Cambric

Every year on the 1st of January, the Tudor monarch and court participated in a gift-giving ceremony to celebrate the New Year. Each gift received and given by the monarch was recorded in a gift-roll: a length of several parchment membranes sewn together head-to-tail that stretches to between three and four metres long. More than twenty gift-rolls survive from the reign of Elizabeth I, and within them are recorded at least nine thousand gifts exchanged with the Queen. Very few of these gifts have survived to the present day, so we are reliant on the rolls for insights into their materiality.

‘New Year's gift-roll of Elizabeth I,

Queen of England’. 1st January 1584/5.

Folger Shakespeare Library Z.d.16.

Eleven gift-rolls describe gifts given by ‘Mrs Dane’, a gentlewoman. Her gifts are always connected to fabric, and they range from good quality linen (cambric, holland, and lawn) to hangings and cloths embroidered with rich materials like ‘venice gold’ and silk. The first gift Mrs Dane is recorded as giving is ‘a pece of Cameryk in a boxe’ in 1562 (Lawson, 61). Cambric is a particularly fine form of linen, named for Cambrai, the region in France where it was originally made. This expensive linen was used for items like ruffs, cuffs, handkerchieves, and especially fine shirts like the one pictured below. High-quality linens had to be imported since English cloth-makers did not have the expertise to make them. They required extra time and care in sorting, weaving, and bleaching the flax fibres from which they were made. The knowledge of how to maintain these linens with laundering and starching was also imported from the Netherlands around the same time.

‘Cambric Shirt’. 1697-1702. Victoria & Albert Museum T.356-1980. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

This entry, ‘a pece of Cameryk in a boxe’, might initially seem an unremarkable entry in the gift-roll. We cannot tell very much about the item itself from this brief description. The box is not described, so perhaps it was unexceptional and its primary purpose was to protect the fabric within. Dane’s choice of cambric is notable, since, at the time, it was still a relatively new material. Edmund Howe’s edition of John Stow’s Annals (1615) claims that cambric and lawn were introduced to England in 1562, the very same year Dane presented her gift. However, M. Channing Linthicum has more recently found that cambric was common in accounts and inventories of royal and noble households as early as 1546. Even so, our early Elizabethan gift-roll records a specific moment of exchange as this new material was becoming more prominent and fashionable.

Of the nine mentions of cambric in the New Year’s gift-rolls of 1559 and 1562, only two record cambric given as a raw material: the one by Mrs Dane and the other by ‘Smith, Customer’. The other seven gifts are elaborate items of clothing which incorporate cambric, such as sleeves and forehead cloths of cambric which are ‘netted with gold’, and ‘a peire of sleves wroght with gold and silk, tufted out with cameryk’. The rich material and textual details in these references sound more impressive than Dane’s ‘pece of Cameryk’. To find out why Dane’s gift was suitable for the Queen, we have to turn from the gift to the gift-giver.

An entry in the gift-rolls for 1559 records the gift of ‘oone faire hatt of blake vellat enbrauderid with venice golde’ by ‘a Merchaunte’, William Dane (Lawson, 42). William was a member of the Ironmongers’ Company and, it turns out, the husband of Mrs Margaret Dane: the same Mrs Dane who appears in the gift-rolls. William was also a linen-draper. Margaret married William in 1542 in Bassishaw, in the City of London, near where she grew up. The most prominent trade in sixteenth-century Bassishaw was mercery – that is, the export of wool, and the import of silks, linens, and velvet (Oldland, 149). Margaret’s family may have been mercers and perhaps she used her family connections to establish a linen-draping business with her husband. If so, the piece of cambric gifted by Margaret in 1562 shows the extent of those connections. Margaret was able to obtain a fabric that was relatively new, and of sufficiently high quality to be suitable as a gift for the Queen. Once gifted, the roll records that the cambric was delivered to Blanche Parry, the Chief Gentlewoman of the Privy Chamber. From there, the cambric could have been made into clothing for the Queen. We might think of the ‘pece of Cameryk’ as an advert, or a sample, encouraging the Queen’s wardrobe to reach out to the Danes for good quality linen. Sure enough, in October of the same year, the Wardrobe Warrants record a payment to William Dane for holland and canvas. A few years later, the payments become regular, with purchases every six months between 1568 and 1573 to William for linen. Margaret continued to give gifts to encourage the Queen’s favour, and William handled business with the Queen’s Wardrobe. One apparently unremarkable line in the gift-rolls, it would seem, records the commencement of a long-standing business agreement between the Danes and the Queen’s Wardrobe.

