What I found in my pants

I'm actively working on a pair of pants after a breeches pattern in Mathew Gnagy's Modern Maker 2.  I got to a point where if I'm going to add trim, I need to do it before moving on, and decided it was time to actually do a little research.  We've had a copy of Jacob de Gheyn II's Exercise of Arms in large format print (the 1971 McGraw Hill facsimile reprint of a 1607 edition) since our first trip to England in 1998 (it was a damn lucky find), and while I'd like to admit that I've used it for research in the past, I would be lying.

Then I had a beautiful thought: I wonder if anyone has done an analysis of clothing in the manual, rather than its usual military function.  A quick web search later, and I was left with having to do it myself 😒.  117 plates (thanks wiktenauer, so I didn't have to tote the book around - although the scans seem to be from the Rijksmuseum) and one spreadsheet later and here we are.

For those unfamiliar with the Exercise of Arms, it is a Dutch military manual printed originally in 1607 (although there's evidence that the work was completed earlier) that contains 117 detailed and stunningly beautiful engravings of drill positions for the weapons of caliver, musket, and pike.  There are some likely duplicates, like plates 2 & 34 of the caliver, but I chose to count them all independently in the data.  Since my current rathole was trying to decide on decoration for pants, I only looked at that garment (some other poor soul can do doublets, hose, and other accoutrements later - oh who am I kidding, I'm that poor soul).  For classifying the pants, the only surviving 16th century tailor's pattern manuals I'm aware of that contain pants are Spanish, and are outlined in Modern Maker 2, so I've used that information for classifying except for the pants that are clearly none of those (i.e., trunkhose).

Fig 1 - Caliver Plate 36 scalloped detail

So what did I learn?  Only pikemen wear trunkhose.  No, I'm kidding (only kinda).  Of the 117 pairs of pants, the vast majority of them (85%) line up best with the standard breeches pattern from the Freyle manual (p. 144, MM2) - this is convenient, as that's the pattern I'm working up.  There are 7 examples of trunkhose (all pikemen), which have no exemplar in the period tailor's manual we own.  The rest are scattered amongst the other styles of breeches, but depending on one's eye, they could all be variants on the Freyle.

Fig 2 - Musket Plate 4 braid detail

For decoration, it's clear that some type of trim and button arrangement on the outside seam was very popular, with 57% of them having between 1 & 4 vertical stripes of trim and 79% having 3 or more buttons, sometimes all the way up the outside of the leg.  There are also a significant number of breeches with a scalloped edge (19), with buttons of course (see Fig 1), and of horizontal braids (18) with tassels (and you guessed it... buttons) (see Fig 2).  Only 5 garments have no decoration at all, and 24 have some form of decoration on the main body of the breeches such as horizontal, diagonal, or vertical stripes, sometimes in addition to the trim on the seam.

I'll bet you're wondering what I chose to do, aren't you?  Well, I'm going to go with this pattern you see in musket plate 15 (see Fig 3).  It shows up a couple times, but should be a fairly easy pattern for me, a novice, to spiff up a pair of breeches.  As to the data as a whole, this is a very narrow set of data to draw any conclusions from.  It's from a very narrow time period, which is nice, but it's really a single person's view of fashion and really only in the scope of working class military.  The variations you see in Exercise of Arms could also easily be small regional variations.  That being said, if you are a Dutch persona from the late 16th century, all of the decorations patterns would be viable for you.  Unless you're a pikemen, then just wear trunkhose 😉.

Fig 3 - Musket Plate 15 detail