I

Almost every adult in early modern England wore a hat or cap. Children wore caps too, and sometimes hats, from a very early age. We hear, for example, of a five-year-old boy accidentally drowned while trying to scoop water out of a pit with his hat.Footnote ⁶ Gregory King estimated that almost five million hats and caps had been sold in 1688, and one humourist could list the fundamental human attributes ‘as to eat, sleep, or wear a night-cap’.Footnote ⁷ The conventions were so deeply ingrained that when John Cook, prosecutor at the trial of Charles I, dreamed of being transported to heaven, he described Christ’s attending angel as wearing ‘a cloth broad brim’d hatt’.Footnote ⁸ Heaven, too, apparently conformed to contemporary practices and styles.

The sway of fashion applied to all items of attire, from headwear to shoes. Many contemporaries thought the Englishman especially fickle, with the pamphleteer Thomas Dekker jibing that ‘the blocke for his heade alters faster then the Feltmaker can fitte him’.Footnote ⁹ Mediaeval people had mostly worn low hats, caps, or hoods, with one scholar commenting in 1692 that ‘the invention of Hats (such as we have at this day) was since the beginning of Queen Elizabeths reign’.Footnote ¹⁰ Fashion in hats was mostly distinguished by the height of the crown and width of the brim. Tall ‘steeple’ hats were favoured in the first half of the seventeenth century, despite their impracticality. They were ‘so incommodious for use’, one writer recalled, ‘that every puffe of wind deprived us of them’. That could be more than merely inconvenient; when a royalist commander’s hat blew off at the siege of Scarborough in 1644, he fell off a cliff in his vain attempt to retrieve it.Footnote ¹¹ Steeple hats also naturally attracted the satirists. One imagined a London churchwarden calculating how to avoid the expense of a new church-spire: ‘I’le get a high crown’d hat with five Low bels/To make a peale shall serve as well as Bow’.Footnote ¹²

The most fashionable hats in the Stuart period were beavers, made from beaver-fur, with castors and demi-castors of rabbit-fur providing cheaper substitutes.Footnote ¹³ Ordinary people wore cloth hats or simple caps, with the term ‘flatcap’ widely used to denote tradesmen and labourers. Women and girls wore coifs and cross-cloths indoors, adding a cap, hood, or straw hat outdoors. Only caps were practical if they were carrying produce or shopping on their heads, but better-off women outdoors often wore beavers or castors. Caps came in many styles too, several listed in the ‘Ballad of the CAPS’.Footnote ¹⁴ Some reflected a regional provenance (‘Monmouth’, ‘Scotch’, ‘Coventry’); others had features such as buttoned ear-flaps. Wearers of hats and caps alike added accessories, with the elite sporting jewelled hatbands, brooches, and exotic feathers, tokens, and ribbons. Even on the eve of the civil war, the Kent gentleman Henry Oxinden could send to London for a fashionable hat and a gold or silver hatband ‘if it soe bee in the fashion, and as many ribands to it as anie we[a]re’.Footnote ¹⁵ From the Restoration period, it became fashionable to wear a wig, either under or instead of a hat, a development shaped by French influence. The new fashion inevitably complicated, and perhaps gradually helped erode, traditional cultural conventions surrounding hats and their deployment.Footnote ¹⁶

Fashionable hats were expensive. Though Gregory King priced an average hat at 2s 3d, Samuel Pepys had paid £4 5s for a good beaver in 1661.Footnote ¹⁷ Many owners kept up with fashion more cheaply by having their old hats altered; Sir Edmund Verney sent two hats to his brother in London in 1679, asking to have the ‘Brimms Reduced nearer the present Mode’.Footnote ¹⁸ Labourers and servants would simply add a cheap ribbon, feather, or favour. Hat-accessories might also serve as badges of occupational identity. We hear of a man with ‘a brooch in his hat, like a tooth-drawer’, another with ‘a Hat drest like a Sow-Gelder’, and a physician who remarks that his hat ‘had hanging at it the ensignes of my profession’.Footnote ¹⁹ These were fictional characters, but readers and playgoers were clearly expected to recognize such images. Caps also served as identifiers, both occupational and in metonyms denoting social types, such as ‘madcap’, ‘huff-cap’ (blustering fellow), or ‘goosecap’ (fool).Footnote ²⁰ And contemporaries sometimes referred, both metaphorically and literally, to a ‘thinking’ or ‘considering cap’, while Samuel Pepys mentioned his ‘velvet studying-cap’.Footnote ²¹ ‘Flatcap’, signifying a man of lower status, usually carried negative connotations.Footnote ²² The authorities’ primary concern with dress was to uphold social hierarchy and discourage wasteful extravagance. The sumptuary laws had imposed tight restrictions on fabrics, rather than styles, to underpin visual distinctions between elites and commoners.Footnote ²³ The ‘Cap Act’ of 1571 (13 Eliz. c19) had a similar goal in requiring commoners to wear caps, not hats, on Sundays; offenders could be prosecuted for wearing hats to church.Footnote ²⁴ The sumptuary laws were only fitfully enforced, however, and in 1604 they lapsed; several attempts between 1610 and 1656 to revive them failed to progress.Footnote ²⁵ The universities, however, did continue to regulate dress. Undergraduates were instructed to wear only caps, with young aristocrats allowed a cap of velvet and a gold or silver band, but the directions were widely ignored.Footnote ²⁶ Attempts by London’s Common Council to regulate apprentices’ clothes proved similarly futile.Footnote ²⁷

