Writing: Measuring the Past

I know. Just a couple of weeks ago, I was complaining about dates that didn’t line up, and here I am fussing about measurements. Does either of them really matter? I claim to be writing a novel, after all, not a historical biography. Can’t I just make something up?

Well, yes, I can, of course. But as I pointed out in that earlier post, one date is not just like another. Things happen at specific times, and the people caught up in those events react to them, often in predictable ways, but the unpredictable reactions tell an even more interesting story, if the writer can just figure out what that story is.

The same holds true for measurements, if the measurements in question reveal, for example, whether an old, rather off-the-cuff story that my future heroine was accepted in the queen’s court as not just a curiosity from a foreign land, which is alienating enough, but either a fool pretending to be an empress from said foreign land or a person who for congenital reasons never reached an average adult height. Or, in the terms used at the time and still present in some of the books I’m consulting, was Ippolyta the Tartarian a midget or a dwarf, accepted into the court despite her low status as a former slave because she amused her new ruler, then replaced in that role after her death, ca. 1576, by a woman known variously as Thomasin, Thomasina, or Thomasine?

To be clear, I don’t believe any part of this tale. Although I can accept that Aura Soltana (my Arasultan) accepted baptism in London in July 1561 and adopted the name Ippolyta (Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons)—one Tatar woman in Tudor London already stretches credulity, so two seems even less probable—the claim that she was formerly a slave purchased by the explorer Anthony Jenkinson strikes me as unlikely. So far as I’ve been able to discover, that argument rests entirely on the supposition of Jenkinson’s nineteenth-century editor, who glommed onto Jenkinson’s use of the word wench in two different contexts and created a story that has entered the literature without supporting evidence. Jenkinson himself claimed that he did not buy slaves on his journey through Astrakhan, but even if he had, those slaves would most likely have been Christians, since Islam forbade the enslavement of co-religionists. Ismail Bey, the then-current power among the Nogai Tatars, even admitted to capturing Russians and flooding the Astrakhan slave market because he resented Tsar Ivan the Terrible reneging on promises made to Ismail in return for support in the conquest of the former Tatar khanate.

Still, you may be wondering, where do the measurements come in? Or, for that matter, the claim that Ippolyta was not of normal height?

The idea seems to have developed in a 1914 book, Shakespeare’s Environment. Somehow, Mrs. C. C. Stopes, the author of this collection of essays, which includes a chapter on “Elizabeth’s Fools and Dwarves,” noticed the entries in the wardrobe registries for clothing and concluded that because they mentioned a fool and “Thomasine the dwarf” as well as Ippolyta the Tartarian, Ippolyta must fall into the same category. (It seems not to have occurred to Mrs. Stopes that Ippolyta might have actually been a Tatar, not someone with delusions of imperial grandeur or playing a part for Elizabeth ’s amusement.) From there, it passed into historical legend.

That’s the source of my focus on measurements. I thought, well, I have no reason to accept this story, but a simple proof would be right there in the wardrobe records. Did Ippolyta receive enough material to make, say, six shifts for a full-grown person? The wardrobe listings are admirably specific: X material for Y garments at Z the quantity. Surely I could compare Ippolyta’s grant to the amounts conferred on someone whose height has never been described as unusually short?

Seems like a simple question with a simple answer, right? But the measurements used then weren’t the same as the ones we use now, and the records often give the length of a bolt of fabric but not the width. I spent a whole evening digging through Janet Arnold’s magisterial Queen Elizabeth’s Wardrobe Unlock’d and discovered much fascinating information, but still no obvious comparison.

Then, this morning, one of those cartoon light bulbs went off in my head, and I realized I had a “shift” of my own (a simple nightgown) that I could measure myself. And sure enough, I discovered—with the help of my research assistant, pictured here, who prevented any escape attempt by the nightgown in question—that without its frill, it is 31 inches in length, and anywhere from 22 to 27 inches wide. So if an English ell ran 45 inches long and was most often 30 to 36 inches wide, you could indeed make a shift out of 1.5 ells, so long as they formed a single piece of fabric and you knew how to lay out the two main pieces to maximize the use of that fabric—a skill that, again according to Arnold, the royal tailors took care to master. (And by the way, I’m five foot five, which is close to the average height of a Tudor woman, at least according to the Internet.)

So my heroine, although still an outsider, probably fit quite well among the rest of Elizabeth’s court in terms of her height. Although let her get anywhere near a horse, and I bet she could show the rest of the ladies a thing or two …

Images: William-Adolphe Bouguereau, At the Start of the Day (1894), public domain via Wikimedia Commons; photograph of Siamese cat © 2026 C. P. Lesley.