samples which serve to show that the searchers did not nicely
discriminate between those who were and were not legally subject to
impressment. A well-dressed man was seized. He protested that he was
a gentleman of position. "The very boy we want," gleefully replied
his captors; "for we've such a set of topping blackguards aboard
the tender, that we wanted a gentleman to teach 'em manners." Sham
press-gangs for the black-mailing of honest citizens were common. In
one case a couple had given all their money to go free, when the real
gang coming up made booty of both parties, and had them aboard in no
time. The quarrymen at Denny Bowl, sixty strong, were heard to brag
in their cups what _they_ would do did the press-gang dare to molest
_them_, whereupon "three merry girls" got into breeches, put cockades
in their hats, took sword and pistol, and advanced, when the quarrymen
ran like hares. And to conclude, there is the legend of the gang that
raided "The Cock and Rummer" in Bow Street. They seized the cook. The
customers, fearing for their dinner, or themselves, rushed to the
rescue. Long the strife hung dubious, when the constable (he ought to
have been a Bow Street runner) stalked in. The gang, with a fine sense
of humour, let the cook go, seized _him_, and away at a great rate,
though not fast enough to get clear.
SUMPTUARY LAWS
"Act of Parliament" is a term apt to mislead. To-day it is enforced
by so powerful a machinery that practice conforms to precept; but in
mediæval England much law was dead letter. Statutes were often mere
admonitions; they expressed but an ideal, a pious intention. This was
specially true of the Sumptuary Laws, whereby the dress and food of
the king's subjects were nicely regulated. If you turn over a book of
costumes you find that man's attire has varied more than woman's. The
sorts and conditions of men were marked by rigid lines. This fact was
shown forth in their dress, and that again re-acted on their modes of
thought and habits of life. "Men's apparel," says Edmund Spenser, "is
commonly marked according to their condition, and their conditions
are often-times governed by their garment, for the person that is
gowned is by his gown put in mind of gravity, and also restrained from
lightness by the very unaptness of his Tweed." Of old time man's dress
was rich and varied, but how to catch its vanished effect? In Courts
of Justice there is still the splendid, if occasional, bravery of the
judge. See the same man in private, gaze on divinity disrobed, and the
disenchantment measures for you what is lost in the splendid garb of
other days. In mediæval Europe the Church first condemned a too ornate
appearance. Thus, under our early Norman Kings, long hair was much in
vogue. In 1104 Bishop Serlo, preaching before Henry I. and his Court
in Normandy, attacked this fashion roundly, compared his hearers to
"filthy goats," and moved them by his eloquence to tears of contrition.
He saw and seized that softer hour. Descending from the pulpit he then
and there clipped the polls of them that heard him till he must fain
sheath his shears for lack of argument. This rape of the locks was
followed by a royal edict against long hair. Alas! for this story.
Rochester Cathedral still bears the effigies of Henry and Maud his
queen; each is adorned even as Absalom, and Time, whilst it has mauled
their faces in cruel fashion, has with quaint irony preserved intact
those stone tresses.
Two centuries pass ere the Sumptuary Laws proper begin. The 10 Edward
III. c. 3 (1336) ordered that no man was to have more than two courses
at dinner, nor more than two kinds of meat, with potage in each course;
but on eighteen holidays in the year the lieges might stuff at will.
Next Parliament common folk were forbidden to wear furs; but the 37
Edward III. was the great session for such work, made needful (it was
thought) by the sudden increase of luxury from the plunder of the
French wars. Some half-dozen Acts prescribed to each rank, from peers
to ploughmen, its wear; nay, the very price of the stuff was fixed;
whilst all wives were to garb themselves according to their husbands'
means--a pious wish, repeated a century afterwards, in an Act of the
Scots James II. The veils of the baser sort were not to cost more than
12d. apiece: embroidery or silk was forbidden to servants, and these
were to eat of flesh or fish but once a day. Cloth merchants were to
make stuff enough, and shopkeepers to have stock enough, to supply
the anticipated demand. Such apparel as infringed the statute was
forfeit to the king. The knight's dress will serve for sample of what
was required. It was to be cloth of silver, with girdles reasonably
embellished with silver, and woollen cloth of the value of six marks
the piece. Under Richard II. monstrous sleeves were much affected. A
monkish scribe inveighs bitterly against these "pokys, like bag-pipes."
Some hung down to the knees; yea, even to the feet. Servants were as
bad as their masters! When potage is brought to table, "the sleeves
go into them and get the first taste." Nay, they are "devil's
receptacles," since anything stolen is safely lodged therein. And so a
statute of the time prohibited any man below a banneret from wearing
large hanging sleeves, open or closed.
