d new.
...
Upon an ambler easily she sat,
Y-wimpled well, and on her head a hat,
As broad as is a buckler or a targe.

So, with a foot-mantle round her hips, and a pair of sharp spurs on her
feet, she looked as defiant as any self-conscious Amazon of any period.
It might perhaps be shown how in more important artistic efforts than
fashions of dress this age displayed its aversion from simplicity and
moderation. At all events, the love of the florid and overloaded
declares itself in what we know concerning the social life of the
nobility, as, for instance, we find that life reflected in the pages of
Froissart, whose counts and lords seem neither to clothe themselves nor
to feed themselves, nor to talk, pray, or swear like ordinary mortals.
The "Vows of the Heron," a poem of the earlier part of King Edward
III's reign, contains a choice collection of strenuous knightly oaths;
and in a humbler way the rest of the population very naturally imitated
the parlance of their rulers, and in the words of the "Parson's Tale,"
"dismembered Christ by soul, heart, bones, and body."

But there is one very much more important feature to be noticed in the
social life of the nobility, for whom Chaucer's poetry must have
largely replaced the French verse in which they had formerly delighted.
The relation between knight and lady plays a great part in the history
as well as in the literature of the later Plantagenet period; and
incontestably its conceptions of this relation still retained much of
the pure sentiment belonging to the best and most fervent times of
Christian chivalry. The highest religious expression which has ever
been given to man's sense of woman's mission, as his life's comfort and
crown, was still a universally dominant belief. To the Blessed Virgin,
King Edward III dedicated his principal religious foundation; and
Chaucer, to whatever extent his opinions or sentiments may have been in
accordance with ideas of ecclesiastical reform, displays a pious
devotion towards the foremost Saint of the Church. The lyric entitled
the "Praise of Women," in which she is enthusiastically recognized as
the representative of the whole of her sex, is generally rejected as
not Chaucer's; but the elaborate "Orison to the Holy Virgin," beginning

Mother of God, and Virgin undefiled,

seems to be correctly described as "Oratio Gallfridi Chaucer"; and in
"Chaucers A. B. C., Called La Priere de Notre Dame," a translation by
hi