Seventeenth-century constraints on plebeian dress were thus largely informal, dependent on the disapproval or ridicule of neighbours, pulpit diatribes, and satirical print. And cost: one writer claimed that rapid changes in expensive fashions were driven in part by the desire to uphold social differentiation. The ‘gallants’, he explained, had adopted the steeple hat ‘to be different from the Vulger herd … for a token of their Nobility’.Footnote ²⁸ But the tide of social emulation proved hard to resist, and provoked repeated complaints of social confusion. The moralist Philip Stubbes complained in 1583 that a man was of no account ‘if he have not a velvet, or a taffety Hatte, and that must be pincked and cunningly carved of the best fashion’ and adorned with an ‘unseemly’ bunch of feathers. Women’s frivolous headgear, he railed, reflected ‘the variable fantasies of their serpentine minds’.Footnote ²⁹ The Jacobean soldier-writer Barnaby Rich even claimed, with some hyperbole, that one could no longer distinguish ‘a Prince from a pesant, … a Lord from a Lowt, a Lady from a Landresse’.Footnote ³⁰ And when a new fashion saw some bold city women adopting masculine styles, with doublets and broad-brimmed hats, James I, scandalized by such ‘insolencie’, ordered London preachers to denounce offenders from the pulpit.Footnote ³¹

The sumptuary laws themselves had been heavily male-orientated, with only men’s attire viewed as a significant threat to social order. The statutes passed in 1483 and 1514 had exempted women from sumptuary regulations altogether.Footnote ³² Women’s dress was nonetheless an important signifier of status, and elite fashions were heavily satirized. A Jacobean wit claimed that one woman’s towering headpiece had left her struggling to pass under a city gate, while Samuel Rowlands jeered that another riding through the streets with ‘three yards of feathers round about her hat’ resembled ‘an Estridge in a Coach’. In a fanciful late Stuart ballad, a farmer’s wife complains that fine ladies with ‘Top Knots of Ribbands full six stories high’ had terrified her cows.Footnote ³³ Elite women were predictably vexed when they saw their elaborate styles imitated by ‘the Wenches that cryes Kitchin-Stuff’, blurring social distinctions. One late Stuart balladeer advised that since the ‘Al-a-mode of the Town’ was being aped by the common sort, fine ladies should abandon it; then ‘Jillian and Dolly will straightways be known/from those that are better descended’.Footnote ³⁴

The wives of tradesmen and craftsmen were equally fashion-conscious. Women were expected to keep their heads covered in church (1 Tim. 2:9), which made services an ideal opportunity for display and competition. Rowlands described a tradesman’s wife telling her friends how, ‘t’other day at Church I spide a Hat/My minde and eye was never off from that,/The onely fashion to content alone’.Footnote ³⁵ Satirists depicted women nagging their husbands to buy them a hat of the latest style, one even threatening to bestow a cuckold’s hat on her spouse if he refused.Footnote ³⁶

Many critics deplored the folly of people willing to face ruin rather than fall behind the latest fashion. Keeping up was certainly expensive. Walter Cary estimated in 1626 that a gentleman’s fine beaver hat, hatband and feather would cost £5 17s, whereas in his youth an equivalent outfit would have cost only 5s. Pointing to wider economic issues, he estimated that £300,000 had been spent on the latest broad-brimmed fashion in the preceding year and a half, while older styles ‘were on the suddaine, of no reckoning at all’, and their value had crashed. Such abrupt fluctuations, he pointed out, created a major problem for merchants and tradesmen left with badly devalued stock.Footnote ³⁷ Cary’s focus on economic issues, rather than social differentiation, reflected a trend increasingly evident as the century progressed.Footnote ³⁸

Despite the complaints of social confusion, contemporaries continued to assess strangers by their dress. In Edward Ward’s The London Spy, the narrator often comments on the inhabitants’ clothes, and feels ashamed of his own shabby attire and misshapen hat.Footnote ³⁹ He was far from alone; Samuel Pepys was similarly troubled to be seen in a ‘bad’ hat and poor clothes.Footnote ⁴⁰ The squabbling apprentices in the Jacobean city-comedy Eastward Ho use poor dress as a powerful insult. One pictures his idle rival reduced to begging ‘without a cloak, with half a hat, without a band’.Footnote ⁴¹ The role of dress as social identifier was further reflected when elite characters don plebeian clothes, including hats, as disguise.Footnote ⁴² The young king of Scots, on the run in 1651 after his rout at Worcester, was initially similarly disguised as a simple rustic, with plain clothes and ‘an old grey, greazy hat without a lining’, later replaced by a modest black hat, ‘like the meaner sort of Country Gentleman’.Footnote ⁴³ Eighteenth-century gentlemen and aristocrats occasionally copied the practice, hoping to pass unnoticed, simply for amusement.Footnote ⁴⁴ Genuine poverty was of course impossible to hide. Samuel Rowlands poked fun at the poor rustic with tattered clothes and ‘a filthy greazie Hat/That had a hole (eate thorowe by some Rat)’, while Ward found black comedy in his own plight, reduced to a greasy hat with one side ‘stitcht up,/’Stead of Button and Loop,/But the Devil a bit of a Lining’.Footnote ⁴⁵

