Though these jerkins and mandillions and doublets which were furnished to the Bay colonists were fastened with hooks and eyes, buttons were worn also, as old portraits and old letters prove. John Eliot ordered for traffic with the Indians, in 1651, three gross of pewter buttons; and Robert Keayne, of Boston, writing in 1653, said bitterly that a “haynous offence” of his had been selling buttons at too large profit—that they were gold buttons and he had sold them for two shillings ninepence a dozen in Boston, when they had cost but two shillings a dozen in London (which does not seem, in the light of our modern profits on imported goods, a very “haynous” offence). He also added with acerbity that “they were never payd for by those that complayned.” Buttonholes were a matter of ornament more than of use; in fact, they were never used for closing the garment after coats came to be worn. They were carefully cut and “laid around” in gay colors, embroidered with silver and gold thread, bound with vellum, with kid, with velvet. We find in old-time letters directions about modish buttonholes, and drawings even, in order that the shape may be exactly as wished. An English contemporary of John Winthrop’s has tasselled buttonholes on his doublet. Various are the reasons given for the placing of the two buttons on the back of a man’s coat. One is that they are a survival of buttons which were used on the eighteenth-century riding-coat. The coat-tails were thus buttoned up when the wearer was on horseback. Another is that they were used for looping back the skirts of the coats; it is said that loops of cord were placed at the corners of the said skirts. A curious anecdote about these two buttons on the back of the coat is that a tribe of North American Indians, deep believers in the value of symbolism, refused to heed a missionary because he could not explain to them the significance of these two buttons. CHAPTER VI RUFFS AND BANDS _“Fashion has brought in deep ruffs and shallow ruffs, thick ruffs and thin ruffs, double ruffs and no ruffs. When the Judge of the quick and the dead shall appear he will not know those who have so defaced the fashion he hath created.”_ —Sermon, JOHN KING, Bishop of London, 1590. “Now up aloft I mount unto the Ruffe Which into foolish Mortals pride doth puffe; Yet Ruffe’s antiquitie is here but small— Within these eighty Tears not one at all For the 8th Henry, as I understand Was the first King that ever wore a Band And but a Falling Band, plaine with a Hem All other people know no use of them.” —“The Prayse of Clean Linnen,” JOHN TAYLOR, the “Water Poet,” 1640. CHAPTER VI RUFFS AND BANDS W e have in this poem of the old “Water Poet” a definite statement of the date of the introduction of ruffs for English wear. We are afforded in the portraiture given in this book ample proof of the fall of the ruff. A Bowdoin Portrait. A Bowdoin Portrait.