Wolf Hall discussion continuation thread

[AKnickerfulOfMenace]

Continuing the thread from Telly Addicts, just in time for episode 4

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/telly_addicts/2288038-Damian-Lewis-fans-line-up-for-Wolf-Hall-tonight?msgid=52500336#52500336

Yes, that one

On the other hand, then Wyatt the elder would never have written 'These bloody days have broken my heart' which would be a great loss to literature.

I like that quote.

I'm 3/4 way through Wolf Hall the book. So do people just go around collecting people to live in their house? Cromwell seems to go around collecting people. Who is this Christophe?

They absolutely do, I think. The bigger your household, the more important you are, so as Cromwell gets more important you would expect his household to expand.

The 'dramatis personae' at the front of Wolf Hall just says, 'Christophe - a servant'. I'm sure there is some backstory if anyone can remember it!

All I know is he met Christophe in Calais. Christophe says the most outrageous things, that the Duke of Norfolk is the one "pissing in your shadow". Made me laugh. And he offered to stab people for Cromwell.

Suffering withdrawal symptoms so have read through these two threads to ease the transition into Wolf Hall-less Wednesdays!
Some discussion regarding Cromwell's day dreaming about touching Anne's cleavage in the past thread, and it not being in the book, found this 53% through my Kindle edition of Wolf Hall:
'Anne is in the gallery beside him. She is wearing a dark red gown of figured damask, so heavy that her tiny white shoulders seem to droop inside it. Sometimes – in a kind of fellowship of the imagination – he imagines resting his hand upon her shoulder and following with his thumb the scooped
hollow between her collarbone and her throat; imagines with his forefinger tracking the line of her breast as it swells above her bodice, as a child follows a line of print.'
There is also somewhere in the book a reference to her habit of putting her hands in her sleeves, so much so that there had been rumours that her hands were disfigured in some way - obviously HM referencing the 6th finger myth.

Actually that quote is right on the cusp of where you move to 54%.

Well detected, Sherlock!

There's also Jane Seymour, I think, who goes around saying her sleeves were Cromwell's sleeves. Or something. These people are weird.

Have just got Wolf Hall to read & BUTB is on it's way!

Will just finish Betty Boothroyd's autobiography before starting!

Great possibilities for the writer, though
Upper class clothes were so horrendously expensive they got passed on, remade, given away, etc, which leads to lots of dramatic possibilities in terms of people wearing each other's clothes.
When Norfolk was arrested all his clothes were confiscated (his pregnant DIL had to beg to be allowed a moth-eaten old fur gown to keep her warm on the way to London when she was kicked out of Kenninghall) and IIRC the Seymours got them.

Can you imagine seeing someone else swanning around court in your imprisoned dad's clothes?

He, Cromwell (see what I did there! ;-) gave Jane Seymour a gift of some needle work patterns wrapped in blue cloth when he had his eye on her for himself. She made the cloth into fancy sleeves - hence her calling them Cromwell's sleeves.

That blue cloth was a very bright blue - was it a fairly common colour or something very expensive/special? Don't recall seeing many blue gowns etc.

Blue was unusual, specially for women - it was the colour worn by servants (dyed with woad) so not seen as posh at all, but according to The Tudor Tailor (which is written by the people who did the amazing costumes for the Edward christening reconstruction that was on tv a few weeks before Wolf Hall) Henry VIII had a few blue garments and Mary I had a blue gown. The Tudor Tailor is pretty thorough so if there was a special expensive blue dye I would expect them to know about/mention it.
It also says the 1533 sumptuary law reserved blue velvet for the nobility and garter knights.

I know that blue paint (made from crushed Lapiz Lazuli) was THE most expensive thing (out of all the colours too) so it would follow that blue cloth ('Mary' blue) would be expensive too?

Ah.

I don't know that lapis lazuli is used as a dye, though? (except on Minecraft, apparently).

Countess, thanks I didn't realise clothes were passed on to others outside the family.

No, research not Minecraft based!

