A few centuries ago you probably would have worn weeds. Not that people were wandering around wrapped in thistle leaves — “weed” used to mean a garment, like this reference from the 1400s: “I am wrappyd in a wurthy weed.” It’s a very old word that came from the predecessors to Old English: Old Frisian, Old German, and the like.
For a long time “weed” meant any piece of clothing, but around the 1500s it began to be used for clothes that carried a message — that is, something that indicated a person’s profession or status. One type of status was conveyed by a “widow’s weed” — that is, what she would wear during the period of mourning her late husband. This usually amounted to a black dress and some kind of veil.
Veils have had a number of incarnations throughout history, and in medieval England the veil was a fairly approximate device — it could be a length of thin, translucent fabric or lace covering the whole face, or, if you didn’t own such a fancy item, it could be as simple as a hood pulled low across the top of the face.
Depending on how you construct a hood, when you pull it forward and down over your face it might have a sort of a point in the middle. That seems to have been the favored approach centuries ago, because enough widows’ weeds were like that to give rise to another aspect of widowhood: the “widow’s peak.” That’s nothing to do with clothing or any sort of veil or hood, but it resembles a hood, just a little bit. A “widow’s peak” is when someone’s hairline comes to a point at their forehead.
It’s called a “widow’s peak” because of the myth that a woman whose hairline ends in a point is fated to outlive her husband. The myth, which isn’t particularly ancient as myths go, may well have originated based on the similarity between the point of a hairline and the point of that hood used as a widow’s weed.
There was another widow-related myth that had to do with hair as well — this one has to do with the “widow’s lock,” which was a tuft or lock of hair that wasn’t cut. It was often, although not exclusively, at the front of the hairline. The idea was that if that lock were to be cut, the woman was fated to become a widow. On the other hand, the character with the most obvious “widow’s lock” is probably Superman, so I’m not sure how accurate the story can be.
There’s some argument, it seems, about whether “widow’s peak” and “widow’s lock” might have originally been the same thing, and only got muddled about due to the typical confusion and disorganization that we think was so common to the medieval period (but in fact probably wasn’t). After all, those people not only had some odd beliefs, but the way they constructed hoods was a bit off, if you get my point.
