entirely English growth escaped the comment attracted by a sinner with
strange garments and new oaths. For in those garments themselves lay an
offence to the commonwealth. I need only refer to the well-known
jealousy, among English haberdashers and milliners, of the superior
craft of Continental workmen, behind whom English weavers lagged: Henry
the Eighth used to have to wear hose cut out of pieces of cloth--on that
leg of which he was so proud--unless "by great chance there came a paire
of Spanish silke stockings from Spaine."[146] Knit worsted stockings
were not made in England till 1554, when an apprentice "chanced to see a
pair of knit worsted stockings in the lodging of an Italian merchant
that came from Mantua."[147] Harrison's description of England breathes
an animosity to foreign clothes, plainly founded on commercial jealousy:
"Neither was it ever merrier in England than when an Englishman was
known abroad by his own cloth, and contented himself at home with his
fine carsey hosen, and a mean slop: his coat, gown, and cloak of brown,
blue, or puke, with some pretty furniture of velvet or of fur, and a
doublet of sad tawny, or black velvet, or other comely silk, without
such cuts and garish colours, as are worn in these days, and never
brought in but by the consent of the French, who think themselves the
gayest men when they have most diversities of rags and change of colours
about them."[148]

Wrapped up with economic acrimony there was a good deal of the hearty
old English hatred of a Frenchman, or a Spaniard, or any foreigner,
which was always finding expression. Either it was the 'prentices who
rioted, or some rude fellow who pulls up beside the carriage of the
Spanish ambassador, snatches the ambassador's hat off his head and
"rides away with it up the street as fast as he could, the people going
on and laughing at it,"[149] or it was the Smithfield officers deputed
to cut swords of improper length, who pounced upon the French ambassador