Page:Costume, fanciful, historical, and theatrical (1906).djvu/62

30 with ermine, which also bordered the côte hairdie. A deep royal blue was a very favourite colour, and jewels obtained in abundance, girdles being encrusted with these, while no neck seemed complete without a necklace of four rows of jewels and a pendent cross.

A good example of the dress worn by the middle class may be taken from Chaucer's Wife of Bath. He tells us she wore on her head on Sundays a fine cloth kerchief which weighed a pound, and scarlet stockings and fine new shoes; she travelled in a wimple and a very broad hat and cloak. The Miller's wife went abroad in a girdle, barred all of silk, and a white apron or barme cloth, as it was then called. Her shift had its collar embroidered in front and behind with black silk, and she covered her head with a white cap tied with strings, above a broad silk fillet. She had a leathern purse with metal buttons and silken tassels depending from her girdle.

Edward II.'s reign welcomed a new mode of dressing the hair, which was parted in the middle; over each ear was a golden basket, and on the top was a band of gold, narrower in the centre and broader towards the ears, and the coverchief was placed on the top of the head. A peculiar method too was the arranging of the hair in sausage rolls, covered with a white veil held in a lattice-work of gold. On the whole, head-dresses were more remarkable than beautiful and becoming. The caput, which came a little later, and might have been called ugly, fitted closely to the head, and had a broad scolloped border, and sometimes, in addition, two lappets which hung to the waist; others were pointed as the bishop's mitre; and most were