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The bands worn by the barristers and clergy of our own time are modifications of this antique falling-band, and like the coif cap of the modern sergeant, they bear only a faint likeness to their originals.
The gentlemen and freeholders seemed well pleased with my charge, and the management of the business of the sessions; and said they perceived one might speak as good sense in a falling-band as in a ruff."
If portraits may be trusted, the falling-band of Charles I.'s time, bore considerable resemblance to the falling neck-frill, which twenty years since was very generally worn by quite little boys, and is still sometimes seen on urchins who are about six years of age.
"At the Quarter-Sessions of Oxford," says Whitelock, speaking of the year 1635, when he was only thirty years of age, "I was put into the chair in court, though I was in colored clothes, a sword by my side, and a falling-band, which was unusual for lawyers in those days, and in this garb I gave the charge to the Grand Jury.
He read from the paper: "'Charles-André-Étienne-Marie de St. Quentin, Comte de Mar. Age, three-and-twenty; figure, tall and slender; was dressed yesterday in black with a plain falling-band; carries his right arm in a sling " "Is my arm in a sling?" Lucas demanded. "No, in a handcuff," the captain laughed, at the same moment that his dragoon exclaimed, "His right wrist is bandaged, though."
It comprised Edward Hyde, then in his twenty-sixth year; young Bulstrode Whitelock, who had not yet astonished the more decorous magnates of his country by wearing a falling-band at the Oxford Quarter Sessions; Edward Herbert, the most unfortunate of Cavalier lawyers; John Selden, already a middle-aged man; John Finch, born in the same year as Selden, and already far advanced in his eager course to a not honorable notoriety.
That the fops of Charles I.'s reign were spending money on a fashion originally set by King Henry the Bluff, was the opinion also of Taylor the Water Poet, who in 1630 wrote In regarding the falling-band as the germ of the ruff, the Water-Poet differs from those writers who, with greater appearance of reason, maintain that the ruff was the parent of the band.
At this time Whitelock had been about seven years at the bar; but at the Quarter-Sessions the young Templar was playing the part of country squire, and as his words show, he was dressed in a fashion that directly violated professional usage. Whitelock's speech seems to have been made shortly before the bar accepted the falling-band as an article of dress admissible in courts of law.
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