13 - Clothing Dependents: Dress of Children and Servants in the Petre Household, 1586–1587

Summary

Household accounts have a quotidian fascination all their own. On the surface these dry and impersonal records of moneys in and moneys out seem to contain little personality; but look deeper, and they illuminate humdrum details of life that would otherwise have been lost centuries ago. You may come across an entry “For my nephew Fraunces … for a pounde of sugere plate and greate comfettes to make hym larne his booke,” and envision a schoolboy sulking in his chair, gazing out the window and daydreaming of doing anything but Latin while his mother coaxes him with candies to mind his tutor. Young Richard Farmor was given “suger-candie to avoyde fleme, his mouthe and throte being sore,” evoking the image of an unhappy, feverish child being soothed by a nurse; and reading about funds “gyven to my cosyn Margett to putt in her purse at her going to My Ladye Elisabethes grace” lets one imagine the excitement of young Margaret, feeling terribly grown-up, her parents exhorting her to pay servants well on her first visit to Princess Elizabeth.

The Petre household accounts are one of several such collections surviving from the Tudor era. Ranging from the 1540s to the beginning of the seventeenth century, these accounts record outlays for food, drink, clothing, entertainment, construction, liveries and wages, household maintenance, and much more. Each book dates from Michaelmas (29 September) of one year to Michaelmas of the next. Although they are not a continuous series, their valuable yearly windows into the life of a Tudor household have seen them used as sources in several books on Tudor entertainment, music, feasting, and politics. They are also quite useful for the student of historical costume, as evidenced by Anne Buck’s examination of the clothing of Thomasine Petre, daughter of William Petre, listed in the Petre accounts of the 1550s.

The present article focuses on a later generation of the Petre family: that of John Petre, born in 1549 to William and his second wife, Anne Tyrrell, and John's children. John Petre married Mary Waldegrave, daughter of Sir Edward Walgrave of Borley, in 1570. They had three surviving sons: William, John, and Thomas. They also had two children who died in infancy: Edward, who lived for five months, and Anne, who lived for 16 months.