American readers may not be familiar with ‘the hoodie’, a caricature of all that is supposedly wrong with English youth as peddled by certain tabloid newspapers and political groups, so called because of a fashion for young people to wear shirts with hoods (excellent in the rain I imagine). Well, Professor Robert Bartlett has waded in with a historical comparison, explaining how the somewhat lawless apprentice boys of twelfth century London wore hooded tops, partly for warmth and partly to conceal their identity in their periodic riots. Bartlett also goes on to explain, in this article, how the English were famed for over drinking, then as now.