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Sumptuary Legislation and Personal Regulation in England

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The idea that the government has the right to tell you how to dress, what to eat, and what type of vehicle you might drive seems strange to us. Yet for the governements of medieval Europe and especially medieval England, such questions were matters of great importance. The visible signs of prosperity , as shown in the quality of dress and food and the horse you rode, were critical in a society in which class was everything. The distance between the nobility and the peasantry was reinforced by the clothing they wore. Wealthy peasants who adopted the clothing and behavior of the nobility were a threat to the stability of society. This beginning in 1263, England began to pass laws restricting the type of clothing and food that different classes might use.

At first this legislation was based solely on the difference of the classes. But ultimately, after the Black Death of 1348, additional reasons were developed to deny the rising middle class access to the rich dress and food. Opposition was based upon the idea that money spent on imported foods and clothes was depleating England of its wealth ( mercantilism) and would leave the country so poor that it could not defend itself.

Sumptuary laws also joined with price-regulation laws to attempt to keep prices down by restricting access to imported
food and goods. None but the wealthy were allowed to wear imported cloth. Englishmen were required to wear English wool,
eat English fare and drink English beer. Ultimately, by the time of Queen Elizabeth, sumptuary legislation began to disappear,as the middle class took over the government. But this change was more apparent than real, for the Puritans reestablished sumptuary regulation on a religious, rather than an economic or class basis.

This is a wonderful book for those interested in this strange subject. Frances Elizabeth Baldwin wrote this book as a Ph.D. dissertation for Johns Hopkins. It was first published in 1926 in the Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science s. 44, n.1