the unmarried go without a hat; but ladies of
distinction have lately learned to cover their faces with silken masks or
vizards, and to wear feathers. The English, he notes, change their
fashions every year, and when they go abroad riding or traveling they don
their best clothes, contrary to the practice of other nations. Another
foreigner, Jacob Rathgeb, 1592, says the English go dressed in exceeding
fine clothes, and some will even wear velvet in the street, when they
have not at home perhaps a piece of dry bread. "The lords and pages of
the royal court have a stately, noble air, but dress more after the
French fashion, only they wear short cloaks and sometimes Spanish caps."

Harrison's arraignment of the English fashions of his day may be
considered as almost commendative beside the diatribes of the old Puritan
Philip Stubbes, in "The Anatomie of Abuses," 1583. The English language
is strained for words hot and rude enough to express his indignation,
contempt, and fearful expectation of speedy judgments. The men escape his
hands with scarcely less damage than the women. First he wreaks his
indignation upon the divers kinds of hats, stuck full of feathers, of
various colors, "ensigns of vanity," "fluttering sails and feathered
flags of defiance to virtue"; then upon the monstrous ruffs that stand
out a quarter of a yard from the neck. "As the devil, in the fullness of
his malice, first invented these ruffs, so has he found out two stays to
bear up this his great kingdom of ruffs--one is a kind of liquid matter
they call starch; the other is a device made of wires, for an
under-propper. Then there are shirts of cambric, holland, and lawn,
wrought with fine needle-work of silk and curiously stitched, costing
sometimes as much as five pounds. Worse still are the monstrous doublets,
reaching down to the middle of the thighs, so hard quilted, stuffed,
bombasted, and sewed that the wearer can hardly stoop down in them. Below
these are the gally-hose of silk, velvet, satin, and damask, reaching
below the knees. So costly are these that "now it is a small matter to
bestow twenty nobles, ten pound, twenty pound, fortie pound, yea a
hundred pound of one pair of Breeches. (God be merciful unto us!)" To
these gay hose they add nether-socks, curiously knit with open seams down
the leg, with quirks and clocks about the ankles, and sometimes
interlaced with gold and silver thread as is wonderful to behold. Time
has been when a man