If you’re not wearing an inverted rooster held down by two foxes on your head, you’re not living 1777.

I have no idea what, beyond extreme hairstyles, this print is satirizing. It’s not the Wedding of Mrs Fox (as interesting a read as that is), and it’s really 100 years too late to be about Quakers.

The thing about those foxes is that at first glance on my phone, I thought they were the muscular lycanthropic squirrels of historic house wallpaper, but what two squirrels would be doing with a rooster– supporting him in illness? holding him hostage for an acorn ransom?– was beyond me.

At least as roosters, this headdress makes a bit more (morbid) sense, but it’s still a satirical engraving that makes less sense to us in 2014 than it did in 1777.