ents
and their triumphs, doubtless; but they also had their work, domestic,
industrial, and sanitary. They knew how to bind up wounds and care for
the sick, and we read many records of their knowledge in this
department. Elaine, when she found Sir Launcelot terribly wounded in the
cave, so skilfully aided him that, when the old hermit came who was
learned in all the simples and science of the times, he told the knight
that "her fine care had saved his life,"--a pleasing assurance that
there were medical men in those days, as well as in our own, who
expressed no unwillingness to allow a woman credit for success in their
own profession.

Illuminated books sometimes show us pictures of women of the humbler
ranks of life at their work. On the border of a fine manuscript of the
time of Edward IV. there is the figure of a woman employed with her
distaff, her head and neck enveloped in a coverchief. The figure rises
out of a flower. In a manuscript of 1316, a country-woman is engaged in
churning, dressed in a comfortable gown and apron, the gown tidily
pinned up, and her head and neck in a coverchief. The churn is of
considerable height, and of very clumsy construction. A blind beggar
approaches her, led by his dog, who holds apparently a cup in his mouth
to receive donations. In another part of the same volume is a beautiful
damsel with her hair spread over her shoulders, while her maid arranges
her tresses with a comb of ivory set in gold. The young lady holds a
small mirror, probably of polished steel, in her hand. Specimens of
these curious combs and mirrors yet exist in collections. A century
later we see a pretty laundress, holding in her hands a number of
delicately woven napkins, which look as if they might have come out of
the elaborately carved napkin press of the same period in the collection
of Sir Samuel Myrick at Goodrich Court.

Although the Knight of the Tower disapproved of young ladies being
taught to write, there were women whose employment writing seems to have
been; but these were nuns safely shut up from the risk of
_billets-doux_. In Dr. Maitland's Essays on the Dark Ages, he quotes
from the biography of Diemudis, a devout nun of the eleventh century, a
list of the volumes which she prepared with her own hand, written in
beautiful and legible characters, to the praise of God, and of the holy
Apostles Peter and Paul, the patrons of the monastery, which was that of
Wessobrunn in Bavaria. The list compris