e
said to express any tendency of an age. Year by year the modes are
deliberately altered by a conclave of the great _modistes_ whose desire
is less to produce rich or beautiful garments than to make that radical
alteration from loose sleeve to tight sleeve, from draped skirt to plain
skirt, which will force every women to cast aside the last season's
garments and buy those of the newer device. But of modern dress it may
at least be said that cheaper materials, the sewing machine and the
popular fashion papers allow women of the humbler classes to dress more
decently and tastefully. Their dress is no longer that frowsy parody of
richer women's frippery which shocked observant foreigners a generation
ago.

_Underclothing._--Of the underclothing worn next the skin something may
be said apart from the general history of costume. Linen shirts were
worn by both men and women in the age before the Conquest, and even in
the 10th century it was a penance to wear a woollen one. After that time
we soon hear of embroidery and ornament applied to them, presumably at
the collar which would be visible above gown or tunic. Men added short
drawers, or breeches, a word which does not secure its modern value
until the end of the 16th century. "Drawers" signified various
descriptions of overall, Cotgrave explaining the word as coarse
stockings drawn over others although Randle Holme gives it in its later
sense. Isaac of Cyprus is named by Robert of Brunne as escaping "bare in
his serke and breke." Henry Christall, who brought four Irish kings to
London, told Froissart how, finding that they wore no breeches, he
bought linen cloth for them. Medieval romances and the like give us the
choice of shirts of linen, of fine Holland, of cloth of Rennes and even
of silk, and Chaucer speaks of women's smocks wrought with silk,
embroidered behind and before. Poorer folk went, like Thynne's poor
countryman, in shirts of "canvas hard and tough," or of coarse Breton
dowlas. Under the first Tudors, shirts are decorated with gold, silk and
black thread embroideries, the latter being seen in the ruffled shirt
worn by the earl of Surrey in our illustration (see fig. 38). Stubbes,
in his often-quoted _Anatomie of Abuses_ (1583) declaims against the
extravagant sums spent in shirts, the meanest of which would cost a
crown or a noble, while the most curiously stitched were valued at ten
pounds a piece, "which is horrible to hear." The Puritans, many of whom,