Fabric for Seventeenth-Century Children and Adolescents' Clothes

Abstract

This article attempts to describe the information on clothing which can be taken from the relatively newly exploited source of the probate account (as opposed to the probate inventory). The accounts only itemize the costs of clothing children up to apprenticeship, or to marriage, not the fully adult. Fortunately for this author's interests, the bulk of the accounts cover the children of parents with moveable goods worth under £100, under yeoman status. This particular article focuses on the range of prices that can be gleaned from the accounts on the prices of fabrics, and demonstrates that the same fabrics in the seventeenth century came in a very large range of prices and qualities. It differs from Professor Shammas' conclusions. The costs of clothing minors rose in the seventeenth century. It examines the prices of boys' and girls' clothes that can be gathered from the accounts, and also the types of fabric that were used to make each type of garment for them, taking into account the economic status of each child. It concludes that although the finer, more expensive, fabrics more commonly made up clothes for better-off children, this did not always follow : nor did the poor always wear the cheapest fabrics. There was no clear social stratification, although there was a rough one.