Why Wear a Dog Collar?

From "The Pilot", 1969, comes this, an interesting historical ramble.

Some Church Customs Explained
By S.G. Thicknesse

Why Wear a Dog Collar?
The English clergy have been unmistakably recognizable by their outdoor dress for no more than a century. It was the influence of the Oxford Movement and of the serious Evangelicals of the early nineteenth century, of men like Pusey and Keble, and Bishop Wilberforce, that made general a quite new sense of separateness from the laity and of serious vocation among the clergy of the Church of England.

This sense came gradually to express itself even in the ordinary outdoor clothes of clergymen. From the mid-nineteenth century it was not to be only the solid majority of the clergy, but all of them, who habitually wore the most simple and sober form of the ordinary middle-class dress of their day.

But, as in the early days of the Church, this sober temper of the clergy proved to be conservative. In Rome in the third century, Christian priests continued to wear the long, sleeved robes which before the barbarian invasions all Roman citizens had worn, until they became the distinctive cassock and alb of the Church, and so, basically, of all offices of clerks, whether judicial, academic or courtly.

So, in England, the clergy have now been wearing for a century the dress which at the time of the Oxford Movement any sober educated man was wearing. The short coat of the bishop and archdeacon of to-day, and their gaiters, are the utilitarian riding dress of the early nineteenth century.

Deans, who had no occasion to travel, emulated the same garb. The clerical collar is the stereotyping of the plain stock and high collar of the same period. The cassock remained, as it had always been, the proper outdoor dress of Anglican clergymen, and came more into use. The apron of bishop and archdeacon is, indeed, merely the shortened cassock.

It is true that from about this time all masculine dress tended to become drab and rather monotonous. But in all walks of life except the clerical this meant that the possibility of recognizing a man's class and profession by his off-duty clothes at least was virtually ended. In these circumstances the clerical dress, with its logical implication that a priest was never off duty, became particularly conspicuous.

Before this every age knew its wide variations in dress which mirrored the great differences of rank and temper of mind of clergymen, just as they did those of their lay contemporaries. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, for example, as previously, there was the minority of notable fops, clerical and lay, with their laces and buckles and powdered perukes. Similarly, at the other end of the social scale, and much more numerous, there were the labourers - town and country parsons among them - living in cottage tenements on the remnant of the glebe. 

It was only new funds and financial improvements behind the determination of Wilberforce and others that, for the first time in English history, got rid of peasants in holy orders, and attempted the introduction of a gentleman into every parish in the land.

But at least the extremes of foppishness and luxury among clergy had always been liable to rebuke. In the fourteenth century, for instance, the Archbishop of Canterbury attacked ecclesiastics for being dressed more like military persons than clerical, some having knives attached to their girdles, green shoes with cracowes, slashed belts studded with precious stones, gowns lined or turned up with fur or silk, rings upon their fingers, hoods with liripipes of wondrous development, and finally, instead of the regulation tonsured head, hair as long and curly as a woman's. 

Probably, however, even among the clerical magnificos of the later middle ages, none was a match for the princely ostentation of Wolsey. Certainly after the Reformation his like was never seen again, and the English, by removing the old basis, made sure that it never could be. So lay owners and lay statesmen took over many of the old properties and offices which for centuries previously had been appropriated and held exclusively by abbots, prelates, and priests.

If before the Reformation luxury of dress was more common than afterwards, so also was asceticism. Particular holiness was ascribed to those who wore from choice the frugal garb of the monk, as St. Cuthbert did, even after he was made Bishop of Hexham. Even when such behaviour came in for papal censure, as it did in the case of some sixth-century bishops of Gaul, it did not shake the people's affection for it. 

The English chroniclers, for example, recounted with delight the reply of the saintly Englishman, Wulfstan, Bishop of Worcester, just after the Norman Conquest, to the sartorial remonstrance of the Frenchman, Geoffrey, Bishop of Coutances. Coutances had told Wulfstan that, in his position, he should wear his garments lined with cat's fur, not with sheepskin. Even the Normans were pleased when Wulfstan answered that he was accustomed to sing `O Lamb of God' not `O Cat of God'.