Why were the sumptuary laws in elizabethan times made?
Sumptuary Laws are laws restricting what persons can wear. They typically restrict certain showy garments to the established upper classes. In Elizabethan England, the social order was undergoing a tremendous range of changes, many of them connected to the tremendous increase in trade at that time. Medieval England had largely had two classes: nobles and peasants. Dress was often distinctive, so that there was no serious difficulty in telling a nobleman or noblewoman from a peasant. By Elizabeth’s time, the middle class was emerging, with traders, wool merchants, ship-owners and the like accumulating fortunes that rivaled and soon outpaced anything that nobles had based on the rents from their various estates. Because of prevailing class prejudice, it was considered a complete disgrace for any nobleman to try his hand at a trade. The merchant classes soon began dressing in progressively fancier clothing, and the reality of the situation soon proved that non-nobles were dressing in clot
