“If Men get up French standing collars Women will have the French standing collar too: if Dublets with little thick skirts, so short none are able to sit upon them, women’s foreparts are thick skirted too.”
Children also had doublets and this same shoulder-cap at the arm-hole; their little doublets were made precisely like those of their parents. Look at the childish portrait of Lady Arabella Stuart, the portrait with the doll. Her fat little figure is squeezed in a doublet which has turreted welts like those worn by Anne Boleyn and by Pocahontas (shown [here]). Often a button was set between each square of the welt, and the sleeve loops or points could be tied to these buttons and thus hold up the detached undersleeves. The portrait of Sir Richard Saltonstall vaguely shows these buttons. Nearly all these garments-jerkins, jackets, doublets, buff-coats, paltocks, were sleeveless, especially when worn as the uppermost or outer garment. Holinshed tells of “doublets full of jagges and cuts and sleeves of sundry colours.” These welts were “embroidered, indented, waved, furred, chisel-punched, dagged,” as well as turreted. On one sleeve the turreted welt varied, the middle square or turret was long, the others each two inches shorter. Thus the sleeve-welt had a “crow-step” shape. A charming doublet sleeve of Elizabeth’s day displayed a short hanging sleeve that was scarce more than a hanging welt. This was edged around with crystal balls or buttons. Other welts were scalloped, with an eyelet-hole in each scallop, like the edge of old ladies’ flannel petticoats. Othersome welts were a round stuffed roll. This roll also had its day around the petticoat edge, as may be seen in the petticoat of the child Henry Gibbes. This roll still appears on Japanese kimonos.
We are constantly finding complaints of the unsuitably ambitious attire of laboring folk in such sentences as this:—
“The plowman, in times past content in russet, must now-a-daies have his doublett of the fashion with wide cuts; his fine garters of Granada, to meet his Sis on Sunday. The fair one in russet frock and mockaldo sleeves now sells a cow against Easter to buy her silken gear.”
Velvet jerkins and damask doublets were for men of dignity and estate. Governor Winthrop had two tufted velvet jerkins.
Jerkins and doublets varied much in shape and detail:—
“These doublets were this day short-waisted, anon, long-bellied; by-and-by-after great-buttoned, straight-after plain-laced, or else your buttons as strange for smallness as were before for bigness.”
An Embroidered Jerkin.