The distinctive features of academic dress are simply survivals of this ordinary dress of the period: the ceremonial hood is the hood which was worn in everyday life in the xiith the xiiith xivth and xvth centuries.[351] If we had looked in at the priory church of Barnwell on a day when the novices made their profession we should have seen each one enter dressed in the black habit or gown, a cloak of fur, and the “amess[352] over his head”: and when he walked out he was already vested with the _capa nigra_ of the canon. Here, then, we have all the elements of early academic dress; the homely Gilbertine canons, so familiar in the Cambridge thoroughfares, wore it in white; for it was the dress of the more respectable, the decently clad, clergy and clerks as well as of those most respectable and regular clergy, the canons. The dress of the better looked-after scholars on the college foundations differed but little from this. No doubt the scholars of Peterhouse habitually wore the clerical _vestis talaris_[353]--the gown to the ankle--but the special item of academic attire adopted at Cambridge appears to have been the _capa nigra._[354] The majority of scholars in the hostels and grammar schools observed no general rule as to costume,[355] but the scholars of any standing wore the black cappa of the canon; and the hood, lined with sheepskin or minever, was becoming--even in the xiv century--the habitual, and therefore distinctive, dress of foundation scholars when they “commenced” bachelor or master.[356] The hood indeed was probably restricted to an academic use before this century closed, for there is a statute of the year 1413 ordering hoods of kid or lambskin to be worn. The incepting Cambridge bachelor,[357] then, wore a _cappa_, a fine hood was gradually restricted to the master of arts. The soft bonnets or caps--of doctors, bishops, jurists, canons--are derivatives of the hood, as is the stiff cap--the biretta, as is the mitre itself. The xviii century Cambridge student still wore a soft round cap, like that worn to-day by the Italian university student and quite recently adopted in France: but the Paduan doctors had adopted the stiff square cap in the xvi century, and our own students revolted against the round cap in 1769, and thereupon accomplished the feat which neither Archimedes “nor our Newton” had attempted: For all her scholars square the circle now.[358] The chancellor of the university wears a black and gold robe. Scarlet is the colour of the doctors’ gowns, as it still is of the papal doctors of divinity. The physician of Chaucer’s time wore his furred scarlet gown, and scarlet gowns and corner caps were worn by the Cambridge doctors when the Cromwells entertained James I. on his way from the north in 1603.