ABSTRACT
Henry VII was a usurper and the founder of a new royal house. He ordered clothing for himself, his family and household from the great wardrobe and much of the evidence for his provision derives from the wardrobe warrants and particular accounts of the keeper of the great wardrobe. Both he and his household drew on the royal style established by the Lancastrian and Yorkist courts and on Burgundian ideas of magnificence. Henry VII is often included in books on the sixteenth century, so grouping him with the other Tudor monarchs, even though the style of dress worn by the king and his subjects had much more in common with the fifteenth century. In comparison to the increasing variety of garment types available to men, late fifteenth-century female dress consisted of a very limited range of garments, and there was remarkably little change in their overall form or profile until the end of the first decade of the following century.
