* *

A brooch she bare upon hir lowe coler,
As broad as is the bos of a buckler.
Her shoes were laced on hir legges hye.'

Here also, from the Parson's Tale, is a sermon against the vain
clothing of his time, that will serve to show how you may best paint
this age, and to what excess of imagination you may run. I have
reduced the wording into more modern English:

'As to the first sin, that is in superfluitee of
clothing, which that maketh it so dere, to the harm of
the people; not only the cost of embroidering, the
elaborate endenting or barring, ornamenting with waved
lines, paling, winding, or bending, and semblable waste
of cloth in vanity; but there is also costly furring in
their gowns, so muche pounching of chisels to make
holes, so much dagging of shears; forthwith the
superfluity in the length of the foresaid gowns,
trailing in the dung and the mire, on horse and eek on
foot, as well of man as of woman, that all this trailing
is verily as in effect wasted, consumed, threadbare, and
rotten with dung, rather than it is given to the poor;
to great damage of the aforesaid poor folk.

'Upon the other side, to speak of the horrible
disordinate scantiness of clothing, as be this cutted
sloppes or hainselins (short jackets), that through
their shortness do not cover the shameful members of
man, to wicked intent.'

After this, the good Parson, rising to a magnificent torrent of
wrathful words, makes use of such homely expressions that should move
the hearts of his hearers--words which, in our day, are not seemly to
our artificial and refined palates.

Further, Chaucer remarks upon the devices of love-knots upon clothes,
which he calls 'amorettes'; on trimmed clothes, as being 'apyked'; on
nearly all the fads and fashions of his time.

It is to Chaucer, and such pictures as he presents, that our minds
turn when we think vaguely of the Middle Ages, and it is worth our
careful study, if we wish to appreciate the times to the full, to
read, no matter the hard spelling, the 'Vision of Piers the Plowman,'
by Langland.

I have drawn a few of the Pilgrims, in order to show that they may be
reconstructed by reading the chapters on the fourteenth century.

HENRY THE FOURTH

Reigned fourteen years: 1399-1413.

Born 1366. Married, 1380, Mary de Bohun; 1403, Joan of
Navarre.

THE MEN AND WOMEN

The r