Habits and men, with remnants of record touching the makers of both

Our ancestors, in early days, had what may be called early ways. They were in no respect superior to New Zealanders in a savage state. Civilization has however copied some of their customs, and old ladies who paint their cheeks and necks are not much further advanced than their ancestors, who coloured themselves all over, and that not out of vanity.

Strabo says that the people in the west of England shaved their chins, but cherished mustachios, wore black garments, and carried a stick. This description might serve for half the gentlemen who are to be seen in Regent Street and Rotten Row during the “season.” But I suppose one may take the liberty to doubt that the Cradocks of today really resemble so closely as the description would seem to warrant, their progenitors the Caradocs of other times, who “looked like furies,” says Strabo, “but were in fact quiet and inoffensive people.”

The early Welsh bards, we are told, dressed in sky-blue; the modern bards of the million are content to breakfast on it: the British astronomers wore green, which was not indicative of what the colour might have stood for,—a verdant knowledge of the science. When the Romans planted their conquering eagles on our soil, the old British chieftains resisted them and their fashions. Tacitus says that it was the sons of the chieftains who first adopted the Roman mode; and no doubt the old gentlemen were disgusted when they beheld their unpatriotic young heirs wandering about without their braccæ, and sporting the tunic before whose presence liberty and trousers had disappeared, but not for ever.

The Saxons brought in their own fashions, and some of these still prevail; the smock-frock, for instance, is the old Saxon tunic without the belt. Such a dress was never known in Ireland nor in Scotland: the Saxons kept for whole centuries to a fixed fashion, as may be seen in any illustrated work on costume. In this respect they were only less tenacious than the Persians, whose garments passed from father to son as long as they could hold together. It would be difficult, I fancy, to persuade any modern young Anglo-Saxon to draw on the scanc-beorg, or shank-coverers, of his respected and deceased “governor.” It is only the mantles of our Peers that descend hereditarily upon the shoulders of succeeding generations; and some of these mantles look dingy enough to date their origin from the time when Henry III. established Tothill-fields Fair, in order to spite the Londoners. The latter, it will be remembered, were compelled to close their shops for an entire fortnight during the holding of the fair in Westminster; and the man on Tower Hill who wanted to furnish his outward or inward person with the smallest article was compelled to resort for it to the neighbourhood of the Abbey, or to do without till the fair was raised.

The taste of the Anglo-Saxons was rather of a splendid character, but sometimes questionable. A lady with blue hair, for instance, could not have been half so pleasant to look at as a lady with blue eyes; though the custom of dyeing the hair blue was perhaps scarcely more objectionable than that of the young ladies and gentlemen of Gaul, who washed theirs in a chalky solution, in order to make it a more fiery red than it had been rendered by nature. I may add that, of the tasteful Anglo-Saxons, the nuns were the most especially tasteful; and the gorgeous attire of the sisters, with other attractions, seems to have stirred the very hearts of some of the most stony of prelates.

Many of the latter however were rigidly severe in their censures against the luxurious dressing of lively Saxon nuns; but their objurgations take very much the form of that delivered by Tartuffe when he handed his kerchief to Dorine:—

Though it be necessary to consider climate and temperature in the matter of dress, we have had weather, even in England, from the severity of which no dress could protect the wearer. Thus, in the year 851, the winter became so suddenly cold and inclement, and went on with such increasing severity, that clothing afforded no warmth to the frame, and the people were widely smitten by paralysis. They suffered excruciating anguish in the limbs; generally the arms and hands were first seized upon by the disease, and those limbs usually became altogether withered and useless. The paralysis respected neither rank, age, nor sex; the highest dignitaries of the Church did not escape, though, of course, they miraculously recovered. The clothiers of the period appear to have been as much puzzled to discover a material for useful wear that would meet the contingency, as a modern tailor would find it difficult to take measure of the pulpy, shapeless, boneless being which Professor Whewell, in his ‘Plurality of Worlds,’ thinks may be existing in Jupiter. And he has a right to think so; for, on our own earth, have we not had animals whose bones were on the outside, and whose inward parts were all of cartilage? They would have been pretty playthings for Jupiter’s emphatically soft nymphs and unvertebrated swains!

