in this article have been run together
with King’s ‘smocks’.
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as a ‘smock’—normally embroidered with the county patterns symbolizing
the occupation of carter, ploughman, gardener, dairymaid, and so on,
and most commonly worn by servants hired by the year—did exist in
the seventeenth century, and seems most likely to have been known as
a ‘frock’. This exemplifies the difficulty of nomenclature. King recorded
200,000 frocks, sold along with various other garments at 4s. each. There
are seventeenth-centry illustrations of these. Samuel Pepys collected a
chapbook which contained a deliberately satirical woodcut of a smart
chapman selling a new twopenny ‘merry’ book to his hayseed customer,
who was dressed in a ‘frock’ or smock.52 The very rare pack of cards
produced in 1679 called ‘The Knavery of the Rump’, with individual
cards engraved from designs by Francis Barlow, included a six of hearts
bearing the image of a waggoner dressed in what we would call a smock,
just as he would have been two centuries later. But his garment was not
called a smock in contemporary usage.53
King’s 1 million coats, which he valued at £1 each, were garments in
which the amount of fabric would be quite different for adults and for
children. Children of both sexes wore coats from infancy, over the gowns
of girls, and the gowns that preceded breeching for boys, through to
adulthood. They seem to have started wearing coats at the age of about
six months.54 It is not surprising, therefore, that there is a wide range of
prices of coats for children recorded in the accounts. In Lincolnshire
these prices range from just over 1s.55 to nearly 13s. with a median of
7s. 6d., compared to a median of 5s. in Kent. King’s price of £1 for a
‘coat’ did not apply to children. Robert Amsden of Canterbury had in
his shop in 1703 men’s lined cloth coats at 10s. each, 14s. each, 15s.
each, 18s. each, and £1 each, as well as a dozen children’s coats at
5s. 6d. each and 38 at 4s. each.56 So both my values and King’s look
reasonable. Robert Amsden’s shop goods also demonstrate the point that
children’s clothes were indeed cheaper.
IV
Coats were among the garments which seem to have shifted during
the seventeenth century from being made up by the local tailor to being
available for purchase ready made, at least in some places, such as Kent.
The appearance of ready-made clothing is one of the important inno-
vations of the century, even though it may have occurred at this time
52 Magdalene College Library, Cambridge, Penny Merriments, I (22), p. 484. Reproduced on the
jacket of Spufford, Small books and pleasant histories.
53 Facsimile of the ‘Knavery of the Rump’ pack (published by Harry Margary and the Guildhall
Library, London, 1978).
54 All general information on clothing is taken from Buck, Clothes and the child.
55 Discounted here are the two coats in Lincolnshire which cost only 1s. 4d. One description was
for ‘making a coate’ which might well mean the cost of material was excluded. The other, paid to
a tailor, was simply for a ‘coate’, and perhaps was also the making-up cost alone. Likewise discounted
are the two Kent accounts which had coats at 7d. and 8d., where the entries contained no indication
as to whether both making up and material were included.
56 Printed in Spufford, Great reclothing, p. 211.
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the cost of apparel in seventeenth-century england 701
only in certain regions. Historians used to think that ready-made clothes
were a nineteenth-century invention, but there is no doubt that they
appeared, and possibly became widespread, in the seventeenth century.
There were ‘salesmen’ in London, Kent, and Staffordshire in the late
seventeenth century and the early eighteenth.57 Certainly, McKendrick
was mistaken in asserting that the eighteenth century saw the appearance
for the first time of ‘mass-produced cheap clothes’, although Styles did
not find salesmen selling ‘heavy-weight garments’ in the north of England
even in the eighteenth century.58 Lemire concluded that ‘by the last half
of the seventeenth century the clothing trade was neither novel nor
original and therein lies its importance. . . . It is ironic that this trade
received relative [sic] little attention from historians when contemporaries
found it such a rewarding avenue of advancement.’59
In 1688, the year in which King’s ‘table of apparel’ appeared, Richard
Cartridge, of the parish of St Botolph, Aldersgate, died. His appraisers
priced the goods in his two-storey warehouse60 as follows:
In the Warehouse two pair of Stairs
Item One hundred thirty four Coats Seventy
nine Sutes forty seven Waistcoats
£208
One hundred and ten pair of Breeches
In the warehouse One pair of Stairs
Item One hundred thirty two Coats
fifty one Sutes eighteen Clokes Seven mens
Gowns, forty peticoats and waistcoats
One hundred forty seven Womens gowns
£206 12s.
