Chris Upton: Fascinating fascinators of an old fashioned order
Jun 26 2008 By Chris Upton
I can say with some confidence that last week was a very good week for fascinators. I had no idea what a fascinator was until I stumbled across the TV coverage of Ascot. A sporting event, it's supposed to be, but one in which the horses play decidedly second fiddle (a violin-playing horse, now that would be something) to the fashionistas.
A fascinator, I learnt, is a plume of feathers worn at ajaunty angle. Fascinators sprung from countless ladies' hats at Ascot, so many, in fact, that they quickly ceased to be fascinating at all. Then the English weather took hold and they all vanished.
But this was not the end of the fascinators; they simply migrated from Surrey to Berkshire.
The investiture of Prince William as a Knight of the Garter at Windsor Castle was one of the acts of pageantry that the British are renowned for. To add to the sense of occasion it was announced that William is the one thousandth such investee.
Nothing shows better than this that what people wear is culturally and historically determined, and has nothing to do with gender. At Ascot the women wore the feathers; at Windsor it was the men. Into St George's Chapel they processed topped with fascinators of ostrich and heron, and wearing garters.
Who are these Knights of the Garter, I wondered, and how does one apply? The television coverage helped me to identify a handful. There was Prince Charles, and Prince Andrew and Prince Edward, and the Bishop of Winchester and (bizarrely) John Major.
As for the rest (there are 24 in all) I had to look them up. There's the King of Norway and the Emperor of Japan. Interestingly, Emperor Hirohito had his membership revoked after Pearl Harbour, but then got it back again after Hiroshima.
At this point Ican put on my historian's hat (which doesn't have any feathers in it at all). The Order of the Garter was established by King Edward III in the 1340s, as one of the ways to establish or fortify asense of Englishness. So badly had things gone under his father (who paid for his mismanagement of the country in a particularly painful fashion), that Edward felt the need to construct a kind of Blairite Cool Britannia. This would involve clobbering the Scots and the Welsh, of course, and later on the Irish. The package included creating a patron saint for England in the shape of St George, building a royal chapel at Windsor Castle, and reinventing the story of King Arthur and his Knights for a new age. Edward's new band of knights would embody the highest ideals of English chivalry: loyalty, patriotism, gentility and good manners. And once established, this band of brothers, this happy few, could ride off into France and clobber the French as well.
Yet this concept of chivalry was already oldfashioned by the 1340s. Goodness knows what that makes it today. The modern warfare of the 14th Century had precious little to do with chivalry; it was brutal, professional and more often than, all about money.
Soldiers in the Hundred Years' War were free to go marauding at weekends to top up their wages, and winning a battle was less important than snatching one of the top enemy knights and then ransoming him for large amounts of cash. And since it was less about victory and more about the economy, it could drag on for years, as the Hundred Years' War (by definition) obviously did.
Edward III turned ablind eye to that and hid behind the pageantry. Surely we don't do the same, do we?
* Dr Chris Upton is fascinated by history at Newman University College in Birmingham.
