Virtually everyone in medieval Europe wore something on their heads much of the time. Hoods, coifs, veils, caps, bonnets, and hats were central to the market in accessories, an especially important sector of the consumer economy after the Black Death. Headgear also served a crucial social function, marking gender, status, occupation, and age.
1 Elizabeth Coatsworth and Gale Owen-Crocker, Clothing the Past: Surviving Garments from Early Medieval to Early Modern Western Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2018), p. 29. Different craft workers and merchants had a stake in the various stages that took raw materials such as wool, animal pelts, and straw through processing and fabrication to the market stall: in London, wool carders, spinners, knitters, weavers, fullers, feltmakers, hatmakers, cappers, hurers, hatter-merchants, haberdashers, and other occupational groups were all involved in making and retailing headgear.
In English, the occupational terms capper, hurer, hatter, and hatmaker – four artisanal occupations centrally concerned with making headgear – were imprecisely distinguished from one another and shifted in meaning over the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
2 Harry Duckworth, The Early History of Feltmaking in London 1250–1604, Research Paper No. 1 (London: Worshipful Company of Feltmakers, 2013), p. 5. By the end of the fifteenth century, however, clearer distinctions between hurers-cappers, hatter-merchants, and hatmakers had developed.
Hurers-cappers controlled the piecework chain that culminated in knitted and felt caps, a ubiquitous head covering especially for men in late medieval England.
3 The term ‘hurer-capper’ combines the French and the English words that had been in use in the two vernaculars, Anglo-Norman and English, spoken in England in the centuries immediately following the Norman Conquest. Possibly ‘hurers’ originally worked with hair rather than wool. See Elizabeth Coatsworth, ‘Hurers’, in Encyclopedia of Medieval Dress and Textiles, ed. Gale Owen-Crocker, Elizabeth Coatsworth, and Maria Hayward (Leiden: Brill, 2016), p. 284. By the later fifteenth century, the English terms ‘hurers’ and ‘cappers’ were used interchangeably or in compounds. Caps were made throughout Europe, including in England, which had developed a substantial cap-making industry in the fifteenth century.
4 Heather Swanson, Medieval Artisans: An Urban Class in Late Medieval England (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), pp. 50–52; Donald Leech, ‘Stability and Change at the End of the Middle Ages: Coventry, 1450–1525’, Midland History 34 (March 2009), 19–20; Duckworth, Early History, pp. 3–10; Kirstie Buckland, ‘Cappers’, in Encyclopedia of Medieval Dress and Textiles, pp. 110–12. The multiple steps involved in fashioning caps (wool carding, spinning, knitting, fulling, felting, and so on) were carried out largely by low-status non-citizen English workers and by immigrants, known in the vernacular as aliens or strangers. A 1512 statute banning the importation of hats and caps to England claimed that ‘thre score thowsand persones’ were engaged in the many steps of cap- and hatmaking (carders, spinners, knitters, thickers, dyers, shearers, cappers, hatmakers); though 60,000 workers is almost certainly an exaggeration for effect, there is no doubt this was an important economic sector.
5 3 Hen. VIII, c.15, The Statutes of the Realm, 11 vols (London: G. Eyre and A. Strahan, 1810–28), III, 33–34. A group of parliamentary petitions brought by Haberdashers’ and Cappers’ guilds in eight English cities in 1531, discussed in chapter 3, adduced more specific numbers for each centre, which added up to about 13,000 workers, including more than 5,000 in London and its immediate environs. London, Archives of Parliament, HL/PO/JO/10/3/178/1 through 8. In London, citizen cappers, members of the guild, fashioned the final product and either sold it wholesale to other merchants, such as hatter-merchants and haberdashers, or retailed the caps themselves. Hatter-merchants (also sometimes simply called ‘hatters’ in the late fifteenth century) sold rather than made hats and bonnets, most of which were imported from the Low Countries, France, and Italy.
6 Careful examination of various records (including wills and other personal documents) indicates that the term ‘hatter’, which appears attached to English men in records in this period (including as the name of a London guild), was synonymous with ‘hatter-merchants’ or ‘hatter-sellers’; they were engaged in importing and selling hats, to be distinguished from hatmakers, who fabricated them. In considering the terminology, we looked at wills from 1374–1570 indexed in Marc Fitch, ed., Index to Testamentary Records in the Commissary Court of London, 1374–1570, Historical Manuscripts Commission, JP 12–13, 2 vols (London: HMSO, 1969, 1974); and in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury (National Archives, PROB 11, using ‘hat*’ as a search term in the occupation field), and at entries in Calendar of the Patent Rolls Preserved in the Public Record Office, 1485–94 (Henry VII, Vol. 1) (London: HMSO, 1914) and Calendar of the Patent Rolls Preserved in the Public Record Office, 1494–1509 (Henry VII, Vol. 2) (London: HMSO, 1916). This differs from the interpretation in Ian W. Archer, The History of the Haberdashers’ Company (Chichester: Phillimore and Co., 1991), p. 61. Other merchants, especially haberdashers who sold accessories of all kinds, were also important retailers of hats and other headgear.
