CHAPTER VIIITHE VENERABLE HOODWe are told by the great Viollet le Duc that the faces of fifteenth-century women were of a uniform type. Certainly a uniform head-dress tends to establish a seeming resemblance of the wearers; the strange, steeple head-dress of that century might well have that effect; and the “French hood” worn so many years by English, French, and American women has somewhat the same effect on women’s countenances; it gives a uniformity of severity. It is difficult for a face to be pretty and gay under this gloomy hood. This French hood is plainly a development of the head-rail, which was simply an unshaped oblong strip of linen or stuff thrown over the head, and with the ends twisted lightly round the neck or tied loosely under the chin with whatever grace or elegance the individual wearer possessed.Varying slightly from reign to reign, yet never greatly changed, this sombre plain French hood was worn literally for centuries. It was deemed so grave and dignified a head-covering that, in the reign of Edward III, women of ill carriage were forbidden the wearing of it.Gulielma Penn.Gulielma Penn.In the year 1472 “Raye Hoods,” that is, striped hoods, were enjoined in several English towns as the distinctive wear of women of ill character. And in France this black hood was under restriction; only ladies of the French court were permitted to wear velvet hoods, and only women of station and dignity, black hoods.This black hood was dignified in allegorical literature as “the venerable hood,” and was ever chosen by limners to cover the head of any woman of age or dignity who was to be depicted.In theLadies’ Dictionarya hood is defined thus: “A Dutch attire covering the head, face and all the body.” And the long cloak with this draped hood, which must have been much like the Shaker cloak of to-day, seems to have been deemed a Dutch garment. It was warm and comfortable enough to be adopted readily by the English Pilgrims in Holland. It had come to England, however, in an earlier century. Of Ellinor Rummin, the alewife, Skelton wrote about the year 1500:—“A Hake of Lincoln greeneIt had been hers I weeneMore than fortye yeareAnd soe it doth appeareAnd the green bare thredsLooked like sere wedesWithered like hayThe wool worn awayeAnd yet I dare sayeShe thinketh herself gayeUpon a holy day.”It is impossible to know how old this hood is. When I have fancied I had the earliest reference that could be found, I would soon come to another a few years earlier. We know positively from theLisle Papersthat it was worn in England by the name “French hood” in 1540. Anne Basset, daughter of Lady Lisle, had come into the household of the queen of Henry VIII, who at the time was Anne of Cleves. The “French Apparell” which the maid of honor fetched from Calais was not pleasing to the queen, who promptly ordered the young girl to wear “a velvet bonnet with a frontlet and edge of pearls.” These bonnets are familiar to us on the head of Anne’s predecessor, Anne Boleyn. They were worn even by young children. One is shownhere. The young lady borrowed a bonnet; and a factor named Husee—the biggest gossip of his day—promptly chronicles to her mother, “I saw her (Anne Basset) yesterday in her velvet bonnet that my Lady Sussex had tired her in, and thought it became her nothing so well as the French hood,—but the Queen’s pleasure must be done!”Hannah Callowhill Penn.Hannah Callowhill Penn.Doubtless some of the Pilgrim Mothers wore bonnets like this one of Anne Basset’s, especially if the wearer were a widow, when there was also an under frontlet which was either plain, plaited, or folded, but which came in a distinct point in the middle of the forehead.This cap, or bandeau, with point on the forehead, is precisely the widow’s cap worn by Catherine de Medicis. She was very severe in dress, but she introduced the wearing of neck-ruffs. She also wore hoods, the favorite head-covering of all Frenchwomen at that time. This form of head-gear was sometimes called a widow’s peak, on account of a similar peak of black silk or white being often worn by widows, apparently of all European nations. Magdalen Beeckman, an American woman of Dutch descent (here), wears one. The name is still applied to a pointed growth of hair on the forehead. It has also been known as a headdress of Mary Queen of Scots, because some of her portraits display this pointed outline of head-gear. It continued until the time of Charles II. It is often found on church brasses, and was plainly a head-gear of dignity. A modified form is shown in the portrait of Lady Mary Armine.Stubbes in hisAnatomie of Abusesgives a notion of the importance of the French hood when he speaks of the straining of all classes for rich attire: that “every artificer’s wife” will not go without her hat of velvet