If the nuns of the Anglo-Saxon times were given to gorgeousness, the clergy were not at all uninclined to dandyism. Boniface himself denounced those priests who wore broad studs and images of worms, as servants of Antichrist. Garments so adorned are looked upon by the descendants of this great Anglo-Saxon missionary as the undoubtedly original “M. B. coats.”

The Danes introduced fashions that sadly perplexed the simple tailors of all Anglia. The former, in the days of their paganism, were attired in garments as black as the raven which soared on their national standard. When they came to England they learned to surpass the Anglo-Saxons themselves in the gaiety of their apparel and manners. They even took to combing their hair once a day; became so effeminate as to wash weekly; and changed their body-linen, if not as often as they might, still more frequently than was their wont of old. “By these means,” says old Wallingford, “they pleased the eyes of the women, and frequently seduced the wives and daughters of the nobility.” Alas, that virtue should not be proof against even a half-washed seducer!

One of the greatest of the North Sea chieftains derived his name from his dress, and Ragner Lodbroch means Ralph Leatherbreeches. The Lethbridges of Somersetshire are said to be descendants from this worthy. They might go further in search of an ancestor and fare worse. Lodbroch delighted in blood and plunder; wine he drank by the quart; wealth he acquired by “right of might;” he believed in little, and feared even less. A family anxious to assert its nobility could hardly do better than hold fast by such a hero. Many a genealogical tree springs from a less illustrious root.

The submission with which England received laws of fashion from France is seen in the circumstance that even before the Conquest the English imported the “mode” from beyond Channel, and universally adopted it. This was the case both in speech and dress. The Saxon tongue became as mute at the court of Edward the Confessor as the Flemish language has around the throne of Leopold of Belgium. The respectable sires however of the period did not make themselves so “outlandish” in their garb as did their sons; yet when William tumbled on the sands at Pevensey, half the hostile array prepared to resist his coming, as well as those who looked on and awaited the course of events, were familiar with his form of speech and accustomed to his fashion of dress. The fact that when William was agitated he invariably occupied himself in lacing and untying his cloak, is at least as well worth knowing as that the great Coligny under similar circumstances used to insert two or three toothpicks into his mouth, and there champ them into pulp. Let us add, that the Normans shaved close and washed thoroughly; and the dirty Saxons might have found consolation in the circumstance that their throats were cut by cleanly gentlemen.

They were a costly people however, those Normans; and they not only ruined the Saxons, but themselves, by the extravagance of their dress, and the ever-varying fashions to which they bore an alacrity of allegiance. Some of our wealthiest men of Norman descent, or fancying themselves to be so, adopt in these days a fashion common enough in the period of the Norman Kings, wearing a plumed helm on parade for show, and a “wide-awake” elsewhere for comfort. The Normans even took the venerated smock-frock of the Saxons, and modifying it a little, and lining it with fur for the winter, they wore it as a surcoat over their armour, and called it by the name of bliaus. Any gentleman therefore who wears a blouse and a wide-awake may fancy himself, if he please, as being attired like a Norman knight. Well, in spite of the strength of his fancy and the sameness of the articles in question, he will be as little like to Norman cavalier “as I to Hercules.”

