HATS AND CAPS. Like clothes, gloves and shoes we wear hats and caps. Hats and caps have two purposes protection and ornament. They have also been worn many years ago to show a rank of the wearer. This type of headwear is seen today in the hats and caps that the soldiers and sailors wear, in the bishop's mitre, in the cardinal's scarlet hat, in the priest's biretta, and in the scholar's mortarboard.
The ancestor of all hats and caps maybe were some kinds of fillet. This was a band tied around the head. The people wore fillet to keep their hair in place. It was worn in ancient Egypt, Babylonia, and Greece. Turbans and crowns came after them, and today it survives as the band on our hats.
Probably the first real hat was the broad-brimmed hats in the ancient Greeks. It was worn only for traveling. Their hats protect them from the sun. A chin strap held the hat on the head or allowed to hang the hat down on the back when it is not needed. It was so comfortable that people all over Europe wore it through out the Middle Ages.
In ancient Rome were many slaves. They were not allowed to cover their heads. When a slave was free, he put a small cone-shaped Phrygian cap to feel as a free man and as a sign of his freedom.
The people of Rome wore a cloak with a hood. Some kind of hood continued to be worn by both men and women throughout the early Middle Ages. If it was separate from the cloak a chaperon. If it was attached, it was a cowl, or capuchon. The earliest hoods looked like the Phrygian cap. By the 13th century the tail had lengthened until it almost touched the ground and was called a liripipe. Later the liripipe was wound round the head, making a turban shape called the roundlet.…