Hatmakers, of course, made hats – the term used in English to designate a head covering with a defined crown and a brim, which could be made of straw or of felt, or occasionally of other materials. Little is known of straw hats in this period, although it is clear they were very common, as customs accounts indicate that large numbers were imported to England in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
7 See for instance, LCA, 2.12, pp. 222–23; LCA, 3.1, p. 281; LCA, 4.10, p. 275; LCA, 4.11, pp. 556–57; LCA, 4.13, p. 364; and Marie-Rose Thielemans, Bourgogne et Angleterre: Relations politiques et économiques entre les Pays-Bas et l’Angleterre, 1435–1467 (Brussels: Presses Universitaires de Bruxelles, 1966), p. 243. Our thanks to Caroline Barron for discussing straw hats with us. They may have primarily served a utilitarian purpose, as a sunshade for those who laboured outside, such as agricultural workers: peasants tilling the ground or harvesting are frequently depicted wearing them in late medieval art. Some images, however, also show wealthier people wearing straw hats for the same purpose of shading from the sun when travelling.
8 Medieval depictions of straw hats – very handily gathered here: ‘Straw Hats’, Medieval and Renaissance Material Culture: The Linkspages at Larsdatter.com <http://www.larsdatter.com/strawhats.htm> – show them generally worn by peasants (e.g. in Les très riches heures du duc de Bérry, June and July) but by no means only by peasants (e.g. also Les très riches heures, August). The famous Arnolfini portrait by Jan van Eyck (painted in Bruges, 1434) even shows Giovanni di Nicolao Arnolfini indoors with an impressive, black-dyed straw hat.
9 Jan van Eyck, ‘The Arnolfini Portrait’, <https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/jan-van-eyck-the-arnolfini-portrait>. There is almost no evidence of straw hats being manufactured in medieval England;
10 The only straw hatmaker we have found for this period in England is Martin Johnson, Gelderlander, a ‘strawen hatmaker alias spliter hatmaker’, who appears among those granted letters of denization on 19 Aug 1530, L&P, IV, no. 6600(19). In the Low Countries, too, hatmakers from Gelderland are known to have migrated to urban centres to produce straw hats, which appears to have been a speciality of the Gelderland region. See Antoon Viaene, ‘Hoedenvlechters uit Gelderland werkzaam in Brugge omstreeks 1440’, Biekorf 70 (1969), 163–68. perhaps it simply made more economic sense to import them.
Felting – the matting of animal fibres such as sheep’s wool through wetting, heating, pressing, and rubbing – had long been known in England as in other parts of Europe, and hats as well as other pieces of clothing or accessories were certainly made in England from at least the fourteenth century and likely before, though not much is known about such manufacture.
11 Elisabeth Crowfoot, Frances Pritchard, and Kay Staniland, Textiles and Clothing c.1150–c.1450: Finds from Excavations in London, c.1150–c.1450, Museum of London: Medieval Finds from Excavations in London (London: HMSO, 1992), pp. 75–76; Coatsworth and Owen-Crocker, Clothing the Past, pp. 50–52; Chris Heal, Felt-Hatting in Bristol & South Gloucestershire. I: The Rise, ALHA Books, 5 (Bristol: David Harrison Printing for Avon Local History & Archaeology, 2013), pp. 2–7. Such felt was pliable: it could be moulded, though without support it would not keep its shape. By the fourteenth century, artisans in Germany and the Low Countries also began to use new techniques (described below) to make felt from the fine hairs of animal fur, which created a material that more effectively retained its shape once it had been moulded, allowing for new fashions of hats with defined brims and crowns. These were what late-medieval and early-modern English people called ‘felt hats’,
12 Christopher John Heal, ‘The Felt Hat Industry of Bristol and South Gloucestershire, 1530–1909’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Bristol, 2012), pp. 48–50. and in what follows we shall keep to that usage. The finest felt hats were made of beaver hair, and since beavers had become extinct in England by around 1300,
13 Lee Raye, ‘The Early Extinction Date of the Beaver (Castor fiber) in Britain’, Historical Biology 27 (2015), 1029–41. beaver hats were luxury items, and the Low Countries had developed a reputation for making the best. From the later fourteenth century onwards, the cloth-making industry that had fuelled the urban economy of the Low Countries went into decline, but the towns that had once depended on the cloth trade bounced back by supplying the demand for high-end luxury objects, tailoring, accessories, illuminated manuscripts, and also hats.
14 Andrew Brown and Jan Dumolyn, Medieval Bruges, c. 850–1550 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 264–67, and on hatmakers, see p. 242. When the Cardinal of Aragon passed through the Low Countries in the early sixteenth century what impressed him particularly was the quality and variety of hats for sale in the city of Bruges.
15 Don Antonio de Beatis, Voyage du Cardinal d’Aragon (1517–1518), ed. And trans. Madeleine Havard de la Montagne (Paris: Perrin, 1913), p. 110. For an English translation, see J. T. Hale and J. M. A. Lindon (trans.), The Travel Journals of Antonio de Beatis (London: Hakluyt Society, 1976), p. 97.The first sign that the English customers with money to spare looked to the Low Countries for felt hats comes from 1384. In that year the customs accounts for the port of London list the import of two dozen ‘capellis de bever’ by merchant Richard Filby, on a ship that probably came from Flanders. By the 1390s, imports of
capelle de bever were common in the customs records.
16 See LCA, 1.4, p. 111 for the 1384 record, and LCA, 1.5, pp. 265–66 for the index entry for many records in the 1390s. The felted beaver hats had become distinctly fashionable by the time Chaucer depicted his Merchant in the Prologue to the
Canterbury Tales (c. 1390). Chaucer says that his Merchant does a lot of travelling ‘Betwixe Middelburghe and Orwelle’, that is, between Middelburg in Zeeland and Orwell Haven on the Suffolk coast, and he is very well turned out on the pilgrimage from Canterbury to London: ‘Upon his heed a Flaundryssh bever hat, / His bootes clasped faire and fetisly’ [elegantly] (lines 272–73).
