Governor John Winthrop.
Our forbears did not change their dress by emigrating; they may have worn heavier clothing in New England, more furs, stronger shoes, but I cannot find that they adopted simpler or less costly clothing; any change that may have been made through Puritan belief and teaching had been made in England. All the colonists
“ ... studied after nyce array,
And made greet cost in clothing.”
Many persons preferred to keep their property in the form of what they quaintly called “duds.” The fashion did not wear out more apparel than the man; for clothing, no matter what its cut, was worn as long as it lasted, doing service frequently through three generations. For instance, we find Mrs. Epes, of Ipswich, Massachusetts, when she was over fifty years old, receiving this bequest by will: “If she desire to have the suit of damask which was the Lady Cheynies her grandmother, let her have it upon appraisement.” I have traced a certain flowered satin gown and “manto” in four wills; a dame to her daughter; she to her sister; then to the child of the last-named who was a granddaughter of the first owner. And it was a proud possession to the last. The fashions and shapes then did not change yearly. The Boston gentlewoman of 1660 would not have been ill dressed or out of the mode in the dress worn by her grandmother when she landed in 1625.
Petty details were altered in woman’s dress—though but slightly; the change of a cap, a band, a scarf, a ruffle, meant much to the wearer, though it seems unimportant to us to-day. Men’s dress, we know from portraits, was unaltered for a time save in neckwear and hair-dressing, both being of such importance in costume that they must be written upon at length.
Let us fix in our minds the limit of reign of each ruler during the early years of colonization, and the dates of settlement of each colony. When Elizabeth died in 1603, the Brownist Puritans or Separatists were well established in Holland; they had been there twenty years. They were dissatisfied with their Dutch home, however, and had had internal quarrels—one, of petty cause, namely, a “topish Hatt,” a “Schowish Hood,” a “garish spitz-fashioned Stomacher,” the vain garments of one woman; but the strife over these “abhominations” lasted eleven years.
James I was king when the Pilgrims came to America in 1620; but Charles I was on the throne in 1630 when John Winthrop arrived with his band of friends and followers and settled in Salem and Boston.
The settlement of Portsmouth and Dover in New Hampshire was in 1623, and in Maine the same year. The settlements of the Dutch in New Netherland were in 1614; while Virginia, named for Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen, and discovered in her day, was settled first of all at Jamestown in 1607. The Plymouth colony was poor. It came poor from Holland, and grew poorer through various misfortunes and set-backs—one being the condition of the land near Plymouth. The Massachusetts Bay Company was different. It came with properties estimated to be worth a million dollars, and it had prospered wonderfully after an opening year of want and distress. The relative social condition and means of the settlers of Jamestown, of Plymouth, of Boston, were carefully investigated from English sources by a thoughtful and fair authority, the historian Green. He says of the Boston settlers in his Short History of the English People:—
“Those Massachusetts settlers were not like the earlier colonists of the South; broken men, adventurers, bankrupts, criminals; or simply poor men and artisans like the Pilgrim Fathers of the Mayflower. They were in great part men of the professional and middle classes, some of them men of large landed estate, some zealous clergymen, some shrewd London lawyers or young scholars from Oxford. The bulk were God-fearing farmers from Lincolnshire and the Eastern counties.”