ABSTRACT
When the remains of the Rose Theatre were excavated on Bankside, London, in the late 1980s, many small objects and fragments related to clothing were found, whose size did liĴle to express their importance to the people who wore them in the late sixteenth century. Two kinds of objects in particular, pins and aglets (Illustrations 5.1 and 5.2), represent the principal methods of keeping clothes fastened together. Without such crucial devices, the fashions of the Elizabethans would not have been possible. They were literally ‘essential’ everyday objects, used by all men and women from every social class.1 By looking at surviving evidence, in the form of wriĴen documents, portraiture and the surviving clothes themselves, the following account will explore the many uses of pins and aglets in dress during the time of Shakespeare.