17 Larry D. Benson, ed., The Riverside Chaucer (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987). Just how desirable a ‘bever hat’ was is apparent from the crimes of one John Cook, alias Lynton, who in 1390 was sentenced to death for stealing ‘a baselard [short sword] mounted with silver, a beaver hat, a silk purse with five silver-gilt rings’.
18 He escaped execution by intercession of the queen: CPR 1388–92, p. 328. Our thanks to Adrian Ailes for this reference.An illustration of a felt hat of the period can be found in another painting by the Bruges-based painter Jan van Eyck. His portrait of Baudouin de Lannoy, c.1439 (fig. 2), shows Baudouin, chamberlain to Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, and ambassador to Henry V of England, with the collar of the Golden Fleece and an imposing fur hat that flaunts his high social status.
19 Van Eyk’s paintings are so detailed that the fabric of his painted hats can be determined on close inspection. The fur hairs of the hat are visible in the close-ups viewable at <https://www.smb.museum/en/museums-institutions/gemaeldegalerie/collection-research/conservation-care/jan-van-eycks-portrait-of-baudouin-de-lannoy/>. Similarly, the tall black hat in Van Eyck’s Arnolfini portrait can be identified on close inspection as one made of straw, and not of beaver fur as is often claimed. As Van Eyck’s painting shows, felt hats created opportunities for displays of fashion, and the fashion in headgear, for those who could afford it, was away from tight-fitting caps to hats with wide brims and high tops. By the mid-fifteenth century such hats had become indispensable to the modish young gentleman. John Paston II wrote to his younger brother, John III, in 1469, directing him to send ‘hastely’ a hat from London, for he could not venture out of doors with those he had, as ‘they be so lewde’: so please, he reiterated, send ‘a blak or tawny hat’.
20 Norman Davis, ed., The Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), I, 540–41.~
Fig. 2 Jan van Eyck, Portrait of Baudouin de Lannoy, c. 1439. © BPK, Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen, Berlin.
The skills and processes for making felt hats had developed in the Netherlands, Flanders, northern France, and Germany in the fourteenth century and remained the preserve of specialised artisans from those regions well into the sixteenth. These artisans refined the making of hats both by using high-quality fur from animal pelts to make the felt from which they were fabricated, and by developing the skill of ‘bowing’ the fibres to ready them for felting. The tool that had advanced that skill was the feltmaker’s bow, shown below in a modern reconstruction (fig. 3) by the historical costume-maker Rachel Frost, who uses traditional techniques to make felt hats.
~
Fig. 3 The hatmaker Rachel Frost in journeyman’s dress with a modern reconstruction of a feltmaker’s bow. Photograph Laurence Winram. © Rachel Frost.
Kathleen Walker-Meikle who saw Rachel Frost in action describes the production process as follows:
The beaver’s guard hairs (which are long and wiry) were first plucked out by hand. Only the down hair, which would then be shaved from the pelt, can be used for felting. The cut fur is laid before the bow carder. The felter plucks the string with a wooden pin, which creates vibrations, and the fur is thus teased and ‘mixed’ up. Once carded in this way, the fur can be piled onto a surface ready for the next step.
21 Kathleen Walker-Meikle, ‘Felt-and Hat-Making Workshop (School of Historical Dress)’, Renaissance Skin, 2018 <https://renaissanceskin.ac.uk/news/felt-and-hat-making-workshop-school-historical-dress/>. We have emended ‘wool’ to ‘fur’. See also John Thompson, A Treatise on Hat-making and Felting (Philadelphia: Henry Carey Baird, 1868), pp. 38–39.The next steps were steaming, compressing, shaping the matted felt around a hat block, and stiffening the interior with glue. The hat could then be lined and decorated with feathers.
According to Walker-Meikle, the feltmaker’s bow which revolutionised the making of felt hats was not introduced into England until the second half of the sixteenth century by Huguenot refugees, but our evidence suggests that Dutch hatmakers may have brought them in earlier than that. The rise and spread of the technology can be traced in the iconography of St James the Less. In later medieval iconography, he is typically represented with a fuller’s club, used for beating and cleaning wool; but from the late fourteenth century onwards he is also depicted with a bow which probably represents the hatmaker’s bow, for St James was the favourite patron saint of hatmakers. Perhaps the earliest depiction of St James with a feltmaker’s bow, rather than a fuller’s club, is a stone sculpture of the saint in the south portal of Augsburg Cathedral (c.1356).
22 Richard P. Bedford, St James the Less: A Study in Christian Iconography (London: Quaritch, 1911), p. 26. Not much later (1377) is the Escutcheon of the Hatmakers’ guild of Cracow, showing a beaver hat and a felt-maker’s bow: J. F. Crean, ‘Hats and the Fur Trade’, Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science 28 (1963), 373–86. About a century later, this iconography appears in England, the earliest example there being the statue of St James the Less on the upper tier of saints on the West Front of Exeter Cathedral, sculpted in the 1480s.
23 Bedford, St James the Less, p. 49. Bedford erroneously gives the date as fourteenth century. Carrying a spear in his left hand, he holds the feltmaker’s bow in his right. From London itself, and from around the same time as the Dutch hat-making Fraternity of St James was active there, comes a gold figure of St James holding a feltmaker’s bow (the string is now missing) (fig. 4).