every day; “every merchant’s wife and meane gentlewoman” must be in her “French hood”; and “every poor man’s daughter” in her “taffatie hat or of wool at least.” We have seen what a fierce controversy burned over Madam Johnson’s “schowish” velvet hood.An excellent account of this black hood as worn by the Puritans is given in rhyme in “HudibrasRedivivus,” a long poem utterly worthless save for the truthful descriptions of dress; it runs:—“The black silk Hood, with formal prideFirst roll’d, beneath the chin was tiedSo close, so very trim and neat,So round, so formal, so complete,That not one jag of wicked laceOr rag of linnen white had placeBetwixt the black bag and the face,Which peep’d from out the sable hoodLike Luna from a sullen cloud.”It was doubtless selected by the women followers of Fox on account of its ancient record of sobriety and sanctity.“Are the pinch’d cap and formal hood the emblems of sanctity? Does your virtue consist in your dress, Mrs. Prim?”writes Mrs. Centlivre inA Bold Stroke for a Wife.The black hood was worn long by Quaker women ere they adopted the beaver hat of the eighteenth century, and the poke-bonnet of the nineteenth century.Hereis given a portrait of Hannah Callowhill Penn, a Quaker, the second wife of William Penn. She was a sensible woman brought up in a home where British mercantile thrift vied with Quaker belief in adherence to sober attire, and her portrait plainly shows her character. Penn’s young and pretty wife of his youth wears a fashionable pocket-hoop and rich brocade dress; but she wears likewise the simple black hood (here).The dominance of this black French hood came not, however, through its wear by sober-faced, discreet English Puritans and Quakers, but through a French influence, a court influence, the earnestness of its adoption by Madame de Maintenon, wife of King Louis XIV of France. The whole dress of this strange ascetic would by preference have been that of a penitent; but the king had a dislike of anything like mourning, so she wore dresses of some dark color other than black, generally a dull brown. The conventual aspect of her attire was added to by this large black hood, which was her constant wear, and is seen in her portraits. The life at court became melancholy, dejected, filled with icy reserve. And Madame, whether she rode “shut up in a close chair,” says Duclos, “to avoid the least breath of air, while the King walked by her side, taking off his hat each time he stopped to speak to her”; or when she attended services in the chapel, sitting in a closed gallery; or even in her own sombre apartments, bending in silence over ecclesiastic needlework,—everywhere, her narrow, yellow, livid face was shadowed and buried in this black hood.Madame de Miramion.Madame de Miramion.Her strange power over the king was in force in 1681, and, until his death in 1715, this sable hood, so unlike the French taste, covered the heads of French women of all ages and ranks. The genial, almost quizzical countenance of that noble and charitable woman, Madame de Miramion, wears a like hood.This French hood is prominent everywhere in book illustrations of the eighteenth century and even of earlier years. The loosely tied corners and the sides appear under the straw hats upon many of the figures in Tempest’sCryes of London, 1698, such as the Milk woman, the “Newes” woman, etc., which publication, I may say in passing, is a wonderful source for the student of everyday costume. I give the Strawberry Girl on this page to show the ordinary form of the French hood on plain folk.Misson’s Memories, published also in 1698, it gives the milkmaids on Mayday in like hoods. The early editions of Hudibras show these hoods, and in Hogarth’s works they may be seen; not always of black, of course, in later years, but ever of the same shape.The Strawberry Girl.The Strawberry Girl.The hood worn by the Normans was called a chaperon. It was a sort of pointed bag with an oval opening for the face; sometimes the point was of great length, and was twisted, folded, knotted. In the Bodleian Library is a drawing of eleven figures of young lads and girls playingHoodman-blindorBlindman’s-buff. The latter name came from the buffet or blow which the players gave with their twisted chaperon hoods. The blind man simply put his hood on “hind side afore,” and was effectually blinded. These figures are of the fifteenth century.Black Silk Hood.Black Silk Hood.The wild latitude of spelling often makes it difficult to define an article of dress. I have before me a letter of the year 1704, written in Boston, asking that a riding-hood be sent from England of any color save yellow; and one sentence of the instructions reads thus, “If ’tis velvet let it be a shabbaroon; if of cloth, a French hood.” I abandoned “shabbaroon” as a