‘They tell me they were in fashion last year’: Samuel and Elizabeth Jeake and Clothing Fashions in Late Seventeenth-Century London and Rye

Abstract

This article examines high fashion culture in late seventeenth-century London and Rye, focusing on the ways that Rye merchant, Samuel Jeake (1652–1699), and his wife, Elizabeth (1667–1736), engaged with the London fashion market at a time when the transmission of fashion styles was still primarily by word of mouth. Both Samuel and Elizabeth were intensely concerned to appear fashionable in provincial Rye. Correspondence between Samuel and Elizabeth and their London relatives shows how fashion information was being communicated between London and Rye and the speed with which clothing fashions changed in the capital. The discussion of Samuel and Elizabeth’s engagement with fashion is framed by an analysis of contemporary satirical literature which takes the supposed obsession of the English with fashion as its theme.

Keywords:

• Samuel Jeake
• Elizabeth Jeake
• Rye
• Sussex
• seventeenth-century clothing
• seventeenth-century shopping
• seventeenth-century fashion
• seventeenth-century London
• gender
• consumption

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Sarah Cooper and Linden Thomas for allowing me to look at the Selmes archive at the Rye Castle Museum, Christopher Whittick for his help with the Frewen archive at the East Sussex Record Office and for reading the article through whilst in draft, Sir George White Bt for his advice on Samuel Jeake’s watch and Barbara Painter for reading the article through whilst in draft.

Notes

¹ Randle Holme, Academy of Armory (Chester, 1688), Book III, Ch. V, p. 234. Holme describes a ‘jump’ as ‘a loose coat’ which ‘extends to the thighs, is open or buttoned down before, open or slit up behind half way; the sleeves reach to the wrist having the turn up sometime round, then with hound’s ears and another time square’ (Book III, Ch. III, p. 96).

² As Ruth Hentschell has observed, it was ‘a stock emblem for representing the absurd sartorial habits of the English’. R. Hentschell, ‘A Question of Nation: Foreign Clothes on the English Subject’, in Clothing Culture, 1350–1650, ed. by C. Richardson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), p. 55.

³ Andrew Boorde, Introduction to Knowledge (London, 1542), f. Aiii^v.

⁴ Anon., England’s Vanity: or the Voice of God against the Monstrous Sin of Pride in Dress & Apparel (London, 1683), p. 132.

⁵ See S. Warneke, ‘A Taste for Newfangledness: The Destructive Potential of Novelty in Early Modern England’, The Sixteenth Century Journal, 26:4 (1995), 881–96.

⁶ M. Hunter and A. Gregory, An Astrological Diary of the Seventeenth Century: Samuel Jeake of Rye 1652–1699 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), pp. 117–18 (hereafter Diary). Jeake had smallpox when he was fourteen (Diary, p. 89).

⁷ Father and son moved into the house in August 1680; the marriage took place in March 1681 (Diary, pp. 153, 154).

⁸ For a Jeake family tree, see T. W. W. Smart, ‘A Biographical Sketch of Samuel Jeake Senior of Rye’, Sussex Archaeological Collections, 13 (1861), 78–79. Jeake had two other children who died in infancy: Elizabeth (b. 1682; d. 1682) and Manasseh (b. 1688; d. 1690).

⁹ The National Archives (hereafter TNA), PROB 11/662/135 (Joseph Tucker, 1733); TNA, PROB 11/678/209 (Elizabeth Tucker, 1736).

¹⁰ For a history of Rye in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, see G. Mayhew, Tudor Rye (Hove: Delta Press, 1987) and S. Hipkin, ‘The Economy & Social Structure of Rye, 1600–1660’ (Unpublished Oxford DPhil thesis, 1985). For the built environment of Rye, see D. and B. Martin, J. Clubb and G. Draper, Rye Rebuilt: Regeneration & Decline within a Sussex Port Town, 1350–1660 (Burgess Hill: Domtom Publishing, 2009). P. Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance: Culture & Society in the Provincial Town, 1660–1770 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).

¹¹ But see A. L. Murphy, The Worlds of the Jeake Family of Rye, 1640–1780 (British Academy Records in Social and Economic History, forthcoming in 2016). The original diary is in the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California. The following section draws on the extensive introduction to the published edition, which was written by Michael Hunter.

