"Act of Parliament" is a term apt to mislead. To-day it is enforced by so powerful a machinery that practice conforms to precept; but in mediÆval England much law was dead letter. Statutes were often mere admonitions; they expressed but an ideal, a pious intention. This was specially true of the Sumptuary Laws, whereby the dress and food of the king's subjects were nicely regulated. If you turn over a book of costumes you find that man's attire has varied more than woman's. The sorts and conditions of men were marked by rigid lines. This fact was shown forth in their dress, and that again re-acted on their modes of thought and habits of life. "Men's apparel," says Edmund Spenser, "is commonly marked according to their condition, and their conditions are often-times governed by their garment, for the person that is gowned is by his gown put in mind of gravity, and also restrained from lightness by the very unaptness of his Tweed." Of old time man's dress was rich and varied, but how to catch its vanished effect? In Courts of Justice there is still the splendid, if occasional, bravery of the judge. See the same man in private, gaze on divinity disrobed, and the disenchantment measures for you what is lost in the splendid garb of other days. In mediÆval Europe the Church first condemned a too ornate appearance. Thus, under our early Norman Kings, long hair was much in vogue. In 1104 Bishop Serlo, preaching before Henry I. and his Court in Normandy, attacked this fashion roundly, compared his hearers to "filthy goats," and moved them by his eloquence to tears of contrition. He saw and seized that softer hour. Descending from the pulpit he then and there clipped the polls of them that heard him till he must fain sheath his shears for lack of argument. This rape of the locks was followed by a royal edict against long hair. Alas! for this story. Rochester Cathedral still bears the effigies of Henry and Maud his queen; each is adorned even as Absalom, and Time, whilst it has mauled their faces in cruel fashion, has with quaint irony preserved intact those stone tresses.

Two centuries pass ere the Sumptuary Laws proper begin. The 10 Edward III. c. 3 (1336) ordered that no man was to have more than two courses at dinner, nor more than two kinds of meat, with potage in each course; but on eighteen holidays in the year the lieges might stuff at will. Next Parliament common folk were forbidden to wear furs; but the 37 Edward III. was the great session for such work, made needful (it was thought) by the sudden increase of luxury from the plunder of the French wars. Some half-dozen Acts prescribed to each rank, from peers to ploughmen, its wear; nay, the very price of the stuff was fixed; whilst all wives were to garb themselves according to their husbands' means—a pious wish, repeated a century afterwards, in an Act of the Scots James II. The veils of the baser sort were not to cost more than 12d. apiece: embroidery or silk was forbidden to servants, and these were to eat of flesh or fish but once a day. Cloth merchants were to make stuff enough, and shopkeepers to have stock enough, to supply the anticipated demand. Such apparel as infringed the statute was forfeit to the king. The knight's dress will serve for sample of what was required. It was to be cloth of silver, with girdles reasonably embellished with silver, and woollen cloth of the value of six marks the piece. Under Richard II. monstrous sleeves were much affected. A monkish scribe inveighs bitterly against these "pokys, like bag-pipes." Some hung down to the knees; yea, even to the feet. Servants were as bad as their masters! When potage is brought to table, "the sleeves go into them and get the first taste." Nay, they are "devil's receptacles," since anything stolen is safely lodged therein. And so a statute of the time prohibited any man below a banneret from wearing large hanging sleeves, open or closed.

The fashion changed to dagges, a term explained by the 8th of Henry IV., which forbade "gown or garment cut or slashed into pieces in the form of letters, rose-leaves, and posies of various kinds, or any such devices." The fantastic peaked shoes of the fifteenth century, sometimes only held up by a chain from the girdle, were fair mark for the lawgiver, and under Edward IV. no less person than a lord was allowed peaks exceeding two inches. An Act in the same reign banned the costly head-gear of women. Henry VIII. saw to men's garb as well as their beliefs. His first Parliament forbade costly apparel, and there is preserved in the Record Office a letter from Wolsey enclosing to the King, at his request, the Act of Apparel, with an abstract, for examination and correction. Exemptions were not unknown: thus, in 1517, Henry Conway of Bermondsey obtained license to wear "camlet, velvet, and sarcenet, satin and damask, of green, black, or russet colour in his clothing." Under Queen Mary common folk who wore silk on "hat, bonnet, girdle, scabbard, hose, shoes, or spur-leathers," were grievously amerced. Under Elizabeth the regulations were numberless: thus there is an act for "uttering of caps, and for true making of hats and caps." No one was to engage in this business unless he had been "a prentice or covenant servant" by the space of seven years. No one under the degree of knight was to wear a cap of velvet. But these were not pure sumptuary regulations: they were for protection of home industries. A statute of the previous reign had declared that no man was to buy more than twelve hats or caps, be it out of this realm; and a previous Act of Elizabeth had strangely provided that if anyone sold foreign apparel on credit for longer than eight days to persons not having £3000 a year he should be without legal remedy against his debtor.

