ATTIRE OF VIRGINIA DAMES AND THEIR NEIGHBORS
t is a matter of deep regret that no “Lists of Apparel” were made out for the women emigrants in any of the colonies. Doubtless many came who had a distinct allotment of clothing, among them the redemptioners. We know one case, that of the “Casket Girls,” of Louisiana, where a group of “virtuous, modest, well-carriaged young maids” each had a casket or box of clothing supplied to her as part of her payment for emigration. I wish we had these lists, not that I should deem them of great value or accuracy in one respect since they would have been made out naturally by men, but because I should like to read the struggles of the average shipping-clerk or supercargo, or even shipping-master or company’s president, over the items of women’s dress. One reason why the lists we have in the court records are so wildly spelled and often vague is, I am sure, because the recording-clerks were always men. Such hopeless puzzles as droll or drowlas, cale or caul or kail, chatto or shadow, shabbaroon or chaperone, have come to us through these poor struggling gentlemen.
There are not to my knowledge any portraits in existence of the wives of the first Dutch settlers of New Netherland. They would have been dressed, I am sure, in the full dress of Holland vrouws. We can turn to the court records of New Netherland to learn the exact item of the dress of the settlers. Let me give in full this inventory of an exceptionally rich and varied wardrobe of Madam Jacob de Lange of New Amsterdam, 1662:—
| £; | s. | d. | |
| One under petticoat with a body of red bay | 1 | 7 | |
| One under petticoat, scarlet | 1 | 15 | |
| One petticoat, red cloth with black lace | 2 | 15 | |
| One striped stuff petticoat with black lace | 2 | 8 | |
| Two colored drugget petticoats with gray linings | 1 | 2 | |
| Two colored drugget petticoats with white linings | 18 | ||
| One colored drugget petticoat with pointed lace | 8 | ||
| One black silk petticoat with ash gray silk lining | 1 | 10 | |
| One potto-foo silk petticoat with black silk lining | 2 | 15 | |
| One potto-foo silk petticoat with taffeta lining | 1 | 13 | |
| One silk potoso-a-samare with lace | 3 | ||
| One tartanel samare with tucker | 1 | 10 | |
| One black silk crape samare with tucker | 1 | 10 | |
| Three flowered calico samares | 2 | 17 | |
| Three calico nightgowns, one flowered, two red | 7 | ||
| One silk waistcoat, one calico waistcoa. | 14 | ||
| One pair of bodices | 4 | ||
| Five pair white cotton stockings | 9 | ||
| Three black love-hoods | 5 | ||
| One white love-hood | 2 | 6 | |
| Two pair sleeves with great lace | 1 | 3 | |
| Four cornet caps with lace | 3 | ||
| One black silk rain cloth cap | 10 | ||
| One black plush mask | 1 | 6 | |
| Four yellow lace drowlas | 2 |
This is a most interesting list of garments. The sleeves with great lace must from their price have been very rich articles of dress. The yellow lace drowlas, since there were four of them (and no other neckerchiefs, such as gorgets, piccadillies, or whisks are named), must have been neckwear of some form. I suspect they are the lace drowls or drolls to which I refer in a succeeding chapter on A Vain Puritan Grandmother. The rain cloth cap of black silk is curious also, being intended to wear over another cap or a love-hood. The cornet caps with lace are a Dutch fashion. The “lace” was in the form of lappets or pinners which flapped down at the side of the face over the ears and almost over the cheeks. Evelyn speaks of a woman in “a cornet with the upper pinner dangling about her cheeks like hound’s ears.” Cotgrave tells in rather vague definition that a cornet is “a fashion of Shadow or Boone Grace used in old time and to this day by old women.” It was not like a bongrace, nor like the cap I always have termed a shadow, but it had two points like broad horns or ears with lace or gauze spread over both and hanging from these horns. Cornets and corneted caps are often in Dutch inventories in early New York. And they can be seen in old Dutch pictures. They were one of the few distinctly Dutch modes that lingered in New Netherland; but by the third generation from the settlement they had disappeared.
Mrs. Livingstone.
What the words “potto-foo” and “potoso-a-samare” mean I cannot decipher. I have tried to find Dutch words allied in sound but in vain. I believe the samare was a Dutch fashion. We rarely find samares worn in Virginia and Maryland, but the name frequently occurs in the first Dutch inventories in New Netherland and occasionally in the Connecticut valley, where there were a few Dutch settlers; occasionally also in Plymouth, whose first settlers had been for a number of years under Dutch influences in Holland; and rarely in Salem and Boston, whose planters also had felt Dutch influences through the settling in Essex and Suffolk of opulent Flemish and Dutch “clothiers”—cloth-workers. These Dutchmen had married Englishwomen, and their presence in English homes was distinctly shown by the use then and to the present day of Dutch words, Dutch articles of dress, furniture, and food. From these Dutch-settled shires of Essex and Suffolk came John Winthrop and all the so-called Bay Emigration.