On the 15th June 1574, an elaborate proclamation complained of "the wasting and undoying of a great number of young gentlemen" who were "allured by the vayne shewe of those thyngs." A schedule was appended in which the costumes prescribed for all sorts and conditions of men were set forth. In the Star Chamber on June 12th, 1600, my Lord Keeper gravely admonished the judges to look to all sorts of abuses--"Solicitors and pettifoggers," "Gentlemen that leave hospitality and housekeeping and hide in cities and borough towns," "Masterless men that live by their sword and their wit, meddlers in princes' matters and libellers," and last, but not least, "to the vanity and excess of woman's apparel." All was in vain, if we are to believe the fierce invective of Stubb's _Anatomie of Abuses_. "There is now," he groans, "such a confused mingle-mangle of apparel, and such preposterous excess thereof as every one is permitted to flaunt it out in whatever apparel he listeth himself, or can get by any kind of means." It was horrible to hear that shirts were sold at £10 a piece, and "it is a small matter now to bestow twenty nobles, ten pound, twenty pound, forty pound, yea, a hundred pound, of one pair of breeches (God be merciful to us!)" After this aught else were anti-climax, and so for the women he can only say they were worse than the men. A new order of things came in with the next reign, for the act Jac. I. c. 25, sec. 45, repealed at one stroke all statutes against apparel. In Scotland they kept up the game some time longer, but one need not pursue the subject there, though a curious statute of the Scots James II. (1457) must have a word. It provided that "na woman cum to Kirk nor mercat with her face mussled that she may nocht be kenn'd under the pain of escheit of the curchie" (forfeiture of the hood). In Ireland there was a law (says Spenser) which "forbiddeth any to weare theyre beardes on the upper lip and none under the chinn:" another "which putteth away saffron shirtes and smockes," and so forth; but these were of English importation.