The Greensleeves Project

The Greensleeves Project is an interdisciplinary collaboration between a team of established historians and practitioners to look at one of the most famous English historical songs, the Elizabethan ballad of Greensleeves.

The earliest surviving text of Greensleeves dates from 1584. It’s a long song, with 18 verses, written in a somewhat stalker-like fashion, by a man who showers his would-be beloved with gifts, including a lot of clothes. Put together, these gifts provide us with a rich resource of information on clothing, fabrics, embroidery, and other aspects of material culture.

Interpreting a literary source like this, especially when most people today lack the material literacy of their early modern counterparts, throws up many questions, some of which are only possible to answer through attempting to reconstruct the clothes described in the song. Is the writer being literal, or are the clothes simply a fantasy? Is the answer somewhere in the middle? Given the fact that the first surviving version of the song is from four years after the original was written, has anything changed? Were there more than 18 verses in the original? What might they have looked like? What can this source tell us about clothes and the way they were worn that we might not get from wills and inventories, wardrobe accounts, portraits, or surviving garments? Who was Greensleeves?

We have been given the Janet Arnold Award by the Society of Antiquaries of London, and will be working with a team of superb historians and practitioners to examine and recreate the items described in the ballad.

We will be filming at Athelhampton House in 2025, working with Bernadette Banner to create a video of the all of the verses of Greensleeves, and a documentary on the whole project. Both of these will show the clothes, accessories and other gifts described in the ballad.

Further plans for the Greensleeves Project include an exhibition, a book on early modern clothing in music and song, and a CD with Resonus Classics

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