24 Bedford, St James the Less, p. 27. This little statuette was probably imported into London from the Low Countries, for the saint is named ‘Jacob’, not ‘James’,
25 ‘The Apostle James the Younger’, Victoria and Albert Museum <https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O91807/the-apostle-james-the-younger-figure-unknown/>. just as he is in the Dutch text of the Ordinances. Locally produced in London and dated 1536 is a set of apostle spoons including one with a decorative finial showing St James the Less, looking exactly as he does in the Flemish statuette.
26 Private collection; reproduced and discussed by J. W. Caldicott, The Values of Old English Silver and Sheffield Plate from the XVth to the XIXth Centuries (London: Bemrose, 1906), pp. 36–37. The reason why the Dutch Hatmakers of London chose James (or ‘Jacob’) as their patron saint will now be clear: they made felt hats (see the references to ‘feltes’ in articles 18 and 23) and presumably wielded the feltmaker’s bow for which St James had become known.
~
Fig. 4 Small silver parcel-gilt figure of the Apostle James the Younger, 1500–19, of Dutch or German make. © Victoria and Albert Museum.
Before migrant hatmakers began plying their craft in England, perhaps as early as the 1420s, felt hats were imported into England, such imports being recorded from at least the fourteenth century onward.
27 LCA, 1.4, 206, 207; LCA, 1.5, 262, 265–66, 275. The customs accounts of the late-medieval period show considerable fluctuations over the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in imports of headgear of various kinds (caps, bonnets, hats). Documented hat imports began to expand in the later 1430s
28 LCA, 2.6, pp. 234–35; LCA, 2.7, pp. 159–60; LCA, 2.8, p. 189; LCA, 2.9, pp. 376–77. and hit a peak in the customs records in 1449 and 1450, when more than 38,000 felt hats were imported, mostly by Dutch and German merchants.
29 LCA, 2.10, calculated from entries at p. 276. Marie-Rose Thielemans (Bourgogne et Angleterre, p. 243) calculated that 26,826 felt hats entered the city of London between 1 April and 25 September 1450. Numbers continued to remain high in the 1450s and 1460s: LCA, 2.12, pp. 222–23; LCA, 3.1, p. 281; LCA, 3.2, p. 300. This was clearly a significant consumer commodity in the mid-fifteenth century.
The lively London trade in hats does not need to be left to our imagination because it is evoked in the poem London Lickpenny (c. 1440), formerly attributed to John Lydgate. The poem relates the experiences of a countryman from Kent who goes to London to seek justice at the court of Westminster, only to discover that without money he is nothing. Once outside the doors of Westminster Hall, he hears the voices of Flemings:
In all Westminstar Hall I could find nevar one
That for me would do, thowghe I shuld dye.
Without the dores were Flemings grete woon;
Upon me fast they gan to cry
And sayd, “Mastar, what will ye copen or by —
Fine felt hatts, spectacles for to rede?”
Of this gay gere, a great cause why
For lake of money I might not spede. (49–56)
30 ‘London Lickpenny’, in Medieval English Political Writings, ed. James M. Dean, TEAMS Middle English Texts (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 1996).The ‘fine felt hatts’ are here paired with ‘spectacles’ which were also imported in large numbers from the Low Countries until the first London spectacle makers, again immigrants from the Low Countries, started to make them on English soil in the 1440s.
31 Joshua Ravenhill, ‘The Earliest Recorded Spectacle Makers in Late Medieval England: Immigration and Foreign Expertise’, Notes and Queries 65 (2018), 11–13, and Michael Rodes, ‘A Pair of Fifteenth-Century Spectacles Frames from the City of London’, The Antiquaries Journal 62 (1982), 57–73. The poet registers the Dutch connection of spectacles and beaver hats not only by naming the hawkers as ‘Flemings’ but also by imitating their language.
Copen, conveniently glossed as ‘by’ (buy), was authentically Flemish, also as regards the spelling with <c> (<k> being the spelling found in northern Dutch dialects). It is tempting to imagine the Flemings here as peddlers selling their wares on the street,
32 As does Jonathan Hsy, ‘City’, in A Handbook of Middle English Studies, ed. Marion Turner, (Hoboken: New Jersey: Wiley, 2013), pp. 315–29. but this may not be appropriate. The merchandise is costly and upmarket, ‘gay gere’ (finery), fit for ‘masters’, and beyond the means of the narrator. Such merchandise was in fact for sale in Westminster Hall. In this period, the hall was lined with shopkeepers’ stalls, which were let out by the Warden of the Fleet as
ex officio keeper of the palace. In 1489 he charged 6s. 8d. a year for every ten feet occupied,
33 Sir John Baker, Oxford History of the Laws of England, VI, 1483–1558 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 128. a price a peddler could hardly afford. The vocal ‘Flemings’ in
London Lickpenny were probably stationed ‘without the dores’ by the entrance to Westminster Hall to entice passers-by to visit the stall in the hall, where the latest fashion was on display. It was still so in the days of Samuel Pepys, who reports in his diary (20 January 1659/60), ‘Thence to Westminster Hall where Mrs Lane and the rest of the maids had [bought] their white scarfs’.
34 https://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/1660/01/20/.Around the time that
London Lickpenny was written, ‘Flemings’ were beginning to make felt hats in London. Customs accounts from the 1420s show the import of ‘hatte here’ (hat hair) and ‘hatte wolle’. This was presumably wool from sheep (especially merino wool) and hair from beavers, goats,
35 For the use of goat hair in the manufacture of felt hats, see the bill obligatory of 1455 by the Antwerp hatmaker Cornelijs Laureyss, who owed the London haberdasher William Welbec ‘vilten hoeye van boxhare gemaect’ (felt hats made of goat hair): Antwerp, Municipal Archives, FelixArchief, Regesten van de schepenregisters, SR#50. and other mammals suitable for the making of felt for hats.
