The surplice was of course, throughout the period, the universally recognised vestment of the Church of England clergy.  Not that it had altogether outlived the unreasoning hatred with which it was regarded by ultra-Protestants outside the National Church.  It was still in the earlier part of the century inveighed against by some of their writers as ’a Babylonish garment,’[1088] ’a rag of the whore of Babylon,’[1089] a ’habit of the priests of Isis.’[1090] In William III.’s time, its use in the pulpit was evidently quite exceptional.  The writer of a letter in the Strype Correspondence—­one of those in whose eyes a surplice was ’a fool’s coat’—­making mention that on the previous day (in 1696) he had seen a minister preach in one, added that to the best of his remembrance he had never but once seen this before.[1091] During the next reign the custom was more common, but was looked upon as a decided mark of High Churchmanship.  There is an expressive, and amusingly inconsequential ‘though’ in the following note from Thoresby’s Diary for June 17, 1722:  ’Mr. Rhodes preached well (though in his surplice).’[1092] In villages, however, it was very frequently worn, not so much from any idea of its propriety as what Pasquin in the ‘Tatler’ is made to call ’the most conscientious dress,’[1093] but simply from its being the only vestment provided by the parish.  Too frequently it betrayed in its appearance, ’dirty and contemptible with age,’[1094] a careless indifference quite in keeping with other externals of worship.  At the end of the seventeenth century many Low Church clergy were wont so far to violate the Act of Uniformity as often not to wear the surplice at all in church.  They would sometimes wear it, said South, in a sermon preached in King William’s reign, and oftener lay it aside.[1095] Such irregularities appear, however, to have been nearly discontinued in Queen Anne’s time.[1096] About this date, the growing habit among clergymen of wearing a wig is said to have caused an alteration from the older form of the surplice.  It was no longer sewn up and drawn over the head, but made open in front.[1097]

Those who abominated the surplice had looked with aversion on the academical hood.  Even in the middle of the eighteenth century, some Low Church clergymen—­they would hardly be graduates of either University—­objected to its use.  Christopher Pitt, recommending preachers to sort their sermons to their hearers, bids them, for example, not to be so indiscreet as to ’rail at hoods and organs at St. Paul’s.’[1098]

Next, says Addison, after the clergy of the highest rank, such as bishops, deans, and archdeacons, come ’doctors of divinity, prebendaries and all that wear scarfs.’[1099] It was an object therefore of some ambition in his day to wear a scarf.  There was many a clerical fop, we are told in a later paper of the ‘Spectator,’ who would wear it when he came up to London, that he might be mistaken for a dignitary of the Church, and be called ‘doctor’ by his landlady and by the waiter at Child’s Coffee House.[1100] Noblemen also claimed a right of conferring a scarf upon their chaplains.  In this case, those who knew the galling yoke that a chaplaincy too often was, might well entitle it ’a badge of servitude,’ and ’a silken livery.’[1101]