ns clerical discipline restrained the members of the bar
from garments of lavish costliness and various colors, unless high rank
and personal influence placed them above the fear of censure and
punishment; but as soon as the law became a lay-profession, its
members--especially those who were still young--eagerly seized the
newest fashions of costume, and expended so much time and money on
personal decoration, that the governors of the Inns deemed it expedient
to make rules, with a view to check the inordinate love of gay apparel.

By these enactments, foppish modes of dressing the hair was
discountenanced or forbidden, not less than the use of gaudy clothes and
bright arms. Some of these regulations have a quaint air to readers of
this generation; and as indications of manners in past times, they
deserve attention.

From Dugdale's 'Origines Juridiciales,' it appears that in the earlier
part of Henry VIII.'s reign, the students and barristers of the Inns
were allowed great licence in settling for themselves minor points of
costume; but before that paternal monarch died, this freedom was
lessened. Accepting the statements of a previous chronicler, Dugdale
observes of the members of the Middle Temple under Henry--"They have no
order for their apparell; but every man may go as him listeth, so that
his apparell pretend no lightness or wantonness in the wearer; for, even
as his apparell doth shew him to be, even so he shall be esteemed among
them." But at the period when this licence was permitted in respect of
costume, the general discipline of the Inn was scandalously lax; the
very next paragraph of the 'Origines' showing that the templars forbore
to shut their gates at night, whereby "their chambers were oftentimes
robbed, and many other misdemeanors used."

But measures were taken to rectify the abuses and evil manners of the
schools. In the thirty-eighth year of Henry VIII. an order was made
"that the gentlemen of this company" (_i.e._, the Inner Temple) "should
reform themselves in their cut or disguised apparel, and not to have
long beards. And that the Treasurer of this society should confer with
the other Treasurers of Court for an uniform reformation." The
authorities of Lincoln's Inn had already bestirred themselves to reduce
the extravagances of dress and toilet which marked their younger and
more frivolous fellow-members. "And for decency in Apparel," writes
Dugdale, concerning Lincoln's Inn, "at a council held