wholly lost word; until Mrs. Gummere announced that the word was chaperon, from the Norman hood just described. This chaperon is specifically the hood worn by the Knights of the Garter when in full dress; in general it applies to any ample hood which completely covers head and face save for eye-holes. Another hood was the sortie.Quilted Hood.Quilted Hood.The term “coif,” spelt in various ways, quoif, quoiffe, coiffer, ciffer, quoiffer, has been held to apply to the French hood; but it certainly did not in America, for I find often in inventories side by side items of black silk hoods and another of quoifs, which I believe were the white undercaps worn with the French hood; just as a coif was the close undercap for men’s wear.Through the two centuries following the assumption of the French hood came a troop of hoods, though sometimes under other names. In 1664 Pepys tells of his wife’s yellow bird’s-eye hood, “very fine, to church, as the fashion now is.” Planché says hoods were not displaced by caps and bonnets till George II’s time.In the list of the “wedding apparell” of Madam Phillips, of Boston, are velvet hoods, love-hoods, and “sneal hoods”; hoods of Persian, of lustring, of gauze; frequently scarlet hoods are named. In 1712 Richard Hall sent, from Barbadoes to Boston, a trunk of his deceased wife’s finery to be sold, among which was “one black Flowered Gauze Hoode,” and he added rather spitefully that he “could send better but it would be too rich for Boston.” He was a grandson of Madam Symonds of Ipswich. Furbelowed gauze hoods were then owned by Boston women, and must have been pretty things. Their delicacy has kept them from being preserved as have been velvet and Persian hoods.For the years 1673 to 1721 we have a personal record of domestic life in Boston, a diary which is the sole storehouse to which we can turn for intimate knowledge of daily deeds in that little town. A scant record it is, as to wearing apparel; for the diary-writer, Samuel Sewall, sometime business man, friend, neighbor, councillor, judge,—and always Puritan,—had not a regard of dress as had his English contemporary, the gay Samuel Pepys, or even that sober English gentleman, John Evelyn. In Pepys’s pages we have frequent and light-giving entries as to dress, interested and interesting entries. In Judge Sewall’s diary, any references to dress are wholly accidental and not related as matters of any moment, save one important exception, his attitude toward wigs and wig-wearing. I could wish Sewall had had a keener eye for dress, for he wrote in strong, well-ordered English; and when he was deeply moved he wrote with much color in his pen. The most spirited episodes in the book are the judge’s remarkable and varied courtships after he was left a widower at the age of sixty-five, and again when sixty-eight. While thus courting he makes almost his sole reference to women’s dress,—that Madam Mico when he called came to him in a splendid dress, and that Madam Winthrop’s dress,after she had refused him, was “not so clean as sometime it had been.” But an article of his own dress, nevertheless, formed an important factor in his unsuccessful courtship of Madam Winthrop—his hood. When all the other widowers of the community, dignified magistrates, parsons, and men of professions, all bourgeoned out in stately full-bottomed wigs, what woman would want to have a lover who came a-courting in a hood? A detachable hood with a cloak, I doubt not he wore, like the one owned by Judge Curwen, his associate in that terrible tale of Salem’s bigotry, cruelty, and credulity, the Witchcraft Trial. I cannot fancy Judge Sewall in a scarlet cloak and hood—a sad-colored one seems more in keeping with his temperament.Perhaps our old friend, the judge, wore his hood under his hat, as did the sober citizens in Piers Plowman; and as did judges in England.It is certain that many men wore hoods; and they wore occasionally a garment which was really woman’s wear, namely, a “riding hood”; which was also called a Dutch hood, and was like Elinor Rummin’s hake. This riding-hood was really more of a cloak than a head-covering, as it often had arm-holes. It might well be classed with cloaks. I may say here that it is not possible, either by years or by topics, to isolate completely each chapter of this book from the other. Its very arrangement, being both by chronology and subject, gives me considerable liberty, which I now take in this chapter, by retaining the riding-hood among hoods, simply because of its name.Pink Silk Hood.Pink Silk Hood.Pug Hood.Pug Hood.On May 6, 1717, theBoston News Lettergave a description of a gayly attired Indian runaway; she wore off a “red Camblet Ryding Hood fac’d with blue.” Another servant absconded with an orange-colored riding-hood with arm-holes. I have an