¹² The correspondence (FRE 4814-5358) forms part of the Frewen archive held at the East Sussex Record Office (hereafter ESRO); Jeake’s business ledger covering the period 1680–1688 (RYE 145/11) is in the Rye municipal archive (also held at ESRO); Jeake’s personal accounts covering the period 1674–1680 (RYEYT: N39.40) form part of the Selmes archive held at Rye Castle Museum (hereafter RYEYT).

¹³ Hunter describes Jeake’s astrology as a kind of ‘secularized providentialism’ (Diary, p. 19).

¹⁴ J. Spurr, ‘From Puritanism to Dissent, 1660–1700’, in The Culture of English Puritanism, 1560–1700, ed. by C. Durston and J. Eales (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 234–65.

¹⁵ Diary, p. 9.

¹⁶ Diary, pp. 10–11.

¹⁷ Miller was born in 1644 (RYEYT: INV 17.71).

¹⁸ In 1678 all French imports were banned in anticipation of war with France; initially intended to last three years, the ban was not repealed until 1685.

¹⁹ Diary, pp. 58–73. The Million Adventure was a project to raise £1,000,000 from subscriptions in multiples of £10 in return for guaranteed basic annuities and the chance of winning supplementary ones (Diary, p. 70).

²⁰ Diary, p. 158.

²¹ Diary, p. 34.

²² J. Stobart, ‘Who were the Urban Gentry? Social Elites in an English Provincial Town, c.1680–1760’, Continuity & Change, 26:1 (2011), 89–112.

²³ See Diary, p. 117 for Jeake’s audit of his learning aged nineteen. For a discussion of Jeake’s intellectual development, see Diary, pp. 40–50.

²⁴ Diary, p. 37; ESRO, FRE 5308.

²⁵ Edward Chamberlayne, Angliae Notitia (London, 1679), part II, p. 176.

²⁶ P. Borsay, ‘The London Connection: Cultural Diffusion & the Eighteenth-Century Provincial Town’, The London Journal, 19:1 (1994), 21–35; P. Earle, The Making of the English Middle Class: Business, Society and Family Life in London 1660–1730 (London: Methuen, 1989), pp. 17–34; J. Styles, ‘Product Innovation in Early Modern London’, Past & Present, 168 (2000), 124–69. Quote from Borsay, p. 24.

²⁷ V. Harding, ‘Shops, Markets & Retailers in London’s Cheapside, c.1500–1700’, in Retail Circuits & Practices in Medieval & Early Modern Europe, ed. by Bruno Blondé, Peter Stabel, Jon Stobart and Ilja Van Damme (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), pp. 155–70.

²⁸ C. Walsh, ‘Social Meaning & Social Space in the Shopping Galleries of Early Modern London’, in A Nation of Shopkeepers: Five Centuries of British Retailing, ed. by John Benson and Laura Ugolini (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003), pp. 52–79.

²⁹ Anon., England’s Vanity, pp. 124–25, 130. See also ‘The Fantastic Act: Or the Anatomy of England’s Vanity in Wearing the Fashions of Several Nations’ (British Library, Roxburghe 1. 476–77, 1633–1669) for a similar set of criticisms.

³⁰ For a discussion of ‘Gallomania’ in Restoration England, see G. Stedman, Cultural Exchange in Seventeenth-Century France & England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013).

³¹ Anon., A Satire against the French (London, 1691), p. 6.

³² A. Ribeiro, Fashion & Fiction: Dress in Art & Literature in Stuart England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005), pp. 255–58; D. De Marly, ‘Fashionable Suppliers. 1660–1700: Leading Tailors and Clothing Tradesmen of the Restoration Period’, The Antiquaries Journal, 58 (1978), 333–51.

³³ John Evelyn, Tyrannus, or the Mode in a Discourse of Sumptuary Laws (London, 1661).

³⁴ John and Mary Evelyn (attributed), Mundus Muliebris; or, The Ladies’ Dressing Room Unlocked … Together with the Fop Dictionary, Compiled for the Use of the Fair Sex (London, 1690).

