The style can be traced back to the 16th century in Northern England, when it was more likely to be called a "
bonnet". This term was replaced by "cap" before about 1700, except in
Scotland, where it continues to be referred to as a
bunnet in
Scots. An act in 1571 of the
Parliament of England aimed to stimulate domestic wool consumption and general trade. It decreed that on Sundays and holidays, all males over 6 years of age, except for the nobility and "persons of degree", were to wear woollen caps or pay a fine of three
farthings per day (). The act was repealed in 1597, by which time it had become firmly entrenched as a recognised mark of a
commoner, such as a
burgher, a
tradesman or an
apprentice. The style may have been the same as the
Tudor bonnet still used in some styles of
academic dress. In the 19th and early-20th centuries, when men predominantly wore some form of headgear, flat caps were commonly worn throughout Great Britain and Ireland. Versions in finer cloth were also casual countryside wear for upper-class men. Flat caps were worn by fashionable young men in the 1920s. Boys of all classes in Britain wore caps during this period; a peaked school cap of prescribed colour and design, of more rounded shape than men's flat caps, was part of the normal
school uniform. The flat cap made its way to
southern Italy in the late 1800s, likely brought by British servicemen. In Turkey, the flat cap became the main headgear for men after it became a replacement for the
fez, which was banned by
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in 1925. It also became popular in the
Balkans around the same time. In the early-20th century it was worn by working-class men in Spain and it became part of the traditional attire and folklore of Madrid, where it is called ''
, gorra madrileña'', or "Madrid Cap". ==British popular culture==