Because when King Charles II came back from his exile in France, he brought back with him the trend of wearing a periwig, which he got himself from King Louis XIV, his first cousin.
The periwig eventually came to be a sign of status – quite literally, the larger your wig was, the more fashionable and higher class you were. Eventually, judges, being high in authority, adopted the trend. When the rest of society stopped wearing them, judges continued to do so.
Barristers, who were considered extremely educated, and therefore ‘up there’ as well, also adopted the trend; of course, their wigs are shorter in length to signal that the judge is still the big man in charge
Interestingly fact, those black robes that barristers wear only became exclusively black when King Charles II died. They used to be all sorts of colors, red, blue, green, eventually changing to black when they entered a period of mourning that they seemingly never left.As much as I love the tradition, there a few left that would fight to uphold it, I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole thing was curtailed by the time I have the chance to wear one.
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