This is part of a a collection of summaries on the fourteenth century.

The sumptuary laws of mediæval Europe are probably the most spectacular example of the difference in attitudes between western society then and today. They are the expression of the antithesis of several key principles, listed below, that our society has incorporated so thoroughly that we have come to feel them natural and inevitable.

• Equality before the law: That is, that rich, important and powerful people are subject to the same laws as poor, unimportant (except to themselves) and powerless people. Regardless of how cynical we may be about the practice, we recognise violations of this principle as morally reprehensible. The French writer Anatole France once ironically observed that the law was very just to bar the rich, as well as the poor, from sleeping under bridges, begging and so forth. But in the fourteenth century the various "estates" (clergy, nobles and commoners) did not consider each other equals in any sense. The trial of a noble and of a commoner were completely different in principle, as well as in practice.
• Individual choice: The various western legal systems do recognise a few "victimless crimes", such as drug abuse or adult consenting homosex. Also, society regulates behaviour in public, such as nudity, that may "make a lot of people over eighty up tight", to borrow from Arlo Guthrie. But by and large, our personal lives are considered ours to control, and our personal wealth ours to dispose of as we see fit. The powerful weren't entirely cynical about this, or at least clothed their cynicism is a claim that the estates had been separated by God and to allow them to become indistinguishable was morally wrong if not blasphemous. One justification of sumptuary law was to prevent the "outrageous and excessive apparel of divers people against their natural estate". How much of this is self-serving and how much they came to believe is debatable, I guess.
• Self-improvement: The idea of a poor person working his or her way up society's ladder to wealth and fame is a key mythic symbol of some western societies, notably the United States of America. Sumptuary laws were aimed at preventing incremental social climbing, or at least forcing it to require higher sanction.

Sumptuary laws served multiple purposes.

• Enforcing an immediately visible difference between a minor noble on the one hand and a rich bourgeois on the other. The very richest nobles didn't really need sumptuary laws: they all knew each other anyway and their costumes were so elaborate and individual that nobody was likely to copy them. Tuchman speaks of "their gold-embossed surcoats and velvet mantles lined in ermine, their slashed and parti-coloured tunics embroidered with family crest or verses or a lady-love's initials, their hanging scalloped sleeves with coloured linings, their long pointed shoes of red leather from Cordova, their rings and chamois gloves and belts hung with bells and trinkets, their infinity of hats - puffed tam o'shanters and furred caps, hoods and brims, chaplets of flowers, coiled turbans, coverings of every shape, puffed, pleated, scalloped, or curled into a long-tailed pocket called a liripipe - they were beyond imitation". But knights got seriously offended when their clothes and manners were aped by their inferiors. Sometimes this was extended to forcing a particular style on a disreputable component of society, such as prostitutes.
• Discouraging "excess" consumption and hence encouraging thrift. Note this is something that the nobles wanted the commoners to do, it wasn't anything they thought laudable in themselves. And the nobles or clergy would tax off any excess.

The laws regulated a wide variety of forms of consumption. The list that follows is compiled form Tuchman. I guess we can assume it's the most interesting, well-recorded and surprising examples, and it illustrates the detail of thought that went into specifying exact limits.

• In Florence, bourgeois were permitted to ride in carriages, and to wear ermine. But bourgeois women were not permitted to wear multi-coloured, striped or checked gowns, or brocade or figured velvet, or fabrics embroidered with silver or gold thread.
• In France, the number of costumes a person could purchase per year was regulated by their income and social rank. A territorial lord could order as many as four. Knights and bannerets were limited to three, one of which must be for summer. Boys were limited to one, as were demoiselles, unless they were the chatelaine of their house and (or?) had an income of at least 2000 livres per year.
• England (perhaps more understanding of wealthy bourgeois?) ruled that a merchant worth 1000 pounds could wear the same clothing as a knight worth 500 pounds. Similarly for a merchant worth 200 pounds and a knight worth 100 pounds.
• How many dishes could be served at a meal.
• How many minstrels could perform at a wedding party.
• How many different garments and linens could be used in a trousseau.
• The reservation to nobles of the right to wear impractically wide sleeves.
• Prostitutes could be required to wear striped clothing, or to wear it inside-out.

The respect for law was such that these restrictions, that our culture would find quite odious, were obeyed without question. Yeah, right. In fact, the literature is full of statements such as this by English chronicler Henry Knighton:

There was so much pride amongst the common people in vying with one another in dress and ornament that it was scarcely possible to distinguish the poor from the rich, the servant from the master, or the priest from any other man.

• "cloth of white marbled silk embroidered with vine leaves and red grapes";
• "a coat with white and red roses on a pale yellow ground"; and
• "blue cloth with white lilies and white and red stars and compasses and white and yellow stripes across it, lined with red striped cloth".

Another example of an absurd yet irrepressible fashion inspired the long-running campaign to suppress the wearing of pointy shoes. Upper class Europe fell in love with this fashion and couldn't be persuaded or forced to drop it. The points grew so long that they had to tied off around the calf. Sometimes the point was stuffed to make it stand out straight, and used for phallic imagery (the fourteenth century wasn't all that subtle).

Enforcement procedures for the sumptuary laws had real teeth. Florentine city officials pursued women in the street to examine their gowns, and even entered their homes to examine their wardrobes.

The nearest living relative of a sumptuary law today is probably school uniforms. These had several purposes, some of them quasi-military, but one of the more robust surviving reasons is to reduce the scope for fashion wars within the student body: to discourage wasteful extravagance. Such rules are only applied against people who society considers socially inferior and unqualified to judge their own needs, but who are on their way up the social ladder and can be expected to want to assert their judgement more than society permits. The superficial resemblance is so strong it's hard not to see an analogy.

Tuchman remarks that the period was filled with restrictions that could never succeed because they were in conflict with the fundamental drives of human beings. The sumptuary laws, commercial laws and church dogma on sex all fall into this category.

Other material can be found on my home page, including some on alternate history. I welcome feedback at David.Bofinger@dsto.defenceSpamProofing.gov.au (delete the spamproofing).