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1642－1646 第一次英格兰内战 英格兰清教革命时期保王派(又称骑士党)与革命派(又称圆颅党)的内战
Royalist Bluecoat soldier 1643.
Another from my collection of English Civil War figures , this one shows the Royalist uniform we know most about , and posting it provides a good excuse to discuss some of the interesting things that need to be considered when making a historical reconstruction .
I’ve loved this period for a long time, to the point of obsession , have lots of books , and keep up with the researches done by re-enactors into original documents .
We have little hard information about the clothing produced in the ECW for common soldiers, and of course not a single surviving item . What survives are contracts for supplying clothing , and some very stylised and crude woodcuts, so you need to know a bit about 17c clothing before starting .
Painting scarcely existed in England apart from foreign artists working for the Court , who painted the wealthy people rather than common labourers .
There are , alas , no British parallels to the innumerable Netherlandish and French paintings showing peasants , but we have to presume British ones looked pretty similar .
Clothing was expensive at this period, since it depended entirely on hand work , and most men of the very low status who made up the Foot would have owned little more than what they stood up in, and once enlisted and marched away had no way of replacing it, since most of their clothes were woven at home.
Most men wore homespun, in various shades of browny-grey( russet ) and would have owned just one suit.
A few months marching around the English Midlands and sleeping in hedges would have reduced them to rags, and if they were to serve efficiently they needed clothing.
The King’s Army , based by then in Oxford , were in a particularly desperate case , because they had lost control of London and the South-East , which was the centre of all the nation’s trade as well as the chief port for imports from overseas. They obtained several large shipments of arms from Europe, but clothing had to be organised , and cash was very short.
We know that a contractor called Thomas Bushell undertook to clothe the Royal Foot in “suits” of red and blue cloth , comprising caps, coats , breeches and stockings , and this figure is an attempt to reconstruct what they might have looked like.
Cloth had long been England’s major manufacture , and it went on almost everywhere , but the major centres were the West Country , Yorkshire , East Anglia , and the Thames valley. All but the first of those areas were in control of the Parliament or disputed, so it’s most likely that the cloth came from Gloucestershire or Somerset .
Weaving areas had large numbers of individual weavers working in their own homes, often doing piece work for contractors like Bushell ; the factory or mill was yet to come , and there must have been variation in the quality of the cloth produced.
Some was made from dyed yarn , obtained from craftsman dyers by the contractor , but much cloth was made undyed , from brown and white wool mixed , to make the everyday “russet” that most poorer people wore.
That could be dyed “ in the piece “ , but the dye tended to take less well.
It was difficult to obtain really large quantities of any one colour, hence the motley appearance of armies, with each regiment in any colour cloth the commander happened to be able to get.
Red cloth was dyed with madder, imported from the Mediterranean in large quantities through ports like Bristol.
Blue cloth was dyed with woad, which could be grown in Britain , but was mostly imported , in the form of dried “woad balls “ made from the leaves. What exact shade was created depended on the strength of the dye, the darker shades being more expensive to make , so I have elected to use a mid-blue, known at the time as “watchet” , which was a common shade for liveries .
Such suits would presumably have been made with economy as the major consideration, so would have been meagrely cut .
We know that Soldier’s coats were cut from 1 or 1 & 1/3rd yards of broadcloth , a thick fulled cloth which is woven 60” wide .
There are a couple of ways of cutting a coat from such a length , but the end result is generally rather simple , and without much flare to the skirts. It has the minimum of seams to make it quicker to make.
They were lined with thin woolen cloth like baize, or linen.
Tin buttons were likely the most common , since they could be cast quickly .
Buttons sewn from balls of cloth were also common.
The breeches are also quite narrow, running against the prevailing fashion for wider ones using more cloth .
The stockings could be knitted , as here , or tailored from cloth.
The cap is interesting :
We don’t know what the issued caps looked like .
Knitted or tailored caps of wool or linen were commonplace , being worn by everyone at home or work when the fashionable felt hat was too expensive or inconvenient. The commonest caps worn by poorer men were knitted Monmouth caps , in various shapes like the old Tudor brimmed cap , or one like a modern seaman’s brimless knitted cap.
Since the issue caps were probably made from cloth , we might guess that they were like the “English Fog Hat”( German term ) or “ Bouckingan” ( after the Duke of Buckingham , French ) that were popular at the time , and appear in many pictures, including those of soldiers. And from those foreign names we know they were thought of as English, though the period English name is uncertain. Re-enactors today call it a montero .
The kid in the painting above is wearing one.
It’s a handy item , since you can roll it down in bad weather and disappear from view :
Also good for sleeping in.
Shoes : he might at first glance seem to be wearing modern combat boots. These are actually what were known as “ Startups”, which were a kind of rustic boot worn by agricultural workers…. he was wearing them when pressed for a soldier .
They are mentioned in countless texts, and appear in crude woodcuts, but I don’t think any actually survive , so these are a fair guess.
The armament is not disputed : a matchlock with a full-length 48” barrel , which needed a rest to be used accurately. During the war they were often shortened to make them easier to use, but the pre-war Statute declared that they should have barrels four foot long , so most would have been that long during the first years of the war. Doubtless the rests were often dumped.
The sword is a Hounslow hanger , a common short sword .
The owner of the Hounslow sword factory joined the King in Oxford , and presumably took some of his tools and stock with him , because swordmaking was undertaken there to equip the troops.
The equipment : a bandolier with twelve wooden bottles , to carry a pound of powder and twelve bullets.
He has a canvas snapsack which has been soaked in linseed oil to waterproof it, which when it (eventually) dries goes this orange-brown colour.
It contains food and spare clothing, if he has any.
There is no provision for drinking or sleeping, such as the waterbottles and blankets provided to later soldiers
He’s still wearing his own russet doublet and linen shirt , since they are still good enough to keep .Uniform coats were worn on top of any other clothes , effectively as overcoats .
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