Through the two centuries following the assumption of the French hood came a troop of hoods, though sometimes under other names. In 1664 Pepys tells of his wife’s yellow bird’s-eye hood, “very fine, to church, as the fashion now is.” Planché says hoods were not displaced by caps and bonnets till George II’s time.
In the list of the “wedding apparell” of Madam Phillips, of Boston, are velvet hoods, love-hoods, and “sneal hoods”; hoods of Persian, of lustring, of gauze; frequently scarlet hoods are named. In 1712 Richard Hall sent, from Barbadoes to Boston, a trunk of his deceased wife’s finery to be sold, among which was “one black Flowered Gauze Hoode,” and he added rather spitefully that he “could send better but it would be too rich for Boston.” He was a grandson of Madam Symonds of Ipswich. Furbelowed gauze hoods were then owned by Boston women, and must have been pretty things. Their delicacy has kept them from being preserved as have been velvet and Persian hoods.
For the years 1673 to 1721 we have a personal record of domestic life in Boston, a diary which is the sole storehouse to which we can turn for intimate knowledge of daily deeds in that little town. A scant record it is, as to wearing apparel; for the diary-writer, Samuel Sewall, sometime business man, friend, neighbor, councillor, judge,—and always Puritan,—had not a regard of dress as had his English contemporary, the gay Samuel Pepys, or even that sober English gentleman, John Evelyn. In Pepys’s pages we have frequent and light-giving entries as to dress, interested and interesting entries. In Judge Sewall’s diary, any references to dress are wholly accidental and not related as matters of any moment, save one important exception, his attitude toward wigs and wig-wearing. I could wish Sewall had had a keener eye for dress, for he wrote in strong, well-ordered English; and when he was deeply moved he wrote with much color in his pen. The most spirited episodes in the book are the judge’s remarkable and varied courtships after he was left a widower at the age of sixty-five, and again when sixty-eight. While thus courting he makes almost his sole reference to women’s dress,—that Madam Mico when he called came to him in a splendid dress, and that Madam Winthrop’s dress, after she had refused him, was “not so clean as sometime it had been.” But an article of his own dress, nevertheless, formed an important factor in his unsuccessful courtship of Madam Winthrop—his hood. When all the other widowers of the community, dignified magistrates, parsons, and men of professions, all bourgeoned out in stately full-bottomed wigs, what woman would want to have a lover who came a-courting in a hood? A detachable hood with a cloak, I doubt not he wore, like the one owned by Judge Curwen, his associate in that terrible tale of Salem’s bigotry, cruelty, and credulity, the Witchcraft Trial. I cannot fancy Judge Sewall in a scarlet cloak and hood—a sad-colored one seems more in keeping with his temperament.
Perhaps our old friend, the judge, wore his hood under his hat, as did the sober citizens in Piers Plowman; and as did judges in England.
It is certain that many men wore hoods; and they wore occasionally a garment which was really woman’s wear, namely, a “riding hood”; which was also called a Dutch hood, and was like Elinor Rummin’s hake. This riding-hood was really more of a cloak than a head-covering, as it often had arm-holes. It might well be classed with cloaks. I may say here that it is not possible, either by years or by topics, to isolate completely each chapter of this book from the other. Its very arrangement, being both by chronology and subject, gives me considerable liberty, which I now take in this chapter, by retaining the riding-hood among hoods, simply because of its name.
Pink Silk Hood.
