Medieval Hunting by Richard Almond

dress. Everybody moved about in their everyday dresses, varied according to social status, even though the colour might be adapted to the environment.’ 95
    Danielsson’s assertion is rather misleading, because in spite of the opening statement, it clearly intimates that there was a special hunting dress and that it was green or some other natural colour. Hunting dress in the fourteenth century may well have been undifferentiated for many aristocratic hunters but this seems unlikely as a general rule. Hunting all day on horseback over every sort of terrain, but particularly in woodland, required some sort of appropriate wear which was protective, comfortable and denoted status. The pen drawings of hunting scenes in Queen Mary’s Psalter show the gentry and nobility wearing wide, pleated ankle-length dresses with wide sleeves, round, open rolled necks and hoods. The king wears a white Spanish cloak on top of this, whereas the nobility wear a pelerine or overcoat. Gloves with long cuffs are worn, indicating gentility. Male headgear includes crowns, an assistant’s hat and a felt hat, peaked out in front belonging to ‘probably a distinguished gentleman’. The ladies wear long smooth dresses, covering the whole of their feet when on horseback. These are simple garments with long sleeves, often supplemented by a smooth or pleated overcoat slit up to the hip. A scarf tied round the head, chin and neck secured the hood. A cleric in hooded, half-sleeved dress accompanies the king and his retinue out hunting. 96
    However, we must be careful here on the representation of hunting dress in art, whether it is found in an illuminated bas de page in the Calendar of a Book of Hours, a psalter or a royal tapestry. The great problem is assessing how close to reality the visual evidence is. Usually we have no way of knowing what the patron of illustrative material ordered in detail or the relative inputs of artist and patron. Did he or she require the artist to show the hunters in their ‘best’ outfits? Were the hunt servants well dressed to enhance the overall richness of the illustrative scene and the status of the patron and the dominant figures? The answer to these two questions is probably ‘yes’, given human nature and the desire to achieve several points with one work of art. Perfection in illustration is understandable and can be compared to a posed photograph. Whether these pictures represent the total reality of dress in the hunting field is another question, to which the most sensible answer is ‘probably partly’. No doubt there were royal and major aristocratic hunting days and events for which everybody, including the professional staff, was required to dress up accordingly and in the height of current hunting fashion, but for most hunting and hawking forays the mode of dress was probably less elaborate, more practical and certainly less expensive.
    The upper classes hunted on horseback and two small but important items of dress or equipment which indicate high status are connected with the horse. The first can clearly be seen in Queen Mary’s Psalter . The noble or gentle hunters wear small spurs of the strap-on ‘prick’ variety. Danielsson’s text, however, states that none of the huntsmen carried spurs, which is puzzling. 97 The dismounted professional huntsmen certainly do not (and why should they?), and it would be strange if the huntsmen of rank were not wearing spurs. Spurs were an essential aid to horsemanship and control of the war and hunting horse in the Middle Ages, and for centuries to come. If the illustrations in Livre de chasse are examined, the nobles are invariably portrayed equipped with the large rowelled spurs of the early fourteenth century; in contrast, the hunt servants do not wear any, as was apparently the norm. The plate for Chapter 28 shows the mounted huntsman, wearing rowelled spurs, instructing an apprentice in the recognition of a