II

The multiple gestures that involved hats played an equally important role in early modern culture. They fell into two distinct categories. One related to courtesy; doffing the hat was a polite salutation between friends or respectable acquaintances. The other, more complex and contentious, related to the performance of deference.Footnote ⁴⁶ Social hierarchy and political authority were tightly bound, and both needed to be displayed and performed. In early modern England, the conventions and gestures associated with hats and caps played a significant part in serving that function. Inferiors were expected to remove their hats in the presence of those of higher status and authority, such as a parent, employer, gentleman, or magistrate. Superiors were free to respond as they chose, perhaps with a simple nod. These conventions both reflected and reinforced social and political authority.Footnote ⁴⁷ Though no law existed to underpin hat-honour, judges ruled that custom was sufficient to make it obligatory, while clerics explained that the biblical commandment to honour one’s father and mother applied to every position of authority.Footnote ⁴⁸ A tract published in 1564 observed that doffing the cap was ‘the greatest signe of obedience and humilitie yt can be’. Over a century later, when Richard Newman pictured the typical countryman addressing a gentleman, ‘his Hat is off, and in his Hand, (or) he holds it behind his Poll, (or) under his Arm’, each humble gesture acknowledging the gulf dividing them.Footnote ⁴⁹ Many men probably internalized such behaviour, but for others it was deeply resented and merely performative. Robert Coster, a Digger, hated that labourers had to ‘go with cap in hand and bended knee to gentlemen and farmers’, while Roger Crab pictured the poor man ‘cursing the rich behinde his back, and before his face, cap and knee, and a whining countenance’.Footnote ⁵⁰

The hat also featured in less familiar rituals that asserted authority through the public humiliation of offenders. In 1581, for example, the captured Jesuit missionary Edmund Campion was paraded through the London streets with a sign reading ‘Campion the seditious Jesuit’ fastened to his hat.Footnote ⁵¹ In the 1650s, one Quaker was sentenced to ride backwards on a horse, with a paper sewn to his hat bearing a demeaning verse in capital letters.Footnote ⁵² For offences such as fraud, extortion, or seditious language, a miscreant could be pilloried with a paper similarly attached to his hat (or over his head) declaring the nature of his crime.Footnote ⁵³ In 1635 a Somerset yeoman, convicted of abusing a knight, was sentenced by the Court of Chivalry to stand on a stool for hours, with a paper pinned to his hat.Footnote ⁵⁴ And in 1641 militant Londoners with copies of the anti-Catholic Protestation in their hats were described as looking ‘like men standing upon severall Pillorys with Papers in their Hatts, carrying in them their crime and condemnation for it’.Footnote ⁵⁵

Since convention required a man to doff his hat to a superior, it followed that permission to remain covered constituted a very significant gesture of favour. Charles I, playing bowls in 1628, allowed the duke of Buckingham to wear his hat while the other courtiers remained bare-headed; an outraged guard snatched it off and threw it to the ground, declaring ‘there were as good and as loyal men as himself stood bare’.Footnote ⁵⁶ Charles II allowed the same privilege to his illegitimate son, the duke of Monmouth, in 1663. Noticing the youngster dancing with the queen at Windsor with his hat in his hand, he kissed him and told him to put it back on.Footnote ⁵⁷ Samuel Pepys, who recorded that incident, treasured similar favours bestowed on himself. Socially ambitious, he was immensely proud when the chief minister, Clarendon, allowed him to remain covered during a private conversation, and in 1665 he wore his hat at a committee meeting at Lord Ashley’s house while other officials stood bare. It felt ‘mighty strange’, he confided to his diary, but hugely gratifying.Footnote ⁵⁸ Such favours were equally potent signifiers in far humbler contexts. The astrologer William Lilly, who owed his fortune to an unlikely match with an elderly widow, recalled that after accepting his audacious offer of marriage, she ‘made me sit down at Dinner with my Hat on my Head’, signalling the new domestic order.Footnote ⁵⁹ Laura Gowing noted a similar favour bestowed on a London apprentice in 1662. In this case, the death of an elder brother had made him heir to a good estate, and his scheming master now viewed him as a potential son-in-law.Footnote ⁶⁰

More surprising, perhaps, is to find elite men reversing conventional practice and doffing their hats to social inferiors. This had a range of possible meanings, depending on context. In dangerous situations it could be a gesture of appeasement.Footnote ⁶¹ It might equally serve to demonstrate personal respect. When the veteran nonconformist William Bridge left Norwich in 1669 to avoid prosecution, for example, Lord Townsend and other sympathetic gentlemen reportedly spoke to him at his departure ‘with their hats in their hands’.Footnote ⁶²

