“A little apish hat couched faste to the pate, like an oyster."[145]

Arthur Hall and the Earl of Oxford will perhaps serve to show that many young men pointed out as having returned the worse for their liberty to see the world, were those who would have been very poor props to society had they never left their native land.  Weak and vain striplings of 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 because his sword was longer than the statutes allowed.  “He was in a great fury....  Her Majestie is greatly offended with the officers, in that they wanted judgement."[150]

There was also a dislike of the whole new order of things, of which the fashion for travel was only a phase:  dislike of the new courtier who scorned to live in the country, surrounded by a huge band of family servants, but preferred to occupy small lodgings in London, and join in the pleasures of metropolitan life.  The theatre, the gambling resorts, the fence-schools, the bowling alleys, and above all the glamor of the streets and the crowd were charms only beginning to assert themselves in Elizabethan England.  But the popular voice was loud against the nobles who preferred to spend their money on such things instead of on improving their estates, and who squandered on fine clothes what used to be spent on roast beef for their retainers.  Greene’s Quip for an Upstart Courtier parodies what the new and refined Englishman would say:—­