Two Centuries of Costume in America, Volume 1 (1620-1820)Earle, Alice Morse
History
Two Centuries of Costume in America, Volume 1 (1620-1820)
Earle, Alice Morse
Clothing and dress -- United States -- History
This French hood is prominent everywhere in book illustrations of the
eighteenth century and even of earlier years. The loosely tied corners
and the sides appear under the straw hats upon many of the figures in
Tempest’s _Cryes of London_, 1698, such as the Milk woman, the “Newes”
woman, etc., which publication, I may say in passing, is a wonderful
source for the student of everyday costume. I give the Strawberry Girl
on this page to show the ordinary form of the French hood on plain
folk. _Misson’s Memories_, published also in 1698, it gives the
milkmaids on Mayday in like hoods. The early editions of Hudibras show
these hoods, and in Hogarth’s works they may be seen; not always of
black, of course, in later years, but ever of the same shape.
The Strawberry Girl. The Strawberry Girl.
The hood worn by the Normans was called a chaperon. It was a sort of
pointed bag with an oval opening for the face; sometimes the point was
of great length, and was twisted, folded, knotted. In the Bodleian
Library is a drawing of eleven figures of young lads and girls playing
_Hoodman-blind_ or _Blindman’s-buff_. The latter name came from the
buffet or blow which the players gave with their twisted chaperon
hoods. The blind man simply put his hood on “hind side afore,” and was
effectually blinded. These figures are of the fifteenth century.
Black Silk Hood. Black Silk Hood.
The wild latitude of spelling often makes it difficult to define an
article of dress. I have before me a letter of the year 1704, written
in Boston, asking that a riding-hood be sent from England of any color
save yellow; and one sentence of the instructions reads thus, “If ’tis
velvet let it be a shabbaroon; if of cloth, a French hood.” I abandoned
“shabbaroon” as a wholly lost word; until Mrs. Gummere announced that
the word was chaperon, from the Norman hood just described. This
chaperon is specifically the hood worn by the Knights of the Garter
when in full dress; in general it applies to any ample hood which
completely covers head and face save for eye-holes. Another hood was
the sortie.
Quilted Hood. Quilted Hood.
The term “coif,” spelt in various ways, quoif, quoiffe, coiffer,
ciffer, quoiffer, has been held to apply to the French hood; but it
certainly did not in America, for I find often in inventories side by
side items of black silk hoods and another of quoifs, which I believe
were the white undercaps worn with the French hood; just as a coif was
the close undercap for men’s wear.
Through the two centuries following the assumption of the French hood
came a troop of hoods, though sometimes under other names. In 1664
Pepys tells of his wife’s yellow bird’s-eye hood, “very fine, to
church, as the fashion now is.” Planché says hoods were not displaced
by caps and bonnets till George II’s time.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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