The English Spy, page 619 by Bernard Blackmantle
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One circumstance which made our party more conspicuous, was, the rejection of the Welsh wigs, which not all the entreaties of the attendant could induce any of the wags to wear. The young ladies disfigure themselves by wearing the black bonnets of the bathing women; but spite of this masquerading in the water, their lovely countenances and soul-subduing eyes, create sensations that will be more easily conceived than prudently described. A certain facetious writer, who has published his "Walks through Bath," alluding to this practice, speaks of it as having been prohibited in the fifteenth century. How long such prohibition, if it ever took place, continued, it is not for me to know; but if the Bath peripatetic historian had made it his business to have seen what he has described, he would have found, that the practice of bathing males and females together in puris naturalibus was still continued in high perfection, in spite of the puritans, the Vice Society, or the prohibition of Bishop Beckyngton.{2}
2 It appears, that about the middle of the fifteenth century it was the custom for males and females to bathe together, in puris naturalibus, which was at length prohibited by Bishop Beckyngton, who ordered, by way of distinction, the wearing of breeches and petticoats; this indecency was suppressed, after considerable difficulty, at the end of the sixteenth century, (quere, what indecency does our author of the "Walks through Bath" mean? the incumbrance of the breeches and petticoats, we must imagine). It also seems, that about 1700 it was the fashion for both sexes to bathe together indiscriminately, and the ladies used to decorate their heads with all the advantages of dress, as a mode of attracting attention and heightening their charms. The husband of a lady in one of the baths, in company with Beau Nash, was so much enraptured with the appearance of his wife, that he very im-prudently observed, "she looked like an angel, and he wish