For riding and sport the ladies wore the hood, and sometimes a broad round hat over it, or the peaked hat. The countrywoman wore an ill-fitting gown with tight sleeves, an apron, and an open hood.
A WOMAN OF THE TIME OF EDWARD III. (1327-1377)
You will notice that the woman also wears the tippet on her arm. The gorget is high about her neck, and is held up by pins to her plaited hair.
Imagine London in the year of the third great pestilence, 1369. It is October, and the worst of the pestilence is over; John Chichester, the Mayor, is riding through the streets about some great affairs; many knights and ladies pass by. It is raining hard after the long drought of the summer, but, despite the rain, many citizens are abroad to see the doings in the City, and one may see the bright parti-coloured clothes of the lords and ladies, and here and there, as a cloak is blown back, a glimpse of rich-patterned cloth of gold.
Perhaps Will Langland—Long Will—a gaunt man of thirty-seven, is brushing past a young man of twenty-nine, Chaucer, going to his work.
Silk dresses and frieze gowns, velvet and homespun, hurry along as the rain falls more heavily, and after a while the street becomes quite deserted. Then nothing but the dreary monotony of the rain falling from the gables will come to the room of the knight’s lady as she lies sick of small-pox. John de Gaddesden, the King’s doctor, has prescribed for her that she must lie clothed in scarlet red in a room of that colour, with bed-hangings of that same colour, and so she must lie, without much comfort, while the raindrops, falling down the wide chimney, drip on the logs in the fire and make them hiss.