I have said that the Normans generally were remarkable for the splendour and variety of their costume; I may add that some of the Saxons were in no degree behind them. There is Becket, for instance, the champion of the Saxons and advocate of the Commons. When that remarkably humble man went on his famous progress to Paris, the rustics observed, as he rode meekly along, that the king of England must be a marvellous personage indeed, seeing that his Lord Chancellor looked more like a king on his throne than a traveller in the saddle. He was as stately in dress at home as abroad; and he never forgave King Henry for tearing from his shoulders his splendid new scarlet mantle lined with fur, to fling it to a shivering beggar at his side. Excellent practical lesson, it may be observed. Well, it assuredly was all the practical charity ever evinced by the king. And moreover it was inappropriate. We all laughed when the angelic Irving subscribed his gold watch to some benevolent fund; and we should feel no particular increase of respect for our Sovereign and the Lord Primate if they were to stand at Temple Bar, and the former were to distribute the wardrobe of the latter among the mendicants who pass beneath that hideously ridiculous arch.

Foppery in dress was at its height in the reign of Henry III., when men half-ruined themselves in order that they might dress in vestments of the magnificent material called cloth of Baldekins, or of Baldeck, the usually received term for Babylon. The rich Cyclas of this time were also named from the locality where the material was manufactured,—a custom common enough, as may be seen in the names Worsted, Blanket, Cambric, Diaper (d’Yprès), Bayonet, and many others. The general love of dress, and the wealth manifested by the grandeur of the latter, made Innocent IV. to speak of England as a “garden of delights,” and a “truly inexhaustible fountain of riches.” From this fountain his Holiness drank many a draught; and they who were compelled to supply it wished it might choke him. But Innocent made cheap compensation to England by conferring on it the signal honour of adopting its old national “wide-awake,” and after dyeing it red, conferring it on his Cardinals. The scarlet wide-awake was first worn at the Council of Lyons, in 1245. The Cardinals did not exhibit their accustomed vigilance when they permitted the fashion of this covering to glide from that of the wide-awake into that of the “broad-brim” of the Society of Friends. But perhaps it is because of its present fashion that Mr. Bright, who loves Russia and hates the press, has such respect for Rome and such welcome for her aggressions.

“Why do you not wear richer apparel?” once asked a familiar friend of Edward I. “Because,” said the sensible king, “I cannot be more estimable in fine than I am in simple clothing.” If the monarch had only shown as much sense in other matters, he would have been a more profitable king to the state, however little beneficial he may have been to tailors. It was, of course, the fashion now to be rather simply dressed; but there were occasional departures from the rule: such as when the young Prince Edward was invested as a knight, on which occasion the Temple Gardens were crowded with the young nobility, his “companions,” who assembled there to receive a magnificent distribution of purple robes, fine linen garments, and mantles woven with gold. The two latter were furnished by the merchant-tailors; and these, no doubt, blessed the donor as heartily as the trade would now do, were her Majesty to assemble the heirs and younger sons of Peers, have them measured in public, and dressed at her expense for the benefit of trade. There are many younger sons who would be as rejoiced thereat as the tailors themselves.

Old Kit Marlowe, and doubtless from good authority, has graphically described not only Edward the Second, but that fine gentleman, his favourite Gaveston. Of the latter he says:—

And of Edward, Mortimer is made to say:—

If the Norman Kings up to the period of Edward I. had encouraged a costly extravagance of dress, there was another Norman habit which had spread among the people generally, and quite as much to their cost,—the wretched habit of swearing. To that people might well be applied the assertion, that they were covered with curses as with a garment. The Saxons were astounded at the variety and intensity of these oaths. They had not been accustomed to such profanity; but as the conquerors, and particularly the kings, swore whenever they spoke, why to use oaths was to put on the air of a conqueror and gentleman, and so a species of Norman pride kept oaths in vigour among the élite of society until a very recent period; but, as Mr. Robert Acres remarks, “the best terms will grow obsolete, and Damns have had their day.” How we progressed through execratory terms until this consummation was arrived at, is very tersely told in an old epigram of Sir John Harrington’s:—