36 Duckworth, Early History, 9–10; Rosemary Weinstein, The History of the Worshipful Company of Feltmakers, 1604–2004 (Chichester: Phillimore, 2004), pp. 17–22. The importers were almost invariably Dutch or German and their buyers in England seem to have been their hatmaker countrymen who had settled in England.
37 LCA, 2.4, p. 277; LCA, 2.6, pp. 234–35; LCA, 2.7, p. 106; LCA, 2.9, pp. 83, 376. By the 1430s, we begin to see the names of those Dutch hatmakers who had migrated to England in government records. Below we list the names of the earliest Dutch hatmakers we have found in these records.
38 We list all Dutch hatmakers before 1470, when references to Dutch hatmakers become more plentiful (non-Dutch hatmakers are rare in these records, some of which are of course skewed as they are alien tax lists). Our list builds on, but extends, the data available in J. L. Bolton, ed., The Alien Communities of London in the Fifteenth Century: The Subsidy Rolls of 1440 & 1483–4 (Stamford: Paul Watkins, Richard III and Yorkist History Trust, 1998) (hatmakers at p. 122) and the England’s Immigrants Database (<www.englanddsimmigrants.com>).Table 1: Early Evidence for Dutch Hatmakers in England, 1400–70
| Godfrey van Elest of Southwark, hatmaker, born in the bishopric of Liège, CPR 1429–36, 552 |
| John Sonne of London, hatmaker, born in Gelderland, CPR 1429–36, p. 551 |
| Arnold Arnoldesson, hatmaker, TNA, E179/184/21 |
| John Lyoner of Southwark, hatmaker, TNA, E179/184/211 |
| Clays Hattmaker, importer of ‘hat wool’ to London, LCA 2.9, p. 83 |
| Albright Sas of London, ‘hattemaker’, CCR 1454–61, p. 374 |
| John Derykson of Westminster, beerbrewer and hatmaker; CCR 1454–61, 279, p. 304 |
| John Gisbertson alias van Bevon of Southwark, ‘hattemaker’, CCR 1454–61, p. 438 |
| Nicholaus Wilde of York, ‘felthatmaker’, Register of the Freemen of York, I, p. 182 |
| John Mogan of York, ‘felthatmaker’, Register of the Freemen of York, I, p. 183 |
| Deryk de Wale (Dedericus de Vale) of Southwark, hatmaker, CCR 1461–68, pp. 145, 452 |
| Peter Knyfe of York, ‘felthatmaker’, Register of the Freemen of York, I, p. 183 |
| Godfrey Geldrope of London, hatmaker, CCR 1468–76, p. 409 |
| Peter Williamson of York, hatmaker, Register of the Freemen of York, I, p. 184 |
| John van Acon of York, hatmaker, Register of the Freemen of York, I, p. 185 |
| Nicholas Gilbert of York, hatmaker, Register of the Freemen of York, I, p. 186 |
| John Butwell of Surrey, hatmaker, TNA, E 179/236/94, m. 1 |
| John Holt of Surrey, hatmaker, TNA, E 179/236/94, m. 1 |
| Deryk Isbrand of Surrey, hatter, TNA, E 179/236/94, m. 1 |
| Herman Gerardson of Surrey, hatter, TNA, E 179/236/94, m. 1 |
| John van Beregyn of Southwark, hatmaker, CCR 1461–68, p. 331 |
| Adrian Ale of London, hatmaker, Mackman and Stevens, BHO CP 40 Calendar,* TNA, CP 40/823, rot. 322; CP 40/825, rot. 123d |
| Peter van Cleve of Southwark, hatmaker, Mackman and Stevens, BHO CP 40 Calendar, TNA, CP 40/828, rot. 210d |
| John Moens of York, hatmaker, Register of the Freemen of York, I, p. 190 |
* Jonathan Mackman and Matthew Stevens, ‘Court of Common Pleas: The National Archives, CP40, 1399–1500’, (British History Online, 2010) <http://www.british-history.ac.uk/no-series/common-pleas/1399-1500>; the cases may be accessed in this online resource by the National Archives references that follow.
A list of aliens in the kingdom in 1436 includes two hatmakers, Godfrey van Elest of Southwark, born in the bishopric of Liège, and John Sonne of London, born in Gelderland. The raw materials from which they made their hats could have been provided by fellow Dutchman Clays Hattmaker, who in the mid-1440s imported 400 lb of ‘hat wool’ through the port of London (and perhaps himself practised the trade his surname suggests). Though references to the trade of hatmaker of any nationality remain sparse in accessible English records through the first half of the fifteenth century, by the 1460s references begin to multiply, virtually always attached to men whose names were probably or certainly Dutch. In most cases the type of hat these men made is not specified, but in the case of three men admitted to the freedom of the city of York in the early 1460s (Petrus Knyfe, Johannes Mogan and Nicholaus Wilde), the trade was described as ‘felthatmaker’.