ancient pattern of a riding-hood; it was found in the bottom of an old hair-covered trunk. It was marked “London Ryding Hood.” With it were rolled several packages of bits of woollen stuff, one of scarlet broadcloth, one of blue camlet, plainly labelled “Cuttings from Apphia’s ryding hood” and “Pieces from Mary’s ryding hood,” showing that they had been placed there with the pattern when the hood was cut. It is a cape, cut in a deep point in front and back; the extreme length of the points from the collar being about twenty-six inches. The hood is precisely like the one on Judge Curwen’s cloak, like the hoods of Shaker cloaks. As bits of silk are rolled with the wool pieces, I infer that these riding-hoods were silk lined.A most romantic name was given to the riding-hood after the battle of Preston in 1715. The Earl of Nithsdale, after the defeat of the Jacobites, was imprisoned in the Tower of London under sentence of death. From thence he made his escape through his wife’s coolness and ingenuity. She visited him dressed in a large riding-hood which could be drawn closely over her face. He escaped in her dress and hood, fled to the continent, and lived thirty years in safety in France. After that dashing rescue, these hoods were known as Nithsdales. The head-covering portion still resembled the French hood, but the shoulder-covering portion was circular and ruffled—according to Hogarth. In Durfey’sWit and Mirth, 1719, is a spirited song commemorating this “sacred wife,” who—“by her Wits immortal painsWith her quick head has saved his brains.”One verse runs thus:—“Let Traitors against Kings conspireLet secret spies great Statesmen hire,Nought shall be by detection gotIf Woman may have leave to plot.There’s nothing clos’d with Bars or LocksCan hinder Night-rayls, Pinners, Smocks;For they will everywhere make goodAs now they’ve done the Riding-hood.”In 1737 “pug hoods” were in fashion. We have no proof of their shape, though I am told they were the close, plain, silk hood sometimes worn under other hoods. One is shownhere. Pumpkin hoods of thickly wadded wool were prodigiously hot head-coverings; they were crudely pumpkin shaped. Knitted hoods, under such names as “comforters,” “fascinators,” “rigolettes,” “nubias,” “opera hoods,” “molly hoods,” are of nineteenth-century invention.CHAPTER IXCLOAKS AND THEIR COUSINS“Within my memory the Ladies covered their lovely Necks with a Cloak, this was exchanged for the Manteel; this again was succeeded by the Pelorine; the Pelorine by the Neckatee; the Neckatee by the Capuchin, which hath now stood its ground for a long time.”—“Covent Garden Journal,” May 1, 1752.“Mary Wallace and Clemintina Ferguson Just arrived from the Kingdom of Ireland intend to follow the business of Mantua making and have furnished themselves from London in patterns of the following kinds of wear, and have fixed a correspondence so to have from thence the earliest Fashions in Miniature. They are at Peter Clarke’s within two doors of William Walton’s, Esq., in the Fly. Ladies and Gentlemen that employ them may depend on being expeditiously and reasonably served in making the following Articles, that is to say—Sacks, Negligees, Negligee-night-gowns, plain-nightgowns, pattanlears, shepherdesses, Roman cloaks, Cardinals, Capuchins, Dauphinesses, Shades lorrains, Bonnets and Hives.”—“New York Mercury,” May, 1757.
W
e are told by the great Viollet le Duc that the faces of fifteenth-century women were of a uniform type. Certainly a uniform head-dress tends to establish a seeming resemblance of the wearers; the strange, steeple head-dress of that century might well have that effect; and the “French hood” worn so many years by English, French, and American women has somewhat the same effect on women’s countenances; it gives a uniformity of severity. It is difficult for a face to be pretty and gay under this gloomy hood. This French hood is plainly a development of the head-rail, which was simply an unshaped oblong strip of linen or stuff thrown over the head, and with the ends twisted lightly round the neck or tied loosely under the chin with whatever grace or elegance the individual wearer possessed.
Varying slightly from reign to reign, yet never greatly changed, this sombre plain French hood was worn literally for centuries. It was deemed so grave and dignified a head-covering that, in the reign of Edward III, women of ill carriage were forbidden the wearing of it.
Gulielma Penn.Gulielma Penn.
Gulielma Penn.
In the year 1472 “Raye Hoods,” that is, striped hoods, were enjoined in several English towns as the distinctive wear of women of ill character. And in France this black hood was under restriction; only ladies of the French court were permitted to wear velvet hoods, and only women of station and dignity, black hoods.
