Queen Elizabeth to Sir Edward Denny's lady,
were sold for £25 4s. They were bought by
Thomas Denny of Ireland, the direct descendant
of the great Sir Anthony Denny, one of
Henry the Eighth's executors, and are probably
the oldest gloves extant.

Gloves were greatly favoured as special
presents on New Year's-day and other solemn
occasions of gift-making. By degrees the
fashion died out, having first passed through
the phases of a glove full of money; then of
"glove money" without the glove; until glove
money was a tax long after the meaning of the
name had died out, and people had forgotten
why it was given or expected. It was not
thought indecorous to present New Year's-day
gloves even to judges, though they might not be
worn; at least not in court, where it was de
rigueur that a judge appeared bare handed. Was
there suspicion of the itching palm beneath
salved over with a silver plaister? Sir Thomas
More once decreed a cause in favour of a Mrs.
Croaker against Lord Arundel. In the warmth
of her gratitude she sent him, on the following
New Year's day, a pair of gloves with forty
angels inside; but the lord chancellor wrote
back word, that as it would be against good
manners to refuse a gentlewoman's New Year's
gift, he accepted the gloves, but "their lining
you will be pleased otherwise to bestow."
Pardoned criminals paid to the court a kind of
symbolic fee for their escape, in sundry pairs of
white gloves. John Bull, who had been
outlawed on an indictment for murder, and whose
outlawry was reversed in 1464, "paid the fees
of gloves to the court, two dozen for the officers
of the court, for these in all four shillings, and
in addition three pairs of furred gloves for the
three judges there, to wit, Markham, chief justice,
Yelverton, and Bingham, and so the prisoner
went to God." This is from the Yearbook of
Edward the Fourth, as quoted in Notes and
Queries. A different ending this benediction of
"ala a Dieu," to that found in the Yearbook of
the third Edward, when the Bishop of Chester
was defendant in a cause against the king—an
unjust and illegal attempt on his part—so the
bishop got his cause as he deserved; and the
report of the disappointed royal reporter
concluded with, "and you bishop go to the very great
devil without day—au tres graund deable sans
jour."

It is a pretty piece of symbolism, kept up in
our formal, unpoetic, matter=of-fact old times,
when a pair of white gloves is presented to the
judge on the occasion—unhappily too rare—of a
maiden assize. In 1856, Lord Campbell held his
third maiden assize at Lincoln; the third in six
years; so the authorities presented him with
a magnificent pair of white gloves, cunningly
embroidered and ornamented with Brussels lace,
and with the city arms embossed in frosted silver
.on the back. Not exactly fit for dancing in, but
pleasant and acceptable to my lord, doubtless, if
good for little but to be kept under a glass
case, and respect fully examined. Knitted gloves
of silk were common in the early times, before
the delicate white kid came into fashion; also
gloves of fair white linen, curiously wrought
about with gold and needlework. Kings royally
clothed for their burial, were royally gloved as
well, in these fair white linen gloves, with gold
quatrefoils, or lilies, or other emblems beseeming
on the back, as part of the needful paraphernalia
of the grave. Time and the damps of the tomb,
which have destroyed the gloves, have left the
golden ornaments still entire.

Long before our time gloves were worn, and
held to be symbolic too. Xenophon speaks of
the Persians as effeminate for clothing their
head, their feet, and their hands with thick
gloves against the cold. Homer speaks of
Laertes in his garden, with gardener's gloves to
keep him from the thorns; and another poet,
Varro the Roman, says that olives gathered by
the naked hand are better than those plucked
with gloves. The Chinese think differently about
their tea. Athenæus, in his Deipnosophists,
speaks of a glutton who went to table with his
gloves on, that he might eat his meat hotter
than the rest, and so get a greater share; and
Musonius, a philosopher, who lived at the close
of the first Christian century, among other
invectives against the corruption of the age—
that poor age which is always so much more
corrupt than its predecessors!—says: "It is
shameful that persons in perfect health should
clothe their hands and feet with soft hairy coverings".
All of which collection of erudite lore
may be found in Disraeli's Curiosities of
Literature—itself the greatest curiosity.

The Jews knew the value of these hand coverings.
That expression in the Psalms, "Over Edom
will I cast out my shoe," is said, in the version
known to scholars as the Chaldee Paraphrase,
to mean: "Over Edom will I cast out my glove"
—I will take possession, I will assert my right,
and challenge its denial: throwing the glove
being an Eastern manner of taking possession.
Also in Ruth, when it says, "Now this was the
manner in former time in Israel concerning
redeeming and concerning changing, for to confirm
in all things; a man plucked off his shoe, and
gave it to his neighbour: and this was a
testimony in Israel"—it was his glove that he
plucked off: his glove which Boaz withdrew
when he bought the land of Naomi's kinsman,
and which he gave up as the symbol of taking
possession. So, Saul, after his victory over the
Amalekites, set up a hand as the token of his
victory; and many Phoenician monuments have an
arm and a hand held up as a sign of supremacy
and power. The custom of blessing gloves at the
coronation of the kings of France is a remnant
of this old Eastern habit—a glove, indeed,
meaning to them investiture. When Conradin
was deprived of his crown and his life by the
usurper Mainfroy, he flung his glove among the
crowd as he stood on the scaffold, desiring some
one to take it up and carry it to his relatives,
who would revenge his death. A knight took
it up and brought it to Peter, king of Aragon;
who, in virtue of this glove, was afterwards
crowned at Palermo. The feudal and old-time