The fashion changed to _dagges_, a term explained by the 8th of Henry
IV., which forbade "gown or garment cut or slashed into pieces in the
form of letters, rose-leaves, and posies of various kinds, or any
such devices." The fantastic peaked shoes of the fifteenth century,
sometimes only held up by a chain from the girdle, were fair mark for
the lawgiver, and under Edward IV. no less person than a lord was
allowed peaks exceeding two inches. An Act in the same reign banned
the costly head-gear of women. Henry VIII. saw to men's garb as well
as their beliefs. His first Parliament forbade costly apparel, and
there is preserved in the Record Office a letter from Wolsey enclosing
to the King, at his request, the Act of Apparel, with an abstract,
for examination and correction. Exemptions were not unknown: thus,
in 1517, Henry Conway of Bermondsey obtained license to wear "camlet,
velvet, and sarcenet, satin and damask, of green, black, or russet
colour in his clothing." Under Queen Mary common folk who wore silk on
"hat, bonnet, girdle, scabbard, hose, shoes, or spur-leathers," were
grievously amerced. Under Elizabeth the regulations were numberless:
thus there is an act for "uttering of caps, and for true making of
hats and caps." No one was to engage in this business unless he had
been "a prentice or covenant servant" by the space of seven years. No
one under the degree of knight was to wear a cap of velvet. But these
were not pure sumptuary regulations: they were for protection of home
industries. A statute of the previous reign had declared that no man
was to buy more than twelve hats or caps, be it out of this realm;
and a previous Act of Elizabeth had strangely provided that if anyone
sold foreign apparel on credit for longer than eight days to persons
not having £3000 a year he should be without legal remedy against his
debtor.
On the 15th June 1574, an elaborate proclamation complained of
"the wasting and undoying of a great number of young gentlemen"
who were "allured by the vayne shewe of those thyngs." A schedule
was appended in which the costumes prescribed for all sorts and
conditions of men were set forth. In the Star Chamber on June 12th,
1600, my Lord Keeper gravely admonished the judges to look to all
sorts of abuses--"Solicitors and pettifoggers," "Gentlemen that leave
hospitality and housekeeping and hide in cities and borough towns,"
"Masterless men that live by their sword and their wit, meddlers in
princes' matters and libellers," and last, but not least, "to the
vanity and excess of woman's apparel." All was in vain, if we are to
believe the fierce invective of Stubb's _Anatomie of Abuses_. "There
is now," he groans, "such a confused mingle-mangle of apparel, and
such preposterous excess thereof as every one is permitted to flaunt
it out in whatever apparel he listeth himself, or can get by any
kind of means." It was horrible to hear that shirts were sold at £10
a piece, and "it is a small matter now to bestow twenty nobles, ten
pound, twenty pound, forty pound, yea, a hundred pound, of one pair
of breeches (God be merciful to us!)" After this aught else were
anti-climax, and so for the women he can only say they were worse than
the men. A new order of things came in with the next reign, for the act
Jac. I. c. 25, sec. 45, repealed at one stroke all statutes against
apparel. In Scotland they kept up the game some time longer, but one
need not pursue the subject there, though a curious statute of the
Scots James II. (1457) must have a word. It provided that "na woman cum
to Kirk nor mercat with her face mussled that she may nocht be kenn'd
under the pain of escheit of the curchie" (forfeiture of the hood). In
Ireland there was a law (says Spenser) which "forbiddeth any to weare
theyre beardes on the upper lip and none under the chinn:" another
"which putteth away saffron shirtes and smockes," and so forth; but
these were of English importation.
In the North American colonies sumptuary legislation has a history of
its own. In Massachusetts an edict of September 1639, declaims against
the "much waste of the good creatures (not the tipplers, but the
tipple) by the vain drinking of healths," which practice is straightway
forbidden. Excess or bravery of apparel is condemned, and no one is
to wear a dress "with any lace on it, silver, gold silk, or thread
under the penalty of forfeiture." Again, it is provided that children
or servants are not to have ornamental apparel. Here is an individual
case. Robert Coles, in March 1634, for drunkenness is disfranchised
and condemned for a whole year to "wear about his neck, and so to hang
upon his outward garment a D made of red cloth and set upon white"--a
very unromantic scarlet letter! These things, too, passed away, but
in the Maine Liquor Law of 1851, one traces the revival of the old
idea. In England the thing lived not again. Under the Commonwealth
public opinion enforced a "sober garb." Charles II. had some idea of
a national costume, but he was too wise or too careless to attempt
legislation. In 1747 the wearing of the Highland dress was forbidden,
but that was policy, just as centuries before the Jews had a special
garb ordained for them. Also a number of laws were passed to promote
home manufactures: so under Charles I. and Charles II. the entry of
foreign bone-lace was prohibited, though the second monarch granted
licence for importing same to John Eaton for the use of the royal
family. It would also serve, he coolly remarked, for patterns. There is
one other curious example. Too much foreign linen was used, and so the
30th of Charles II. c. 3 ordered the dead (save the plague-stricken)
to be buried in woollen shrouds. The relatives must file an affidavit
with the clergyman as to this, and £5 was the fine for _him_ if he
neglected his part. Did the vision of that unseemly shroud really
disturb poor Nance Oldfield's last moments, as Pope would have us
believe?
"Odious! in woollen! 'twould a saint provoke!"
Were the last words that poor Narcissa spoke.
"No: let a charming chintz and Brussels lace
Wrap my cold limbs and shade my lifeless face!"
"Narcissa" had her wish: the "Brussels lace" of her head-dress, her
"Holland shift," a "pair of new kid gloves on her cold hands," were the
talk of the town; so they tricked her out for Westminster Abbey.
Almost up to Waterloo the Act lingered on the Statute Book, till some
ingenious rascal brought an action against various clergymen for the £5
penalty, for that they had not certified to churchwardens the cases of
non-compliance. And so, in 1814, the 54th George III. c. 108 swept away
the strange provision.
PRINTED BY TURNBULL AND SPEARS, EDINBURGH
TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:
Text in italics is surrounded with underscores: _italics_.
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
Inconsistencies in spelling, punctuation, and hyphenation have been
standardized.