³⁵ There is some dispute amongst costume historians about the role of French prints in disseminating fashion information in late seventeenth-century England. Alice Dolan has argued that it is more useful to consider them ‘as part of a broader attempt by France to permeate and even dominate the cultures of other European countries, rather as disseminators of specific fashion advice’. She also notes that there were ‘much more effective and practical ways of disseminating information about clothing’, including by the written and spoken word and through direct observation. See Alice Dolan, ‘An Adorned Print: Print Culture, Female Leisure and the Dissemination of Fashion in France and England, around 1660–1779’, V&A Online Journal, 3 (Spring 2011) <http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/journals/research-journal/issue-03/an-adorned-print-print-culture,-female-leisure-and-the-dissemination-of-fashion-in-france-and-england,-c.-1660-1779> [accessed 19 May 2015]. For a recent reassessment of the role of the ‘fashion’ print in seventeenth-century France, see E. Davis, ‘“Habit de Qualité”: Seventeenth-Century French Fashion Prints as Sources for Dress History’, Dress, 40 (2014), 117–43. See also A. McShane and C. Backhouse, ‘Top Knots and Lower Sorts: Print and Promiscuous Consumption in the 1690s’, in Printed Images in Early Modern Britain, ed. by M. Hunter (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 337–57.

³⁶ For ballads satirizing contemporary fashion, see ‘The Virgin’s Vindication: Or the Conceited Fashionmonger’ (Magdalene College, Cambridge, Pepys 5.432, 1664–1703?); ‘The Young Man’s Advice to Proud Ladies: Or, A Friendly Caution against their Monstrous Dress’ (National Library of Scotland, Crawford 744, 1692).

³⁷ Museum numbers T.846-1974, T.847-1974. See McShane and Backhouse, ‘Top Knots and Lower Sorts’, pp. 345–46. For a discussion of fashion dolls in the eighteenth century, see N. McKendrick, J. Brewer and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (London: Europa, 1982), pp. 43–47.

³⁸ Diary, pp. 98–99.

³⁹ Diary, pp. 100, 102; ESRO, FRE 4816-4838.

⁴⁰ Diary, pp. 120, 159; ESRO, FRE 5301-5315.

⁴¹ Diary, pp. 164–69. His father moved to London in 1682 to escape prosecution, remaining there until 1687 (Diary, pp. 33, 161).

⁴² Elizabeth Bonnick was Jeake the elder’s sister. Nathaniel died in 1670, after which she married the Southwark glazier, Christopher Dighton (d. 1686) (Smart, ‘Biographical Sketch’, pp. 78–79).

⁴³ Mary Jaye was the daughter of Jeake the elder’s brother-in-law, William Key, a Rye mariner who died in 1666. She married John Jaye in 1681. They lived at the Golden Lion in Fenchurch Street. Elizabeth Mackley was also the daughter of William Key. She married John Mackley in 1674. They lived in Tooley Street in Southwark (RYEYT: N39.6.1).

⁴⁴ Diary, pp. 33, 164. In London Miller and his wife Elizabeth lived in Dunster Court, Minster Lane, just off Fenchurch Street (ESRO, FRE 5309).

⁴⁵ Diary, p. 222. They arrived in London on 6 June, staying with Thomas and Elizabeth Miller, returning to Rye on 6 July. There is no further information about what Jeake bought on this occasion.

⁴⁶ ESRO, FRE 5330, 5318, 5349; Diary, pp. 193, 194. The furniture was damaged in transit, much to Jeake’s fury.

⁴⁷ ESRO, FRE 5337-5358.

⁴⁸ ESRO, FRE 5047.

⁴⁹ RYEYT: N39.56.2.

⁵⁰ Diary, pp. 89–90. In 1676 Jeake paid 3s. for a pair of ‘convex’ spectacles (RYEYT: N39.40).

⁵¹ RYEYT: N39.40.

⁵² ‘Serge’ is a type of woollen fabric with a warp of worsted and a weft of wool, one of the so-called ‘new draperies’ produced in the West Country. ‘Stuff’ is a coarse thickly woven cloth of wool or a wool and flax mix. ‘Camlet’ is like stuff but with the wool mixed with silk, cotton, linen or Angora. ‘Dowlas’ is a coarse linen cloth. ‘Cambric’ is a fine, white linen cloth.