£33 11s.
In the Shop
Item One hundred and fourteen peticoats
and several odd things
In the Little Shop and Warehouse
Item One hundred and two Coats forty four
Sutes Twenty mens Waistcoats forty four
pair of breeches eighty five gowns and peticoats
£146 6s.
There is no doubt that these garments were already made up for the
customers. Another warehouse held his materials. This find is important
for the history of clothes production, and gives more advanced infor-
mation on seventeenth-century ready-made clothing for civilians than
57 Styles, ‘Clothing the north’, p. 141, n. 18.
58 Ibid., p. 143.
59 Lemire, Dress, culture and commerce, pp. 38, 40.
60 PRO, Prob. 32/25/212, erroneously catalogued under the name of Edward Hill, as an account,
is in fact Richard Cartridge’s inventory.
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hitherto.61 Lemire has drawn attention62 to the major role of the various
armies of the period, the navy, the Hudson’s Bay Company, the American
colonies, and the slave trade in stimulating the clothing trade. Outfitting
these provided major markets, and major profits, for contractors. ‘Slopsel-
lers’,63 and the ‘salesmen’ who, to start with, specialized in ready-made
clothing,64 were not unrelated. But at the beginning of the civil war,
contractors existed who, from the very outset in August 1642, could
supply literally thousands of coats, breeches, ‘suits’, knapsacks, shirts,
and pairs of stockings and shoes. These contractors were mainly, but not
entirely, based in London: there were also some from Cambridge, Hert-
ford, Plymouth, and Nantwich. The suppliers of suits were variously
described as ‘merchant’, ‘woollen draper’, ‘linen draper’, ‘tailor’, and
‘silkman’. Vigorous complaints were made about the quality of some of
the garments supplied: the ‘breeches were cutt so narrowe, that men
were not well able to gett into them [without] tearinge’ argued the
supplier of 50 suits. Captain Bromly deposed that ‘Many of the sleeves
of the Coats were so shorte as thatt they came butt a little below their
Elbowes, and for their shirts, they were so shorte [that] dyverse of them
would nott hide their pryvities, And for the breeches, they were so
scantey [or] they did Ripp in the hinder seame.’65 Despite this miserable
picture, the capacity of these people to organize the sudden purveyance
of thousands of garments, however ill they were made up, suggests a
very high degree of organization indeed. There is then a chicken-and-egg
situation. The sudden opportunities given to the clothing trade by the
needs of whole armies must have encouraged the making of ready-made
clothes for civilians: but could the army in August 1642 have been
outfitted at all on this scale without the existence already of an organiza-
tion accustomed to making up large numbers of garments?
It is interesting to note that the group of seven men indicted at Petty
Sessions in Oxford in 1668, charged with ‘using the trade of Salesmen’,
that is ‘selling Sales clothes’ ready-made, against the Elizabethan Statute
of Artificers, defended themselves by saying the statute was irrelevant,
‘for [their own trade] hath not been in use about [above?] 30 years . . .
and they doe not make the coates or things they sell, but only buy them
ready made, of the Taylors whose Trade it is to make garments; and
buying them ready made and soe selling them againe’.66 This defence
61 This inventory is not unique: both David Mitchell and John Styles have similar inventories
including wholesale civilian clothing, which I have yet to see.
62 Lemire, Dress, culture and commerce, ch. 1, passim, but note especially p. 11, on civil war supplies,
and pp. 25, 26, containing a list of clothing approved for an individual footsoldier in 1689 by
William III. I thank Dr Peter Edwards, of University of Surrey, Roehampton, who has drawn my
attention to supplies of clothing to the army, and given me the reference to McGurk, Elizabethan
conquest of Ireland as well as access to his own analysis of the equipment for the civil war armies,
including the complaint quoted below. A brief account will appear in Edwards, Dealing in death, ch. 6.
63 Lemire, Dress, culture and commerce, pp. 12-25, for slopsellers, contractors for navy basic clothing.
See also ibid., p. 164, n. 50.
