I realise that May is a little early to be awarding the inaugural Male Order Garment Of The Year award, but I can't believe that in the seven months to come anything is going to trump the item I have in mind for the accolade.

So I'm calling it now: this year's prize goes to the codpiece.

To be honest it was a done deal from the moment the credits rolled on the first episode of Wolf Hall back in January and we were transported to a time when men thought their Hilary Mantels deserved an ostentatious pouch in which to sit, rather than the more discrete Y-fronts and tanga briefs we favour today. By the 1530s, when the action in Wolf Hall takes place, the craze was at its height and codpieces had grown so large that even if a man owned a pair of shoes with laces, he wouldn't have been able to lean over to tie them.

Not that you'd have seen such a comical sight in Wolf Hall. In fact if the rumours are true then the codpiece sported in the series by Damien Lewis's Henry VIII had to be downsized considerably so as not to offend the Puritanical sensibilities of the BBC's American co-producers, PBS. Certainly the actor himself described it as "dinky" and co-star Mark Rylance did hint at some form of trans-Atlantic interference. Then again, Anne Boleyn is supposed to have told the Venetian ambassador that the real Henry "lacked vigour" in the codpiece region, so maybe in an odd kind of way the prudery of the Yanks tallies with the historical truth. Who knows?

Still, diminished or not, there were codpieces at the heart of our primetime TV this year and for that we should be thankful, if only because it served as a reminder that the late 20th and early 21st centuries aren't the only eras to have thrown up insane fashions.

Not that insane fashions don't have a way of returning. Wolf Hall is currently screening in America, so the Land of the Free is now gripped by the codpiece. And don't think we've forgotten them here, either: on Thursday a paper on the subject was delivered at Cambridge University, no less. Titled What Goes Up Must Come Down, its author was one Victoria Miller and in her lecture she analysed why the codpiece became so popular and why, in the teeth of condemnation from outraged moralists, it eventually shuffled off the sartorial stage.

"For me, the interesting thing about 16th century male fashion is the way in which it reveals what was important to men at this time - their preoccupation with masculinity, military prowess and virility," she said. Plus ça change, eh?

Still, it begs the question: is there life left in the codpiece? Half a millennium on, is it due a comeback, sculpted in bulletproof Kevlar, perhaps, or in that waxed canvas they make Barbours from? Or - God help us all - crocheted in rainbow colours? Personally I don't have a problem with men dressing like they're in a Blackadder sketch. But I'm not sure I have the, er, bottle to tackle a codpiece - even in Henry VIII-style extra-small.