JOHN THOMPSON, HATTER,
Makes and Sells Hats
for Ready Money
Above the inscription was the ordinary figure of a hat. But he thought he would submit the composition to his friends for amendment. The first he showed it to thought the word “hatter” tautologous, because followed by the words “makes hats,” which showed he was a hatter; it was struck out. The next observed that the word “makes” might as well be omitted, because his customers would not care who made the hats; if good, and to their mind, they would buy, by whomsoever made. He struck that out also. A third said he thought that the words “for ready money” were useless, as it was not the custom of the place to sell on credit—every one who purchased expected to pay. These, too, were parted with, and the inscription then stood, “John Thompson sells Hats.” “Sells Hats!” says his next friend; “why, who expects you to give them away? What, then, is the use of the word?” It was struck out, and HATS was all that remained attached to the name John Thompson. Even this inscription, brief as it was, was reduced ultimately to “John Thompson,” with the figure of the hat above it.
The Hat and Feathers was almost equally common in those days, when no full-fledged gallant could be deemed complete without his fluttering ribbons and plume. The puritanical Philip Stubbe in his “Anatomie of Abuses,” 1585, is very hard upon this fashion:—
“Another sort, (as phantasticall as the rest,) are content with no kind of hat, without a great bunch of feathers of divers and sondrie colours, peaking on top of their heades, not unlike (I dare not saie) cockes combes, but as Sternes of Pride and ensignes of vanitie and these fluttering sailes and feathered flagges of defiaunce to virtue, (for so they are,) are so advanced in Ailgnia [Anglia] that euery child has thē in his Hatte or Cappe. Many get good living by deying and selling of them, and not a fewe proue themselues more than fooles in wearyng of them.”
Decker calls the “swell” of his day “our feathered ostrich,” and in his comedy of the “Sun’s Darling” he mentions “some alderman’s son wondrous giddy and light-headed, one that blew his patrimony away in feathers and tobacco.” There is one sign of the Hat and Feathers still in existence, a publican’s, at Grantchester, in Cambridgeshire.
Another old hatter’s sign is the [Hat and Beaver], which at present may be seen at the door of a publican’s in Leicester. Shopbills of this once common sign occur amongst the Banks Collection, representing a beaver seated on the edge of a stream, with a hat above him. The relation between the two is evident, and about as gratifying to the beaver as it was to the widow of the hanged man to hear the gallows named. The beaver hats worn in England at the time of Edward III., and long after, were made in Flanders and Picardy. From the Privy Purse expenses of Henry VIII. we see that the king paid in 1532:—
“Item, the xxiij day [of October] for a hath and plume for the King in Boleyn, xv shillings.”
“On 27 May MDLV. (ij of Queen Mary) Sir William Cecil [afterwards Lord Burghley] being then at Callice [Calais] bought [as appears from his MS. Diary] three hats for his children at xxd each.”
The Protestant refugees, however, from Flanders and France, introduced the manufacture of these hats into England when they settled in Norwich; by a statute 5 and 6 Edw. VI., the manufacture of felt and thrummed hats was confined to Norwich and the corporate and market towns in that county.[575] As for the shapes of the hats worn at that period we must again refer to Stubbe’s satirical account:—