Fifteenth-Century Men's "Acorn" Caps (and How to Knit One)
by Alianora Munro
The earliest depictions of this style cape as an item of lay men's dress date from the late 1440s and early 1450s. The painting of St Eligius in his goldsmith's shop by Petrus Christus (c. 1449) shows the saint wearing a brown acorn cap with a fairly low crown. A nearly identical cap is worn by a scribe in an illumination of c. 1450 depicting the death of Alexander the Great. Again, the crown is low and there are folds at the top which indicate gathers or pleats that give the cap its characteristic shape.1
Both these caps were worn by relatively modest individuals -- St Eligius was a holy man of modest birth, and his headgear is in contrast to that of the fashionable young man who is in his shop. The scribe would have been a relatively low-ranking member of the royal household. Caps with taller crowns seem to have been worn in the 1450s by higher ranking or more ostentatious individuals. For example, two of the men in the "Retable du Parlement de Paris," who are probably meant to represent some of the wealthy bourgeois or lawyers summoned to that Parlement, wear taller acorn caps.2 The height of their caps is not excessively tall, probably not more than 10" overall. This painting also shows the "stalk" at the top of the cap very clearly.
These middle-height caps remained fashionable through the next decade. A portrait by Rogier van der Weyden of Antoine, the "Grand Bâtarde" of Burgundy, from c. 1460 shows the half-brother of Charles the Bold wearing a plum-coloured cap of this style.3 Likewise a portrait of a young aristocratic couple from the mid or late 1460s shows the man wearing a similar cap, although this version tapers a bit more sharply than other acorn caps, and also apparently lack the stalk at the top.4
The style continued largely unchanged into the 1470s. Dieric Bouts' painting of the martyrdom of St Hippolytus (c. 1470) , for instance, shows the saint's coat and hat thrown to the ground.5 The cap is the same sort of middle-height acorn cap worn in the previous two decades, and the stalk at the top is clearly visible. No seams are apparent, suggesting that this cap was not made from woven fabric. Similar, if slightly taller, caps appear in Bouts' "Ordeal by Fire" scene from his "Justice of Emperor Otto" diptych, finished in 1473. Several of the men in the foreground and background wear this style of cap, and again the stalks are clearly visible.
Quite short-crowned versions of the cap appear in the 1470s, but these seem to have been completely unfashionable. One such cap is portrayed in the Matheron Diptych by Nicolas Froment, a portrait of René d'Anjou and his second wife Jeanne de Laval in their later years. Despite their high rank, both are dressed quite modestly and soberly, and he wears a low-crowned black cap clearly designed for function rather than display. A similar black cap appears in an author-portrait of the monk Vincent of Beauvais in a manuscript of his Speculum Historiale.6 The portrait of Vincent clearly shows both the stalk and that the cap was hemmed. Even a peasant might wear this simple style of cap; the man on the right in an anthropomorphic initial A in an Italian gradual from the third quarter of the fifteenth century wears one. His unfashionable and tattered clothes, not to mention the fact that he is helping carry a large branch, mark him as a peasant.7
A very tall-crowned version of this cap also came into fashion during the 1470s. This style is well illustrated by two men in Loyset Liédet's illumination "Lydia's Sons Sentenced to Death."8 Both wear quite tall red caps; the one in the foreground is clearly something of a dandy, with excessively long points on his shoes. His cap seems to show shaping at the top of the crown. The other is at the back of the crowd and less clearly depicted. More such very tall caps appear in a c. 1470 frontispiece of a manuscript of a Tristan romance.9 Men both in the ship and on the shorewear very tall-crowned acorn caps and equally tall-crowned bowler-type brimmed caps with shaggy finishes. Not quite as tall, but still taller than caps of the 1460s, are the hats in Colin d'Anjou's illumination "The Marriage of Emilia and Palemon" in a manuscript of Boccaccio's Teseida.10 This illumination is particularly interesting because it shows several of these caps from behind. Some appear to have simple round crowns, like the hat in Bouts' painting of St Hippolytus, but others show a shaped back section probably meant to make the hat fit better. One of the men in this illumination appears to wear a jewelled hat-badge on the side of his cap; others wear flowers pinned to their caps.
