When a dignitary of great fame but also unpredictable, unstable behavior visits a community unused to hosting such personages, local officials are often frightened and want to put forth the best possible appearance. You can see this sort of thing in North Korea, where you have to dress and act in specific ways when attending a military parade. You can see it when a navy hides a ship named for a former statesman who is out of favor with the current despot (that actually happened in the US during the previous administration). And you saw it in the city of York, England in 1483 on the eve of a visit by King Richard III.
In the case of York, the city council issued strict instructions: “All others of whatever occupation, dressed in blue, violet and musterdevillers, shall meet our sovereign lord on foot at St James’ church.” Since history records no massacres or imprisonments in York at the beginning of August in 1483, the king must have been satisfied with the musterdevillers. Not to mention the blue and violet, of course, but I think the musterdevillers had to have been the key to the whole operation.
Clothes were quite valuable in the 1400s, and if you had an outfit made of musterdevillers, you were doing pretty well. It was a fabric made of wool that was so prized that people mentioned it in their wills, like John Estcourt did in that era: “To Juliana Bolle my gown of musterdevillers and to Sir Thomas Drury my fellow canon the fur of the same gown.” With all that value, not to mention the importance of wearing it to meet the king, you might think it was some bright, attractive color — but nope, by all reports it was just gray. It must have been a particular shade of gray though, because “musterdevillers” meant the color as well as the cloth.
The origin of the relatively bizarre term is, as you might guess from the spelling, French. It was a place; a town in Normandy now called Montivilliers. Evidently that’s where the cloth was made. The fact that it had to be imported from France probably added to its value.
Like all fashions, though, musterdevillers didn’t stay popular. By 1603, it was so out of favor they’d forgotten how they used to spell it: “In the 19. yeare of Henrie the sixt, there was bought for an Officers Gowne two yeards of Cloath, coloured Mustard villars (a colour now out of vse).”
I guess the lesson is that if you have a valuable, high-style wardrobe, feel free to will it to somebody, but if you instead store it in a time capsule to be opened a couple of centuries from now, don’t expect anybody in the future to be particularly impressed by your fashion sense.
