The gorget when worn by women was enriched with lace and needlework.
“These Holland smocks as white as snow
And gorgets brave with drawn-work wrought
A tempting ware they are you know.”
Thus runs a poem published in 1596.
Mary Verney writes in 1642 her desire for “gorgetts and eyther cutt or painted callico to wear under them or what is most in fashion.”
The shadow has been a great stumbling-block to antiquaries. Purchas’s Pilgrimage is responsible for what is to me a very confusing reference. It says of a certain savage race:—
“They have a skin of leather hanging about their necks whenever they sit bare-headed and bare-footed, with their right arms bare; and a broad Sombrero or Shadow in their hands to defend them in Summer from the Sunne, in Winter from the Rain.”
This would make a shadow a sort of hand-screen or sunshade; but all other references seem as if a shadow were a cap. As early as 1580, Richard Fenner’s Wardship Roll has “Item a Caul and Shadoe 4 shillings.” I think a shadow was a great cap like a cornet. Cross-cloths were a form of head-dress. I have seen old portraits with a cap or head-dress formed of crossed bands which I have supposed were cross-cloths.
Cross-cloths also bore a double meaning; for certainly neck-cloths or neckerchiefs were sometimes called cross-cloths or cross-clothes. Another name is the picardill or piccadilly, a French title for a gorget. Fitzgerald, in 1617, wrote of “a spruse coxcomb” that he glanced at his pocket looking-glass to see:—
“How his Band jumpeth with his Peccadilly
Whether his Band-strings ballance equally.”
Another satirical author could write in 1638 that “pickadillies are now out of request.”