farthingales were bought by Mary I of England and became an essential element of Tudor fashion in England. At a dinner for French diplomats in May 1559, the farthingales of Elizabeth I and her ladies took up so much space that some women of her privy chamber had to sit on the rush-covered floor. Farthingales were bought for children, including Ann Cavendish, the nine year old stepdaughter of Bess of Hardwick in 1548. The French educated Mary, Queen of Scots had a black taffeta "verdugalle" in 1550, and another of violet taffeta, and a set of fashion dolls with 15 farthingales. Whale bone was bought to shape her farthingales in 1562. The contemporary French physician Ambroise Paré noted the use of baleen from the mouths of whales for women's "vertugalles" and "busques". French farthingale roll French farthingales originated in court circles in France and they first appeared in England during the 1570s. On 17 March 1577 the English ambassador to Paris, Amyas Paulet, sent a new type of farthingale to Queen Elizabeth I stating that it was "such as is now used by the French Queen and the Queen of Navarre." Janet Arnold has stated that this new style was probably a roll that sat on top of the cone-shaped Spanish farthingale. Randle Cotgrave, in his Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (1611), defined the French farthingale as "the kind of roll used by such women as weare no Vardingales." Several wardrobe accounts and tailors' bills of the late 16th century give us an idea of what these rolls were made of: they were stuffed with cotton and rags, and stiffened with hoops of whalebone, wire or ropes made of bent reeds. Buckram (stiff canvas) is the most commonly mentioned material. Other references describe the rolls being starched. Here are a couple of sample references to rolls from Queen Elizabeth I's Wardrobe Accounts (MS Egerton 2806): (1585) (1586) There are no extant examples of this style of undergarment, and only one illustration, a satirical Dutch engraving of c. 1600, that shows the bum-roll being affixed by a tiring-woman. From contemporary references, and the visual cues provided by the engraving, it appears to have consisted of a bolster-like roll either stuffed or held out with reeds which, being fastened around the hips, served the purpose of widening the skirts at the hip area, creating drapes. Some modern costumers conjecture that