What in the world is a farthingale?

Question

I think it's a bird but I think it's also some sort of midievel woman's underclothes. I'm not sure though

Answer 1

It is a piece of clothing (15-16th century) that is designed to shape dresses in the desired form, they are suppose to be in. In other words, an under garment.

Answer 2

A support, such as a hoop, worn beneath a skirt to extend it horizontally from the waist, used by European women in the 16th and 17th centuries.

If you type any word you need into the google or yahoo and write definition next to it, you will get a bunch of on line dictionaries.

Answer 3

"Farthingale is a term applied to any of several structures used under Western European women's clothing in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to support the skirts into the desired shape"

"The Spanish farthingale was a hoop skirt."

"Spanish farthingales were an essential element of Tudor fashion in England, and remained a fixture of conservative Spanish court fashion into the early seventeenth century."

"The French farthingale or vertugadin is properly a crescent- or sausage-shaped pad stiffened with bent or whalebone and tied around the waist under the skirts; the resulting silhouette is broad and rounded over the hips with the skirt hanging freely in folds."

"This type of French farthingale seems to be the item called a roll in Elizabeth I's wardobe accounts. It is the origin of the bumroll worn by Elizabethan recreationists."

""The term 'French farthingale' is also used for the wheel or drum farthingale, a stiffened circular support for the drum-shaped silhouette worn at the English court from the 1590s to c. 1620.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farthingale

Answer 4

It is a form of women's clothing worn around the 16th century. A very full underskirt.

The bird you are thinking of is a nightingale.