French hood

French hood is the English name for a type of elite woman's headgear that was popular in Western Europe in roughly the first half of the 16th century.

"[5] Despite its growth in popularity, Queen Jane Seymour apparently forbade her ladies from wearing the French hood,[6] perhaps because it had been favoured by her executed predecessor Anne Boleyn.

John Husee informed Lady Lisle that her daughter, an attendant to the Queen, was required to instead wear a "bonnet and frontlet of velvet", lamenting that it "became her nothing so well as the French hood.

[7] Other sources detail that Anne of Cleves wore rich attires in the German fashion when she arrived in England, and adopted the French hood in the days after her wedding.

[9]Most examples from this period are seen in portraits of women who were in service to one of Henry VIII's wives, implying that it was primarily a court fashion.

[12] In the early 1540s, Henry VIII passed a sumptuary law restricting the usage of "any Frenche hood or bonnet of velvett with any habiliment, paste, or egg [edge] of gold, pearl, or stone" to the wives of men with at least one horse.

[13] Katherine Brandon, Duchess of Suffolk owned several pairs of gold billaments, set with table and pointed diamonds, rubies, or pearls, and enamelled.