GLOVE, a covering for the hand and wrist. To throw the glove was a practice or ceremony very usual amongst our forefathers, being the challenge by which one man defied another to single combat. It is still retained at the coronation of our kings, when the king’s champion casts his glove in Westminster hall, and thus challenges all men to dispute the royal title.

Favyn supposes the custom to have arisen amongst the eastern nations, who in all their sales and deliveries of lands, goods, and the like, used to give the purchaser their glove by way of delivery or investiture. To this effect he quotes Ruth (iv. 7), in which the Chaldee paraphrase has glove where the common version renders the Hebrew word by shoe. He adds, that the Rabbin interpret by glove that passage in the 108th Psalm, In Idiuneam extendam calceamentum meum, Over Edom will I cast out my shoe. Accordingly, amongst us, he who took up the glove, thereby declared his acceptance of the challenge, and as a part of the ceremony, took the glove off his own right hand, and cast it upon the ground, that it might be taken up by the challenger. This had the force of a mutual engagement to meet at the time and place which might be appointed by the king, the parliament, or the judges.

Gloves are now a common article of dress. They are most commonly made of leather; but there are others made of silk, thread, cotton, or worsted. Leather gloves are made of the skins of the chamois, kid, lamb, beaver, doe, elk, and other animals. The leather of gloves is not, properly speaking, tanned, but cured with alum, by which it is rendered soft and pliable. Some sorts of leather gloves admit of being washed, others do not. Woodstock and Worcester, but particularly the fo r mer, are famed for the manufacture of leather gloves of a superior quality. The produce of the Worcester manufacture has been estimated at about 42,000 dozen pairs of oil-leather or beaver gloves, and 470,000 dozen pairs of kid and lamb-skin gloves, the value of the whole being about L.375,000. There are other places in England celebrated for their manufacture of gloves; and Dundee, in Scotland, has long been famed for the production of this article. Machinery is occasionally employed in sewing gloves; but this process is not considered as cheaper than that accomplished by manual labour, and is only had recourse to when it is wished to have the stitches correctly equidistant Limerick used to be famous for the manufacture of a kind of ladies’ gloves, called chicken gloves. Great quantities of cotton gloves are made at Nottingham and Leicester. Until the year 1825 the importation of leather gloves and mitts was prohibited; but at that period a duty was laid upon them, and they are now allowed to enter. The total quantity of these articles imported in the year 1832 was 126,386 dozen pairs, and the total receipt of duty on them L.27,106. The number of lamb and kid skins entered for home consumption in the year ending 1831 was 3,901,241, and the number of dozen pairs of gloves produced in the same year 585,180.

Gloves were used for certain purposes at a very early period. It is believed that the Persians used them, and they were employed by the Greeks and Romans in certain kinds of labour. During the middle ages gloves were worn by certain functionaries as a mark of dignity, but as civilization advanced they gradually became common to all classes of the community.