In Charles II’s time at the May-pole dances still appear the old, welted doublets. Jack may have worn Cicily’s doublet, and Peg may have borrowed Will’s for all the difference that can be seen. The man’s doublet did not ever have long, hanging sleeves, however, in the seventeenth century, while women wore such sleeves.
Sometimes the sleeves were very large, as in the Bowdoin portrait ([here]). The great puffs were held out by whalebones and rolls of cotton, and “tiring-sleeves” of wires, a fashion which has obtained for women at least seven times in the history of English costume. Gosson describes the vast sleeves of English doublets thus;—
“This Cloth of Price all cut in ragges,
These monstrous bones that compass arms,
These buttons, pinches, fringes, jagges,
With them he (the Devil) weaveth woeful harms.”
We have seen how bitterly the slashing of good cloth exercised good men. The “cutting in rags” was slashing.
A favorite pattern of slashing is in small, narrow slits as shown in the portrait [here] of James Douglas. These jerkins are of leather, and the slashes are of course ornamental, and are also for health and comfort, as those know who wear chamois jackets with perforated holes throughout them, or slashes if we choose to call them so. They permit a circulation of the skin and a natural condition. These jerkins are slashed in curious little cuts, “carved of very good intail,” as was said of King Henry’s jerkin, which means, in modern English, cut in very good designs. And I presume, being of buff leather, the slashes were simply cut, not overcast or embroidered as were some wool stuffs.
The guard was literally a guard to the seam, a strip of galloon, silk, lace, velvet, put on over the seam to protect and strengthen it.
The large openings or slashes were called panes. Fynes Mayson says, “Lord Mountjoy wore jerkins and round hose with laced panes of russet cloth.” The Swiss dress was painted by Coryat as doublet and hose of panes intermingled of red and yellow, trimmed with long puffs of blue and yellow rising up between the panes. It was necessarily a costly dress. Of course this is the same word with the same meaning as when used in the term a “pane of glass.”
The word “pinches” refers to an elaborate pleating which was worn for years; it lingered in America till 1750, and we have revived it in what we term “accordion pleating.” The seventeenth-century pinching was usually applied to lawn or some washable stuff; and there must have been a pinching, a goffering machine by which the pinching was done to the washed garment by means of a heated iron.
