In early times a tippet or cape made of fur or cloth edged or lined with fur, according to the degree, was also worn. To this we have alluded when speaking of the surplice (see page 199). It seems also to have originally been a kind of hood which developed first into the almuce, one of the processional vestments of the priesthood. This was covered by the ecclesiastical cope, but was worn outside the academical gown. Doctors of Divinity were allowed to wear scarlet tippets, and the colour survives now in their academical hood, and the ordinary black almuce with its fur lining has not been greatly changed in becoming the hood of the Bachelor of Arts. Sometimes the tippet and sometimes the hood was worn (if we may judge from monumental brasses), but also they were both put on at the same time. The figure of a doctor embroidered on a fifteenth-century cope belonging to the Pro-Cathedral of the Apostles at Clifton, depicts him wearing a tippet edged with white, a red hood, and a red cap. His gown, which is worked in gold thread, is shown with a blue lining. Perhaps no form of head-dress is more strange than the college cap or mortar-board, or, in technical language, _pileus quadratus_, or cater cap. This skull-cap, with its curious square top, is not the only kind of academical head-dress. There is the round cap which is especially that of the doctor, while the mortar-board or trencher already mentioned is used by masters and bachelors, as well as by undergraduates and scholars. The former head-dress seems to have been very little altered, and was developed somewhere about the fourteenth century or earlier from the ecclesiastical skull-cap, which was something like an old-fashioned man's nightcap, with a tuft. The square cap is an undoubted descendant of the ecclesiastical cap of dignity, and in England this also came from the skull-cap already mentioned. Towards the end of the fifteenth century, while still used by ecclesiastics, it began to assume a square or cusped shape. Prof. E. C. Clark[31] agrees with the opinion expressed to him by the late Dr. Littledale, that folds were introduced into the soft material in order to make the cap easier to hold, for by them it was stiffened. The folds became four wings, and so converted the round top into a square. From this it was but a short step to the ecclesiastical biretta of the present day. Any further exaggeration of its top would cause the cap to fall down on the face, and would naturally suggest the insertion of something to stiffen it and hold it out, and in the end the square top of the cap was made of cardboard covered with cloth, and a skull-cap was fixed to it underneath. (See Figure 136.) [Illustration: FIG. 136.--A college cap or trencher.] [Illustration: FIG. 137.--Cranmer's hat, illustrating a stage in the evolution of a mortar-board (after Fairholt).]