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, like the later
Clapham sect, were careful of
intimate luxuries, had a curious
fashion of wearing shirts and
smocks worked with “holy embroideries,”
Biblical sentences or
figures, which recall a similar
custom among the early
Christians. At this time underclothing
had increased in quantity,
for there are many indications
that the men and women of
the middle ages were often
content with a bare change of
linen at the best. The Book of
Courtesy (temp. Hen. VII.) orders
the servant to provide “clene
sherte and breche” against his
master’s uprising, but the
laundering of the linen of the
Percy household, a hundred and
seventy people, costs but forty shillings a year in the reign of
Henry VIII.
 |
| Fig. 48.—A Man-at-arms and a Man in a Shirt (early 14th century). From Royal MS. 19 B. xv. |
With that modern period of dress which may be said to begin with the Restoration, shirts increased in number. Women shifted their smocks when coming in from field sports, fine gentlemen became proud of the number of their shirts, as was that 18th-century lord who boasted to Casanova of his changing a shirt several times in the day, his chin being shaved on each occasion. A valuable document concerning the underclothing worn by a citizen in the reign of Charles II. is afforded by the evidence of the man who helped to strip the body of the suicide Sir Edmond Berry Godfrey. “I pulled off his shoes,” says Fisher, “three pairs of stockings and a pair of socks, his black breeches and his drawers.” His coat and waistcoat, his shirt and his flannel shirt are also named. The knight came by his end on an October day. He was therefore warmly clad. His three pair of stockings will be noted: two pair are worn at the present day by most men in court dress. The socks are a rarely named addition, and the flannel shirt may be remarked. Loose ruffles of lace were attached to shirt cuffs until during the great part of the 18th century, and the ruffled or goffered shirt-front, which became common under George III., continued in use in the early Victorian period, the stiffly starched shirt-front taking its place at last even in evening dress. The last quarter of the 19th century, breaking through the strange mock-modesty which spoke of breeches as “inexpressibles,” saw the question of hygienic underclothing a subject much in debate, and now most men other than the poorer sort wear, besides the shirt, a light woollen vest and short drawers or long pantaloons of wool or wool’s counterfeit. Woollen shirts are worn by bicyclists, cricketers and tennis players. In morning dress the inconvenience of the starched shirt-front is commonly avoided. A goffered shirt-front worn with evening dress is the mark of a foreigner in London, but some few men venture to clothe themselves for the evening in a shirt whose front is pleated and but slightly starched. Loose collars, formerly known as false collars, descendants of the Puritan’s “plain band,” have been attached to the shirt by studs at least for the last fifty years. Their fashions often change, but the older type turned down at the edge is not often seen. To women’s underclothing drawers have been added in the 19th century. Brantôme, writing in the 16th, speaks of this garment as then lately introduced since the time of Henri II., but the fashion, apparently, did not long endure in France. In England they are noted as in occasional use at the Restoration. After 1820 a sort of trouser with a frilled edge was worn for a time by fashionable women in England. The pantalette which afterwards appears in pictures of young girls was a mere legging fastened by tapes above the knees. Many women of the better class only adopted drawers at the end of the ’forties, and it may be presumed that the fashion reached the humble sort at a much later date. Towards the end of the 19th century both drawers and smock or “chemise” were commonly exchanged for a more convenient “combination garment.”
 |
| From Hottenroth, Trachten der Völker, by permission of Gustav Weise Verlag. |
| Fig. 49.—German Dress (early 16th century). |
European Fashions.—Race, climate, poverty and wealth have all had their part in the fashion of clothing. A mountaineer is not clad as a lowlander; the Tirolese in his short breeches, the Highlanders of Scotland and Albania in their tartan or white linen kilts go with uncovered knees. The Russian moujik in winter has his frowsy sheepskin coat, and the Russian prince imitates it in costly furs. While the rich man’s clothing alters with every fancy of the tailors, the poor man’s garments, fewer and cheaper, change slowly in the ages. An old Lincolnshire peasant wearing his smock frock and leathern gaiters might pass unnoted in a peasant crowd of centuries ago. Here and there in Europe we find in the 20th century a peasantry in whose clothing fashion seems to have been suddenly stayed. A Breton peasant in his holiday dress gives us a man of the late 17th century, even as an Irish peasant may keep the breeches, shoes and tailed coat of the early 19th. But the old fashions are passing from Europe: the sewing machine and the railway sweep before them the pleasant provincialisms of dress. A shirt with the bosom heavily embroidered, a skirt with a year’s stitching in the hem are not to be imitated by the dealer in ready-made clothing, who offers, instead, cheapness and the brisk variety of the town. Old writers, each in turn, set up their wail that the time was come when you could not tell Jack from his master, the burgess from the knight. And now that time has come in some sort, for the town dress of the richer classes of London or Paris is imitated by all peoples and by rich and poor. Especially is this the case in England where the clean and honourable blouse of the French workman is not, a journeyman painter or labourer often going to his work