This was from a book whose title escapes my memory but it was about a family who buried a child dressed in 'Mary Blue' under a farmhouse hearth.

Also think Girl in Pearl Earring discusses Lapiz as source for the Blue used for Skies in Churches?

No no, I didn't mean you re the Minecraft

You are absolutely right about lapis being used as a paint pigment and the 'Mary blue' cloaks.

I thought the suggestion of it being used in a fabric dye was really interesting and I hadn't heard of it so I googled to check, and got lots of hits, but it turned out they were all from Minecraft, where you can use it to dye your sheep

Ah. Getting better - the below is from 'Pigments Through the Ages':

"Short History of Blue Pigments

The first blue pigment was azurite, a natural mineral. Soon thereafter, Egyptians manufactured Egyptian blue, which quickly spread throughout the ancient world. During the Middle Ages, the recipe for Egyptian blue was lost, so azurite and expensive ultramarine from Afghanistan were the only sources of blue available. In the 15th century, smalt, a finely ground blue glass, came into use for painting. The first pigment produced due to the advancement of modern chemistry was a blue, Prussian blue, which was soon followed by cobalt blue and cerulean blue."

"In early medieval Europe, blue was a royal and aristocratic color, as blue dyes were rare and expensive. Due to the rarity of blue dyes made from woad, and also because Tyrian purple had gone out of use in Western Europe after the collapse of the Roman Empire, Europeans’ idea of royal color shifted from Tyrian purple towards blue. The working class wore mainly green and brown."

Ah - double blush.

Sorry to be so defensive.

You have contributed LOADS of really erudite stuff to the thread and I thought I could chip in with my teeny bit of semi knowledge (from a paperback I cant remember the name of

and I got all defensive about the Minecraft stuff. Sorry!

My children play it (incessantly) and I tried once - only once - and got stuck down a hole. Upside down. For hours. To their great amusement.

Relieved I didn't imagine the 'Mary Blue' bit.

There is a Farm Park not so very far from where I live where they dye their sheep Tartan, as a tourist attraction. Wonder what they use?

and at the tartan sheep.

That's really interesting about the blue pigments and early medieval feeling that blue was royal. I wonder when woad became widespread.

If we are using Girl With A Pearl Earring as reference, I think this is a good time to mention my fangirl email to Tracy Chevalier in which I very politely pointed out that in Remarkable Creatures (I think), she had a character in a mauve gown, despite mauve not being synthesised as a colour until much later in the Victorian era. She wrote back and said she wished I'd been her editor

From 'History of Woad in Britain':

"Woad was not used only for textile dyes and, for example the illustrators of the Lindisfarne Gospels (late 7th/early 8th century) used a woad-based pigment for the blue. Evidence for use of dyestuffs and vegetative remains of woad plants were found in Viking age York (9th/10th century).

By 1377, Coventry was apparently the fourth largest city in England, a centre of the wool and cloth trade. Blue cloth dyed in Coventry had a reputation for being highly colourfast, i.e. not fading with either washing or exposure to light. The phrase ‘as true as Coventry blue’ originated from this fact, as recorded by John Ray in 1670. The chief commodity imported into Coventry through Southampton from the late 1420s to 1478 was woad for dyeing the Coventry blue cloth.

Woad was used in England throughout the medieval period, much of it imported from Europe. However, the area under woad increased substantially during the 16th century. This was probably because woad supplies from abroad became unreliable and expensive.

Woad cultivation became strictly regulated in the late 1500s in a period of food shortage leading up to the famine of 1586 and concerns that too much land was being devoted to woad rather than to cereals. Queen Elizabeth I issued a “Proclamation against the sowing of woade” on 14 October 1585, stating that the breaking up and sowing of the most fertile ground with woad was a cause of great complaint and that no person was to break up ground for the present nor to sow woad within four miles of a market or clothing town or within eight miles of any house of the Queen’s. This was amended in 1587 to allow no more than 40 or 60 acres of woad in any one parish and no more than 20 acres sown by one person yearly."

www.deadlinenews.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/tartan-sheep-2.jpg