BEHOLD!

...For today I was lucky enough to discover the single greatest book ever conceived, written, and published.... and here, you lucky bastards, it is:

Here you can see Thomas Pitkin of Swanbourne in his smock:

This is a book about smocks. Who wore smocks and why? How were they made? And other such questions are answered therein. (Actually, those are all the questions addressed). 

I have learned things such as, another word for smock is 'slop', another is 'cow gown' (my personal favourite i might add).

Most commonly  it was a smock, or a smock frock, or in it's earliest reference from 1741, 'Hee wears a white ffrock when hee rubs his horses down'.

and from 1787, where a man requests some smocks for one of his workers:

 "... some strong clothing for Bartholomew Walbroke who is an ideot, such as a round frock, a strong waistcoat and a pair of leather breeches as he is grown a great unruly boy and wears his clothes out very fast."

Then there's just loads and loads of stuff about gathering and stitching on the bias and how they are made which is boring. We are told that smocks were worn by those who worked outside, and as protective clothing... And by pig farmers so that their pigs didn't run through their legs when they caught them for market. 

I must make it abundantly clear here that i LOVE smocks. They are truly a noble, everyman garment, and staggeringly beautifully made, really detailed. Much as i laughed at this book, I ended up genuinely respecting the smock as a great leveller, an incredible practical garment, and the techniques used to make them are actually brilliant. 

Still, they look pretty funny though! To me they're are just always the village idiot on Monty Python depositing his earnings of soil and leaves into the bank.