ABSTRACT
In 1815 Samuel Rush Meyrick and Charles Hamilton Smith published The Costume of the Inhabitants of the British Islands, a survey of the historical costumes worn by the peoples inhabiting this territory from the remotest antiquity until the late Middle Ages. Increasingly, antiquarians such as William Borlase, proselytizing for the study of Ancient Britain, were arguing for deductions to be made from material evidence rather than insisting on a text-dominated historiography. Clearly, with reference to antiquarian recreations of the past this is an important insight, for it allows to understand how the effect of historical reality is produced. Antiquarianism itself has often been accused of whimsy and credulity when compared to the protocols and procedures of a rational science and a rigorous historiography. Antiquarians' employment of visual illustrations of Ancient Britain had fabricated a specious authority that threatened to displace their scholarly enterprise.
