"Now up alofte I mount unto the ruffe, Which into foolish mortals pride doth puffe; Yet ruffes' antiquity is here but small-- Within this eighty years not one at all; For the Eighth Henry (so I understand) Was the first king that ever wore a _band_; And but a _falling-band_, plaine with a hem; All other people knew no use of them. Yet imitation in small time began To grow, that it the kingdom overran; The little falling-bands encreased to ruffes, Ruffes (growing great) were waited on by cuffes, And though our frailties should awake our care, We make our ruffes as careless as we are."
In regarding the falling-band as the germ of the ruff, the Water-Poet differs from those writers who, with greater appearance of reason, maintain that the ruff was the parent of the band. Into this question concerning origin of species, there is no occasion to enter on the present occasion. It is enough to state that in the earlier part of the seventeenth century bands or collars--bands stiffened and standing at the backward part, and bands falling upon the shoulder and breast--were articles of costume upon which men of expensive and modish habits spent large sums.
In the days of James I., when standing bands were still the fashion, and falling-bands had not come in, the Inns of Court men were very particular about the stiffness, cut, and texture of their collars. Speaking of the Inns of Court men, Sir Thomas Overbury, (who was poisoned in 1613), says: "He laughs at every man whose band sits not well, or that hath not a fair shoe-type, and is ashamed to be in any man's company who wears not his cloathes well."
If portraits may be trusted, the falling-band of Charles I.'s time, bore considerable resemblance to the falling neck-frill, which twenty years since was very generally worn by quite little boys, and is still sometimes seen on urchins who are about six years of age. The bands worn by the barristers and clergy of our own time are modifications of this antique falling-band, and like the coif cap of the modern sergeant, they bear only a faint likeness to their originals. But though bands--longer than those still worn by clergymen--have come to be a distinctive feature of legal costume, the bar was slow to adopt falling-collars--regarding them as a strange and fanciful innovation. Whitelock's personal narrative furnishes pleasant testimony that the younger gentry of Charles I.'s England adopted the new collar before the working lawyers.