lest kind, with wide skirts reaching to his feet, and the belt
with the long tongue about his middle.

The patterns upon the dresses of these people are heraldry
contortions--heraldic beasts intertwined in screws and twists of
conventional foliage, griffins and black dogs held by floral chains to
architectural branches, martlets and salamanders struggling in
grotesque bushes, or very elaborate geometrical patterned stuffs.

There is a picture of the Middle Ages which was written by Langland in
'Piers the Plowman'--a picture of an alehouse, where Peronelle of
Flanders and Clarice of Cockeslane sit with the hangman of Tyburn and
a dozen others. It is a picture of the fourteenth century, but it
holds good until the time of Henry VIII., when Skelton, his tutor,
describes just such another tavern on the highroad, where some bring
wedding-rings to pay their scot of ale, and

'Some bryngeth her husband's hood
Because the ale is good.'

Both accounts are gems of description, both full of that rich, happy,
Gothic flavour, that sense of impressionist portraiture, of broad
humour, which distinguishes the drawings in the Loutrell Psalter.

[Illustration: The Sugar-bag Cap.]

[Illustration: A Hood.]

I feel now as if I might be accused of being interesting and of
overlaying my history with too much side comment, and I am well aware
that convention demands that such books as this shall be as dull as
possible; then shall the vulgar rejoice, because they have been
trained to believe that dullness and knowledge snore in each other's
arms.

However wholeheartedly you may set about writing a list of clothes
attributable to certain dates, there will crop up spirits of the age,
who blur the edges of the dates, and give a lifelike semblance to them
which carries the facts into the sphere of fiction, and fiction was
ever on the side of truth. No story has ever been invented by man but
it has been beaten out of time by Nature and the police-courts; no
romance has been penned so intricate but fact will supply a more
surprising twist to life. But, whereas facts are of necessity bald
and naked things, fiction, which is the wardrobe of fact, will clothe
truth in more accustomed guise.

I put before you some true facts of the clothes of this time, clothed
in a little coat of facts put fictionally. I write the word 'cloak';
describe to you that such people wore circular cloaks split at one or
both sides, on one side to the ne