The fashion for very tall hats seems to have been limited to the 1470s; depictions of the acorn cap after that decade show a return to the more modest heights of the preceding decades. A portrait of a fashionable young man of Brussels from the 1480s, for instance, shows a simple brown acorn cap.11 Scott describes it as "shrunken," but it is unclear if she means the modest size in comparison to the heights of the previous decade or that the wool from which it was made was fulled. She also suggests that the band crossing his chest is the cornete of his cap.12 This is a problematic assertion as cornete seems usually to mean the "tail" or lirripipe at the back of a hood, and no depictions of the acorn cap show such a detail. Also, the cap in the painting is brown, and the band over the man's chest is blue; it seems very unlikely that they were related in any way. However, there are some pictures which show men in acorn caps with a soft hood thrown over their shoulders, as for instance in the c. 1468 illumination "The Marriage of Arthur," in which some of the wedding guests carry hoods in addition to their acorn caps.13 It is difficult to say for sure but the young man may in fact be carrying spare headwear rather than sporting a cap with a cornete. His cap does show the typical short stalk at the top the crown.
The last signs of the acorn cap in aristocratic lay society appear in the 1490s. The portrait of Pierre de Bourbon by the Master of Moulins, for example, shows the same simple cap that had been fashionable 30 years earlier. However, Pierre was already a man of middle years when the portrait was painted and the cap seems already to have fallen out of fashion with younger men.
The low-crowned cap remained part of ecclesiastical dress in the sixteenth century, as Gerard Horebout's depiction of St Mark, wearing a red cap, in the month of April calendar page from the Spinola Hours, shows.14 The shape was retained for fashionable linen nightcaps to the end of the sixteenth century, although it was no longer part of court attire. The style probably also remained current among the lower classes, being simple and serviceable. A cap of this same type was found at Gunnister, Shetland, and has been dated from the coins found at the site to the last decade of the sixteenth century.15 The Gunnister cap is thrummed knitting, lightly fulled, worked in stocking stitch. It has a bottom circumference of 24.5" (size 7 7/8), with a depth of crown of 7.5 inches. The gauge is 8 st x 10 r per inch. The cap is seamless, and seams to have been worked from the bottom up. The bottom edge was turned under once and hemmed with coarse two-ply thread. The crown shaping is arranged so that there are four narrow strips of plain knitting in a cross shape at the crown with 8 lines of decreasing against the arms of the cross. The stalk in this case has been turned into loop, knitted from the last few stitches of the cap with the end turned over and caught down. The four-armed shaping of the crown is not an innovation; the same sort of shaping is found in surviving sixteenth-century men's nightcaps made of linen which have the same shape as the fifteenth-century caps.16
Acorn caps were probably made in a variety of ways during the fifteenth century -- the folds at the crown in some depictions suggest fabric, and felt is also a likely material -- but we know that caps were knitted in the fifteenth century from entries like this one in the French royal accounts:
1463 - Pour deux chappeaulx noirs faiz à l'aiguill [pour le roi], 38s 4d t.17
1463 - For two black knitted hats [for the king], 38s 4d touraines.It is not specified what sort of hats were purchased, but it has already been established that acorn caps were fashionable in the 1460s. Furthermore, acorn caps are extremely easy to knit, being essentially stocking caps, and the stalk detail at the top is more easily made by knitting than with tailoring techniques. Some representations of acorn caps also do not show seams, an effect easily produced by knitting on double-pointed needles, a technique attested by pictorial representations from the fourteenth century. It is therefore logical to suggest that at least some of the time acorn caps were made by knitting. Although the depictions do not show a distinctively knitted surface, knitting may be fulled like woven cloth, and in fact surviving wool knitting from the Middle Ages is almost always fulled. Fulling causes knitting to lose the surface texture typical of unfulled knitting and more closely resemble woven fabric or even felt. Fulling also raises a nap on both woven and knitted textiles; this was usually sheared off in the Middle Ages, but some depictions of the bowler-type hats which were also fashionable during the second half of the fifteenth century show a shaggy finish characteristic of unshaved fulled surfaces.
First, select the yarn and needles you want to use and knit a 4x4 inch test swatch to determine your gauge. Full the swatch (and don't use superwash wool) if you intend to full the finished hat.
