A Christmas (out)fit for a king?
Rewind to a dancing doublet, cockles of silver – and a very happy new year
The past, as we know, is a foreign country: they do things differently there.
A bit differently, at least.
Christmas was a big deal in medieval England, just as it is today. But the forty days of the medieval Christmas season didn’t culminate on 25 December. Instead, Christmas Day was the beginning of the festivities, which ran all the way to the feast of Candlemas on 2 February.
(‘Christmastide’ therefore encompassed the often riotous New Year celebrations on 1 January, despite the fact that technically – ie legally and administratively – the calendar year didn’t change until 25 March. And that – via an elision of eleven days when the calendar was changed and regulated in the middle of the eighteenth century – is why the British tax year still begins on 5 April.)
So, in the expansive spirit of medieval Christmastide, I’m wishing you all a very merry Christmas still! And the happiest of new years for 2026.
Next week, I’ll pick up where we left off in 2025. But first, ahead of Richard II’s 659th birthday on 6 January, I thought I’d offer a tale that I wrote for The H Files’s paid subscribers back in March: the story of a Christmas ‘dancing doublet’ so richly decorated with silver and gold that it was fit for a king – but was it worn by one?
A few years ago I was reading a scholarly article by G.B. Stow called ‘Richard II and the Invention of the Pocket Handkerchief’ (of which more another time).
During his investigation of the handkerchief’s possible royal origins, Stow takes a contextual detour to consider ‘Richard’s personal interest in and expenditures on exotic fashions in dress’.
Two items in particular caught my eye, from (Stow says) a wardrobe account dated Christmas 1393: a white satin ‘daunsyng doublet’ embroidered with golden trees from which hung a hundred silver-gilt oranges, and a loose white satin jacket embroidered with a design of leeches, water and rocks, embellished with fifteen silver-gilt whelks, fifteen silver-gilt mussels, and fifteen cockles of silver.
The cockles might have been silver, but – for a writer of narrative history – this was gold.
The book I was then in the middle of writing is (among other things) about the psychology of power. At a distance of more than 600 years, every scrap of evidence is precious, but to be able to ‘see’ one of my protagonists in a specific outfit at a specific moment is a rare gift, in two different ways.
More than most kings, Richard was obsessed with the visual representation of his own kingship – so a bedazzled Christmas dancing doublet offered an intriguing new perspective on his intensively curated royal image.
And, for the construction of the book itself, any moment of sensory detail – satin and silver-gilt glimmering in candlelight – adds richness and texture, visual and tactile punctuation, to a narrative that might otherwise begin to feel aridly political.
I was excited when I looked up Stow’s source: the full text of the wardrobe account of 1393–4, presented with opening remarks to the Society of Antiquaries in 1911 by one of their Fellows, W. Paley Baildon.
I was even more excited as I skimmed through it. The king, Baildon says, ‘appears to have been fond of jousting, since several payments were made in connexion with that sport, which seems rather out of keeping with one’s preconceived notions of his character and habits’.
This was huge. We know that Richard liked hunting, but fighting – whether in anger or for fun – was not his thing. He did once, according to one chronicle, appear in exquisite armour at a tournament he organised, to signal his leadership of the knights who would joust for England’s honour. Of Richard himself doing any actual jousting, there’s no credible evidence whatsoever.
Until now.
Although that exciting thought did give me pause. If Baildon had found the whelk-encrusted outfit and jousting expenses in 1911, and Stow had mentioned them in 1995, why hadn’t I found them in any of the books written about Richard in the decades since then?
My first clue came in the first lines of the wardrobe account itself. The third item on the list is payment for some scarlet cloth – ‘scarlet’ being rich fabric that was often, but not always, bright red – to make hose ‘for the lord’s journey to Wales’.
Alarm bells started ringing. ‘The lord’ didn’t sound right; ‘the lord king’ was the usual formulation. And, in the year when these payments were made, Richard didn’t go anywhere near Wales.
I read on. The document is full of wonderfully evocative detail: ornate fabrics and jewels; gowns and shoes in the latest styles for autumn-winter ’93; the repair of a jousting saddle with pillow stuffing and red leather; payments to Wynald the goldsmith and Matilda Baleye the silkwife.
And then – just before the tantalising first mention of the ‘daunsyng doublet’ – my answer: a golden chain made for ‘the lady Countess of March, consort of the lord’.
The account – and the outfits, and the jousting equipment – didn’t belong to Richard. They were made for Roger Mortimer, the nineteen-year-old earl of March.
Suddenly every detail fell into place. Richard didn’t go to Wales in 1393, but Roger Mortimer did – presumably in his scarlet hose – to visit the vast Welsh estates of which he’d only just grown old enough to take possession.
It was dashing, reckless Mortimer, not Richard, whose hard-worn jousting saddle needed mending. It was flamboyant, handsome Mortimer who danced in white satin that Christmas.
And with that, the glimmer of candlelight on silver cockles and a hundred silver-gilt oranges faded to black. The details are extraordinary, but I couldn’t reliably place Mortimer with Richard at Christmas 1393 – and, even if I could, a Christmas scene crowbarred in purely to show off his haute couture outfit would have derailed the story I was trying to tell.
When I was working with students on how best to structure an essay, I used to say that a question no writer wants to raise in a reader’s mind is ‘why are you telling me this?’ Because that means you’ve lost them: they’re no longer following your argument, or immersed in your narrative.
But I can still see Mortimer, dazzling with silver and gold, in my mind’s eye. And I’m happy, finally, to have told you about him here.
In Germany Christmas still runs until Marialichtmas (ie Candlemas).
Thought you were goung to say the outfit belonged to a Holand! Nice to hear a personal detail of this Roger Mortimer.