The men had even greater fondness for finery.  Paul Hentzner, the Brandenburg jurist, in 1598, saw, at the Fair at St. Bartholomew, the lord mayor, attended by twelve gorgeous aldermen, walk in a neighboring field, dressed in a scarlet gown, and about his neck a golden chain, to which hung a Golden Fleece.  Men wore the hair long and flowing, with high hats and plumes of feathers, and carried muffs like the women; gallants sported gloves on their hats as tokens of ladies’ favors, jewels and roses in the ears, a long love-lock under the left ear, and gems in a ribbon round the neck.  This tall hat was called a “capatain.”  Vincentio, in the “Taming of the Shrew,” exclaims:  “O fine villain!  A silken doublet!  A velvet hose!  A scarlet cloak!  And a capatain hat!” There was no limit to the caprice and extravagance.  Hose and breeches of silk, velvet, or other rich stuff, and fringed garters wrought of gold or silver, worth five pounds apiece, are some of the items noted.  Burton says, “’Tis ordinary for a gallant to put a thousand oaks and an hundred oxen into a suit of apparel, to wear a whole manor on his back.”  Even serving-men and tailors wore jewels in their shoes.

We should note also the magnificence in the furnishing of houses, the arras, tapestries, cloth of gold and silver, silk hangings of many colors, the splendid plate on the tables and sideboards.  Even in the houses of the middle classes the furniture was rich and comfortable, and there was an air of amenity in the chambers and parlors strewn with sweet herbs and daily decked with pretty nosegays and fragrant flowers.  Lights were placed on antique candelabra, or, wanting these at suppers, there were living candleholders.  “Give me a torch,” says Romeo; “I’ll be a candle-holder, and look on.”  Knowledge of the details of luxury of an English home of the sixteenth century will make exceedingly vivid hosts of allusions in Shakespeare.

Servants were numerous in great households, a large retinue being a mark of gentility, and hospitality was unbounded.  During the lord mayor’s term in London he kept open house, and every day any stranger or foreigner could dine at his table, if he could find an empty seat.  Dinner, served at eleven in the early years of James, attained a degree of epicureanism rivaling dinners of the present day, although the guests ate with their fingers or their knives, forks not coming in till 1611.  There was mighty eating and swigging at the banquets, and carousing was carried to an extravagant height, if we may judge by the account of an orgy at the king’s palace in 1606, for the delectation of the King and Queen of Denmark, when the company and even their majesties abandoned discretion and sobriety, and “the ladies are seen to roll about in intoxication.”

The manners of the male population of the period, says Nathan Drake, seem to have been compounded from the characters of the two sovereigns.  Like Elizabeth, they are brave, magnanimous, and prudent; and sometimes, like James, they are credulous, curious, and dissipated.  The credulity and superstition of the age, and its belief in the supernatural, and the sumptuousness of masques and pageants at the court and in the city, of which we read so much in the old chronicles, are abundantly reflected in the pages of Jonson, Shakespeare, and other writers.