Like many of the most striking fashions of olden times, the ruff was Spanish. French gentlemen had worn frills or ruffs about 1540; soon after, these appeared in England; by the date of Elizabeth’s accession the ruff had become the most imposing article of English men’s and women’s dress. It was worn exclusively by fine folk; for it was too frail and too costly for the common wear of the common people, though lawn ruffs were seen on many of low degree. A ruff such as was worn by a courtier contained eighteen or nineteen yards of fine linen lawn. A quarter of a yard wide was the fashionable width in England. Ruffs were carefully pleated in triple box-plaits as shown in the Bowdoin portrait here. Then they were bound with a firm neck-binding. This carefully made ruff was starched with good English or Dutch starch; fluted with “setting sticks” of wood or bone, to hold each pleat up; then fixed with struts—also of wood—placed in a manner to hold the pleats firmly apart; and finally “seared” or goffered with “poking sticks” of iron or steel, which, duly heated, dried the stiffening starch. To “do up” a formal ruff was a wearisome, difficult, and costly precess. Women of skill acquired considerable fortunes as “gofferers.” Stubbes tells us further of the rich decoration of ruffs with gold, silver, and silk lace, with needlework, with openwork, and with purled lace. This was in Elizabeth’s day. John Winthrop’s ruff (here) is edged with lace; in general a plain ruff was worn by plain gentlemen; one may be seen on Martin Frobisher (here). Rich lace was for the court. Their great cost, their inconvenience, their artificiality, their size, were sure to make ruffs a “reason of offence” to reformers. Stubbes gave voice to their complaints in these words:— “They haue great and monstrous ruffes, made either of cambrike, holland, lawne, or els of some other the finest cloth that can be got for money, whereof some be a quarter of a yarde deepe, yea, some more, very few lesse, so that they stande a full quarter of a yearde (and more) from their necks hanging ouer their shoulder points in steade of a vaile.” Still more violent does he grow over starch:— “The one arch or piller whereby his (the Devil’s) kyngdome of great ruffes is vnderpropped, is a certaine kind of liquid matter, whiche they call starch, wherein the deuill hath willed them to washe and dive their ruffes well, whiche, beeying drie, will then stande stiff and inflexible about their necks. “The other piller is a certaine device made of wiers, crested for the purpose; whipped over either with gold thred, silver, or silke, and this he calleth a supportasse or vnderpropper; this is to bee applied round about their neckes under the ruffe, upon the out side of the bande, to beare up the whole frame and bodie of the ruffe, from fallying and hangying doune.”