After calculating from the gauge a stitch count that matches the head size of the person who will wear the hat, deduct about 10% so the cap fits fairly snugly rather than slopping around on the wearer's head.
My test swatch: 2-ply black Shetland wool on 2.25mm needles
I wanted to make a hat equivalent to a size 7, which is a head circumference of 22". According to my gauge that would be 220 sts, minus the 10% reduction. I cast on 196 sts (which made the numbers work out nicely).
A Sample Pattern:
Using dp or circ. needles, cast on 196 sts (66-65-65) Work plain for 37 rounds (if a taller cap is desired, work more rows here, remembering that your shaping will cover approximately 5" after fulling); on last round k49 (1/4 of the total stitch count), place marker (4x).
K around, decreasing 1 st on each side of each marker (ssk, sl marker, k2tog) every third round (i.e. rounds 3, 6, 9, etc) until 12 sts remain. Then decrease every round until 4 sts remain. (Each decrease round has a total decr. of 8 sts)
Slip the last 4 sts onto a one needle and work as I-cord for an inch. Break off the yarn and tie it off.
Full the hat vigourously in plenty of hot soapy water. Once completely fulled and dry, turn the bottom edge under and hem, using some broad ribbon to prevent the wool from irritating the forehead, if desired.
To see a picture of a hat made from this pattern, click here.
Notes
40st x 30r = 4.5" x 2.5"; gauge = 8.8st x 12r = 1" unfulled
40st x 30r = 4" x 2"; gauge: 10 x 15 = 1" fulled
1. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale MS FR 9342, f. 210r. Reproduced in Margaret Scott, Late Gothic Europe (London, 1980),
61, fig. 24.
2. Paris, The Louvre. Reproduced in Scott, 158, fig. 86.
3. Brussels, Musées Royaux des Beaux Arts. Reproduced in Scott, 167, fig. 100.
4. Portrait of a Couple, by the Master of the Legend of St Barbara. Banbury, Upton House, Viscount Bearsted Collection. Reproduced in Scott, 178, fig. 111.
5. Groeninge Museum, Bruges. Reproduced in Scott, 12, fig. 3.
5. Belgian (Bruges?) illumination, 1478-83. British Library Royal MS 14.E.I part 1 f. 3. Reproduced in Michelle P. Brown, Understanding Illuminated Manuscripts (Malibu, 1994), 114.
7. Italian (Lombard) illumination. J. Paul Getty Museum MS Ludwig VI 2 (83.MH.85) fol. 160v. Reproduced in Brown, 11.
8. Belgian (Bruges) illumination, c. 1463-1472. J. Paul Getty Museum MS Ludwig XIII 6 (83.MP.149) leaf 12. Reproduced in Brown, 27.
9. FR 103, f. 1. Reproduced in R.S. Loomis, Arthurian Legends in Medieval Art, (London, 1938) plate 304.
10. Vienna, Oesterreichisches Nationalbibliothek MS 2617, f. 182, c. 1470. Reproduced in Françoise Piponnier and Perrine Mane, Dress in the Middle Ages translated by Caroline Beamish (New Haven, 1997) 110, fig.43.
11. "Portrait of a Man," by the Master of the View of Sainte Gudule. London, National Gallery, NG2612. Reproduced in Scott, 190, fig. 126. I have seen this painting myself in London.
12. Scott, 190.
13. Brussels 9243, f. 39v. Reproduced in Loomis, plate 344.
14. Belgian (Ghent or Mechelen) illumination, c. 1515. J. Paul Getty Museum, MS Ludwig IX 18 (83.ML.114), f. 3. Reproduced in Brown, 30.
15. Audrey S. Henshall, and Stuart Maxwell, "Clothing and Other Articles from a Late 17th-Century Grave at Gunnister, Shetland." Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries, Scotland 86 (1951-52): 36-37.
16. Two such caps are photographed in Jane Ashelford, Dress in the Age of Elizabeth I, (London, 1988) 84, fig. 56, and 97, fig. 66.
17. Victor Gay, Glossaire archéologique du moyen age et de la renaissance (Paris, 1887-1928) II.424.