Fig. 160.—The bands that survive on a lady’s nightdress.
Fig. 161.—A woman’s nightcap, still worn in Wiltshire.
Here and there we find that nightcaps are still worn. That belonging to an old lady, which we figure (see Figure [161]), came from the village of Bishopstone in Wiltshire, where no fewer than twelve old ladies, all of them over eighty, still wear such a head-dress at night. Nightcaps were worn by men in the time of the Tudors, and that of Queen Elizabeth, as is shown by the following extract from a bill of 1547: “Pd. for two nyght caps of vellvet for them, 8s. 0d.”[47]
They were very elaborately embroidered at this time, and in Mary’s reign were mentioned in a sumptuary law. Old men still wear nightcaps, and the one we figure was used until lately at South Stoke in Oxfordshire. It is of the familiar style that we associate with such a head-dress, and has a tassel on the top. (See Figure [162].)
Fig. 162.—A man’s nightcap, from Oxfordshire.