Large ruffs were the despair of laundresses as often these were held away from the wearer’s face by hundreds of carefully inserted sticks of wood or bone, and could only be worn once before they had to be washed, ironed and refolded, the tiny sticks painstakingly reinserted. This was to change in 1564 with the arrival of Mistress Dinghen Van Der Plasse, who essentially taught the English how to make starch – a word derived from Middle English ‘sterchen’ meaning to stiffen.
