From this vest, or surcoat, was developed a coat, with skirts, such as had become, ere the year 1700, the universal wear of English and American men. Its first form was adopted about at the close of the reign of Charles II. By 1688 Quaker teachers warned their younger sort against “cross-pockets on men’s coats, side slopes, over-full skirted coats.”
In an old play a man threatens a country lad, “I’ll make your buttons fly.” The lad replies, “All my buttons is loops.” Some garments, especially leather ones, like doublets, which were cumbersome to button, were secured by loops. For instance, in spatterdashes, a row of holes was set on one side, and of loops on the other. To fasten them, one must begin at the lower loop, pass this through the first hole, then put the second loop through that first loop and the second hole, and so on till the last loop was fastened to the breeches by buckle and strap or large single button. From these loops were developed frogs and loops.
Major John Pyncheon had, in 1703, a “light coulour’d cape-coat with Frogs on it.” In the New England Weekly Journal of 1736 “New Fashion’d Frogs” are named; and later, “Spangled Scalloped &; Brocaded Frogs.”
Though these jerkins and mandillions and doublets which were furnished to the Bay colonists were fastened with hooks and eyes, buttons were worn also, as old portraits and old letters prove. John Eliot ordered for traffic with the Indians, in 1651, three gross of pewter buttons; and Robert Keayne, of Boston, writing in 1653, said bitterly that a “haynous offence” of his had been selling buttons at too large profit—that they were gold buttons and he had sold them for two shillings ninepence a dozen in Boston, when they had cost but two shillings a dozen in London (which does not seem, in the light of our modern profits on imported goods, a very “haynous” offence). He also added with acerbity that “they were never payd for by those that complayned.”
Buttonholes were a matter of ornament more than of use; in fact, they were never used for closing the garment after coats came to be worn. They were carefully cut and “laid around” in gay colors, embroidered with silver and gold thread, bound with vellum, with kid, with velvet. We find in old-time letters directions about modish buttonholes, and drawings even, in order that the shape may be exactly as wished. An English contemporary of John Winthrop’s has tasselled buttonholes on his doublet.
Various are the reasons given for the placing of the two buttons on the back of a man’s coat. One is that they are a survival of buttons which were used on the eighteenth-century riding-coat. The coat-tails were thus buttoned up when the wearer was on horseback. Another is that they were used for looping back the skirts of the coats; it is said that loops of cord were placed at the corners of the said skirts.
A curious anecdote about these two buttons on the back of the coat is that a tribe of North American Indians, deep believers in the value of symbolism, refused to heed a missionary because he could not explain to them the significance of these two buttons.