r gilded,
or a "garded or pinched shirte." Brooches of goldsmith's work were for
none below a gentleman. Women whose husbands could not afford to
maintain a light horse for the king's service had no business with gowns
or petticoats of silk, chains of gold, French hoods, or bonnets of
velvet. This French hood is the small bonnet, two of whose many forms
may be seen in the best-known portraits of Mary of England and Mary,
queen of Scots--a cap stiffened with wires. With its introduction the
fashionable skirt began to lose its graceful folds and to spread stiffly
outward in straight lines from the tight-laced waist, the front being
open to show a petticoat as stiff and enriched as the skirt. The neck of
the gown, cut low and square, showed the _partlet_ of fine linen pleated
to the neck. In the days of Edward VI. and Queen Mary the dress of most
men and women loses the fantastic detail of the earlier Tudor age. In
the dress of both sexes the joining of the sleeve to the shoulder has,
as a rule, that large puff which stage dressmakers bestow so lavishly
upon all old English costumes, but otherwise the woman's gown and hood
and the man's doublet, jerkin and trunk hose are plain enough, even the
shoes losing all the fanciful width. Mary, indeed, added to the statute
book more stringent laws against display of rich apparel, laws that
would fine even a gentleman of under L20 a year if silk were found in
his cap or shoe. Small ruffs, however, begin to appear at the neck, and
most wrists are ruffled. The ruff, which began simply enough in the
first half of this century as a little cambric collar with a goffered
edge, is for all of us the distinguishing note of Elizabethan dress. It
grew wide and flapping, therefore it was stiffened upon wires and spread
from a concealed frame, row on row of ruffs being added one above the
other until the wearer, man or woman, seemed to carry the head in a
cambric charger. Starch, cursed as a devilish liquor by the new Puritan,
gave it help, and English dress acquired a deformity which can only be
compared with the great farthingale or with the last follies of the wig.
The skirt of a woman of fashion, which had already begun to jut from the
waist, was drawn out before the end of Elizabeth's reign at right angles
from the waist until the dame had that air of standing within a great
drum which Sir Roger de Coverley remarked in the portrait of an
ancestress. Elizabeth herself, long-waisted and of meag