Only ‘G—d damn them’ is their common oath.
Thus custom kept decorum by gradation,
That losing mass, cross, faith, they find damnation.”
Henry I. was surrounded by a crowd of friends, whose dresses were splendid and whose principles were detestable,—not to say “devilish.” These were the “Effeminati.” They were like the “mignons” of the French King Henri, and acquired their appellation from the fact of dressing nearly after the fashion of women. Their tunics were deep-sleeved, and their mantles long-trained. The peaks of their shoes were not only enormously long, but twisted so as to represent the horns of a ram or the coils of a serpent. Their peaks, introduced by Fulk, Earl of Anjou, to conceal his misshapen feet, were stuffed with tow; and certainly, were any earl or other gentleman now to enter a drawing-room thus remarkably shod, he would himself be taken in tow (if I may be so bold as to say so), and conveyed before a tribunal de lunatico inquirendo. The Effeminati, like the French “mignons,” wore their hair long, smooth, and parted in the middle; and they were not only unpleasantly unnatural to look at, but were horribly so in their deeds.
The foreign knights and visitors who came to Windsor in Edward the First’s reign, and brought with them a continual succession of varying fashions, turned the heads of the young with delight, and of the old with disgust. Douglas, the monk of Glastonbury, is especially denunciative and satirical on this point. He says that in the horrible variety of costume,—“now long, now large, now wide, now straight,”—the style of dress was “destitute and devert from all honesty of old arraye or good usage.” It is all, he says, “so nagged and knibbed on every side, and all so shattered and also buttoned, that I with truth shall say, they seem more like to tormentors or devils in their clothing, and also in their shoying and other array, than they seemed to be like men.” And the old monk had good foundation for his complaint; and the Commons themselves having, what the Commons now have not, a dread of becoming as extravagant as their betters in the article of dress, actually sought the aid of Parliament. That august assembly met the complaint by restricting the use of furs and furls to the royal family and nobles worth one thousand per annum. Knights and ladies worth four hundred marks yearly, were permitted to deck themselves in cloths of gold and silver, and to wear certain jewellery. Poor knights, squires, and damsels were prohibited from appearing in the costume of those of higher degree. As for the Commons themselves, they could put on nothing better than unadorned woollen cloth; and if an apprentice or a milliner had been bold enough to wear a ring on the finger, it was in peril of a decree that it should be taken off,—not the finger, but the ring,—with confiscation of the forbidden finery.
The consequence was that the Commons, being under prohibition to put on finery, became smitten with a strong desire to assume it; and much did they rejoice when they were ruled over by so consummate a fop as Richard of Bordeaux. All classes were content to do what many classes joyfully do in our own days,—dress beyond their means; and we find in old Harding’s ‘Chronicle’ that not only were
“Yemen and gromes in cloth of silk arrayed,
Sattin and damask, in doublettes and in gownnes,”
but that all this, as well as habits of “cloth of greene and scarleteen,—cut work and brodwar, was all,” as the Chronicler expresses it, “for unpayed;” that is, was not paid for. So that very many among us do not so much despise the wisdom afforded us by the example of our ancestors as didactic poets and commonplace honest writers falsely allege them to do. And those ancestors of Richard the Second’s time were especially given to glorify themselves in parti-coloured garments of white and red, such being the colours of the King’s livery (as blue and white were those of John of Gaunt); and they who wore these garments, sometimes of half-a-dozen colours in each, why they looked, says an old writer, “as though the fire of St. Anthony, or some such mischance,” had cankered and eaten into half their bodies. The long-toed shoes, held up to the knee by a chain and hook, were called crackowes, the fashion thereof coming from Cracow in Poland. The not less significant name of “devil’s receptacles” were given to the wide sleeves of this reign, for the reason, as the Monk of Evesham tells us, that whatever was stolen was thrust into them.
The fashion of clothes has long ceased to mark the position of the wearer. On this subject, Fuller says in his ‘Church History,’ when treating of the time of Edward III., that “some had a project that men’s clothes might be their signs to show their birth, degree, or estate, so that the quality of an unknown person might, at the first sight, be expounded by his apparel. But this was at once let fall as impossible: statesmen in all ages, notwithstanding their several laws to the contrary, being fain to connive at men’s riot in this kind, which maintaineth more poor people than their charity.”