This black hood was dignified in allegorical literature as “the venerable hood,” and was ever chosen by limners to cover the head of any woman of age or dignity who was to be depicted.
In theLadies’ Dictionarya hood is defined thus: “A Dutch attire covering the head, face and all the body.” And the long cloak with this draped hood, which must have been much like the Shaker cloak of to-day, seems to have been deemed a Dutch garment. It was warm and comfortable enough to be adopted readily by the English Pilgrims in Holland. It had come to England, however, in an earlier century. Of Ellinor Rummin, the alewife, Skelton wrote about the year 1500:—
“A Hake of Lincoln greeneIt had been hers I weeneMore than fortye yeareAnd soe it doth appeareAnd the green bare thredsLooked like sere wedesWithered like hayThe wool worn awayeAnd yet I dare sayeShe thinketh herself gayeUpon a holy day.”
“A Hake of Lincoln greeneIt had been hers I weeneMore than fortye yeareAnd soe it doth appeareAnd the green bare thredsLooked like sere wedesWithered like hayThe wool worn awayeAnd yet I dare sayeShe thinketh herself gayeUpon a holy day.”
It is impossible to know how old this hood is. When I have fancied I had the earliest reference that could be found, I would soon come to another a few years earlier. We know positively from theLisle Papersthat it was worn in England by the name “French hood” in 1540. Anne Basset, daughter of Lady Lisle, had come into the household of the queen of Henry VIII, who at the time was Anne of Cleves. The “French Apparell” which the maid of honor fetched from Calais was not pleasing to the queen, who promptly ordered the young girl to wear “a velvet bonnet with a frontlet and edge of pearls.” These bonnets are familiar to us on the head of Anne’s predecessor, Anne Boleyn. They were worn even by young children. One is shownhere. The young lady borrowed a bonnet; and a factor named Husee—the biggest gossip of his day—promptly chronicles to her mother, “I saw her (Anne Basset) yesterday in her velvet bonnet that my Lady Sussex had tired her in, and thought it became her nothing so well as the French hood,—but the Queen’s pleasure must be done!”
Hannah Callowhill Penn.Hannah Callowhill Penn.
Hannah Callowhill Penn.
Doubtless some of the Pilgrim Mothers wore bonnets like this one of Anne Basset’s, especially if the wearer were a widow, when there was also an under frontlet which was either plain, plaited, or folded, but which came in a distinct point in the middle of the forehead.
This cap, or bandeau, with point on the forehead, is precisely the widow’s cap worn by Catherine de Medicis. She was very severe in dress, but she introduced the wearing of neck-ruffs. She also wore hoods, the favorite head-covering of all Frenchwomen at that time. This form of head-gear was sometimes called a widow’s peak, on account of a similar peak of black silk or white being often worn by widows, apparently of all European nations. Magdalen Beeckman, an American woman of Dutch descent (here), wears one. The name is still applied to a pointed growth of hair on the forehead. It has also been known as a headdress of Mary Queen of Scots, because some of her portraits display this pointed outline of head-gear. It continued until the time of Charles II. It is often found on church brasses, and was plainly a head-gear of dignity. A modified form is shown in the portrait of Lady Mary Armine.
Stubbes in hisAnatomie of Abusesgives a notion of the importance of the French hood when he speaks of the straining of all classes for rich attire: that “every artificer’s wife” will not go without her hat of velvet every day; “every merchant’s wife and meane gentlewoman” must be in her “French hood”; and “every poor man’s daughter” in her “taffatie hat or of wool at least.” We have seen what a fierce controversy burned over Madam Johnson’s “schowish” velvet hood.
An excellent account of this black hood as worn by the Puritans is given in rhyme in “HudibrasRedivivus,” a long poem utterly worthless save for the truthful descriptions of dress; it runs:—
“The black silk Hood, with formal prideFirst roll’d, beneath the chin was tiedSo close, so very trim and neat,So round, so formal, so complete,That not one jag of wicked laceOr rag of linnen white had placeBetwixt the black bag and the face,Which peep’d from out the sable hoodLike Luna from a sullen cloud.”
“The black silk Hood, with formal prideFirst roll’d, beneath the chin was tiedSo close, so very trim and neat,So round, so formal, so complete,That not one jag of wicked laceOr rag of linnen white had placeBetwixt the black bag and the face,Which peep’d from out the sable hoodLike Luna from a sullen cloud.”
