“Their Gowns be no less famous, some of silk velvet grogram taffety fine cloth of forty shillings a yard. But if the whole gown be not silke or velvet then the same shall be layed with lace two or three fingers broade all over the gowne or the most parte. Or if not so (as Lace is not fine enough sometimes) then it must be garded with great gardes of costly Lace, and as these gowns be of sundry colours so they be of divers fashions changing with the Moon. Some with sleeves hanging down to their skirts, trayling on the ground, and cast over the shoulders like a cow’s tayle. These have sleeves much shorter, cut up the arme, and pointed with Silke-ribons very gallantly tyed with true loves knottes—(for soe they call them). Some have capes fastened down to the middist of their backs, faced with velvet or else with some fine wrought silk Taffeetie at the least, and fringed about Bravely, and (to sum up all in a word) some are pleated and ryveled down the back wonderfully with more knacks than I can declare.” The guards of lace a finger broad laid on over the seams of the gown are described by Pepys in his day. He had some of these guards of gold lace taken from the seams of one of his wife’s old gowns to overlay the seams of one of his own cassocks and rig it up for wear, just as he took his wife’s old muff, like a thrifty husband, and bought her a new muff, like a kind one. Not such a domestic frugalist was he, though, as his contemporary, the great political economist, Dudley North, Baron Guildford, Lord Sheriff of London, who loved to sit with his wife ripping off the old guards of lace from her gown, “unpicking” her gown, he called it, and was not at all secret about it. Both men walked abroad to survey the gems and guards worn by their neighbors’ wives, and to bring home word of new stuffs, new trimmings, to their own wives. Really a seventeenth-century husband was not so bad. Note in my _Life of Margaret Winthrop_ how Winthrop’s fellow-barrister, Sergeant Erasmus Earle, bought camlet and lace, and patterns for doublets for his wife Frances Fontayne, and ran from London clothier to London mantua-maker, and then to London haberdasher and London tailor, to learn the newest weaves of cloth, the newest drawing in of the sleeves. I know no nineteenth-century husband of that name who would hunt materials and sleeve patterns, and buy doublet laces and find gown-guards for his wife. And then the gown sleeves! What a description by Stubbes of the virago-sleeve “tied in and knotted with silk ribbons in love-knots!” It is all wonderful to read.