64 Spufford, Great reclothing, pp. 123-5, 210-30.
65 Dr Peter Edwards also gave me the text of this complaint (PRO SP 28) 253 B (ii).
66 Quoted in Lemire, Dress, culture and commerce, pp. 45-8. See also the ‘farren merchant’ trying
to sell ready-made suits at a fair in Oxford in 1647, ibid., p. 45.
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the cost of apparel in seventeenth-century england 703
takes the rise of the trade in ready-made clothes for civilians back to
1638, perhaps fortuitously to before the outbreak of war. Despite these
claims that the trade had its beginnings in the 1630s, there is an earlier
account describing how the army which quelled the Irish in the late
1590s was clothed, which demonstrates the clothiers’ profits out of this
large trade, their frequent corruption, and also the quite frequently
appalling end results. It was then estimated that the common soldier’s
winter wear should cost £2 13s. 8d. for a winter coat, a canvas lined
doublet, a pair of lined breeches, two shirts with bands, three pairs of
shoes, and three pairs of kersey stockings. Two more pairs of shoes, one
more pair of stockings, and a hat should be added in the summer for a
further 14s. 4d.67 Essex’s army was dressed in two sizes only: ‘large’
and ‘small’. This provides an interesting comparison with William III’s
footsoldier of 1689, whose clothes should have cost £3 19s. 10d. over
two years. They included a coat and breeches, which would have been
a ‘suit’ to the civil war contractors, a pair of stockings, gloves, a sash, a
belt, shoes, and a hat in the first year, all at £2 10s. 6d., with the addition
in the second year of a greatcoat, a shirt, a cravat, second pairs of
stockings and shoes, and another hat for a further £1 9s. 4d.68 Did
Essex’s war in Ireland in the late 1590s come as a complete shock to
the clothing trade, or were ‘the salesmen’ in Oxford in 1668, who claimed
that their trade did not go back beyond the 1630s, mistaken or deliber-
ately being misleading? Did they have trade ancestors despite the Statute
of Artificers?
It appears that they did. The area around Birchin Lane in London,
extending into Lombard Street and Cornhill, was an established centre
for the retail sale of ready-made garments by the mid-Elizabethan period,
and the ‘enthusiastic selling techniques’ and Sunday opening hours of
the salesmen were unpopular with some citizens as early as the 1580s.
There is also a tale that in 1612 a visitor to London was set upon by
Birchin Lane apprentices, who persuaded him with much ‘bawling in his
ears’ to purchase a new suit of apparel with every conceivable accessory.69
Ready-made clothes were cheaper than tailor-made, but often of inferior
quality. Sleigh-Johnson dates the increasing scale of the ready-made trade
to c. 1625, and there were waves of complaint against their workmanship
in the 1640s and 1680s.
67 McGurk, Elizabethan conquest of Ireland, pp. 209-14. For the common soldier’s appropriate
outfit, see p. 210.
68 Lemire, Dress, culture and commerce, pp. 25-6.
69 Sleigh-Johnson, ‘Merchant Taylors’ Company’, ch. 7, is a detailed examination of the workings
of the company and the organization of the tailoring trade in the City of London; quotation from
pp. 365-7. I am grateful for permission to quote his work. Following him, Styles, ‘Product innovation’,
dates the appearance of ‘salesmen’ in increasing numbers to the second quarter of the seventeenth
century. (The last section of that article also discusses the sizing of garments in the ready-made
clothing trade.)
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V
This article represents the end of the first step in this project, and has
examined the economic value and separate prices of different garments,
and established whether the garments Gregory King thought were com-
monest were, in reality, the commonest.70 It seems that they were. His
prices also seem reasonable, given the enormous variety of shop prices
and qualities for the same garment, and the fact that, throughout, we
have been comparing his prices for the whole population with those for
the clothes of minors only.
Harte asked a rhetorical question: ‘Can any reliance be placed on the
average prices [King] provides for each category of clothing?’71 The
answer given by the probate accounts seems to be ‘yes’. The surprising
fact to emerge is that so many of the children of inventoried people
below the level of gentry were relatively well-clad; indeed, almost all of
them had some new clothes.
University of Surrey, Roehampton
70 The next stage of this project will concentrate on the range of fabrics used for individual
garments. After that, I hope to look at the evidence for the relative costs of material and ‘making
up’ of these garments, and which were commonly made up individually for the particular child.
71 Harte, ‘Economics of clothing’, p. 285.
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