Meaning & Analysis
His hood is so worn and full of holes that his hair pokes through—he is reduced to shabby poverty.
Insights
Threadbare Poverty
Turns ragged clothing into a public meter of want: when hair shows through the hood, destitution can no longer be concealed.
Care-Worn Life
Equates relentless worry and hardship with physical decay—care ‘eats’ the garment until the wearer’s very body breaks through.
Mismanagement’s Cost
Links poor stewardship—bad servants, gambling, lax accounts—to visible decline: negligence makes the master’s hood unravel.
Social Exposure
Holes in the hood symbolize breached boundaries; private struggle becomes publicly legible, eroding dignity and reputation.
Overburdened Household
Dependents and debts (‘a nest of chickens’) strain resources until even basic attire fails, dramatizing the peril of unchecked obligations.
Garment as Ledger
In early modern life the hood was everyday outerwear; its condition signaled credit, thrift, and fortune. A perforated hood reads like an open account-book of losses.
Moralizing Economy
Citations blame dice, careless servants, and excess mouths, casting poverty not as fate alone but as a consequence of vice, folly, or lax governance.
Personified Affliction
Variants such as ‘Care groweth through his hood’ animate worry as an active gnawer, making anxiety’s invisible bite theatrically visible.
Raggedness as Evidence
Before formal audits, communities judged by appearances; frayed garments served as social proof, compressing complex household failures into a single, scannable image.
Idiomatic Family
Kin to sayings about being ‘all to pieces,’ it trades in fabric imagery to render dissolution—of cloth, capital, and composure—through one tactile trope.
Rhetorical Devices
Hyperbole
Exaggerates shabbiness until hair protrudes, heightening the shock-value and memorability of the poverty image.
Synecdoche
‘Hair’ stands for the person and ‘hood’ for material means; their breach embodies total household decline.
Visual Imagery
A crisp, bodily picture turns abstract want into something seen and felt—strands piercing worn cloth.
Alliteration
The h-h cluster (‘hair’/‘hood’) gives the line a hushed, hammering beat that aids recall.
Metonymy
Shabby clothing metonymically conveys depleted resources, collapsing moral and economic judgments into attire.
Transcription
Quotations
Yet nought had he kept to finde him cloth nor fode, At diuers holes his heare grewe through his hode.
He hath a nest of chekyns.. That wil sure make his heare grow thorow his hood.
If ye use it [dice playing] long, your hear wil grow through your hood.
Kepe neuer such seruantes, as doth thee no good, for making thy heare, growing thorrough thy hood.
Here's excellent fellows, are able to make their masters haire grow through his hood in a month! They can not only carelessly deliuer away his ware, but also they will not take money for it when it comes.
Marcus his haire growes through his whood they say.
Care groweth through his hood.
*He is very poor, his hood is full of holes.
In so much that Snip was condemn'd to make good the Stuffs to all his Customers; and to this day poor Cabbidge's Hair grows through his Hood.
Cross References
Annotations
Related Proverbs
Original Scan
Used under CC BY-NC 3.0.