39 Heal, ‘The Felt Hat Industry’, p. 48; Swanson, Medieval Artisans, p. 50; Duckworth, Early History, pp. 9–10. All three were probably Dutch speakers. ‘Knijf’ is a very old Dutch surname;
40 See ‘Knijff’, Nederlandse Familienamenbank <https://www.cbgfamilienamen.nl/nfb/>. Mogan is again found in the York House Books in 1484, in an entry certifying that ‘John Mogan, ducheman’ is a freeman and denizen of the city;
41 Meg Twycross, ‘Some Aliens in York and Their Overseas Connections: up to c.1470’, Leeds Studies in English 29 (1998), 359–80. and Nicholaus Wilde may be the same Nicholas Wilde who received letters of denization in 1470, where he is said to have been born in Kampen in the Bishopric of Utrecht. His profession is there described as skinner, but, of course, skinners, like felt hatmakers, worked with fur.
42 Bolton, Alien Communities, p. 56, n 49. By the 1470s, the number of artisans designated as ‘hatmaker’ increases, almost all of them Dutch immigrants by the evidence of their names or by more explicit evidence.
43 As shown by a search for ‘hatmaker’ in the database of documented aliens: England’s Immigrants 1330–1550: Resident Aliens in the Late Middle Ages <http://www.englandsimmigrants.com>.The Dutch hatmakers settled in various parts of the metropolitan region. In the 1483–84 Alien Subsidy roll, ten ‘Teutonic’ hatmakers, nine hatmaker servants, and three hatters were listed for London and Middlesex; about half lived in Portsoken ward on the east end outside the walls, and the others in the central or western wards in the City (Vintry, Candlewick Street, Castle Baynard).
44 Following the index entries in Bolton, Alien Communities , p. 184. Dutch hatmakers also made their homes in Southwark by the late fifteenth and sixteenth century and perhaps were more plentiful there than on the north side of the Thames: almost a third of hatmakers found in the records of the court of Common Pleas between 1460 and 1540 resided in Southwark and Bermondsey, significantly outnumbering those who gave London itself as their place of residence.
45 Searching ‘hatmaker’ in Mackman and Stevens, ‘Court of Common Pleas’, and in Rosemary Simons and Vance Mead, ‘CP40 Indices’, in Anglo-American Legal Tradition, ed. Robert C. Palmer <http://aalt.law.uh.edu/Indices/CP40Indices/CP40_Indices.html>. Southwark had evidently become an important centre for hatmaking by the time the Fraternity of St James had formed; Martha Carlin found from the archbishop’s manor court rolls in Southwark between 1504 and 1511 that hatmaker was the second most common occupation after brewer, another Dutch-dominated industry.
46 Martha Carlin, Medieval Southwark (London: Hambledon Press, 1996), pp. 280–84. Whether hatmakers working south of the Thames became members of the Blackfriars fraternity is unclear, but it is likely.
The beginnings of domestic production of felt hats by these Dutch migrants may correlate with a decline in the import of these products. According to customs records, the number of hats brought from overseas to the port of London fell precipitously in the later fifteenth century. To be sure, the figures from the customs records likely reflect more than raw imports: the last decades of the fifteenth century were marked by considerable controversy over customs collection. Nonetheless, it is significant that imports never again reached the level of the mid-fifteenth century, probably because domestic manufacture now served much of the market.
47 LCA, 4.10, pp. 428, 430, 442; LCA, 4.11, pp. 538, 541, 556–57; LCA, 4.13, pp. 349, 352, 364. It should be noted that from the 1510s import numbers rose again, though not to mid-fifteenth-century heights: LCA, 4.11, pp. 556–57 for 1513–14 has entries which total about 16,000 hats, including 9,000 simply designated ‘hats’ and 7,000 straw hats. LCA, 4.13, p. 364 has entries for about 14,000 hats evenly split between ‘hats’ and ‘straw hats’. The customs accounts also shed some light – though there are still some large shadows – on how the form of hats and the terms used to identify them changed over the century and a half these customs accounts cover. The shifts in nomenclature of the headgear indeed make it difficult to determine when high-quality felted hats, as opposed to cheaper wares, are meant: the
capella de bever in the late fourteenth-century accounts was presumably the same as Chaucer’s ‘Flaundrissh bever hat’ and indeed in the 1390s the term
capella de bever was shifting to
bever hatte.
48 LCA, 1.6, pp. 288, 295; LCA, 2.1, p. 239. From the 1430s through to the 1450s,
bever hatte disappeared from the records and instead
felt hatte became the most common term. These were more or less the same item, although the use of beaver hair likely became less prominent as the fifteenth century went on.
49 Scholars have noted the extinction of beavers in Europe through over-hunting and thus the substitution of other fibres for beaver hair in the making of superior felt; note, however, that beaver pelts continued to be imported to England into the early sixteenth century (e.g. LCA, 4.11, p. 536; LCA, 4.15, p. 348; cf. Elspeth M. Veale, The English Fur Trade in the Later Middle Ages, London Record Society 38 (London: London Record Society, 2003) <https://www.british-history.ac.uk/london-record-soc/vol38>, pp. 158–59, 175–76). Whether these beaver pelts were destined for hatmakers’ shops or used more generally as fur is hard to know, though certainly beaver was frequently used for garments – see Veale, English Fur Trade, pp. 148–49. In any case, it is likely that other kinds of animal fibres came to be used in felt making during most of the sixteenth century, until North American beaver pelts became available from about the 1570s. In turn, both ‘felt’ and ‘beaver’ hats may have been similar at least in material if not in shape to two kinds of hats common in the records from the 1460s into the 1480s,
Sent Omers hattes and
Copyn hattes. ‘Sent Omers hattes’ were presumably made in the town of Saint Omer in the Burgundian Netherlands, but the way the term was used suggests a specific style (unfortunately unknown) as well as location of manufacture; whether they were made of felt is also unknown.
