Meaning & Analysis
He has switched sides—recanted his former stance or allegiance, like a person who turns a garment to show a different face.
Insights
Opportunistic reversal
The speaker abandons yesterday’s position for today’s advantage, signaling expediency rather than conviction.
Public recantation
Turning the garment stands for a visible renunciation—confession, apology, or policy U-turn—performed for an audience.
Identity as costume
Beliefs are treated as changeable attire; the proverb implies that some ‘principles’ are merely outfits swapped to suit the weather.
Survival calculus
In dangerous times, reversal may be self-preserving; the line captures the hard choice between constancy and prudence under pressure.
Hypocrisy unmasked
By naming the flip, the proverb shames fair-weather loyalty and flatters those who hold steady despite shifting winds.
Garment metonymy
A ‘tippet’—a scarf or stole, often clerical—stands for office and party; to ‘turn’ it is to turn one’s colors, like reversing a cloak to change livery.
Reformation backdrop
Early citations target priests and pamphleteers who swapped confessions or patrons; the proverb became a stock taunt in sectarian controversy.
From coat to standard
Variants—‘turn one’s coat,’ ‘turn the ensign’—militarize the image: changing banners equals desertion, intensifying the moral charge.
Theatricality of repentance
Burning books or staging recantations (as in period recantation poems) treats conversion as spectacle—gesture substituting for inner change.
Psychology of switch
Cognitive dissonance and social pressure can prompt rapid belief-revision, later rationalized as ‘growth’; the proverb pushes back, reading the move as convenience.
Ambivalence acknowledged
Not all turning is treachery: new evidence should sway honest minds. The sting arises when timing, benefits, and rhetoric betray self-interest rather than reason.
Sounding the turncoat
The cluster of ‘turn’ sayings polices communal trust: by making disloyalty legible and laughable, they deter cheap conversions.
Rhetorical Devices
Metonymy
The tippet/coat stands in for allegiance, letting a wardrobe gesture carry political and moral meaning.
Visual symbolism
A single flip of cloth enacts reversal, giving abstract fickleness a crisp, stageable image.
Alliteration
The ‘t’ chime in ‘turn’ and ‘tippet’ lends a clipped, taunting snap suited to accusation.
Ellipsis/idiom
No verb of allegiance is named; the idiom compresses a complex social act into a compact charge.
Antithesis (implicit)
Old side versus new side—constancy versus convenience—anchors the proverb’s moral tension.
Transcription
Quotations
So turned they theyr tippets by waie of exchaunge.
The priests, for the most part, were double-faced, turn tippets and flatterers.
All which I now recant, and here before you burne Those trifling bookes, from whose lewd lore my tippet here I turne.
You marvel .. that I should so soon turn my tippet and recant.
Now must I turne my coate, and cleaue vn to my God, Desiring pardon for my crime, that spared hath his rod.
He turned his tippet: but as I discerne The tippet still turned the Turner Perne.
Twenty of your trip-coats turn their tippets.
He has changed his tippet, or his cloak on the other shoulder.
That all the protestants would either turn their coats, copies, arms, or fly away.
To turn the Ensign, viz. for one to turn his coat, and to desert his party, and forsake it quite.
But let me advise you .. your old Coats for to turn.
Cross References
Related Proverbs
Original Scan
Used under CC BY-NC 3.0.