Sumptuary Laws

From My Universe
Jump to: navigation, search

In premodern times, one's socio-economic class was an important part of someones identity. Dress and other forms of display were meant to reflect accurately class or status or station in life. To dress or act above or below one's station was at least unseemly or at worst a form of fraud.

Even today, it is illegal to wear priestly vestments or a police uniform if one is not entitled to.

Sumptuary Laws were laws that forbade people within a community to dress or act publicly above their station. Due to the plague, access to wealthy people's clothing was easier to obtain, whether by purchase or theft.

The earliest sumptuary regulations in Christian Europe were Church regulations of Clergy, distinguishing what ranks could wear which items of vestments or (to a lesser extent) normal clothes on particular occasions; these were already very detailed by 1200, in early recensions of canon law. Next followed regulations, again flowing from the church (by far the largest bureaucracy in Medieval Europe), attempting to enforce the wearing of distinctive clothing or badges so that members of various groups could be readily identified, as branded criminals already could be.

The groups covered included Jews, Muslims, heretics such as Cathars (repentant ones were made to wear the Cathar yellow cross), Lepers and sufferers from some other medical conditions, and Prostitutes. The enactment and effectiveness of such measures was highly variable — efforts to make lepers wear long whitish robes were apparently not successful, as they are usually shown in pictures wearing normal clothes, but carrying a horn or rattle to warn others of their approach.

Sumptuary laws issued by secular authorities aimed at keeping the main population dressed according to their "station" do not begin until the later 13th century. These laws were addressed to the entire social body, but the brunt of regulation was directed at women and the middle classes. Their curbing of display was ordinarily couched in religious and moralizing vocabulary, yet was affected by social and economic considerations aimed at preventing ruinous expenses among the wealthy classes and the drain of capital reserves to foreign suppliers.

The efforts to make Jews and Muslims dress distinctively date from 1215 or shortly before. One aspect of medieval sumptuary laws was to make the Jewish and other non-Christian populations identifiable by the wearing of special yellow badges or the conical Jewish hat, the latter having initially been a voluntary form of distinctive dress imported from the Islamic world. Canon 68 of the Fourth Council of the Lateran in 1215 stipulated that Jews and Muslims should wear distinctive clothing; avoiding sexual contact between the populations was the reason given.

The Jews of Castile, the largest population in Europe, were exempted by the pope four years later, but elsewhere, local laws were introduced to bring the canon into effect. In much of Europe, Jews were supposed to wear the Judenhut or a yellow badge in the form of a wheel or ring (the "rota"), or, in England, a shape representing the Tablets of the Law. Muslims usually were supposed to wear a crescent-shaped patch or Eastern dress. Enforcement of these laws seems to have dwindled gradually, and the hat is not often seen in pictures after the 15th century, although the ring continues after that.