More often, such gestures were designed to curry favour. In 1598 a cynic criticized the ambitious politician who ‘Vaileth his cap to each one he doth meet’, branding it a ‘trick, with curtesie/T’entrench himselfe in popularitie’.Footnote ⁶³ For the elite, as for the poor, hat-honour might thus be merely performative. After the civil wars, condemned royalists sometimes choreographed their behaviour on the scaffold, doffing their hats to address the assembled crowd. When Lord Capel stepped on to the stage, ‘he looked towards the people, put off his Hat, as at a salute, and then cockt it, and strutted about the Scaffold in a carelesse posture’.Footnote ⁶⁴ The ‘salute’ was a gesture of solidarity to a hopefully sympathetic crowd, and of defiance to the authorities. A generation later, the duke of Monmouth touring the country in 1682 repeatedly doffed his hat to crowds of well-wishers, both gentlemen and ‘rabble’.Footnote ⁶⁵ And a witness to the crowd-violence that accompanied the trial of the High-Church populist Dr Sacheverell in 1710 said he had seen ‘the Doctor put his hat off to the mob’.Footnote ⁶⁶

By contrast, the refusal of ‘hat-honour’ by a social inferior was invariably perceived as a deliberate and shocking gesture of defiance. A Worcestershire knight, outraged in 1608 when a parish officer refused to doff his hat, ordered his servants to beat up the offender. On other occasions, the offending hat was knocked off by the aggrieved party or a bystander.Footnote ⁶⁷ The refusal of hat-honour was standard practice among the Quakers, and provoked similar fury. George Fox insisted it was merely a gesture against the sins of vanity and pride, but did not hide his contempt for the deferential ‘crouching, scraping, capping’ the elites demanded in the name of ‘that they call their civilitie’.Footnote ⁶⁸ Numerous Quaker leaders were imprisoned on this score.

Hat-doffing as social deference remained conventional practice across the period. Where the gesture related to political or ecclesiastical authority, by contrast, the period witnessed fluctuations in both the intensity of enforcement and the scale and strength of defiance. William Hacket, the Elizabethan self-proclaimed messiah, refused to remove his hat when brought before privy councillors and the lord mayor in 1592, declaring himself above them all.Footnote ⁶⁹ Several early radicals insisted their defiance was directed only at ‘popish’ bishops, not magistrates. When an obstreperous oatmeal-maker, hauled before the High Commission in 1630, was informed that some of his judges were privy councillors as well as bishops, he replied, unfazed, ‘as you are privy councillors … I put off my hat; but as ye are rags of the Beast, lo!- I put it on again’.Footnote ⁷⁰ Joseph Higgs of Hertfordshire similarly refused to remove his hat at an ecclesiastical court hearing in 1639 while declaring himself the king’s faithful servant.Footnote ⁷¹

The requirement for laymen to uncover in church during services, spelled out in the canons of 1604, was often flouted, and conformists railed against ‘Ruffians and rude ones’ who wore their hats while psalms were being read or sung, and defiant puritans ‘putting them off but half way’.Footnote ⁷² Visitation articles routinely asked if any parishioners flouted the directions, whether from negligence or deliberately, and offenders could be prosecuted. Compelling men to uncover formed part of the vigorous campaign by the Laudian church in the 1630s to enforce prescribed rituals and behaviours.Footnote ⁷³ The Restoration church still required laymen to uncover during services, and conformists still railed against the ‘unmannerly wearing their Hats’ or removing them ‘but half way’ in prayer.Footnote ⁷⁴ Practices varied widely, however, and offenders were rarely prosecuted. The behaviour of nonconformists attending parish services to escape prosecution also attracted ire. As one critic pointed out, some removed their hats during the sermon but not during prayers, while others did the reverse, both offering theological explanations he dismissed as absurd.Footnote ⁷⁵

Though women were expected to remain covered, Laudian campaigners demanded that those being ‘churched’ after childbirth should be veiled and hatless. Some, especially Puritans, strongly objected.Footnote ⁷⁶ In the 1640s, however, when the tables were turned and many High Church clerics were being displaced, we hear of a more conservative Suffolk woman who pulled off a Puritan’s hat in church ‘and threw it downe at his feet to Provoke him’.Footnote ⁷⁷

The failure of many men to uncover in church, a gesture of disrespect, was paralleled by a vigorous tradition of satire and polemic aimed at the clergy’s own behaviour. Though ministers were allowed to wear hats outside church, not all behaved with due decorum, arousing the ire and scorn of anticlericals, Puritans, and sectarians alike. In 1589 Thomas Nash poked fun at proud clerics who enforced lay compliance yet wore ‘hattes of a Babilonian blocke, a foot at least above their heads’.Footnote ⁷⁸ Early Quakers echoed his jibe, mocking Puritan ministers who urged sober dress on their hearers but chose fine clothes and an extravagant ‘cocketing hat’ for themselves. How, George Fox demanded, ‘can you look upon your Congregation without blushing?’Footnote ⁷⁹ In the early eighteenth century, we even hear of London street-robbers admitting that they deliberately targeted clerics, ‘for they wear the best of Hats’.Footnote ⁸⁰ Bernard Mandeville poked fun at the pompous Anglican minister who ‘scorns ever to be seen abroad with a worse Beaver than what a rich Banker would be proud of on his Wedding Day’.Footnote ⁸¹ Nonconformist ministers, though less flamboyant, shared the trend. One Anglican polemicist jeered that the Presbyterians had abandoned the austere ‘Black Scull-cap’, and that their ‘old Greasie slouching Hat, a la mode de Roundhead, is converted to a shining Beaver, cock’d en Cavalier’.Footnote ⁸²