It was doubtless selected by the women followers of Fox on account of its ancient record of sobriety and sanctity.
“Are the pinch’d cap and formal hood the emblems of sanctity? Does your virtue consist in your dress, Mrs. Prim?”
“Are the pinch’d cap and formal hood the emblems of sanctity? Does your virtue consist in your dress, Mrs. Prim?”
writes Mrs. Centlivre inA Bold Stroke for a Wife.
The black hood was worn long by Quaker women ere they adopted the beaver hat of the eighteenth century, and the poke-bonnet of the nineteenth century.Hereis given a portrait of Hannah Callowhill Penn, a Quaker, the second wife of William Penn. She was a sensible woman brought up in a home where British mercantile thrift vied with Quaker belief in adherence to sober attire, and her portrait plainly shows her character. Penn’s young and pretty wife of his youth wears a fashionable pocket-hoop and rich brocade dress; but she wears likewise the simple black hood (here).
The dominance of this black French hood came not, however, through its wear by sober-faced, discreet English Puritans and Quakers, but through a French influence, a court influence, the earnestness of its adoption by Madame de Maintenon, wife of King Louis XIV of France. The whole dress of this strange ascetic would by preference have been that of a penitent; but the king had a dislike of anything like mourning, so she wore dresses of some dark color other than black, generally a dull brown. The conventual aspect of her attire was added to by this large black hood, which was her constant wear, and is seen in her portraits. The life at court became melancholy, dejected, filled with icy reserve. And Madame, whether she rode “shut up in a close chair,” says Duclos, “to avoid the least breath of air, while the King walked by her side, taking off his hat each time he stopped to speak to her”; or when she attended services in the chapel, sitting in a closed gallery; or even in her own sombre apartments, bending in silence over ecclesiastic needlework,—everywhere, her narrow, yellow, livid face was shadowed and buried in this black hood.
Madame de Miramion.Madame de Miramion.
Madame de Miramion.
Her strange power over the king was in force in 1681, and, until his death in 1715, this sable hood, so unlike the French taste, covered the heads of French women of all ages and ranks. The genial, almost quizzical countenance of that noble and charitable woman, Madame de Miramion, wears a like hood.
This French hood is prominent everywhere in book illustrations of the eighteenth century and even of earlier years. The loosely tied corners and the sides appear under the straw hats upon many of the figures in Tempest’sCryes of London, 1698, such as the Milk woman, the “Newes” woman, etc., which publication, I may say in passing, is a wonderful source for the student of everyday costume. I give the Strawberry Girl on this page to show the ordinary form of the French hood on plain folk.Misson’s Memories, published also in 1698, it gives the milkmaids on Mayday in like hoods. The early editions of Hudibras show these hoods, and in Hogarth’s works they may be seen; not always of black, of course, in later years, but ever of the same shape.
The Strawberry Girl.The Strawberry Girl.
The Strawberry Girl.
The hood worn by the Normans was called a chaperon. It was a sort of pointed bag with an oval opening for the face; sometimes the point was of great length, and was twisted, folded, knotted. In the Bodleian Library is a drawing of eleven figures of young lads and girls playingHoodman-blindorBlindman’s-buff. The latter name came from the buffet or blow which the players gave with their twisted chaperon hoods. The blind man simply put his hood on “hind side afore,” and was effectually blinded. These figures are of the fifteenth century.
Black Silk Hood.Black Silk Hood.
Black Silk Hood.
The wild latitude of spelling often makes it difficult to define an article of dress. I have before me a letter of the year 1704, written in Boston, asking that a riding-hood be sent from England of any color save yellow; and one sentence of the instructions reads thus, “If ’tis velvet let it be a shabbaroon; if of cloth, a French hood.” I abandoned “shabbaroon” as a wholly lost word; until Mrs. Gummere announced that the word was chaperon, from the Norman hood just described. This chaperon is specifically the hood worn by the Knights of the Garter when in full dress; in general it applies to any ample hood which completely covers head and face save for eye-holes. Another hood was the sortie.
Quilted Hood.Quilted Hood.
Quilted Hood.
