Although Louis XIV disdained wigs until his abundant natural hair began to fall out, the fashion flourished at his court and was brought over to England by the restored Charles II, who began in 1663 to affect a large black wig. Charles may have been the first English king to adopt the custom, but it is said that Elizabeth I owned some 80 auburn, orange, and gold wigs to cover her thinning hair. Just as Louis XIII’s courtiers hastened to don wigs as soon as their monarch did, so aspiring ladies and gentlemen of Restoration England emulated their king. Samuel Pepys recorded that his wife first acquired “a pair of peruques of hair, as the fashion now is for ladies to wear; which are pretty, and are of my wife’s own hair, or else I should not endure them.” Then, after great hesitation, he bought a “periwigg” for himself and had his hair cut off and made into another. Pepys’s final word on the subject was to wonder “what will be the fashion after the plague is done, as to periwiggs, for nobody will dare to buy any haire, for fear of the infection, that it had been cut off the heads of people dead of the plague.” He need not have been concerned on that score; the fashion throve better after the plague than before, attaining its greatest development under Queen Anne, when the long curls of men’s full-bottomed wigs covered the back and shoulders and floated down over the chest. In France, according to Diderot’s _Encyclopedia_ (published 1751-1772), late seventeenth-century _perruques_ were so long and so much adorned that they commonly weighed as much as two pounds and cost more than 1,000 _ecus_ (silver coins about the size of a dollar). Milady’s hairdress reached even more preposterous extremes in the many-tiered and bejewelled “fontanges” of Louis XIV’s court (an exaggeration he disapproved in vain) about 1700. After a period of some moderation the style reappeared in the yard-high “heads” dictated to fashion by Marie Antoinette before she lost hers. If English and colonial women did not go to the extreme, they nevertheless followed the style. A letter to the New York _Journal or General Advertiser_ in 1767 complained that “it is now the Mode to make the Lady’s Head of twice the natural Size, by means of artificial Pads, Boulsters, or Rolls” which—the writer had on good authority—came from hospital patients dead of the smallpox and of “a Distemper still more disagreeable.” _WIG SHOPS IN WILLIAMSBURG_ The shop that Richard Gamble entrusted to his new partner in 1752 stood next door to the Raleigh Tavern, in what was sometimes called “the most public part of the city.” Certainly no better location in Williamsburg could have been found for a barber shop than on the Duke of Gloucester Street in the block nearest the Capitol.