"A small waist was decidedly, as we have seen before, one criterion of a beautiful form, and, generally speaking, its length was currently regulated by a just idea of elegance, and especially in the thirteenth century. In the fourteenth the women seem to have contracted a vitiated taste, and not being content with their form as God hath made it, introduced the corset or bodice—a stiff and unnatural disguisement even in its origin."
Lady of Rank of the Thirteenth Century.
How far this newly-introduced form of the corset became a "disguisement" will be best judged of by a glance at the foregoing illustration, which represents a lady in the dress worn just at the close of the thirteenth century. The term surcoat was given to this new introduction. This in many instances was worn over the dress somewhat after the manner of the body of a riding-habit, being attached to the skirt, which spreads into a long trailing train. An old author, speaking of these articles of dress, thus writes:—
"There came to me two women wearing surcoats, longer than they were tall by about a yard, so that they were obliged to carry their trains upon their arms to prevent their trailing upon the ground, and they had sleeves to these surcoats reaching to the elbows."
The trains of these dresses at length reached such formidable dimensions that Charles V. of France became so enraged as to cause an edict to be issued hurling threats of excommunication at the heads of all those who dared to wear a dress which terminated "like the tail of a serpent."
Notwithstanding this tremendously alarming threat, a tailor was found fully equal to the occasion, who, in spite of the terrors inspired by candle, bell, and book, set to work (lion-hearted man that he was) and made a magnificent surcoat for Madame du Gatinais, which not only trailed far behind on the ground, but actually "took five yards of Brussels net for sleeves, which also trailed." History, or even tradition, fails to inform us what dreadful fate overtook this desperate tailor after the performance of a feat so recklessly daring; but we can scarcely fancy that his end could have been of the kind common to tailors of less audacious depravity.