On the 15th June 1574, an elaborate proclamation complained of "the wasting and undoying of a great number of young gentlemen" who were "allured by the vayne shewe of those thyngs." A schedule was appended in which the costumes prescribed for all sorts and conditions of men were set forth. In the Star Chamber on June 12th, 1600, my Lord Keeper gravely admonished the judges to look to all sorts of abuses—"Solicitors and pettifoggers," "Gentlemen that leave hospitality and housekeeping and hide in cities and borough towns," "Masterless men that live by their sword and their wit, meddlers in princes' matters and libellers," and last, but not least, "to the vanity and excess of woman's apparel." All was in vain, if we are to believe the fierce invective of Stubb's Anatomie of Abuses. "There is now," he groans, "such a confused mingle-mangle of apparel, and such preposterous excess thereof as every one is permitted to flaunt it out in whatever apparel he listeth himself, or can get by any kind of means." It was horrible to hear that shirts were sold at £10 a piece, and "it is a small matter now to bestow twenty nobles, ten pound, twenty pound, forty pound, yea, a hundred pound, of one pair of breeches (God be merciful to us!)" After this aught else were anti-climax, and so for the women he can only say they were worse than the men. A new order of things came in with the next reign, for the act Jac. I. c. 25, sec. 45, repealed at one stroke all statutes against apparel. In Scotland they kept up the game some time longer, but one need not pursue the subject there, though a curious statute of the Scots James II. (1457) must have a word. It provided that "na woman cum to Kirk nor mercat with her face mussled that she may nocht be kenn'd under the pain of escheit of the curchie" (forfeiture of the hood). In Ireland there was a law (says Spenser) which "forbiddeth any to weare theyre beardes on the upper lip and none under the chinn:" another "which putteth away saffron shirtes and smockes," and so forth; but these were of English importation.

In the North American colonies sumptuary legislation has a history of its own. In Massachusetts an edict of September 1639, declaims against the "much waste of the good creatures (not the tipplers, but the tipple) by the vain drinking of healths," which practice is straightway forbidden. Excess or bravery of apparel is condemned, and no one is to wear a dress "with any lace on it, silver, gold silk, or thread under the penalty of forfeiture." Again, it is provided that children or servants are not to have ornamental apparel. Here is an individual case. Robert Coles, in March 1634, for drunkenness is disfranchised and condemned for a whole year to "wear about his neck, and so to hang upon his outward garment a D made of red cloth and set upon white"—a very unromantic scarlet letter! These things, too, passed away, but in the Maine Liquor Law of 1851, one traces the revival of the old idea. In England the thing lived not again. Under the Commonwealth public opinion enforced a "sober garb." Charles II. had some idea of a national costume, but he was too wise or too careless to attempt legislation. In 1747 the wearing of the Highland dress was forbidden, but that was policy, just as centuries before the Jews had a special garb ordained for them. Also a number of laws were passed to promote home manufactures: so under Charles I. and Charles II. the entry of foreign bone-lace was prohibited, though the second monarch granted licence for importing same to John Eaton for the use of the royal family. It would also serve, he coolly remarked, for patterns. There is one other curious example. Too much foreign linen was used, and so the 30th of Charles II. c. 3 ordered the dead (save the plague-stricken) to be buried in woollen shrouds. The relatives must file an affidavit with the clergyman as to this, and £5 was the fine for him if he neglected his part. Did the vision of that unseemly shroud really disturb poor Nance Oldfield's last moments, as Pope would have us believe?

"Narcissa" had her wish: the "Brussels lace" of her head-dress, her "Holland shift," a "pair of new kid gloves on her cold hands," were the talk of the town; so they tricked her out for Westminster Abbey.

Almost up to Waterloo the Act lingered on the Statute Book, till some ingenious rascal brought an action against various clergymen for the £5 penalty, for that they had not certified to churchwardens the cases of non-compliance. And so, in 1814, the 54th George III. c. 108 swept away the strange provision.

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