Henry I. was surrounded by a crowd of friends, whose dresses were splendid and whose principles were detestable,—not to say “devilish.” These were the “Effeminati.” They were like the “mignons” of the French King Henri, and acquired their appellation from the fact of dressing nearly after the fashion of women. Their tunics were deep-sleeved, and their mantles long-trained. The peaks of their shoes were not only enormously long, but twisted so as to represent the horns of a ram or the coils of a serpent. Their peaks, introduced by Fulk, Earl of Anjou, to conceal his misshapen feet, were stuffed with tow; and certainly, were any earl or other gentleman now to enter a drawing-room thus remarkably shod, he would himself be taken in tow (if I may be so bold as to say so), and conveyed before a tribunal de lunatico inquirendo. The Effeminati, like the French “mignons,” wore their hair long, smooth, and parted in the middle; and they were not only unpleasantly unnatural to look at, but were horribly so in their deeds.

The foreign knights and visitors who came to Windsor in Edward the First’s reign, and brought with them a continual succession of varying fashions, turned the heads of the young with delight, and of the old with disgust. Douglas, the monk of Glastonbury, is especially denunciative and satirical on this point. He says that in the horrible variety of costume,—“now long, now large, now wide, now straight,”—the style of dress was “destitute and devert from all honesty of old arraye or good usage.” It is all, he says, “so nagged and knibbed on every side, and all so shattered and also buttoned, that I with truth shall say, they seem more like to tormentors or devils in their clothing, and also in their shoying and other array, than they seemed to be like men.” And the old monk had good foundation for his complaint; and the Commons themselves having, what the Commons now have not, a dread of becoming as extravagant as their betters in the article of dress, actually sought the aid of Parliament. That august assembly met the complaint by restricting the use of furs and furls to the royal family and nobles worth one thousand per annum. Knights and ladies worth four hundred marks yearly, were permitted to deck themselves in cloths of gold and silver, and to wear certain jewellery. Poor knights, squires, and damsels were prohibited from appearing in the costume of those of higher degree. As for the Commons themselves, they could put on nothing better than unadorned woollen cloth; and if an apprentice or a milliner had been bold enough to wear a ring on the finger, it was in peril of a decree that it should be taken off,—not the finger, but the ring,—with confiscation of the forbidden finery.

The consequence was that the Commons, being under prohibition to put on finery, became smitten with a strong desire to assume it; and much did they rejoice when they were ruled over by so consummate a fop as Richard of Bordeaux. All classes were content to do what many classes joyfully do in our own days,—dress beyond their means; and we find in old Harding’s ‘Chronicle’ that not only were

but that all this, as well as habits of “cloth of greene and scarleteen,—cut work and brodwar, was all,” as the Chronicler expresses it, “for unpayed;” that is, was not paid for. So that very many among us do not so much despise the wisdom afforded us by the example of our ancestors as didactic poets and commonplace honest writers falsely allege them to do. And those ancestors of Richard the Second’s time were especially given to glorify themselves in parti-coloured garments of white and red, such being the colours of the King’s livery (as blue and white were those of John of Gaunt); and they who wore these garments, sometimes of half-a-dozen colours in each, why they looked, says an old writer, “as though the fire of St. Anthony, or some such mischance,” had cankered and eaten into half their bodies. The long-toed shoes, held up to the knee by a chain and hook, were called crackowes, the fashion thereof coming from Cracow in Poland. The not less significant name of “devil’s receptacles” were given to the wide sleeves of this reign, for the reason, as the Monk of Evesham tells us, that whatever was stolen was thrust into them.

The fashion of clothes has long ceased to mark the position of the wearer. On this subject, Fuller says in his ‘Church History,’ when treating of the time of Edward III., that “some had a project that men’s clothes might be their signs to show their birth, degree, or estate, so that the quality of an unknown person might, at the first sight, be expounded by his apparel. But this was at once let fall as impossible: statesmen in all ages, notwithstanding their several laws to the contrary, being fain to connive at men’s riot in this kind, which maintaineth more poor people than their charity.”

