Academic Dress: Personal Reminiscences

Abstract

My first contact with an academic hood was when, at eight years of age, I joined a local parish church choir. I can still vividly remember the choir lining up in the vestry ready to process into the church and our vicar, a Keble man, holding his Burgon-shape MA hood in front of him by the neckband and, with great style, swinging it over his head. Most of the clergy who came to preach at our church at that time seemed to have the same hood; these were the days when most of those entering the Church seemed to be Oxford men. How things have changed over the years in the Anglican Church! [Excerpt].