The Ola Sumptuary Laws. checked was the ridiculous length of shoe points. Some of these were two feet long. A law was passed forbidding anyone under the rank of earl wearing shoe points longer than two inches. Then again short garments were held to be indecent when worn by com moners, so gowns and cloaks were ordered to be made of a certain length, under pain of forfeiture. The last sumptuary law enrolled among the statutes of England was that made under the first Queen Mary. Persons with an in come of less than twenty pounds a year might not wear any silk in their hats or bon nets, girdles, nightcaps, hose, shoes, scab bards, or spur-leathers. The penalty was three months' imprisonment and a fine often pounds for every day the interdicted mate rial was worn. Moreover, anyone keeping a servant in his employ who had broken the law, should pay a fine of one hundred pounds. While Queen Bess, who succeeded, did not enact any sumptuary laws of her own, she was ven- active in enforcing those already on the statute-book. She issued proclamations reminding her subjects of the existence of certain Acts of Apparel and, to enforce these acts, she appointed special officers in each city. Ina proclamation dated 1575, she sets forth the evils caused by the daily increasing excess, " particularly the wasting and undoing of a great number of young gentlemen, otherwise serviceable." Under James I the sumptuary laws were all repealed; although that monarch in the early part of his reign tilted by proclama tion against costly hose, " Spanish shoes with polonied heels," the wearing of hair in tufts or locks, and "any body or sleeves of wire, whalebone, or other stiffening, saving canvas or buckram only." Concerning the last it was ordered that no lady or gentleman wearing "this impertinent garment" should be permitted to the festivities of the court. Three articles which came under the ban of the early sumptuary legislators in Mass
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achusetts appear to have been tobacco, dress, and intoxicating drinks. In the records, dated 1634, it is ordered " that victuallers or keepers of an ordinary shall not suffer any tobacco to be taken into their houses, under penalty of 5 shillings for every offence, to be paid by the victualler, and 1 2 pence by the party that takes it." Lest we should say that such a law only be enacted under a ram pant puritanism, let us glance over a law made by one of the sultans of Turkey. The monarch in question ordained that anyone of his subjects detected in the act of smok ing should for the first offense have his cheeks bored and transfixed by his pipe; for the second offense he was to have his nose cut off, and for the third he was to lose his head. Another Massachusetts law of the same year read " that no person, either man or woman, shall hereafter make or buy any ap parel either woollen, silk, or linen, with any lace on it, silver, gold, silk, or thread, under penalty of forfeiture of such clothes." Two years later it was ordered that no person should make, sell, or set on their garments any bone lace, or indeed any kind of lace except small edging. In 1639 it was found necessary to issue a new edict against this obnoxious lace which tended " to the nourish ment of pride and the exhausting of men's estates, and was also of evil example to others." Perhaps after all the most curious of the sumptuary laws of our Puritan ancestors was the following, and with this we conclude. "If any men shall judge the wearing of any the forenamed particulars, new fashions, or long hair, or anything of the like nature, to be uncomely or prejudicial to the common good, and the party offending reform not the same upon notice given him, that then the next Assistant, being informed thereof, shall have power to bind the party so offending to answer it at the next Court, if the case so requires; provided, and it is the meaning of the Court, that men and women shall have liberty to wear out such apparel as they are