50 LCA, 3.2, p. 300; LCA, 3.3, pp. 232–33; LCA, 3.4, p. 293; LCA, 3.5, p. 292. A ‘Copyn hatte’ (see fig. 5) was a half-translation of the Dutch
Jacobshoet,
Coppyn or Coppen being a Dutch diminutive for Jacob
51 LCA, 3.1, p. 281; LCA, 3.2, p. 300; LCA, 3.3, pp. 232–33; LCA, 3.4, p. 293; LCA, 3.5, p. 292. See ‘jacobshoed’, Historische Woordenboeken <https://gtb.ivdnt.org/search/>. Its only attestation there is eighteenth century, but the word is medieval. See the earlier fifteenth-century example in A. G. B. Schayes, ed., ‘Inventaire des joyaux et curiosités du duc de Brabant, Jean IV, en 1419’, Annales de l’Académie royale d’archéologie de Belgique 9 (1852), 156–58 (p. 157). – an interesting bilingual and bicultural coining
. A
Jacobshoet was a felt hat with a wide brim folded up at the front and a relatively shallow crown; its name came from its association with pilgrims to the shrine of St James (or Jacobus) of Compostela in Castile.
~
Fig. 5 Saint James the Great wearing a ‘jacobshoet’ or coppyn hat, the traditional pilgrim’s headgear. Lucas Cranach the Elder, “Saint James the Great.” © Harvard Art Museums collections online, R906, https://hvrd.art/o/242552.
Both the terms ‘Copyn hattes’ and ‘Sent Omers hattes’ disappear from the records after the early 1480s, at the same time as imports of headgear in general fall off. In the 1510s when the import of headgear once again rose in volume, many customs entries simply recorded ‘hattes’, along with ‘strawn hattes’ and some other variations; presumably the unqualified term designated felt hats, a term otherwise unattested in the import records in this period. Though by the early sixteenth century felt hats were certainly being manufactured in England, they were not yet made by English craftsmen: hatmaking in England in the decades around 1500 was the preserve of immigrants. The craft of fabricating moulded hats from high-quality felt was evidently not known to English hatters or cappers in this period. The hatmakers in London and elsewhere in the kingdom we have identified were all, as far as we can tell, immigrants from the Low Countries and Normandy.
Given the other evidence for the dominance of Dutch immigrants in the craft of hatmaking in England in the later fifteenth century, it comes as no surprise that
the four masters of the Fraternity of St James named in the 1501 Ordinances can also be identified as Dutchmen.
52 In 1511, when the Dutch Hatmakers of the Fraternity of St James merged with the Haberdashers’ Company, only James Lese was still a master; but the incoming masters were certainly or probably also Dutch. A later record for Anthony Levyson or Leveson indicates he was born in Zeeland (TNA, C 1/1021/44); his surname that may well have been Anglicised: cf. Dutch ‘Lievens’ and ‘Jan Lievenszoon’ (1420, Zierikzee), in Nederlandse Familienamenbank. Gerard Rowst’s will indicates close social ties with Dutch speakers (LMA, DL/C/B/004/MS09171/9, fol 94rv, will of Gerard Roest, 1518), and both he and the Anthony de Wyne had common medieval Dutch surnames (‘Roest’ and ‘De Wijn’). Their names, ‘Andrewe Morter, James Lese, Bartylmewe Brynke, Herry Gram’ (art. 25), are slightly anglicised, as was the way, but the surnames are recognisably Dutch and of long standing. The Database of Dutch family names records a ‘Hinryck Brynck’ in Drenthe (c.1450) and an ‘Ameltinck Brinck’ in Harderwijk (1461), a ‘Joannem
dictum Gram’ in Simpelveld, Limburg (c.1330). English ‘Lees’ in surnames is derived from ‘lee’ (open place), but it is also a Dutch patronymic surname (Lees = Laurentius), first documented in Leeuwarden (1540). ‘Andrewe Morter’ sounds English, but behind the name lurks ‘Mortier’ (from French
mortier, Latin
mortarium ‘boggy ground’), a common surname in the southern Low Countries from the thirteenth century onwards. We find the same individual named as executor in the will (TNA, PROB 11/8/311) of another Dutch-speaking hatmaker, Johannes Blankynk, dated 1488, where his name is Andreas Mortier. Interestingly, Blankynk’s will includes a bequest of twelve pence,
ad sustentacioni luminis sancti Jacobi in ecclesiam fratrum predicatorium (‘for maintaining St James’s light in the church of the Friars Preachers [the Dominicans]’). No mention is made of a Fraternity of St James, but the fines in wax repeatedly mentioned in the Ordinances of the Hatmakers had the same pious objective as Blankynk did: to keep the candle at the altar of St James burning bright.
Though many of the hats sold in England at the turn of the sixteenth century were likely still imported from France and the Low Countries (especially from Bruges and Brussels),
53 Wim Blockmans, Bert De Munck, and Peter Stabel, ‘Economic Vitality: Urbanisation, Regional Complementarity and European Interaction’, in City and Society in the Low Countries, 1100–1600, ed. Bruno Blondé, Marc Boone, and Anne-Laure Van Bruaene (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 49–50. increasing numbers of immigrants practising this trade moved to London and other parts of the country in the decades around 1500, a time when migration from the Low Countries to England and especially to London was generally quickening. The hatmakers from the Low Countries joined other Dutch immigrants in London working in artisanal trades associated with the manufacture of garments and accessories, an expanding sector of the economy. As Katherine French, Christopher Dyer, and others have detailed, fifteenth-century England experienced a ‘consumer revolution’, driven by clothing and accessories within the financial reach of many in English society: kerchiefs, prayer beads, pins, buttons, ribbons, clothes – and caps and hats.
