It is impossible to know how old this hood is. When I have fancied I had the earliest reference that could be found, I would soon come to another a few years earlier. We know positively from the _Lisle Papers_ that it was worn in England by the name “French hood” in 1540. Anne Basset, daughter of Lady Lisle, had come into the household of the queen of Henry VIII, who at the time was Anne of Cleves. The “French Apparell” which the maid of honor fetched from Calais was not pleasing to the queen, who promptly ordered the young girl to wear “a velvet bonnet with a frontlet and edge of pearls.” These bonnets are familiar to us on the head of Anne’s predecessor, Anne Boleyn. They were worn even by young children. One is shown here. The young lady borrowed a bonnet; and a factor named Husee—the biggest gossip of his day—promptly chronicles to her mother, “I saw her (Anne Basset) yesterday in her velvet bonnet that my Lady Sussex had tired her in, and thought it became her nothing so well as the French hood,—but the Queen’s pleasure must be done!” Hannah Callowhill Penn. Hannah Callowhill Penn. Doubtless some of the Pilgrim Mothers wore bonnets like this one of Anne Basset’s, especially if the wearer were a widow, when there was also an under frontlet which was either plain, plaited, or folded, but which came in a distinct point in the middle of the forehead. This cap, or bandeau, with point on the forehead, is precisely the widow’s cap worn by Catherine de Medicis. She was very severe in dress, but she introduced the wearing of neck-ruffs. She also wore hoods, the favorite head-covering of all Frenchwomen at that time. This form of head-gear was sometimes called a widow’s peak, on account of a similar peak of black silk or white being often worn by widows, apparently of all European nations. Magdalen Beeckman, an American woman of Dutch descent (here), wears one. The name is still applied to a pointed growth of hair on the forehead. It has also been known as a headdress of Mary Queen of Scots, because some of her portraits display this pointed outline of head-gear. It continued until the time of Charles II. It is often found on church brasses, and was plainly a head-gear of dignity. A modified form is shown in the portrait of Lady Mary Armine. Stubbes in his _Anatomie of Abuses_ gives a notion of the importance of the French hood when he speaks of the straining of all classes for rich attire: that “every artificer’s wife” will not go without her hat of velvet every day; “every merchant’s wife and meane gentlewoman” must be in her “French hood”; and “every poor man’s daughter” in her “taffatie hat or of wool at least.” We have seen what a fierce controversy burned over Madam Johnson’s “schowish” velvet hood. An excellent account of this black hood as worn by the Puritans is given in rhyme in “Hudibras _Redivivus_,” a long poem utterly worthless save for the truthful descriptions of dress; it runs:—