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Probably the earliest depiction of the Spanish verdugada. Pedro García de Benabarre, Salome from the St John Retable, Catalonia, 1470-80.

Tudor gown showing the line of the Spanish farthingale: portrait traditionally described as Jane Grey but possibly Catherine Parr, 1545.

Silhouette of the 1590s: Elizabeth I, the Ditchley portrait

Farthingale is a term applied to any of several structures used under Western European women's clothing in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to support the skirts into the desired shape.

The Spanish farthingale was a hoop skirt. Originally stiffened with the subtropical Giant Reed, later designs in the temperate climate zone were stiffened with osiers (willow cuttings), rope, or (from about 1580) whalebone. The name comes from Spanish verdugo 'green wood', because the dying stems of Giant Reed are rigid.

The earliest primary sources indicate that Princess Isabel of Portugal brought verdugadas with 14 hoops each with her to Spain for her marriage to Charles V in the 1470s. The earliest images of Spanish farthingales show hoops prominently displayed on the outer surfaces of skirts, although later they merely provided shape to the overskirt. The Spanish princess Catherine of Aragon brought the fashion into England on her marriage to Prince Arthur, eldest son of Henry VII in 1501.

Spanish farthingales were an essential element of Tudor fashion in England, and remained a fixture of conservative Spanish court fashion into the early seventeenth century (see Portrait of Queen Margaret of Austria, 1609).

French farthingales, c. 1580

The French farthingale or vertugadin is properly a crescent- or sausage-shaped pad stiffened with bent or whalebone and tied around the waist under the skirts; the resulting silhouette is broad and rounded over the hips with the skirt hanging freely in folds.

This type of French farthingale seems to be the item called a roll in Elizabeth I's wardobe accounts. It is the origin of the bumroll worn by Elizabethan recreationists.

The term French farthingale is also used for the wheel or drum farthingale, a stiffened circular support for the drum-shaped silhouette worn at the English court from the 1590s to c. 1620.

The farthingale is the ancestor of eighteenth century panniers and of the nineteenth century crinoline.

• 1500-1550 in fashion
• 1550-1600 in fashion
• 1600-1650 in fashion

• Farthingales and Bumrolls

• Anderson, Ruth Matilda: Hispanic Costume 1480-1530, The Hispanic Society of America, New York 1979. ISBN 0-8753-5126-3
• Arnold, Janet: Patterns of Fashion: the cut and construction of clothes for men and women 1560-1620, Macmillan 1985. Revised edition 1986. ISBN 0-89676-083-9
• Arnold, Janet: Queen Elizabeth's Wardrobe Unlock'd, W S Maney and Son Ltd, Leeds 1988. ISBN 0-901286-20-6

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