During the revolutionary 1640s and 1650s, the refusal of hat-honour became an important gesture of defiance in the political sphere. When the Leveller John Lilburne, jailed in Newgate in 1646, was ordered to appear at the bar of the House of Lords, he resolved to ‘come in with my hat upon my head, and to stop my eares when they read my Charge, in detestation’.Footnote ⁸³ The Digger leaders Everard and Winstanley, brought before General Fairfax in April 1649, also kept on their hats, telling him he was ‘but their fellow Creature’.Footnote ⁸⁴ Fifth Monarchists breathed similar defiance. Wentworth Day, prosecuted for sedition in 1658, told magistrates that ‘he was no Quaker, but could very well give them civil respect: And therefore what he did now, in refusing to put off his Hat, it was to shew he could not own their Authority’, accusing them of betraying the Good Old Cause.Footnote ⁸⁵

Though we naturally associate such gestures with radicals, this was not the whole story. After their defeat in the civil war, for example, we can find eminent royalists adopting the same tactic. Charles I remained covered when he appeared before the High Court of Justice in January 1649, refusing to respect a court whose legitimacy he rejected. The earl of Peterborough’s son, tried for treason in 1658, similarly refused to remove his hat or to plead.Footnote ⁸⁶

Hats and their accessories played an equally significant role in the political upheavals of the mid-century and late Restoration period as signals of allegiance.Footnote ⁸⁷ As divisions deepened in the early 1640s, sympathies were often evident in hat-styles as well as hairstyles. As Thomas Jordan noted in 1641, a ‘steeple crown hat, short hair, Geneva Ruffe’ were signs by which a parliamentarian proclaimed his values and sympathies.Footnote ⁸⁸ Ribbons and papers attached to hatbands similarly declared the owner’s loyalties. Radical Londoners marched in 1641–2 with copies of the Protestation in their hats, while mutinous soldiers in 1649 had papers in their hats bearing the words ‘Souldiers rights, and Englands freedom’.Footnote ⁸⁹ On the royalist side, scouts in rural Merioneth were delighted to encounter a helpful young man with ‘a ribbin in his hat, with vive la Roy in it’.Footnote ⁹⁰ Surrey petitioners marching on London to demand peace in 1648 wore bays in their hats, while royalist gentlemen fighting in Wales sported blue ribbons with the motto, ‘I long to see His Majestie’.Footnote ⁹¹ During the civil war itself, visual tokens were essential to know friends from enemies in the confusion of battle, both sides generally adopting a ‘word’ and a hat-token. Fairfax, facing the royalist army in the southwest in 1646, appointed the word ‘Emanuel, God with us, and a Furr Bush [sprig of furze] in our Hats’.Footnote ⁹² The political significance of hats resurfaced from the late 1670s in the context of the Exclusion campaign to bar the Catholic duke of York from the succession, with ribbons again serving as identifiers. In one Tory ballad, a loyal apprentice proudly declares, ‘I wear this Ribband in my Hatt,/For all the Whiggs to wonder at’, while a Whig satirist claimed that a Tory’s ‘Mark is a Red-Ribbon in his Capp, to shew that he belongs to the Scarlet Whore [Rome]’.Footnote ⁹³

The political significance of hat-honour is also evident in many other contexts, relating to far more circumscribed issues of authority. Quakers, for example, generally removed their hats at their own meetings, but when George Fox and James Nayler clashed in 1656, Nayler and his supporters refused to do so. A splinter group later claimed the freedom to remain covered at meetings, if moved by the spirit, and friction between ‘the Hatmen’ and their opponents continued for many years.Footnote ⁹⁴ Dissident Anglicans occasionally adopted similar behaviour. Edmund Hickeringill, a contentious cleric, refused to remove his hat when brought before Doctors’ Commons in 1681, claiming it was improper for his case to be heard there. When an official pulled it off, he snatched it back and replaced it.Footnote ⁹⁵ At other times, refusal reflected disagreement over which party possessed the higher authority, as in a dispute between a naval captain and a local magistrate.Footnote ⁹⁶ The issue also surfaced in the context of the relationship between judges and juries in periods of political tension. In 1651 William Walwyn, former Leveller and a champion of jurors’ rights, urged Grand Jurymen to remain covered, ‘as became them’. Their authority was judicial, he argued, that of magistrates merely ‘ministerial’. A generation later, at the height of the Exclusion crisis, another writer made a similar point to underline the status, authority, and independence of juries, claiming that Grand Jurymen kept on their hats ‘by immemorial custom’.Footnote ⁹⁷

