© 2013 Sue & Eamonn O’Rourke

Shoes in Tudor times were extremely wide, in fact Henry VIII passed a law restricting them to a maximum width of six inches!

It was also law that only nobility could wear the the colours crimson or blue.

Babies were dressed in swaddling clothes - which meant they were bandaged up tightly to include hands and feet.

Boys were dressed as girls until the age of 5 or 6 and all children were dressed as miniature adults.

Over the whole of the Tudor period fashions for the nobility and the rich changed enormously but for the less well off and country folk styles changed very little through the whole of the era.

Apart from anything else ruffs, farthingales and padding would have been very impractical for someone trying to work!