The term “coif,” spelt in various ways, quoif, quoiffe, coiffer, ciffer, quoiffer, has been held to apply to the French hood; but it certainly did not in America, for I find often in inventories side by side items of black silk hoods and another of quoifs, which I believe were the white undercaps worn with the French hood; just as a coif was the close undercap for men’s wear.
Through the two centuries following the assumption of the French hood came a troop of hoods, though sometimes under other names. In 1664 Pepys tells of his wife’s yellow bird’s-eye hood, “very fine, to church, as the fashion now is.” Planché says hoods were not displaced by caps and bonnets till George II’s time.
In the list of the “wedding apparell” of Madam Phillips, of Boston, are velvet hoods, love-hoods, and “sneal hoods”; hoods of Persian, of lustring, of gauze; frequently scarlet hoods are named. In 1712 Richard Hall sent, from Barbadoes to Boston, a trunk of his deceased wife’s finery to be sold, among which was “one black Flowered Gauze Hoode,” and he added rather spitefully that he “could send better but it would be too rich for Boston.” He was a grandson of Madam Symonds of Ipswich. Furbelowed gauze hoods were then owned by Boston women, and must have been pretty things. Their delicacy has kept them from being preserved as have been velvet and Persian hoods.
For the years 1673 to 1721 we have a personal record of domestic life in Boston, a diary which is the sole storehouse to which we can turn for intimate knowledge of daily deeds in that little town. A scant record it is, as to wearing apparel; for the diary-writer, Samuel Sewall, sometime business man, friend, neighbor, councillor, judge,—and always Puritan,—had not a regard of dress as had his English contemporary, the gay Samuel Pepys, or even that sober English gentleman, John Evelyn. In Pepys’s pages we have frequent and light-giving entries as to dress, interested and interesting entries. In Judge Sewall’s diary, any references to dress are wholly accidental and not related as matters of any moment, save one important exception, his attitude toward wigs and wig-wearing. I could wish Sewall had had a keener eye for dress, for he wrote in strong, well-ordered English; and when he was deeply moved he wrote with much color in his pen. The most spirited episodes in the book are the judge’s remarkable and varied courtships after he was left a widower at the age of sixty-five, and again when sixty-eight. While thus courting he makes almost his sole reference to women’s dress,—that Madam Mico when he called came to him in a splendid dress, and that Madam Winthrop’s dress,after she had refused him, was “not so clean as sometime it had been.” But an article of his own dress, nevertheless, formed an important factor in his unsuccessful courtship of Madam Winthrop—his hood. When all the other widowers of the community, dignified magistrates, parsons, and men of professions, all bourgeoned out in stately full-bottomed wigs, what woman would want to have a lover who came a-courting in a hood? A detachable hood with a cloak, I doubt not he wore, like the one owned by Judge Curwen, his associate in that terrible tale of Salem’s bigotry, cruelty, and credulity, the Witchcraft Trial. I cannot fancy Judge Sewall in a scarlet cloak and hood—a sad-colored one seems more in keeping with his temperament.
Perhaps our old friend, the judge, wore his hood under his hat, as did the sober citizens in Piers Plowman; and as did judges in England.
It is certain that many men wore hoods; and they wore occasionally a garment which was really woman’s wear, namely, a “riding hood”; which was also called a Dutch hood, and was like Elinor Rummin’s hake. This riding-hood was really more of a cloak than a head-covering, as it often had arm-holes. It might well be classed with cloaks. I may say here that it is not possible, either by years or by topics, to isolate completely each chapter of this book from the other. Its very arrangement, being both by chronology and subject, gives me considerable liberty, which I now take in this chapter, by retaining the riding-hood among hoods, simply because of its name.
Pink Silk Hood.Pink Silk Hood.
Pink Silk Hood.
Pug Hood.Pug Hood.
Pug Hood.
On May 6, 1717, theBoston News Lettergave a description of a gayly attired Indian runaway; she wore off a “red Camblet Ryding Hood fac’d with blue.” Another servant absconded with an orange-colored riding-hood with arm-holes. I have an ancient pattern of a riding-hood; it was found in the bottom of an old hair-covered trunk. It was marked “London Ryding Hood.” With it were rolled several packages of bits of woollen stuff, one of scarlet broadcloth, one of blue camlet, plainly labelled “Cuttings from Apphia’s ryding hood” and “Pieces from Mary’s ryding hood,” showing that they had been placed there with the pattern when the hood was cut. It is a cape, cut in a deep point in front and back; the extreme length of the points from the collar being about twenty-six inches. The hood is precisely like the one on Judge Curwen’s cloak, like the hoods of Shaker cloaks. As bits of silk are rolled with the wool pieces, I infer that these riding-hoods were silk lined.