III

Doffing the hat was only one part of its place in the history of gesture. Men’s hats also featured in a wide range of more emphatic gestures, in both public and private contexts. (By contrast, women’s hats, usually fastened at the chin, rarely featured in female gestures.) Waving or tossing hats in the air expressed collective acclamation, resolution, or celebration. In 1588 a pamphleteer marvelled at the crowd’s response to the queen’s defiant speech at Tilbury: ‘Such throwing up of hats … such cryes of joy’.Footnote ⁹⁸ In 1642 the Essex trained bands similarly signified their support for the Protestation by ‘throwing up of Hatts, and Acclamations’. And when Major-General Skippon delivered a rousing speech to his troops in 1644, ‘they threw up their Hats and gave a great shout, resolving unanimously to fight it out to the last man’.Footnote ⁹⁹ Londoners of a different persuasion reacted similarly to the restoration of Charles II: ‘they cast up their hats and cryd Vive la Roy’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Tory loyalists welcoming the king to Oxford in 1681 and Whig citizens supporting Monmouth and later the prince of Orange followed the same pattern.Footnote ¹⁰¹ It appears in non-political contexts too, such as a last-minute reprieve at the gallows or a sporting triumph. One bull-baiting anecdote described the response to a dog’s ‘noble victory’: ‘up flie caps and hats’.Footnote ¹⁰²

More extreme gestures signified still stronger emotions and commitment. A political health might see joyful or defiant loyalists throw their hats in the fire, signalling a readiness to sacrifice their possessions and even themselves for the cause. A royalist in the dark year 1649 spoke of ‘three bushels of ashes of Beaver-hats sacrificed in healths to the King, Queen, and Blacke Boy in the Buffe [Prince Charles]’.Footnote ¹⁰³ In a comparable gesture, sailors on the Naseby in May 1660 welcomed the returning king aboard by ‘hurling their caps or hats into the sea as a token of their joy to see His Majesty’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ And in a personal context, we find a Norfolk gentleman, desperate for a son and heir, pledging that ‘cou’d I once see that Boy,/I’d burn my cap, a sacrifice to joy’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

The hat could also serve as a highly versatile gestural tool. Attached to a pole, it became a makeshift standard. In 1625, two Dorset villagers abused the parish constable with rude words and gestures and then left ‘holdinge their hatts upon theire staves whooping and hollowinge’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ After a riot at London’s Guildhall in 1682, it was reported that a Tory rabble had marched through the streets ‘with their Hats upon Sticks, crying, Damn the Whiggs’. Similarly, a crowd of Monmouth’s supporters, defying guards sent to restore order, ‘set a hat upon a stick and cried, Stand to it, fall on, fall on’.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Other dramatic gestures were improvised to fit the occasion. One irate royalist demonstrated his contempt for a victualler who had refused to join in a health to Charles in 1649 by sticking ‘his hat with his sword to the ceiling’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

The hat thus signalled political or religious loyalties in multiple contexts and reflected other personal or collective emotions. How it was worn or doffed revealed other personal qualities, including breeding and civility. It was easy to poke fun at the simple rustic, newly arrived in town, who ‘takes off his hat by the crown [instead of brim], and claps you on the shoulder’.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ The tilt of the hat could be equally expressive of character or mood.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Manuals explained that it should not be worn too high on the head, drooping over the face, or in the fashion of ‘swaggerers’. ‘I walk along the street,/So spruce and boldly’, a fictional pimp boasts, ‘Cocking my beaver, looking bigg withall’.Footnote ¹¹¹ ‘Cocking’ the hat generally signalled vanity and jaunty self-confidence. Pepys despised a conceited young official wearing a ‘hat cockd like a fool behind’, dubbing it ‘the present fashion among the blades’.Footnote ¹¹² Such cockiness also functioned as sexual display. One of Thomas D’Urfey’s stage characters explains how to appear a ‘Man of Mode’ to impress women: ‘Cock your Hat, place your Arms thus, look like the Son of Thunder, and cry Hoh’. Elsewhere D’Urfey jested that even a little boy of seven ‘Cocks hat, and imitates the Men/To please the tiptoed Girl of Ten’.Footnote ¹¹³ But in other contexts, the same gesture could signify defiance and contempt, as with the condemned royalists cited above. The Ranter Abiezer Coppe was described as ‘cocking his Beaver, and staring upon the Nobility and Gentry’ in scorn.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Similarly, an ‘impudent’ robber brought before a London justice in 1725 ‘stood and strut, cock’d his Hat, and giving a Fillup with his Fingers, Now (says he to his Worship) do your worst’.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Cocking could feature in the political sphere too. When James II expelled Protestant Fellows from Magdalen College, Oxford, young scholars who had survived the purge invited several of the victims to dine with them in hall, and ‘sate with their hats cock’d in defiance of the new masters’.Footnote ¹¹⁶

