e change.

15th century.

In the 15th century the middle ages run out. Fashions in this period
become, if not more fantastic, more various. Its earlier years see men
of rank still inclined to the rich modes of the last age: Harry of
Monmouth, drawn about 1410 by an artist who shows him as Occleve's
patron, wears a blue gown which might have passed muster at the court of
Richard II. for its trailing skirts and its long sleeves, their
slittered edges turned back (fig. 32). A strange fancy at this time was
the hanging of silver bells on the dress. One William Staunton, in 1409,
seeing in a vision at St Patrick's Purgatory the fate of earth's proud
ones, is exact to note that in the place of torment the jags in men's
clothes turn to adders, that women's trailing skirts are burnt over
their heads, and that those men whose garments are overset with silver
gingles and bells have burning nails of fire driven through each gingle.
As for the chaplets of gold, of pearls and precious stones, they turn
into nails of iron on which the fiends hammer.

[Illustration: FIG. 33.--The Squire. (From the Ellesmere MS. of the
_Canterbury Tales_.)]

[Illustration: FIG. 34.--An English Squire and his Wife. (From a brass
of 1409.)]

[Illustration: FIG. 35.--English Dress, c. 1433. (From Harl. MS. 2278.)]

The common habit of a well-clad man in the first half of this century is
a loose tunic, lined with fur, or edged with fur at neck, wrist and
skirt. At first the sleeves are long and bag-like, like to the Richard
II. sleeve but drawn in to the wrist, where early examples are fastened
with a button. A shorter tunic is worn below, whose tight sleeves are
seen beyond the furred edge of the upper garment, mittens being
sometimes attached to them. Over the shoulders the hood is thrown, or,
in foul weather, a hood and cloak. The gown is girdled at the waist with
a girdle from which hangs the anelace or baselard (fig. 34). Shoes are
pointed. Hats and caps are seen in many shapes, but the most remarkable
is the developed form of that head-dress which the 14th-century man
seems to have achieved by putting his pate into the face-hole of his
hood and twisting its liripipe round his brows. In the 15th century the
effect is produced with a thick, turban-like roll of stuff from the top
of which hung down on one side folds of cloth coming nigh to the
shoulder, and on the other the liripipe broadened and lengthened to 4 or
5 ft. of a narrower folded