Distinction in dress, it will be remembered, was not allowed by More in his Utopia. “All the island over,” he says, “they make their own clothes, without any other distinction than that which is necessary for marking the difference between the two sexes, and the married and unmarried. The fashion never alters; and as it is not ungrateful nor uneasy, so it is fitted for their climate, and calculated both for their summers and winters. Every family makes their own clothes; but all among them, women as well as men, learn one or other of the trades formerly mentioned.” A costume suitable for all conditions of the seasons, were a consummation that will long be among the things to be devoutly wished for, and never attained.

It was once the fashion to wear coats, the material for which had not long before been on the back of the sheep. For rapidity of work in this way, I know nothing that can compete with the achievement of Coxeter of Greenham Mills, near Newbury. He had a couple of South Down sheep shorn at his factory, at five o’clock in the morning; the wool thus produced was put through the usual processes; and by a quarter past six in the evening, it resulted in a complete damson-coloured coat, which was worn at an evening party, by Sir John Throckmorton. A wager for a thousand guineas was won by this feat, with three-quarters of an hour to spare. The sheep were roasted whole, and devoured at a splendid banquet. In one day they afforded comfort to both the inner and outward man.

We have often been told, that “Beauty, when unadorned, is adorned the most;” and there is much truth in that wholesome apothegm. Beauty indeed needs to be dressed; but Prudence should be her handmaiden. In illustration of the excellence of this counsel, I may quote what happened to two young ladies and one lover in the days of chivalry.

In those days there lived an old noble, rich in two daughters, and in nought besides. Of these, he promised one to a young knight, who was wealthy and idle, and who—strange characteristic of young and gallant knight!—was well content to be saved the trouble of wooing.

On a certain fine morning the sire made the same announcement to his girls which the father of Dinah made to that now celebrated and unhappy young lady,—namely, the necessity of decking themselves in their most seductive array, as there was a lover on the road who would dine with them that day. Now, if the morning was fine, there was also an eager and a nipping air abroad; but the elder of the two damsels, disregarding the temperature, and thinking only how best to display her slender waist and graceful shape, put on a “cote hardie;” and in this close-fitting garment, without an inch of fur to lend it warmth, she accompanied her sister to the portal, to bid welcome to the lover, looking for a lady of his love. But that sister was attired with reference to the condition of the thermometer, if her father had one, which is exceedingly doubtful. She was warmly clad; and if her figure was concealed by her mantle, the result of such covering was, that her young blood, in circulating, left a rose upon her cheeks, and did not fix itself, in obstinate stagnation, as in her more airy sister’s case, on the tip of the nose.

Now a red nose is not fascinating; and the knight’s choice was soon made. He gave his hand to the maiden who had shown most sense in the choice of attire, and a very merry wedding was the speedy consequence. As for what turned up in the way of further results, it was, I believe, chiefly the nose of the unsuccessful candidate, which became “retroussé en permanence”. The moral of the tale is respectfully recommended to the notice of all young ladies who seek to catch ardent knights on wintry mornings.

If the men in the days of Edward III. wore “tails behind,” as well as beards before, the ladies were not behind them in extravagance—in tails; and indeed in other matters. For a lady to ride on a palfrey, and not on a charger, would have been considered as derogatory as for a bridesmaid, in our days, to “spoil her prospects” by going to a wedding in a one-horse fly. The damsels of this age very much affected the dress of the men, and we have seen the same affectation in our own time; and this fashion was pushed to such an extreme, that they even carried two tiny daggers in the pouches of their embroidered zones. Their head-dress still lingers among the female peasantry of Normandy, and may be recognized in the species of mitre cap, of enormous height, from the summit of which streamers float in the air like pennants from the masts of some “tall amiral.” It may be added, that if, in many respects, the dresses of the women resembled those of the men, their deeds, too, were like theirs; and these were often (like the dresses) none of the cleanest.

We will discuss the progress of these matters in a new chapter.