It was decreed that as the ‘monstrous and outrageous greatness of hose’ had crept ‘of late into the realm’ it was, from the day of the order, illegal for any tailor or hosier to use any more than 1¾yd of material to make any one pair of hose and that the lining should only be of one kind. Such linings were not to be loose or bolstered, ‘but to lie just unto their legs’, in other words a man was not to be so vain as to use his hose to ostentatiously display his wealth or to attract the ladies.
