THE VENERABLE HOOD
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.
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 the _Ladies’ Dictionary_ a 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 greene
It had been hers I weene
More than fortye yeare
And soe it doth appeare
And the green bare threds
Looked like sere wedes
Withered like hay
The wool worn awaye
And yet I dare saye
She thinketh herself gaye
Upon 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 the _Lisle Papers_
that 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 shown here. 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 his _Anatomie of Abuses_ gives 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 “Hudibras _Redivivus_,” a long poem utterly worthless
save for the truthful descriptions of dress; it runs:—
“The black silk Hood, with formal pride
First roll’d, beneath the chin was tied
So close, so very trim and neat,
So round, so formal, so complete,
That not one jag of wicked lace
Or rag of linnen white had place
Betwixt the black bag and the face,
Which peep’d from out the sable hood
Like 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 in _A 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. Here is 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’s _Cryes 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 playing
_Hoodman-blind_ or _Blindman’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, the _Boston News Letter_ gave 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’s _Wit and Mirth_, 1719, is a spirited song
commemorating this “sacred wife,” who—
“by her Wits immortal pains
With her quick head has saved his brains.”
One verse runs thus:—
“Let Traitors against Kings conspire
Let secret spies great Statesmen hire,
Nought shall be by detection got
If Woman may have leave to plot.
There’s nothing clos’d with Bars or Locks
Can hinder Night-rayls, Pinners, Smocks;
For they will everywhere make good
As 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 shown here. 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.