Изображения страниц
PDF
EPUB

66

the right side hung a piece of light stuff, which the wearer suffered to float, or which she drew over her bosom like a wimple, by twisting it round the left arm. A lady in full dress displayed collars, bracelets, and rings. To her girdle, enriched with gold, pearls, and precious stones, was fastened an embroidered pouch : she galloped on a palfrey, carrying a bird on her fist, or a cane in her hand. What can be more ridiculous," says Petrarch, in a letter addressed to the Pope in 1366, "than to see men girthed round the body. Below, long peaked shoes; above, caps laden with feathers: hair tressed, moving this way and that, behind them, like the tail of an animal, and turned up on the forehead with ivory-headed pins!" Pierre of Blois adds that it was the fashion to talk mincingly. And what language was so spoken ?-the language of Robert Wace and the Roman du Rou, of Ville-Hardouin, Joinville, and Froissart!

The luxury in dress and entertainments exceeded all belief: we are but paltry personages in comparison with those barbarians of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Then were seen at a tournament a thousand knights attired in a uniform robe of silk, called cointise, and on

the morrow they appeared in new vestments equally magnificent. (Matthew Paris). One of the dresses of Richard II., King of England, cost thirty thousand marks of silver. (Knighton). Sir John Arundel had no fewer than fifty-two complete suits of apparel for his own person, of cloth of gold or of tissue. (Holinshed's Chron.)

At another tournament, sixty superb horses richly caparisoned, each led by an esquire, first filed off one by one, preceded by trumpeters and minstrels; then came sixty young ladies mounted on palfreys, magnificently attired, each leading by a silver chain a knight armed at all points. Dancing and music formed part of these bandors (festivities). The King, the prelates, the knights, danced to the sound of viols, bagpipes, and chiffonies.

At Christmas there were grand masquerades. In England, in 1348, there were prepared eighty tunics of buckram, forty-two masks, and a great number of grotesque dresses, for the masquerades. In 1377, a masquerade, composed of about one hundred and thirty persons disguised in different ways, afforded diversion to the Prince of Wales.

Ball, the mall, quoits, skittles, dice, were amusements in which all took a part. There is

still extant a note of Edward the Second's for the sum of five shillings, which sum he had borrowed from his barber to play at cross or pile.

MIDDLE AGES.

REPASTS.

AMONG the nobles, dinner was announced by the sound of the horn: this was called in France corner l'eau, because the company washed their hands before they sat down to table. The usual dinner hour was nine in the morning, and that for supper five in the evening. They sat on banks or benches, sometimes high, at others low, and the table was raised or lowered in proportion. From the bank or bench is derived the word banquet. There were tables of gold and silver chased: the wooden tables were covered with double cloths, called doubliers; they were laid to resemble the surface of a river which a breeze has ruffled into little waves.

« ПредыдущаяПродолжить »