The clothing of these university participants provided a natural means of identifying their rank, and universities issued rules to be followed by the holders of various degrees. In 1222 the Archbishop of Canterbury, at the Council of Oxford, ordered clerks to wear a long closed cape with a hood attached, made of yards of material draped from the shoulders to the floor with one of two slits through which the wearer’s arms could pass. Clerics in continental Europe had already adopted the long cape as common dress, and because most faculty members of the great universities were clerics, the garment was quickly and widely adopted as the uniform of academics.
