RURAL DRESS IN NORFOLK

Abstract

Ladies and Gentlemen, I suppose I must be the person least qualified among you tonight to speak on the subject of dress, for not only is my theoretical knowledge of your special subject, costume, limited and hazy, but I myself have no practical application either, being quite unable to ply a needle to anybody's satisfaction. My own subject is the social history of rural Norfolk, the tools and implements used in the agriculture of the county, and by the craftsmen, the fishermen, the marshmen and by the women, and the ways and means and the traditions of using those tools. I will not attempt tonight to give you a definitive account of the dress of the agricultural labourer in Norfolk, but to show you, I hope, how one of the tools of my trade may be useful. to you, and to place before you the information that I have gathered so far, without building any thesis upon it or drawing any conclusions. I shall leave you to decide whether my methods of enquiry have anything to offer to help you in your own researches into the history of costume. When I was first appointed to the Bridewell Museum, part of my brief was to undertake fieldwork in the county in the fields of local industry and rural crafts, to locate and collect material evidence relating to these, and to record that which was incapable of transference to the Museum, such as brick kilns, field patterns, and vernacular architecture. It was not many days before it became apparent that the evidence for the social history of the county that was so rapidly disappearing was not only the material evidence, the sugar beet drills, herring nets and blacksmith's anvils, but also the vital oral evidence without which many of the objects we were collecting in the Museum were virtually valueless, It is not so much the thing itself which is important to us but the total environment from which it came and in which it was used. Armed with a· tape recorder and notebooks, I therefore set out to rescue as much as possible before the repositories of this priceless and irretrievable information died,'Yet another race against time! That which I shall now pass on to you has been told to me by men and women in Norfolk, usually in the course of a conversation on a quite different subject, and I would like to record my gratitude to them for their patience and helpfulness. Unless specifically mentioned otherwise, the period concerned is from the beginnings of living memory, say from 1885, up to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, although any firm dating of this sort of evidence is more or less impossible. The First World War acts as a watershed in the history of the county, it is the period when the old traditions largely died, and the agriculture ,of the county changed rapidly with increasing mechanisation, and consequent loss of employmen t on the land. The oral evidence I have been seeking therefore relates to the period before the war, as those whose memories of this period are still fresh, are each year becoming fewer and fewer.