In the household register of Eleanor, Countess of Leicester, which bears the date of May 24, 1265, is one of the earliest places in which the word _corset_ occurs. The word is again found in reference to the wardrobe of Richard King of the Normans, and Edward his son. Corsets were at this time worn by men as well as women. The author of the life of St. Thaïs, who lived in the twelfth century, tells us that the French were so tightly laced that they could bend neither their bodies nor their arms. Peter the Great wrote that the robes are so tightly stretched over the body, that the ladies can scarcely breathe in them, and often suffer very great pain in order to make their bodies slender. It was in the thirteenth to the fourteenth century that the last trace of the Roman drapery gradually disappeared: the women adopted for the most part the robes with the tightly fitting corsage, leaving ordinarily uncovered the neck and the skin of the breast; this closely fitting corsage was closed in the back by lacing. Boots and shoes of this period had their pointed toes made two or three times the length of the wearer’s foot. The fashions of England were the same as those of France, though apparently they were not carried to quite the same excess as on the continent. The singular aim of each sex was not only to emulate the other in the sumptuous style of dress and its profuse adornment, but also to imitate the form and fashion of the other’s attire; this obtained in both countries. =The Renaissance.=—In the sixteenth century a distinct separation between ancient and modern dress took place, and our present fashions took their origin from about that time. It was during this century that men adopted clothes closely fitting about the body, overcoats with tight sleeves, felt hats with more or less rigid brims, and closed boots or shoes. The women also wore their dresses tightly fitting to the figure, with tight sleeves, low-crowned hats, and richly trimmed petticoats. These garments, which differ wholly from antiquity, constitute, as it were, the common type, from which has risen the endless variety of modern male and female dress. At this time the general resemblance between the clothing of the two sexes, which may be traced to the earliest times, became decided. After the accession of Queen Elizabeth in 1558, the well-known costume, associated with herself from about the middle to the close of her reign, gradually became established. The long-peaked and tight stomachers of the ladies, and the padded quilted doublets of the men—it might truthfully be said that each garment was a parody of the other. Ruffs of an exaggerated amplitude and of a painfully severe stiffness were worn by both sexes.