English Sailors and a Thrummed Cap

Other Myths

Myth: All Tudor English pirates should look like they stepped out of a pirate movie.

Mariners of the Tudor age dressed similarly to everyday folk of their time and location. There were some differences peculiar to mariners in general. Pirates or Privateers were no different. It wasn't until 1628 that the British Admiralty made sailor's clothing, called 'slops', for press-ganged men, where Pirates of a later age get their basic gear from.

Sailors of the Elizabethan period, based on period art wear loose venetians or what will later be called slops. Some are shown closed at the bottom some are not. The upper body garments tend to be either close fitting doublets, or a loose smock sort of jacket referred to in the period as a cassock. The real obvious indicator of a sailor is the cap. The most notable ones being thrummed caps. Thrummed caps look in art like fur. They are made from strands of woll (thrum) being afixed through the weave of k(n)it caps, not unlike the modern watch cap.
~ Ron Carnegie, h-cost mail list, 3-8-2006.

Waghenaer's Mariner's Mirror, 1586. Engraved frontispiece by Theodor de Bry.

#275 English Sailor, woodcut by Vecellio 1590-98. Vecellio's Renaissance Costume Book: All 500 Woodcut Illustrations from the Famous Sixteenth-Century Compendium of World Costume. Dover Pictorial Archive Series. ISBN 048623441X.

Detail from Christ and the Adulteress by Pieter Aertsen, 1559.

Gentlemen of Fortune, Pirate Clothing and Equipment [Article], ©? Last retrieved March 22, 2006 from the World Wide Web http://www.gentlemenoffortune.com/sailorskit.htm