uch use may it be!--by a
mincing fellow in your dainty livery. And if--oh, rare disguise!--your
coiffure hides a noble brow, or your little, neat-rimmed coif a clever
head, less honour be to you who dress your limbs to imitate the
peacock, and hide your mind beneath the weight of scented clothes.

[Illustration: SLEEVES]

In the illustrations to this chapter and the next, my drawings are
collected and redrawn in my scheme from works so beautiful and highly
finished that every student should go to see them for himself at the
British Museum. My drawings, I hope, make it quite clear what was worn
in the end of the fifteenth century and the first nine years of the
sixteenth, and anyone with a slight knowledge of pictures will be able
to supply themselves with a large amount of extra matter. I would
recommend MS. Roy 16, F. 2; MS. Roy 19, C. 8; and especially Harleian
MS. 4425.

Of the lower classes, also, these books show quite a number. There are
beggars and peasants, whose dress was simply old-fashioned and very
plain; they wore the broad shoes and leather belts and short coats,
worsted hose, and cloaks of fair cloth. 'Poverty,' the old woman with
the spoon in her hat, is a good example of the poor of the time.

When one knows the wealth of material of the time, and has seen the
wonder of the stuffs, one knows that within certain lines imagination
may have full scope. Stuffs of silk, embroidered with coupled birds
and branches, and flowers following out a prescribed line, the
embroideries edged and sewn with gold thread; velvet on velvet,
short-napped fustian, damasked stuffs and diapered stuffs--what
pictures on canvas, or on the stage, may be made; what marvels of
colour walked about the streets in those days! It was to the eye an
age of elaborate patterns--mostly large--and all this broken colour
and glitter of gold thread must have made the streets gay indeed.

[Illustration: {A man of the time of Henry VII.}]

Imagine, shall we say, Corfe Castle on a day when a party of ladies
and gentlemen assembled to 'course a stagge,' when the huntsmen, in
green, gathered in the outer ward, and the grooms, in fine coloured
liveries, held the gaily-decked horses; then, from the walls lined
with archers, would come the blast of the horn, and out would walk my
lord and my lady, with knights, and squires, and ladies, and gallants,
over the bridge across the castle ditch, between the round towers.
Behind them the dungeon to