"For our lady the queen's use, sixty ells of fine linen cloth, forty
ells of dark green cloth, a skin of minever, a _small brass pan_, and
_eight towels_."

But John, who in addition to his other amiable propensities was the
greatest and most extravagant fop in Europe, was as parsimonious
towards others as selfish and extravagant people usually are. Whilst
even at the ceremony of her coronation he only afforded his Queen
"three cloaks of fine linen, one of scarlet cloth, and one grey
pelisse, costing together 12_l._ 5_s._ 4_d._;" he himself launched
into all sorts of expenditure. He ordered the minutest articles for
himself and the queen; but the wardrobe accounts of the sovereigns of
the middle ages prove that they kept a royal warehouse of mercery,
haberdashery, and linen, from whence their officers measured out
velvets, brocades, sarcenets, tissue, gauzes, and trimmings, of all
sorts. A queen, says Miss Strickland, had not the satisfaction of
ordering her own gown when she obtained leave to have a new one; the
warlike hand of her royal lord signed the order for the delivery of
the materials from his stores, noting down with minute precision the
exact quantity to a quarter of a yard of the cloth, velvet, or
brocade, of which the garment was composed.

"Blessed be the memory of King Edward III. and Philippa of Hainault
his queen, who first invented clothes," was, we are told, the grateful
adjuration of a monkish historian, who referred probably not to the
first assumption of apparel, but to the charter which was granted
first by that monarch to the "cutters and linen armourers,"
subsequently known as the merchant-tailors, who at that period were
usually the makers of all garments, silk, linen, or woollen. Female
fingers had sufficient occupation in the finer parts of the work; in
the "silke broiderie" with which every garment of fashion was
embellished; in the tapestry; in the spinning of wool and flax, every
thread of which was drawn by female hands, and in the weaving of which
a great portion was also executed by them.

In the forty-fourth year of this king, "as the book of Worcester
reporteth, they began to use cappes of divers coloures, especially
red, with costly lynings; and in the year 1372, the forty-seventh of
the above prince, they first began to wanton it in a new round curtall
weede, which they call a cloake, and in Latin _armilausa_, as only
covering the shoulders, and this notwithstanding the king