| Pounds | |
| To making a suit with buttons to it | 80 |
| 1 ell canvas | 30 |
| for dimothy linings | 30 |
| for buttons &; silke | 50 |
| for points | 50 |
| for taffeta | 58 |
| for belly pieces | 40 |
| for hooks &; eies | 10 |
| for ribbonin for pockets | 20 |
| for stiffinin for a collar | 10 |
| —- | |
| Sum 378 |
The extraordinary prices of one hundred and twenty pounds of tobacco for making a pair of stockings, and one hundred for a pair of gloves, when making a coat was but forty, must remain a seventeenth-century puzzle. This coat was probably a petticoat. It is curious, too, to find a tailor making gloves and stockings at any price. I think both buff gloves and stockings were of leather. Perhaps he charged thus broadly because it was “not in his line.” Work in leather was always well paid. We find tailors making leather breeches and leather drawers; the latter could not be the garments thus named to-day. Tailors became prosperous and well-to-do, perhaps because they worked in winter when other Virginia tradesfolk were idle; and they acquired large tracts of land.
The conditions of settlement of Virginia were somewhat different from those of the planting of New England. We find the land of many Massachusetts towns wholly taken up by a group of settlers who emigrated together from the Old World and gathered into a town together in the New. It was like the transferal of a neighborhood. It brought about many happy results of mutual helpfulness and interdependence. From it arose that system of domestic service in which the children of friends rendered helpful duty in other households and were called help. Nothing of the kind existed in Virginia. There was far less neighborhood life. Plantations were isolated. Lines of demarcation in domestic service were much more definite where black life slaves and white bond-servants for a term of years performed all household service. For the daughter of one Virginia household to “help” in the work in another household was unknown. Each system had its benefits; each had its drawbacks. Neither has wholly survived; but something better has been evolved, in spite of our lamentations for the good old times.
Life is better ordered, but it is not so picturesque as when negro servants swarmed in the kitchen, and German, Scotch, and Irish redemptioners served in varied callings. There was vast variety of attire to be found on the Virginia and Maryland plantations and in the few towns of these colonies. The black slaves wore homespun cloths and homespun stuff, crocus and Virginia cloth; and the women were happy if they could crown their simple attire with gay turbans. Indians stalked up to the plantation doors, halted in silence, and added their gay dress of the wild woods. German sectaries and mystics fared on garbed in their simple peasant dress. Irish sturdy beggars idled and fiddled through existence, in dress of shabby gentility, with always a wig. “Wild-Irish” came in brogues and Irish trousers. Sailors and pirates came ashore gayly dressed in varied costume, with gay sashes full of pistols and cutlasses, swaggering from wharf to plantation. Queer details of dress had all these varied souls; some have lingered to puzzle us.
A year ago I had sent to me, by a descendant of an old Virginia family, a photograph of a curious gold medal or disk, a family relic which was evidently a token of some importance, since it bore tiny holes and had marks of having been affixed as an insignia. Though I could decipher the bold initials, cut in openwork, I could judge little by the colorless photograph, and finally with due misgivings and great precautions in careful packing, insurance, etc., the priceless family relic was intrusted to an express company for transmission to my inspection. Glad indeed was I that the owner had not presented it in person; for the decoration of honor, the insignia of rank, the trophy of prowess in war or emblem of conquest in love, was the pauper’s badge of a Maryland or Virginia parish. It was not a pleasant task to write back the mortifying news; but I am proud of the letter which I composed; no one could have done the deed better.
There was an old law in Virginia which ran thus:—
“Every person who shall receive relief from the parish and be sent to the said alms-house, shall, upon the shoulder of the right sleeve of his uppermost garment in an open and visible manner, wear a badge with the name of the parish to which he or she belongs, cut in red, blue or green cloth, as the vestry or church wardens shall direct. And if any poor person shall neglect or refuse to wear such badge, such offense may be punished either by ordering his or her allowance to be abridged, suspended or withdrawn, or the offender to be whipped not exceeding five lashes for one offense; and if any person not entitled to relief as aforesaid, shall presume to wear such badge, he or she shall be whipped for every such offense.”
This law did not mean the full name of the parish, but significant initials. Sometimes the initials “P P” were employed, standing for public pauper. In other counties a metal badge was ordered, often cast in pewter. In one case a die-cutter was made by which an oblong brass badge could be cut, and stamps of letters to stamp the badges accompanied it. Sometimes these badges were three inches long.
The expression, “the badge of poverty,” became a literal one when all persons receiving parochial relief had to wear a large Roman “P” with the initial of their parish set on the right sleeve of the uppermost garment in an open and visible manner. Likewise all pensioners were ordered to wear their badges “so they may be seen.” A pauper who refused to do this might be whipped and imprisoned for twenty-one days. Moreover, if the parish beadle neglected to spy out that the badge was missing from some poor pensioner, he had to pay half a crown himself. This legality was necessitated by actions like that of the English goody, who, when ordered to wear this pauper’s badge, demurely fastened it to her flannel petticoat. For this law, like all the early Virginia statutes, was simply a transcript of English laws. In New York, for some years in the eighteenth century, the parish poor—there were no paupers—were ordered to wear these badges.
This mode of stigmatizing offenders as well as paupers was in force in the earlier days of all the colonies. Its existence in New England has been immortalized in The Scarlet Letter. I have given in my book, Curious Punishments of By-gone Days, many examples of the wearing of significant letters by criminals in various New England towns, in Plymouth, Salem, Taunton, Boston, Hartford, New London, also in New York. It offered a singular and striking detail of costume to see William Bacon in Boston, and Robert Coles in Roxbury, wearing “hanged about their necks on their outerd garment a D made of Ridd cloth sett on white.” A Boston woman wore a great “B,” not for Boston, but for blasphemy. John Davis wore a “V” for viciousness. Others were forced to wear for years a heavy cord around the neck, signifying that the offender lived under the shadow of the gallows and its rope.