A most romantic name was given to the riding-hood after the battle of Preston in 1715. The Earl of Nithsdale, after the defeat of the Jacobites, was imprisoned in the Tower of London under sentence of death. From thence he made his escape through his wife’s coolness and ingenuity. She visited him dressed in a large riding-hood which could be drawn closely over her face. He escaped in her dress and hood, fled to the continent, and lived thirty years in safety in France. After that dashing rescue, these hoods were known as Nithsdales. The head-covering portion still resembled the French hood, but the shoulder-covering portion was circular and ruffled—according to Hogarth. In Durfey’sWit and Mirth, 1719, is a spirited song commemorating this “sacred wife,” who—
“by her Wits immortal painsWith her quick head has saved his brains.”
“by her Wits immortal painsWith her quick head has saved his brains.”
One verse runs thus:—
“Let Traitors against Kings conspireLet secret spies great Statesmen hire,Nought shall be by detection gotIf Woman may have leave to plot.There’s nothing clos’d with Bars or LocksCan hinder Night-rayls, Pinners, Smocks;For they will everywhere make goodAs now they’ve done the Riding-hood.”
“Let Traitors against Kings conspireLet secret spies great Statesmen hire,Nought shall be by detection gotIf Woman may have leave to plot.There’s nothing clos’d with Bars or LocksCan hinder Night-rayls, Pinners, Smocks;For they will everywhere make goodAs now they’ve done the Riding-hood.”
In 1737 “pug hoods” were in fashion. We have no proof of their shape, though I am told they were the close, plain, silk hood sometimes worn under other hoods. One is shownhere. Pumpkin hoods of thickly wadded wool were prodigiously hot head-coverings; they were crudely pumpkin shaped. Knitted hoods, under such names as “comforters,” “fascinators,” “rigolettes,” “nubias,” “opera hoods,” “molly hoods,” are of nineteenth-century invention.
“Within my memory the Ladies covered their lovely Necks with a Cloak, this was exchanged for the Manteel; this again was succeeded by the Pelorine; the Pelorine by the Neckatee; the Neckatee by the Capuchin, which hath now stood its ground for a long time.”—“Covent Garden Journal,” May 1, 1752.“Mary Wallace and Clemintina Ferguson Just arrived from the Kingdom of Ireland intend to follow the business of Mantua making and have furnished themselves from London in patterns of the following kinds of wear, and have fixed a correspondence so to have from thence the earliest Fashions in Miniature. They are at Peter Clarke’s within two doors of William Walton’s, Esq., in the Fly. Ladies and Gentlemen that employ them may depend on being expeditiously and reasonably served in making the following Articles, that is to say—Sacks, Negligees, Negligee-night-gowns, plain-nightgowns, pattanlears, shepherdesses, Roman cloaks, Cardinals, Capuchins, Dauphinesses, Shades lorrains, Bonnets and Hives.”—“New York Mercury,” May, 1757.
“Within my memory the Ladies covered their lovely Necks with a Cloak, this was exchanged for the Manteel; this again was succeeded by the Pelorine; the Pelorine by the Neckatee; the Neckatee by the Capuchin, which hath now stood its ground for a long time.”—“Covent Garden Journal,” May 1, 1752.“Mary Wallace and Clemintina Ferguson Just arrived from the Kingdom of Ireland intend to follow the business of Mantua making and have furnished themselves from London in patterns of the following kinds of wear, and have fixed a correspondence so to have from thence the earliest Fashions in Miniature. They are at Peter Clarke’s within two doors of William Walton’s, Esq., in the Fly. Ladies and Gentlemen that employ them may depend on being expeditiously and reasonably served in making the following Articles, that is to say—Sacks, Negligees, Negligee-night-gowns, plain-nightgowns, pattanlears, shepherdesses, Roman cloaks, Cardinals, Capuchins, Dauphinesses, Shades lorrains, Bonnets and Hives.”—“New York Mercury,” May, 1757.