the more important materials entering into the domestic economy. The climate being a mild one during the greater portion of the year, the large fires were only kept up in the short intervals of very cold weather.
The same fact had a controlling influence in the matter of the clothing worn by the planters and their families. John Smith, who resided long enough in the Colony to form a just notion as to the character of the climate, has preserved the list of articles which the Company considered necessary to the comfort of the emigrant to Virginia in this respect; he was advised to take with him a monmouth cap, three falling bands, three shirts, one waistcoat, one suit of canvas, one of frieze, one of broadcloth, three pairs of Irish stockings, a pair of garters, four pairs of shoes, and a dozen pairs of points. The purchase of these articles entailed an expenditure of fifty-nine shillings.[1]
If reliance can be placed on the testimony of Pory, the presiding officer of the first Assembly convening in Virginia, the simplicity of the outfit advised by the Company was not followed even by persons in the lower ranks of life in the Colony. “Our cow-keeper in Jamestown,” he wrote, “on Sundays goes accoutred in fresh flaming silk, and the wife of one in England that had professed the black art, not of a scholar but of a collier of Croydon, wears her rough beaver hat with a fair pearl hat-band and a silken suit thereto correspondent.”[2] Pory was not indulging in as much exaggeration as would appear upon the surface. Among the regulations established by the Assembly in 1619, over which he presided, there was a provision that every person should, if unmarried, be assessed according to his apparel, and if married, according to the clothing belonging to himself and the members of
