hoops in ladies skirts (Tudor period)

[frangale]

my daughter has been set the task of finding out the "proper name" for the hoops that ladies wore under their skirts in the Tudor period. I have googled etc and can't find them refered to as anything except hoops, can anyone enlighten us?

[Jules001]

I think it is a farthingale.

[Octavius]

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

[Supriya53]

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 stiffened with osiers (willow cuttings), rope, bent, or (from about 1580) whalebone. The name comes from Spanish verdugo 'green wood'.

The earliest primary sources indicate that Princess Isabel of Portugal brought verdugadas with 14 hoops each with her to Spain on her marriage in the 1470s. The Spanish princess Catherine of Aragon brought the fashion into England on her marriage to Prince Arthur, eldest son of Henry VII in 1501.

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 (see Portrait of Queen Margaret of Austria, 1609).