54 Katherine L. French, Household Goods and Good Households in Late Medieval London: Consumption and Domesticity After the Plague (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 2021); Christopher Dyer, An Age of Transition: Economy and Society in England in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 42, 128, 147–48. The domestic production of such items began to involve increasingly elaborated labour structures that moved beyond the household model of artisanal production into proto-industrial piece work. The guild master with apprentices and journeymen employed in a workshop in his own house did not by any means disappear – indeed that remained in guild and civic ordinances the assumed organisation of work for a long time to come – but, in addition, guild masters in some occupations became the heads of complex chains of production where most of the labour was performed by networks of pieceworkers (carders, spinners, weavers, knitters, stitchers, and so on) who worked in their own chambers rather than in the master’s shop, what a later time would call a ‘putting out’ system. Few of those pieceworkers were guild members (in London idiom, they were not ‘of the freedom’) and many were immigrants.
55 W. Mark Ormrod, Bart Lambert, and Jonathan Mackman, Immigrant England, 1300–1550 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019), pp. 127–28.Headgear manufacturers and retailers were, along with tailors, early adopters of this new structure of labour, especially the flourishing cap-making sector, which began to expand significantly in England in the 1480s and 1490s.
56 Charles Phythian-Adams, Desolation of a City: Coventry and the Urban Crisis of the Late Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 44; Swanson, Medieval Artisans, pp. 50–52; Leech, ‘Stability and Change’, pp. 19–20. The years around 1500 saw some clashes among London guilds for control over these chains of cap production, which resulted first in the amalgamation of the Capper-Hurers and the Hatter-merchants in 1501, and then in the absorption of that united guild by the more powerful Haberdashers’ Company in 1502. This pattern of smaller guilds merging or being swallowed up by larger ones is seen in other crafts, too.
57 George Unwin, The Gilds and Companies of London (London: Methuen, 1908), pp. 166–69. The Dutch hatmakers who migrated to London in this same period thus arrived to find a complicated situation, and the same market forces that led to the absorption of the Capper-Hurers and the Hatter-merchants affected their guild too, for in 1511 the Fraternity of St James was taken over by the Haberdashers.
The Dutch Hatmakers’ market advantage, which no doubt brought them to the notice of the Haberdashers who retailed hats and other accessories, was that their own artisanal craft had little or no competition from native Londoners. Indeed, the Ordinances of the Fraternity of St James are to our knowledge the first solid evidence for the manufacture of felt hats in London, and the likelihood that they were pioneers of a new industry is confirmed by what historians close to the period said about the history of felt hat production in England. Edmund Howes in his early-seventeenth-century continuation of Stow’s Chronicle recorded that ‘About the beginning of Henry the 8. began the making of Spanish feltes
58 Spain had been the usual source of beaver furs after the animal had become extinct in England (by 1300), though in the sixteenth century it also became an endangered species in southern Europe. See Raye, ‘Early Extinction’ and Veale, English Fur Trade, pp. 101–32. However, there is no evidence of Spaniards working as hatmakers or feltmakers in early-sixteenth-century London. in England, by Spaniards and Dutchmen, before which time & long since, the English vsed to ride and goe winter and sommer in knit capys, cloth hoods, and the best sort in silke thromd hatts [shaggy felt caps made from woollen ‘thrums’, pieces of waste thread or yarn]’.
59 Edmund Howes, The Annales, or a generall chronicle of England, begun first by maister John Stow (London, Thomas Dawson for Thomas Adams, 1615), p. 840. On thrummed hats, see John S. Lee, ‘Thrums’, in Encyclopedia of Medieval Dress and Textiles, online edition, ed. Gale Owen-Crocker, Elizabeth Coatsworth, and Maria Hayward (Leiden, 2021), <http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/2213–2139_emdt_SIM_001171> Howes records this in his account of the reign of James I because this is when the English Feltmakers were first incorporated (in 1604). The journeymen of the Worshipful Company of Feltmakers also kept in memory the year in which felt hats were first produced in London. A document from 1820 shows their device (a journeyman hatter) with various historic events and dates printed next to it, including: ‘Hats first invented 1456. First made in London 1510’.
60 George Unwin, Industrial Organisation in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1904), p. 215. Presumably the hats referred to here are those that concerned them, that is, felt hats. The chronologies of these later memorials are inaccurate – manufacture in London of felt hats almost certainly dated from the mid-fifteenth century – but they correctly remind us that the making of felt hats was a late medieval innovation.
Unlike the poorly remunerated and low-skill tasks their countrymen and -women performed in the different stages of cap-making, felt hatmaking was a niche and high-skill occupation. The hatmakers, moreover, had another advantage that even other high-skill immigrants such as goldsmiths did not: there were no English guild members who knew the specific processes the hatmakers from the Netherlands used. This did not stop the Cappers-Hurers, Hatter-merchants, and Haberdashers, themselves intensely competing with one another in the years around 1500, from attempting to bring these immigrant hatmakers under their control, but the hatmakers themselves resisted. In answer to attempts by the London guilds to absorb the hatmakers as subordinate members, the hatmakers organised their own guild, the Hatmakers’ Fraternity of St James at Blackfriars. This was, in effect, a rogue guild, at least from the perspective of the City of London, as strangers could not be full members of London craft guilds, much less form their own.