Following William’s death in 1573, the payments in the Wardrobe Warrants cease until one final payment to Margaret in October 1579. However, records elsewhere prove that Margaret continued their linen-draping business as a widow. Between 1571 and 1579, there are six payments recorded in the accounts of the Office of the Revels. All but one of these payments is to Mistress Dane the ‘Lynnen draper’ (Feuillerat, 160, 167, 197, 221, 227, 306). Margaret, in other words, appears to be trading in linen right up until her death in 1579. She was buried in St Margaret Moyses church next to her husband, to whom she had erected a monument upon which she described herself as ‘his faithfull peere’ (Nicholl, 547-8; Ormerod, 18). Her will contains numerous charitable bequests, including £2000 to the Ironmongers’ Company, of which William had been a member, Master, and Alderman. This huge sum, equivalent to more than £400,000 today (according to the National Archives currency converter), was used to help fund apprenticeships with the company. Margaret asked that preference be given to apprentices interested in linen-draping. Her legacy, which started with a simple ‘pece of Cameryk’, continues right up to the present day.

In 1640, the Ironmongers’ Company honoured Margaret’s memory by commissioning a portrait of her by Edward Cocke, which still hangs today in their banqueting hall. Painted so long after her death, we do not know how accurate it is, although it may have been based on an earlier likeness. The painting is unassuming, showing a woman at prayer. But I like to think that those modest ruffs at Margaret’s neck and wrists were made from a particularly fine ‘pece of Cameryk’ that she sourced herself.

Edward Cocke. Portrait of Margaret Dane. 1640. Reproduced by permission of the Worshipful Company of Ironmongers, London.

In this post I have highlighted how a single key thing might be used to uncover histories and networks of an early modern business woman. I would love to know more about the material details of the ‘pece of Cameryk’ itself — what it looked like, what it was made into, and what it might have felt like to wear. Since it is lost, we can only make informed guesses. If the cambric had survived, we may understand more about its materiality but less about the culture and people it was connected to. The parchment and ink of the New Year’s gift-roll have proved more lasting than the objects they recorded. But those objects can still gesture towards countless stories of early modern people and their networks.

Anouska Lester is a PhD Candidate in the English and Creative Writing Department at the University of Roehampton.

She would like to thank Bethan Davies, Sierra Carter, and Filip Ivovic for their feedback on a draft of this post.

Selected Bibliography.

Feuillerat, Albert, editor. Documents Relating to the Office of the Revels in the Time of Queen Elizabeth (Louvain: A. Uystpruyst, 1908).
Lawson, Jane A., editor. The Elizabethan New Year’s Gift Exchanges, 1559-1603 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
Linthicum, M. Channing. Costume in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936).
Nicholl, John. Some Account of the Worshipful Company of Ironmongers (London: J.B. Nichols and son, 1851).
Oldland, John. ‘The Wealth of the Trades in Early Tudor London’. The London Journal, vol. 31, no. 2 (2006), pp. 127–55.
Ormerod, S. C. L. In Search of Margaret and William Dane. Margaret Dane School, 1981.
Leed, Drea. DressDatabase (DressDB). http://elizabethancostume.net/cyte/node/7251. Accessed 27 Jan. 2022.
Stow, John. The Annales, or a Generall Chronicle of England, […] Continued and Augmented [...] by Edmond Howes, Gentleman (London, 1615).

7 April 2022.