1. When the Rules of Discipline of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of 1797 urged Friends to dress in a style that distinguished them more clearly from non-Quakers, it held up plainness as a badge of honour that had been sanctified by the sufferings of earlier Quakers. Plainness of habit, speech, and deportment ‘distinguished our Forefathers, and for which they patiently underwent the reproach and contradiction of sinners’.