In 1639 “immoderate great breeches, knots of riban, broad shoulder bands and rayles, silk roses, double ruffles and capes” were forbidden to folk of low estate. Soon the court expressed its “utter detestation and dislike,” that men and women of “mean condition, education and calling” should take upon themselves “the garb of gentlemen” by wearing gold and silver lace, buttons and points at the knee, or “walk in great boots,” or women of the same low rank to wear silk or tiffany hoods or scarfs. There were likewise orders that no short sleeves should be worn “whereby the nakedness of the arms may be discovered”; women’s sleeves were not to be more than half an ell wide; long hair and immodest laying out of the hair and wearing borders of hair were abhorrent. Poor folk must not appear with “naked breasts and arms; or as it were pinioned with superstitious ribbons on hair and apparell.” Tailors who made garments for servants or children, richer than the garments of the parents or masters of these juniors, were to be fined. Similar laws were passed in Connecticut and Virginia. I know of no one being “psented” under these laws in Virginia, but in Connecticut and Massachusetts both men and women were fined. In 1676, in Northampton, thirty-six young women at one time were brought up for overdress chiefly in hoods; and an amusing entry in the court record is that one of them, Hannah Lyman, appeared in the very hood for which she was fined; and was thereupon censured for “wearing silk in a fflonting manner, in an offensive way, not only before but when she stood Psented. Not only in Ordinary but Extraordinary times.” These girls were all fined; but six years later, when a stern magistrate attempted a similar persecution, the indictments were quashed. The Tub-preacher. The Tub-preacher. It is not unusual to find the careless observer or the superficial reader—and writer—commenting upon the sumptuary laws of the New World as if they were extraordinary and peculiar. There appeared in a recent American magazine a long rehearsal of the unheard-of presumption of Puritan magistrates in their prohibition of certain articles of dress. This writer was evidently wholly ignorant of the existence of similar laws in England, and even of like laws in Virginia, but railed against Winthrop and Endicott as monsters of Puritanical arrogance and impudence.