Habits and men, with remnants of record touching the makers of both

by Dr. Doran

The flinging down of a sandal upon a territory was a symbol of occupancy or possession. “Upon the land of Edom do I cast my shoe” (sandal), says the Psalmist, in the 9th Psalm. And this was a symbol of slavery to the Edomites, for to loose the sandal was the office of a slave; and in Egypt, especially, we find paintings of slaves who are carrying their master’s sandals. On the sole of the latter was sometimes represented a captive, whom the wearer had the pleasure of thus pictorially treading underfoot. When an old shoe is thrown after a newly married couple, it does not so much imply that they have probably been put in possession of felicity, as that they have certainly lost their liberty.

Xenophon remarks that the Persians wore coarse clothes, fought bareheaded, and never required pocket-handkerchiefs. He laughs at them however for using gloves, and for effeminately covering their heads, when the latter might best dispense with the protection. Laertes, the Greek, wore gloves when he was gardening, in order to protect his fingers from the thorns;—and this shows that young Greek noblemen, in remote times, could occupy themselves usefully and innocently. Our youths, with much time, heavy purses, and a lordship of self, would find considerable profit in “putting on the gloves” for no worse purposes.

Gloves were not common among the Romans, but they were not entirely unknown. Varro says that to pluck olives without them was to spoil the olive; and Athenæus tells of a glutton who used to dine out in gloves, and so be enabled to dispose of the hot things quicker than the guests who were less prepared for the handling them. The fashion of gloves made its way however in Rome, in spite of the philosophers who affected to despise comfort, and did assuredly decline cleanliness. They were worn, for instance, by the secretary of the elder Pliny.

The mode seems to have been adopted in some excess by the monks, until a decree of the Council of Aix ordered that they should wear none but gloves of sheep-skin. Had they turned their cilices into gloves, and made flesh-brushes of them, it would have been more profitable to themselves, and to all who stood near them. In France, the use of gloves was allowed only to bishops. They were sometimes used in great formalities of the “Church,” and indeed of the State also; for bishops received investiture by presentation of a glove, and kings were not half crowned who did not receive a pair, with an episcopal blessing to enhance the gift.

Among the early English, the Anglo-Saxons, we find that ladies, before they knew the use of the glove, or applied their knowledge to its most convenient conclusion, had the ends of their mantles shaped into gloves, and these were worn over the hand, under the name of mufflers. Gloves were worn by females before the Reformation, despite what Gough says to the contrary. A dishonoured knight was deprived not only of his spurs, but of his gloves also. It was right that the symbol for or gage of battle should be taken from him whose office it had been to carry arms, but who was no longer accounted as worthy of wielding them.

In Germany, he who entered a prince’s stables, or was present at the killing of a stag, without taking off his gloves, had to pay his footing or fine; in the first case to the grooms, in the second to the huntsmen,—and for this reason, because they could not mingle among grooms and huntsmen, and yet retain their dignity (asserted by keeping on the glove), without paying for it.

Gloves are distributed at funerals,—perhaps originally as a challenge from the doctor, defying all who shall dare say that he had committed murder contrary to the rules of art. But they were acceptable presents on other occasions; and when gloves were rare, and James I. and Elizabeth gave those rich and rare articles as gifts to various members of the Denny family, no doubt the fingers of the latter felt the honour deeply. When these gloves were sold, some two centuries and a half later, a single pair fetched a price for which a man with judgment and taste might purchase a select library. One of this family, Sir William Denny himself, contributed a remarkable poetical work to the libraries of 1653, namely, the ‘Pelecanicidium, or the Christian Adviser against Self-murder; together with a Guide, and a Pilgrim’s Pass to the Land of the Living.’ In the preface he says, “Mine ears do tingle to hear so many sad relations, as ever since March last, concerning several persons, of divers rank and quality, inhabiting within and about so eminent a city as late-famed London, that have made away and murdered themselves.”

In England gloves came in about the time the Heptarchy went out. The exact period is not known; but we do know that when a society of German merchants sought protection for the trade which they carried on between their own country and England, they propitiated King Ethelred II. by presenting him with five pairs of gloves: their not being able to muster the half-dozen shows the rarity of the article. In the case mentioned the gloves were probably not so much a gift or bribe, as a portion of duty paid in kind. Prior to this period the hands of both sexes were covered, as I before observed, by the mantles; and some persons with rapidly progressing ideas, had donned an imperfect structure which presented a stall for the thumb, and a sort of stocking-foot for the rest of the fingers. They were like the mufflers which we place on the digits of young England; and when Mrs. Ramsbottom made the observation I quoted in the first paragraph, of “having had much walking on her hands lately,” she may have had these very mufflers in her eye.

Gloves soon became fashionable among the higher classes; at least, Ordericus Vitalis tells us that when the Bishop of Durham escaped from the Tower, during the reign of Henry I., he had to slide down a rope; and as the bishop, in his hurry, had “forgotten his gloves,” he rubbed the skin off his hands to the bone, in descending from the window. Duke Charles of Guise, when he escaped in a similar manner, from the Château at Tours, in the days of Henri III., had better fortune; he descended more leisurely than the bishop, being lighter, and with no further detriment than a rent in his hose.