IV

The hat’s shape and manoeuvrability enabled it to play a role in English culture that extended far beyond issues of identity and authority. It made a very acceptable and versatile gift, for example, to express affection or gratitude, curry favour, or mollify the offended.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Its utilitarian applications also went far beyond the world of gesture. Its most natural function was as a container, often a makeshift drinking vessel dipped in a stream or under a pump.Footnote ¹¹⁸ When the duke of York visited Oxford in 1683, Anthony Wood noted, the conduits ran with claret which ‘the vulgar sort and rabble’ scooped into their hats and caps to drink his health. The sailor Edward Coxere, imprisoned aboard a Spanish warship, used the confusion of battle to filch some wine and pour it into his hat to make merry with his fellows.Footnote ¹¹⁹ In April 1660 a naval clerk poured ale into his cap and splashed it over his friend Samuel Pepys, as a ‘frolic’. Pepys retaliated in kind.Footnote ¹²⁰ Hats could serve as bowls too; the negligence of a Restoration steward obliged one ship’s company ‘to take their peas in their hats’.Footnote ¹²¹ They also functioned as receptacles. Daniel Defoe described how London urchins would scour the streets with brooms for old iron, nails, and pins, and sweep them into their hats.Footnote ¹²² We hear, too, of dissolute Oxford students coming to chapel drunk and vomiting in their hats.Footnote ¹²³ Both hats and caps could also be pressed into service as makeshift traps. Coxere recalled how, enslaved by the Barbary Moors, ‘My red cap I put into my bosom, to be a trap for the lice, and when I pulled it out I seldom missed a louse’. And it was said that a ‘famous Doctor of Norwich’ (presumably Sir Thomas Browne) would stop his coach and use his hat to catch a ‘gawdy Butterfly’.Footnote ¹²⁴ Hats as containers also featured in humorous and scatological tales. In one, a drunkard dons a hat in which his cat had shat, while the ‘Pleasant History’ of Hodge tells of a simpleton humiliated by a maidservant who claps on his head the hat in which she had just defecated. Early modern humour could be both crude and cruel.Footnote ¹²⁵ Such behaviour, moreover, was not confined to fiction; in 1747 a Wiltshire man admitted snatching a rival’s hat, pissing in it, and clapping it back on the victim’s head.Footnote ¹²⁶ Hats also substituted as fans and handkerchiefs, and even as writing material, with a word or name scrawled on them with chalk.Footnote ¹²⁷

Headwear accessories, too, had multiple uses. The hatband might have a motto written or stitched on it, or the name of one’s Valentine.Footnote ¹²⁸ A hat’s lining might enable a skilful pickpocket to conceal a small trophy, or a secret agent hide a letter.Footnote ¹²⁹ Caps and night-caps could have supplementary medical functions. Physicians claimed that a cap infused with appropriate herbal medicaments could help cure a range of ailments, from headaches to epilepsy.Footnote ¹³⁰

V

Finally, let us return to the story of Thomas Ellwood, with which this article began. As noted earlier, a fine attire and hat served to demonstrate status while shabby dress exposed the wearer’s poverty. That does not explain, however, why Thomas found it unthinkable to go outdoors bareheaded. Even hatless, his other clothes would make it clear to any stranger that he was a young gentleman. Ellwood’s autobiography, penned decades later, reveals that he had spent months trapped in the house merely by the power of cultural convention. ‘I was still under a kind of Confinement’, he wrote, ‘unless I would have run about the Country bare-headed, like a Mad-Man: which I did not see it was my place to do’. It would have brought shame on himself and his family.Footnote ¹³¹

A hat or cap was thus felt such an essential item of attire that to appear bareheaded and, as it were, semi-naked marked out the person as either totally destitute or mad. When Samuel Butler’s comical Puritan zealot Hudibras leads a charge through a country fair to root out superstition, ‘folk thought ‘em mad/(For never Cloak nor Hat they had)’. Hamlet going hatless also fed suspicion that he had lost his senses, and Lear raging bareheaded in a storm confirmed a similar judgement.Footnote ¹³² Only the most eccentric academic might escape pity or censure. John Aubrey tells, for example, how the famous mathematician Isaac Barrow was so extraordinarily absorbed in his studies that ‘he would sometimes be goeing out without his hatt on’, behaviour Aubrey clearly found astonishing.Footnote ¹³³ At lower social levels, going bareheaded (or barefoot) conveyed a very different signal: that this was a nobody, abjectly poor, and accordingly suspicious. Court records contain numerous comments dismissing the accused as ‘a poor Fellow without either Hat or Shoes’.Footnote ¹³⁴ They also show suspects desperately anxious not to be hatless when they appeared before a magistrate or in court. One kindly watchman even lent a hat to a suspect about to appear before a justice, while another man recovered his hat out of pawn to look more respectable in court.Footnote ¹³⁵ Even in London’s seedy underworld, a hat felt essential. James Barker knew that no fence would buy his stolen clock from someone whose appearance made him so obviously suspicious. An associate had to act as intermediary, explaining later that Barker ‘did not go with me to sell the Clock, because he had never a Hat’. Another offender confessed to a burglary but ‘begged very hard’ for the return of his hat, lost at the time of his arrest, ‘for he had none to wear’.Footnote ¹³⁶ A lowly servant appearing as a court witness also needed a hat for his evidence to be taken seriously.Footnote ¹³⁷

The issue of being hatless also featured in another hitherto unnoticed context: highway robbery. One evening in May 1718, for example, William Seabrook was crossing Finchley Common when he was attacked by three footpads, who robbed him of all the money he was carrying, amounting to about £15. The court record relating to the case adds that ‘they also took away his Hat, upon which he begg’d of them not to take away his Hat and make him go home bare-headed; then they threw down his Hat in the Road and left it’.Footnote ¹³⁸ The behaviour of both parties feels counterintuitive. The hat’s monetary value was small, and why would highway robbers accede to such a request? A dozen similar scenarios are recorded in the Old Bailey records in the first half of the eighteenth century.Footnote ¹³⁹ Retaining a hat or wig evidently had a significance understood by both parties but elusive today.

