I’ve noticed that the stereotypical “king” image, in addition to requiring a crown, scepter, and throne, also includes a drape/mantle either trimmed in, or entirely composed of a whitish fabric with black spots on it. What is it?
Most often, the fabric is seen just as the trim of a brightly colored drape. But here’s one very prominent real-life example of King Ludwig II of Bavaria where the entire drape is made out of the material.
The white fabric with black spots is winter ermine fur. In the winter, their coat is entirely white except for a black tip on the tail – hence the black spots on the fur trim.
This is generally ermine.
Not fabric, ermine fur.
The black spots are their tails!
CMC fnord!
Thanks. So next question… why always ermine? As I understand it’s sort of an albino weasel, not exactly the sort of animal you’d associate with royalty.
Well, they’re small, which means you need a lot to make a cloak that size, so they’re expensive (or used to be, before ermine farming). They’re also only white in the winter - they turn a rather drab brown in spring. So having all white ermine means your trapper was skilled enough to trap enough ermine in a short period of time. Which of course means you’re a skilled and powerful man. Or something. Explain any bling, really. Grillz? Really? Grillz? I don’t get it.
Hard to get = expensive = the rich and powerful want it.
And it’s not ALWAYS ermine (I mean, the white with black spots is ermine, but not all Kingly cloaks are ermine.) Sometimes it’s velvet, or satin or other expensive fabrics.
IIRC, there were laws that forbid anyone but those of royal blood from wearing ermine. (Along with fabrics like cloth-of-gold, the color purple and the like.)
Yes, in some countries, at some times there were laws about what social classes could wear what, or taxes based on your clothing (for example, how many buttons you owned). They were (are) called sumptuary laws. I don’t know off the top of my head if ermine was covered in any of them, but it’s not unlikely.
Still, the question would revert to “WHY is weasel-fur valued so much as to be protected by sumptuary law?” (I have a toddler, I know the Why Game.) And, as before, it goes back to expensive = rich and powerful like it.
It might be a historical echo of the ancient days when the north men, who came from the land where ermine was much more common, swept across what is now loosely described as “Western Civilization” and many of their leaders wore furs, trimmed with ermine.
Tris
In traditional heraldry, there are two sorts of furs (which are actually color patterns), ermine and vair. Ermine is white with black patterning, erminois (erminoix?) is yellow with black patterning, and then there are reversals, which I can’t remember the names of right now, but were black with white patterns and black with yellow patterns.
The other sort of fur is vair, from squirrelskin, and is generally portrayed as blue and white bell shapes, alternating. I can’t remember if there are vair variations, it’s been a long, long time since I’ve been interested in developing shield blazons.
The other two ermine variations are erminois (the black with white ‘tails’) and paen (black with gold ‘tails’).
Vair varieties tend to be based solely on position of the shapes. There are other colors in vair than blue and white (azur and argent), but those are blazoned as ‘vairy of (color) and (color)’. So a vair made up of red and gold pieces would be ‘vairy of or and gules’.
Ermine were also, apprently, a symbol of purity, because, according to legend, an ermine would rather suffer death than allow its fur to be soiled. (But, one would presume, a death that would not soil its fur, so it…drank poison? Held its breath till it turned blue? WTF?)
But this piece of information perhaps only muddies the “why” question. Why would purity be associated exclusively with royalty?
The ‘why’ question is indeed the interesting one, not least because it isn’t clear what the actual answer is.
As WhyNot points out, ermine was expensive. It was also exotic. Stoats’ fur only turns entirely white in the far north, so in most parts of Europe ermine had to be imported. But it was just one of many types of expensive, exotic, imported furs known in medieval Europe. Moreover, fur-lined clothes were luxury items with an obvious practical advantage. Being able to wear fur, particularly of high quality and in bulk, was a perennial status symbol.
Yet in the fourteenth century ermine-lined robes seem to have emerged as a stereotypical royal garment. By the 1390s, for example, Richard II was dressed to look like a king. Or at least dressed to match our idea of what a king should look like.
Part of that was doubtless because there was much more fur about. Imports of fur from northern Europe increased rapidly during the fourteenth century and there were particular fashions in fur-lined clothes. Kings tended to wear fur because that’s what other rich people were wearing. But that doesn’t get us very far. It can hardly be that ermine becomes specifically royal because lots of other people were wearing furs.
Nor do sumptuary laws provide much of an answer. Those usually did not restrict ermine to royalty. Thus the 1363 English statute specifically allowed wealthier knights and above to wear it.* It was certainly ‘high status’, but not exactly royal. The fur that the 1532 statute restricted to the Royal Family (and, under certain circumstances, to dukes and marquesses) was not ermine but sable.
*Not that one should make the mistake of assuming that English law can stand for what applied elsewhere, but the general point does still seem to be true.
Moreover, it can be difficult to tell when kings wore ermine-lined cloaks just because such cloaks were reassuringly expensive and when they did so because ermine had become literally a status symbol. Eventually, of course, they would become an example of a form of dress that could only be symbolic because it was so obviously old-fashioned. But there may also have been an element of kings (Charles V of France?) self-consciously adopting a style they could make regal.
Perhaps the real answer is that ermine was so easily identifiable. Those black tails (already more often black lamb’s wool) were distinctive and, most importantly, showed up well in painted representations of such robes. I do rather suspect that it’s not just that kings wore ermine and that therefore they continued to wear it, as that ermine becomes part of the standard iconography of what everyone thought kings should wear, thereby encouraging kings to live up to that expectation. So long as there is the idea that kings should look like kings, they will appropriate - or have appropriated for them - any convenient symbols, whether crowns, sceptres, military uniforms, horse-drawn carriages or corgis.
