The cap worn by the scholars of Christ’s Hospital until the middle of the nineteenth century.
Fig. B.
A scholar of Christ’s Hospital.
(By the courtesy of the Rev. A. W. Upcott, M.A., Headmaster of Christ’s Hospital.)
PLATE IX.
The next subject that we may appropriately consider here is that of the characteristic costumes which are worn in certain schools. In connection with boys, the first case which immediately comes to mind is that of the Blue-coat boys, as the scholars of Christ’s Hospital, which was founded in 1552, have come to be called. Their blue coat is part of the ordinary dress of the citizen of the reign of Edward VI, and the scholarly man at this time had the skirts of his blue coat long, while in other cases they were cut off at the knee. Instead of trunks, however, the Blue-coat boy wears more modern knickerbockers, but he clings to his yellow stockings. (See Plate [IX], Figure [B].)
The scholars of Christ’s Hospital have discarded caps (see Plate [IX], Figure [A]), but the one which should go with their dress is flat, like the one which came into fashion in the reign just mentioned. It was the one afterwards called the statute cap, when Elizabeth for the good of trade ordered that “one cap of wool, knitted thick and dressed in England,” was to be worn “by all over six years of age except such persons as had twenty marks a year in land and their heirs and such as have borne office of worship.” A cap of the same kind was worn by Edward VI, and is still part of the dress of Beef-eaters at the Tower of London.
The blue coat afterwards came to be the ordinary livery of serving-men in the sixteenth and early part of the seventeenth centuries, and blue is still a popular colour for coachmen’s liveries at the present day.