t was dressed in perfect clothes.

The villages were self-providing; they grew by then wool and hemp for
the spindles. From this was made yarn for materials to be made up into
coats and shirts. The homespun frieze that the peasant wore upon his
back was hung by the nobleman upon his walls. The village bootmaker
made, besides skin sandals to be tied with thongs upon the feet,
leather trousers and belts.

The mole-catcher provided skin for hats. Hoods of a plain shape were
made from the hides of sheep or wolves, the wool or hair being left on
the hood. Cloaks lined with sheepskin served to keep away the winter
cold.

To protect their legs from thorns the men wore bandages of twisted
straw wrapped round their trousers, or leather thongs cross-gartered
to the knee.

The fleece of the sheep was woven in the summer into clothes of wool
for the winter. Gloves were made, at the beginning of the thirteenth
century, of wool and soft leather; these were shaped like the modern
baby's glove, a pouch for the hand and fingers and a place for the
thumb.

A coarse shirt was worn, over which a tunic, very loosely made, was
placed, and belted at the waist. The tunic hardly varied in shape from
the Conquest to the time of Elizabeth, being but a sack-like garment
with wide sleeves reaching a little below the elbow. The hood was
ample and the cloak wide.

The women wore gowns of a like material to the men--loose gowns which
reached to the ankles and gave scope for easy movement. They wore
their hair tied up in a wimple of coarse linen.

[Illustration: A PEASANT OF EARLY ENGLAND

(WILLIAM I.-HENRY III.)

His hood is made from sheepskin, the wool outside, the hem trimmed
into points. His legs are bound up with garters of plaited straw.
His shoes are of the roughest make of coarse leather. He has the
shepherd's horn slung over his shoulder.]

The people of the North were more ruggedly clothed than the
Southerners, and until the monks founded the sheep-farming industry in
Yorkshire the people of those parts had no doubt to depend for their
supply of wool upon the more cultivated peoples.

[Illustration: {Two countrymen}]

Picture these people, then, in very simple natural wool-coloured
dresses going about their ordinary country life, attending their bees,
their pigs, sheep, and cattle, eating their kele soup, made of
colewort and other herbs.

See them ragged and hungry, being fed by Remigius, Bishop of Lincoln,