The explanation lies partly in health concerns. Physicians stressed the importance of always keeping the head warm, and as men wearing periwigs often had their head shaved, they were doubly susceptible to cold. John Lane had handed over his money and valuables, but when the robbers took his hat and wig he begged for their return, stressing his concern over his ‘tender Eyes’, and ‘upon that they put my Wig on my Head’, which would keep it warm.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Benjamin Tribe, an innkeeper, handed over his money and valuables but protested when the robbers took his hat and wig: ‘said I, I have a disorder in my head, and I am fearful of catching cold in my head … please to give me my hat or wig, I should be oblig’d to you’. They returned his wig, though they grumbled and refused when he ventured to ask for his hat too.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Their behaviour suggests an unwritten convention that if victims meekly surrendered their valuables, they deserved at least a degree of favour. That is supported by the case of Francis Peters, a gentleman robbed while riding through Westminster in a hackney coach. Thrusting a pistol through the window, the highwayman took Peters’ money, an expensive silver watch, and a mourning ring. But when he also ‘snatch’t off my Hat and Wig’, Peters later explained, ‘I expostulated with him on that Occasion. I told him it was very unusual for Men of his Profession to take such Things, and that it being very cold it might indanger my Health’. The highwayman, William Gordon, was either unaware of the convention or ignored it, vowing to take everything he could get. After Gordon had left, Peters tied a handkerchief round his head to provide at least some protection. Later, hearing he had been arrested, Peters went to confront him in prison and ‘told him, he had used me hardly, in taking my Hat and Wig’. Gordon claimed not to remember but apologized anyway.Footnote ¹⁴²

VI

This article has thrown light on many issues hitherto overlooked or little explored: hats as signifiers in many different forms of identity, including political allegiance, hat-honour waived or reversed, their prominent role in multiple gestures, including their own symbolic destruction, hats utilized in shaming punishments and put to a multitude of other, more mundane uses. It has stressed the critical distinction between hat-doffing as a gesture of submission and as a polite and reciprocal salutation. And it has revealed the unrecognized significance of being hatless.

Long-term changes came very slowly across the period and beyond, not least because the key gestures of politeness and deference were shared across Western Europe and its overseas possessions, constituting an international language of symbolic communication.Footnote ¹⁴³ Contemporaries assumed the basic gestures would be understood even more widely. Thus, when Gulliver found himself unable to communicate with the terrifying giant inhabitants of Brobdingnag, he resorted to the familiar conventions of polite deference: ‘I pulled off my Hat, and made a low Bow’.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Similarly, the English consul in Aleppo, negotiating with the Cadi in 1676 through an interpreter, affirmed the dignity of his office and his nation by sitting ‘with his hat on, and cocked’.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ While fashions changed over the eighteenth century, how the hat was worn and cocked still conveyed familiar social and cultural messages.Footnote ¹⁴⁶

It was not only fashions that changed, however. Hat-badges as tokens of political affirmation appear to have declined, after the Sacheverell protests and a few early Jacobite incidents.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ And the significance of hat-honour gradually diminished as manners became more informal, and the popularity of wigs made hat-wearing itself less ubiquitous.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ The decline is sometimes, but erroneously, linked to the rise of the handshake. The handshake as a new or complementary mode of polite greeting evolved very slowly, and had no bearing on hat-honour as a gesture of deference.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Cultural change is generally gradual and multicausal, and we can only speculate about the factors at play here. That manners slowly became more informal may owe something to the elites’ greater sense of confidence and security in their political and social authority. As thoughtful commentators had long pointed out, demanding excessive displays of deference revealed an unmannerly arrogance and merely bred resentment.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ The mid-seventeenth-century radicals were long gone and largely forgotten, while the Quakers had become models of respectability. Old gestures of defiance lingered on, of course. John Cannon, a Somerset schoolmaster, describes bridling in 1738 at a local doctor’s pomposity and threatening to strike off his wig, and a surly butcher knocking off the mayor’s hat.Footnote ¹⁵¹ But the direction of travel is clear.

The decline of hat-doffing as the conventional mode of polite greeting had different causes. The rise of the wig is probably one; a man wearing a wig, without a hat or merely carrying one, as became fashionable, would certainly not wish to expose his shamefully bald pate to the public gaze.Footnote ¹⁵² It may also be that hat-doffing became increasingly irksome in busy urban streets where one would repeatedly encounter acquaintances. John Dunton recorded an anecdote of the famous Dr Fuller, that he had longed to go ‘disguis’d, for that he had in every street so many Hats, that ‘twas troublesom to him, to walk along’.Footnote ¹⁵³ Similarly, the exaggerated courtesies of men vying to compete in civility may have eventually provoked a reaction. As early as 1659 George Fox had ridiculed two Puritan ministers repeatedly doffing their hats and bowing ‘till they had out-bowed one another’.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Excessive politeness could come to be considered absurd foppery.

Changing fashions in dress had an international dimension, of course, and that may also apply to the decline of hat-honour and changes in hat-related gestures. If so, we will need to consider European trends alongside the multiple factors outlined above. But that is a different story.