es have
been brought suddenly into the stream of European customs and manners.
But with the coming of the Normans, national conservatism yielded to
comparison with the fashions of other peoples, and fashion assumed
the sceptre that it has continued to wield over the English woman. The
changes in dress were at first slight, but by the end of the twelfth
century they had become sufficiently marked to be the target of
witticism and the subject of satire. The foibles of the women were
little regarded by the writers of the time. The dress of the men was
not passed over in like silence, however; it drew from the censors of
the day the severest strictures on account of its flaunting meagreness
and its improprieties in the eyes of its monkish critics. The same
condemnation was visited upon the practice of the men of dyeing their
hair or otherwise coloring it, wearing flowing locks, and painting
their faces. Such fashions were styled reprehensible and effeminate.
It would have been instructive to subsequent generations if these
censorious critics had not been so gallant toward women, and had
given to us the spicy descriptions of feminine attire that, in their
indignation, they have afforded us of that of the men. Had they but
realized that it was the sex whose sins of dress they passed over
so lightly, with charity or indifference, that was to follow the
inconsequential wake of fashion into the wildest vagaries of costume
and adornment, they would have let the men have their brief day, and
massed their strictures against those who were to elevate fashion
to an art and make of its following a devotion. As it is, for our
knowledge of the dress of the weaker sex we are dependent upon the
illuminations, whose brilliant coloring and faithfulness of detail
left little for the text to elucidate. That the new styles were not
received with approbation by the clerical artists is clear enough
from the caricatures and exaggerations of them that appear in their
drawings. The inordinate length of the sleeves, reaching as they did,
in a long, mandolin-shaped pocket, to the knees of the wearer, made
them surely hideous enough to draw out the indignation of those who
had artistic sensibilities to be shocked.

That the notion of fashionable dress as Satanic is very old is shown
by one of the representations of his infernal majesty, where he
is portrayed dressed in the height of feminine fashion. One of the
sleeves of his gown is short and full,