⁵³ ‘Buskins’ are calf-high or knee-high leather boots. ‘Drawers’ or underpants were usually made of linen. Jeake may here be describing leather linings for his breeches, oiled to make them waterproof. A ‘frock’ is a loose protective over-garment usually worn by working men.

⁵⁴ Mayhew, Tudor Rye, p. 14.

⁵⁵ The buttons are described as ‘glass buttons in silver ouches’. ‘Colbertine lace’ is a kind of open lace with a square ground, named after Louis XIV’s Minister of Finance, Jean-Baptiste Colbert.

⁵⁶ Diary, pp. 36–37, 149–54.

⁵⁷ Diary, pp. 150, 155. Money converted using The National Archives Historic Currency Converter: <http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/currency/> [accessed 19 May 2015].

⁵⁸ Wightman married Jeake’s cousin, Anne Keys, in 1674 (RYEYT: N39.6.1); they lived ‘over against the Salutation Tavern’ in Lombard Street in the parish of St Nicholas Acon (ESRO, FRE 5240). He was a member of the Clockmakers’ Company, gaining his freedom in 1670.

⁵⁹ ESRO, FRE 4992.

⁶⁰ I would like to thank Sir George White Bt, Consultant Keeper of the Clockmakers’ Museum, for his advice on Jeake’s watch. For a discussion of the Hooke/Huygens controversy, see L Jardine, The Curious Life of Robert Hooke: The Man who Measured London (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), pp. 197–206.

⁶¹ ESRO, FRE 5003.

⁶² The date is suggested by the sequence of other letters from Wightman to Jeake between April and June 1681 (see ESRO, FRE 5002, 5003, 5009, 5011, 5014, 5017).

⁶³ ESRO, FRE 5047.

⁶⁴ For a discussion of the introduction of the three-piece suit and the ideology that surrounded it, see D. Kuchta, The Three-Piece Suit and Modern Masculinity: England, 1550–1850 (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2002), pp. 77–90.

⁶⁵ Anon., England’s Vanity, pp. 124–25.

⁶⁶ C. W. and P. Cunnington, Handbook of English Costume in the Seventeenth Century (London: Faber & Faber, 1972), pp. 129–54; ERSO, FRE 5047.

⁶⁷ C. H. Crowston, Fabricating Women: The Seamstresses of Old Regime France (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001), pp. 50, 134.

⁶⁸ W. D. Smith, Consumption and the Making of Respectability, 1600–1800 (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 51–53.

⁶⁹ ESRO, FRE 5047.

⁷⁰ ESRO, FRE 5011.

⁷¹ D. Corner, ‘The Tyranny of Fashion: The Case of the Felt-Hatting Trade in the Late Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, Textile History, 22:2 (1991), 153–78. ‘The Maze’ was partly destroyed by fire in June 1681 (ESRO, FRE 5014).

⁷² ESRO, FRE 5011.

⁷³ ESRO, FRE 5011.

⁷⁴ ESRO, FRE 5014.

⁷⁵ Jeake sold a ‘silver-hilted rapier’ — presumably the one he bought in 1676 — in 1685 for £1 12s. (ESRO RYE 145/11).

⁷⁶ RYEYT: N39.40; Diary, p. 156. The fall also squashed his copper tobacco box flat.

⁷⁷ For a discussion of wigs, see S. J. Vincent, The Anatomy of Fashion: Dressing the Body from the Renaissance to Today (Oxford: Berg, 2009), pp. 1–11. Given Jeake’s penchant for fashionable clothes, it seems unlikely that his lack of a wig had anything to do with his religious convictions.

⁷⁸ ESRO, RYE 145/11.

⁷⁹ ESRO, FRE 5329.

⁸⁰ ESRO, FRE 5240 (emphasis added).

⁸¹ ‘Advice to the Maidens of London to Forsake their Fantastical Top Knots’ (Magdalene College, Cambridge, Pepys 4.365, 1685–1688). This and other ‘top-knot’ ballads are discussed by McShane and Backhouse, ‘Top Knots and Lower Sorts’, pp. 337–57.

