This carefully made ruff was starched with good English or Dutch starch; fluted with “setting sticks” of wood or bone, to hold each pleat up; then fixed with struts—also of wood—placed in a manner to hold the pleats firmly apart; and finally “seared” or goffered with “poking sticks” of iron or steel, which, duly heated, dried the stiffening starch. To “do up” a formal ruff was a wearisome, difficult, and costly precess. Women of skill acquired considerable fortunes as “gofferers.”
Stubbes tells us further of the rich decoration of ruffs with gold, silver, and silk lace, with needlework, with openwork, and with purled lace. This was in Elizabeth’s day. John Winthrop’s ruff ([here]) is edged with lace; in general a plain ruff was worn by plain gentlemen; one may be seen on Martin Frobisher ([here]). Rich lace was for the court. Their great cost, their inconvenience, their artificiality, their size, were sure to make ruffs a “reason of offence” to reformers. Stubbes gave voice to their complaints in these words:—
“They haue great and monstrous ruffes, made either of cambrike, holland, lawne, or els of some other the finest cloth that can be got for money, whereof some be a quarter of a yarde deepe, yea, some more, very few lesse, so that they stande a full quarter of a yearde (and more) from their necks hanging ouer their shoulder points in steade of a vaile.”
Still more violent does he grow over starch:—
“The one arch or piller whereby his (the Devil’s) kyngdome of great ruffes is vnderpropped, is a certaine kind of liquid matter, whiche they call starch, wherein the deuill hath willed them to washe and dive their ruffes well, whiche, beeying drie, will then stande stiff and inflexible about their necks.
“The other piller is a certaine device made of wiers, crested for the purpose; whipped over either with gold thred, silver, or silke, and this he calleth a supportasse or vnderpropper; this is to bee applied round about their neckes under the ruffe, upon the out side of the bande, to beare up the whole frame and bodie of the ruffe, from fallying and hangying doune.”
Starch was of various colors. We read of “blue-starch-women,” and of what must have been especially ugly, “goose-green starch.” Yellow starch was most worn. It was introduced from France by the notorious Mrs. Turner. (See [here].)
Wither wrote thus of the varying modes of dressing the neck:—
“Some are graced by their Tyres
As their Quoyfs, their Hats, their Wyres,
One a Ruff cloth best become;
Falling bands allureth some;
And their favours oft we see
Changèd as their dressings be.”
The transformation of ruff to band can be seen in the painting of King Charles I. The first Van Dyck portrait of him shows him in a moderate ruff turned over to lie down like a collar; the lace edge formed itself by the pleats into points which developed into the lace points characteristic of Van Dyck’s later pictures and called by his name.
Evelyn, describing a medal of King Charles I struck in 1633, says, “The King wears a falling band, a new mode which has succeeded the cumbersome ruff; but neither do the bishops nor the Judges give it up so soon.” Few of the early colonial portraits show ruffs, though the name appears in many inventories, but “playne bands” are more frequently named than ruffs. Thus in an Inventory of William Swift, Plymouth, 1642, he had “2 Ruff Bands and 4 Playne Bands.” The “playne band” of the Puritans is shown in this portrait of William Pyncheon, which is dated 1657.