A Very Brief History of Undergraduate Academic Dress by Alex Kerr

Summary of an illustrated talk given at the Burgon Society Study Day held in London on 7 May 2011

Most undergraduate gowns worn (or at any rate prescribed) in Great Britain and Ireland today are direct descendants of the closed, narrowsleeved clerkly overtunic common in universities in the Middle Ages. Medieval students also had a small, unlined hood. They were tonsured and went bareheaded. In some colleges they wore a tabard over the tunic and under the hood (1). After 1500, the tabard was left off and the tunic evolved into a gown as the front 1. Students, c. 1330, in opened up and the sleeves widened tunic, tabard and hood into a bell shape. At Oxford the hood survived until the 19th century, worn only for examinations. In the 16th century, the dress of undergraduates who were not on the foundation but paid fees or undertook menial tasks in their colleges in lieu of fees was less strictly regulated. For them various gowns that were not academic in origin seem to have been acceptable (2, 3) and this continued to be the case well into the 17th century.

derived from 16th-century non-academic dress and were worn mostly with a round cap or hat. A century of agitation led to the square cap being granted to all by 1770. Between 1828 and 1837, Cambridge colleges with the sleeveless curtain (7) each acceded to student requests for bell-sleeved gowns instead. A sleeveless gown with arm flaps survives at Dublin and, now very much shortened, with streamers 7. Pensioner, Cambridge, for commoners at Oxford. 1815, in the curtain Some features of the three-tier scheme were also present in Scottish academic dress (8), but arbitrary innovations in the 18th and 19th centuries confuse the issue. By the 1720s, gowns were no longer worn at Edinburgh. Before 1765, the Aberdeen bursars black gown was replaced by the red gown of the libertines; the latter (at both Kings and Marischal Colleges) added a cape or collar to theirs to maintain a distinction. In the 1830s, pressure

3. Commoner, Brasenose Coll., 2. Student of Civil Law, All Souls Coll., Oxford, 1510, in Oxford, 1581, in gown with closed cassock, gown and hooded mantle sleeves and fur-covered facings

8. Libertine (fee-paying student), Aberdeen, 1677, in scarlet gown with inverted-T-style sleeves

9. Undergraduate, Glasgow, c.1844, in gown with cape and sleeves

Later regulation curbed the excesses of those dressing above their station, restated rules where observance had become lax, and endorsed innovations deemed acceptable. After the Restoration, three basic patterns of undergraduate gown were allowed at Oxford, Cambridge and Dublin (1214, overleaf). Foundation men had the bellsleeved clerical gown of medieval origin, now worn with a square cap. Higher ranks of non-foundationers had lay gowns with closed sleeves, inverted-T armholes and a flap collar; some were coloured and most were elaborately trimmed with black, gold or silver braid or lace (46). Lower ranks had to wear sleeveless lay gowns with streamers and a flap collar. Both patterns of lay gown

from students at St Andrews (like that at Cambridge) led to sleeves and a velvet yoke being added to their sleeveless gown. Something similar happened at Glasgow (9). Edinburgh reintroduced an undergraduate gown (scarlet, London pattern) only in the 20th century. The 1870s saw students sleeved lay gowns fall out of use as robes distinctive of social rank became obsolete. Some new foundations prescribed undergraduate gowns and some did not. Today they are rarely seen outside Oxford, Cambridge, Durham and St Andrews, but about thirty British and Irish universities still include them in their regulations, not to mention several academic institutions in other parts of the Commonwealth and beyond.

4. Nobleman, Oxford, 1675

5. Baronet, Oxford, 1770

6. Fellow-commoner, Cambridge, 1803

10. Undergraduate, New Brunswick, 11. Short-lived undergraduate c. 1890, in Oxford commoners gown gown at Manchester, 1902

Ranks of undergraduates from the 17th to the 19th century

(the parallels suggested are approximate)

Undergraduate gowns: the three basic patterns

(examples from Loggan, Oxford, 1675)

Modern undergraduate gowns

,
Oxford Cambridge Dublin Scotland

Scholar

Pensioner Foundation (Foundationer) Scholar

Bursar

Nobleman Baronet GentlemanCommoner Student of Civil Law

Nobleman Hat FellowCommoner FellowCommoner

Nobleman

Primar

FellowLibertine/ Commoner Secondar

12. Clerical gown from medieval academic tunic 13. Sleeved lay gown from 16th-century non-academic gown
Ternar Sizar Subsizar

Sleeved gowns with inverted-T armholes and flap collar all obsolete as undergraduate dress by the late 19th century Many styles, including: black, plain (Oxford SCL); with black lace (Oxford gentleman-commoner); with gold or silver lace (Cambridge fellow-commoner); coloured brocade with gold lace (nobleman); scarlet (Aberdeen libertine and later any undergraduate at Kings Coll. until it merged with Marischal Coll. in 1860)

Commoner Battelar Servitor

Pensioner (NonFoundationer) Sizar Subsizar

Pensioner

Sources/further reading
W. N. Hargreaves-Mawdsley, A History of Academical Dress in Europe until the End of the Eighteenth Century (OUP, 1963) William Gibson, The Regulation of Undergraduate Academic Dress at Oxford and Cambridge, 16601832, Burgon Society Annual 2004 Alex Kerr, Hargreaves-Mawdsleys History of Academical Dress . . ., Transactions of the Burgon Society, Vol. 8 (2008) Nicholas Groves (ed.), Shaws Academical Dress, third edition (Burgon Society, 2011), including drawings of gowns by Kate Douglas Jonathan C. Cooper, The Scarlet Gown: History and Development of Scottish Undergraduate Dress, Transactions of the Burgon Society, Vol. 10 (2010) A version of this summary was published in the Summer 2011 issue of Burgon Notes. For information about the Burgon Society visit www.burgon.org.uk

14. Sleeveless lay gown from 16th-century non-academic gown

Graduate gowns prescribed for undergraduates Dublin foundation scholars[b10] Dublin BA gown Durham Theology[b8] Oxford BA gown Hertfordshire[b4] London BA gown Liverpool[m2] Cambridge BD gown Codes [u1], [b4], [m2], etc., follow to the Groves Classification scheme. See http://www.burgon.org.uk/design/groves.php