Andrew Boorde, physician to Henry VIII, travelled across Europe in the 1500s and then wrote an ‘itinerary’ to help other travellers understand the people of the countries they’d be visiting. His book includes sections on the Low Countries and Low German speaking parts of Europe, specifically Flanders, Zealand & Holland, Brabant & Hainault, Guelders & Cleves, Julich & Liege, and Cologne & Bonn. I’ve taken these sections and compiled them into the one document for easy reading for us Low Countries researchers.
Here’s the file: Andrew Boorde’s guide to the Low Countries. This file is an easy to read version of his book – a typeset version of the entire book on archive.org. I’ve highlighted any section which refers to clothing, and written two pages on the context of his itinerary and how much faith we can place in his observations.
It’s useful for anyone looking at food, coinage, language and comparisons of general culture of these counties. There are a couple of references to clothing, most notably for our purposes one of the only textual references in English to the huik, as well as frequent commentary that certain counties don’t change their clothes [style].
Oooooh! This Boorde guy is awesome! Sure there is not much about clothing, but just the whole document is facinating! It was also pretty cool to see Liege mentioned (I used to live about 20 minutes drive away, in Verviers), as well as Newport and Oostende (my SCA name, Isolde van Wilravenssijde, comes from a small fishing village that was between the two port towns).
Very cool document. Thank you for compiling it, as well as the commentary!
I’m glad you enjoyed it, I love it as well. I’ve been fascinated ever since I took a medieval medicine class run by Mistress FillipaGinevra of Lochac and the book she was passing around miraculously opened on the Flanders page. (and the rebuild of this website might have been inspired by realising we needed a place to store sources like this).
I love the poems for their gaucheness, but also for the evidence of early nationalism. “My country’s better than your country” not a new thing. Last but certainly not least, it *finally* gave me an understanding of the 16th century’s conception of the boundaries of the Low Countries.