Chapter XXII: Academical Dress

GOWNS AND HANGING SLEEVES--THE FORERUNNER OF THE HOOD--THE ORIGIN
OF THE DOCTOR'S HAT--THE EVOLUTION OF THE MORTAR-BOARD

Many complaints have been very justly made against the solemnity, if not the ugliness, of men's modern evening dress. On important occasions it may be more or less enlivened by the ribbons and stars of various orders, but we really get a return to something of mediæval brightness at those functions connected with the universities at which academical dress is worn. Then the black coats and trousers are practically hidden, in many cases by scarlet, by purple, and other coloured gowns. Occasionally there are combinations of colours which are trying to the eyes of many, but on the whole the effect is one that is pleasing and worthy of repetition. Academical dress is in itself a survival, and the gay colours are almost enough to tell us this. Records exist which show that in the fifteenth century they were already adopted by the graduates of our universities.

The evidence which has been brought forward as to the origin of academic costume points to its having been derived from that of the clergy; but there are interesting connections with civil dress, as we shall see. One of the special features of many academic gowns is their long hanging sleeves, and we shall find that so long ago as the time of William Rufus sleeves had grown so long that it had become convenient to make a hole through them through which the hand and forearm could be protruded. (See Figure 134.)

These sleeves took upon themselves all sorts of forms, and they were made so long and narrow that they resembled very much the elongation of the hood which was called a liripipe. Occasionally it was found necessary to knot them so that they should not trail upon the ground. Very few parts of dress have varied so much as sleeves, and it is said that any costume can be dated by an examination of the sleeves. Nowadays, as in the past, the length of the sleeve and of the gown itself indicates the status of the member of the university. At Oxford, for instance, the undergraduate's gown is so short that it is hardly worthy of the name, and it is without sleeves that act as such. The scholar's gown is more voluminous, and the gowns of the bachelors and masters of arts are more important again, while the sleeves belonging to the latter reach nearly to the ground.

When we come, however, to the robes of the Chancellor, which are made of stiffer material, we find that the ancient character of the hanging sleeves is much more marked (see Figure 135), and there is a train so long that small pages are told off to support it. In the old days, the material of which the gowns were made, and their trimmings indicated the rank of the wearers; and, as Mr. Druitt[30] points out, the bachelor, for instance, was unable to use fur of so costly a kind as that worn by his academical superiors. Stuff or silk gowns still have their significance, and in the hoods which are the survival of a part of dress which was once useful and worn by graduates and undergraduates alike, we find great diversity in the case of the various degrees of different universities.

As a head covering, the cap took the place of a hood, and the latter fell down behind like that often seen on a modern ulster. We have already noticed (p. 157) how this peak of the hood was exaggerated, and in old times the liripipe was longer in the case of undergraduates. The modern hood of the universities has grown in size, but it has lost its long streamer. Examples are, of course, most commonly seen in churches, as it is a custom of the clergy to wear their academical hoods over their white surplices. The colour of the hood and of its lining indicates, to the initiated, the university to which the wearer belongs, and the degree which he has taken.

In early times a tippet or cape made of fur or cloth edged or lined with fur, according to the degree, was also worn. To this we have alluded when speaking of the surplice (see page 199). It seems also to have originally been a kind of hood which developed first into the almuce, one of the processional vestments of the priesthood. This was covered by the ecclesiastical cope, but was worn outside the academical gown. Doctors of Divinity were allowed to wear scarlet tippets, and the colour survives now in their academical hood, and the ordinary black almuce with its fur lining has not been greatly changed in becoming the hood of the Bachelor of Arts.

Sometimes the tippet and sometimes the hood was worn (if we may judge from monumental brasses), but also they were both put on at the same time. The figure of a doctor embroidered on a fifteenth-century cope belonging to the Pro-Cathedral of the Apostles at Clifton, depicts him wearing a tippet edged with white, a red hood, and a red cap. His gown, which is worked in gold thread, is shown with a blue lining.

Perhaps no form of head-dress is more strange than the college cap or mortar-board, or, in technical language, _pileus quadratus_, or cater cap. This skull-cap, with its curious square top, is not the only kind of academical head-dress. There is the round cap which is especially that of the doctor, while the mortar-board or trencher already mentioned is used by masters and bachelors, as well as by undergraduates and scholars. The former head-dress seems to have been very little altered, and was developed somewhere about the fourteenth century or earlier from the ecclesiastical skull-cap, which was something like an old-fashioned man's nightcap, with a tuft. The square cap is an undoubted descendant of the ecclesiastical cap of dignity, and in England this also came from the skull-cap already mentioned. Towards the end of the fifteenth century, while still used by ecclesiastics, it began to assume a square or cusped shape. Prof. E. C. Clark[31] agrees with the opinion expressed to him by the late Dr. Littledale, that folds were introduced into the soft material in order to make the cap easier to hold, for by them it was stiffened. The folds became four wings, and so converted the round top into a square. From this it was but a short step to the ecclesiastical biretta of the present day. Any further exaggeration of its top would cause the cap to fall down on the face, and would naturally suggest the insertion of something to stiffen it and hold it out, and in the end the square top of the cap was made of cardboard covered with cloth, and a skull-cap was fixed to it underneath. (See Figure 136.)

There is a likeness between the round hat of the doctor and the Tudor flat cap, and Fairholt would derive the mortar-board from the same head-dress; and as illustrating the story of its evolution, he compares the cap shown in the portrait of Cranmer (see Figure 137) in the British Museum with that of a bishop of the time of Charles I (see Figure 138); and here again the need for stiffening is obvious, if the enlargement of the crown of the cap be carried any further.