“Right, Caxon, right as my glove! By-the-by, I fancy that phrase comes from the custom of pledging a glove as a sign of irrefragable faith.”—_The Antiquary_: _Sir Walter Scott._
We are so matter of fact in these days that, rarely, if ever, do we speak in symbols. The elaborate code of the glove has almost entirely dropped out of use. “And speaks all languages the rose,” the poet reminds us, but it is doubtful whether the most romantic of flowers ever conveyed such wealth of meaning, even between tongue-tied lovers, as the glove. Certainly, in addition, the latter has expressed a far greater variety of lofty sentiments not connected with affairs of the heart. In the Church, on the throne, in civil law, on the bench, in private breaches of honor, at festivals of rejoicing and in the last solemn rites accorded to the dead, gloves for many centuries were an important part of the ceremonial, and still, to-day, are not without meaning.
Sometimes it is claimed that gloves became a symbol in the Church long before kings singled them out to embody a monarch’s good faith or the royal consent. Of course kings wore gloves before the Christian Church came into being. But, as we have seen, the ancients seem to have attached less allegorical significance to gloves and to have regarded them more as a personal luxury. In the Orient, however, as the Bible shows, challenge by the glove was a recognized institution. Also, in the sales of lands, the purchaser was given a glove to symbolize delivery or investiture—of which the passage from Ruth which heads the previous chapter is, probably, the most famous instance. From the Oriental custom Mediæval Europe derived the challenge, so picturesquely employed in history and in literature. A certain charter of the thirteenth century also names a case of re-investiture, or restitution of property, symbolically expressed by the person restoring the lands casting his glove upon the ground.
If the Greeks and the Romans were somewhat literal and coldly materialistic in their attitude toward gloves, it remained for mediæval Europe to raise them to a cult. In the Middle Ages men had a passion for glorifying the common utensils of life. Whether it was the clergy or royalty which first seized upon gloves to exalt them into the realm of the mysterious, causing them to be scarcely less revered than the king’s or the bishop’s own person, it would be difficult to say. But, as the gloves bestowed upon the kings of olden France at their coronations were blessed and presented by the archbishop of the realm—who, in this act, was simply following the ancient Eastern practice of performing investiture—it would appear that gloves were granted by the Church to the thrones; and that thus the monarch received this sign of his sovereignty as the gracious gift of the Spiritual Power, which enjoyed precedence in honoring the glove.