⁸² A pinner was a long lace or linen streamer that hung down behind and to the side of the top knot.

⁸³ Object number C1443-1928. ‘Cat’ was slang for prostitute; owls were considered foolish; apes vain, undiscriminating and licentious <http://data.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/id/object/72012> [accessed 15 December 2014].

⁸⁴ ESRO, FRE 5335.

⁸⁵ ESRO, FRE 5317.

⁸⁶ ESRO, FRE 5306; 5327.

⁸⁷ Cunnington and Cunnington, Handbook, pp. 172–77.

⁸⁸ Holme, Academy, Book III, Ch. III, p. 95. See Ribeiro, Fashion and Fiction, pp. 246–48; Crowston, Fabricating Women, pp. 36–41.

⁸⁹ Cunnington and Cunnington, Handbook, pp. 177, 178, 181–85.

⁹⁰ ESRO, FRE 5329.

⁹¹ There is no record of where the silk was being painted, possibly in Spitalfields which by the 1690s was already a well-established silk-production district (see Earle, Making of the English Middle Class, pp. 19–20).

⁹² ‘Anterine’ is a type of worsted with a silk warp and a wool weft.

⁹³ ESRO, FRE 5330.

⁹⁴ ESRO, FRE 5335.

⁹⁵ ESRO, FRE 5340.

⁹⁶ TNA, PROB 11/678/209. The ring had been her grandmother’s.

⁹⁷ Quoted in Smith, Consumption, p. 52.

⁹⁸ ESRO, FRE 5340.

⁹⁹ Diary, pp. 64–67, 137–49.

¹⁰⁰ Diary, p. 146. Jeake’s letter does not survive. We know what he requested from Pickersgill’s reply to him date 2 May 1679 (ESRO, FRE 4943). ‘Jessamy’ (an archaic word for jasmine) can refer either to a light yellow colour or to a jasmine fragrance. The ‘other things’ were ‘papers’.

¹⁰¹ Diary, p. 147; RYEYT: N39.44.4. The goods were shipped with Rye mariner, Robert Moore (ESRO, FRE 4904). The port book records that ‘The Return’ of Rye captained by Moore entered the port from Dieppe on 12 July but the only goods recorded were four coach horses (TNA, E190/776/15).

¹⁰² ESRO, FRE 4892. Anne was James Wightman’s wife. Whitsuntide fell between 8 to 10 June in 1679.

¹⁰³ ESRO, FRE 4892.

¹⁰⁴ A stock account for 1679 records that he sold six dozen fans to Thomas Miller and four fans to Rye draper, Thomas Markwick (RYEYT: N39.44.4). His business ledger records that he had six dozen gloves and 27 fans still in stock (ESRO, RYE 145/11).

¹⁰⁵ ESRO, FRE 4941.

¹⁰⁶ ESRO, FRE 4948. See also FRE 4945.

¹⁰⁷ Diary, p. 147.

¹⁰⁸ Diary, p. 233.

¹⁰⁹ For an account of Jeake’s involvement with these and other schemes, see Diary, pp. 69–73.

¹¹⁰ Diary, p. 232.

¹¹¹ Diary, p. 232. T. Gataker, Of the Nature and use of Lots (London, 1619).

¹¹² See Jeake’s interpretation of a dream he had in 1678: ‘I thought this signified the divine protection and special providence of God still preserving me out of the hands of mine enemies; & never suffering them to ruin me’ (Diary, p. 145).

¹¹³ Lorna Weatherill has argued that members of the ‘commercial and dealing trades’ were more likely to own new types of goods in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries than members of the gentry and the professions. L. Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture in Britain 1660–1760 (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 166–189.

¹¹⁴ P. Slack, ‘The Politics of Consumption and England’s Happiness in the Later Seventeenth Century’, English Historical Review, 122:497 (2007), 609–31.

¹¹⁵ John Houghton, England’s Great Happiness (London, 1677), p. 18.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Danae Tankard

Danae Tankard combines her role as a social historian at the Weald & Downland Open Air Museum with a part-time position as a senior lecturer in the Department of History and Politics at the University of Chichester. This article forms part of an on-going study of seventeenth-century provincial clothing, focusing predominantly on the county of Sussex.