arms you will see the curious tippet, the jagged ends of
which hang down; these are the remains of the pendant sleeves. His
shoes are buttoned in front.]

Both this book and the book in the Bodleian Library were illustrated
by persons who were charged to the brim with the spirit of their age;
they were Chaucerian in their gay good-humour and in their quaint
observation, and they have that moral knowledge and outspoken manner
which characterize William Langland, whose 'Piers the Plowman' I have
quoted above.

With Chaucer, Langland, and these illuminators we have a complete
exhibition of English life of these times. The pulse of rural England
is felt by them in a most remarkable way; the religion, language,
thought, politics, the whole trend of rural, provincial, and Court
life may be gathered from their books.

The drawings in the Loutrell Psalter were completed before the year
1340, and they give us all that wonderful charm, that intimate
knowledge, which we enjoy in the 'Canterbury Pilgrims' and the 'Vision
of Piers Plowman.'

There seems to be something in road-travelling which levels all
humanity; there is no road in England which does not throb with
history; there is no poem or story written about roads in England
which does not in some way move the Englishness in us. Chaucer and
Langland make comrades of us as they move along the highway, and with
them we meet, on terms of intimacy, all the characters of the
fourteenth century. With these illuminators of the Loutrell Psalter
and the Bodleian MS. we see actually the stream of English life along
a crowded thoroughfare.

In these books we may see drawings of every form of agricultural life
and manorial existence: we see the country sports, the bear-baiting,
and the cock-fighting; we see the harvesters with straw hats, scythes,
and reaping-hooks; we see carters, carriers, and great carriages, all
depicted in a manner which we can only compare, in later years, to the
broad humour of Hogarth; and, as we turn the priceless pages over, the
whole fourteenth-century world passes before our eyes--japers and
jugglers; disours and jesters; monk, priest, pilgrim, and pardoner;
spendthrift and wench; hermits, good and evil; lords, ladies, and
Kings.

I have written of the men and their dress--how they were often--very
often--dirty, dusty, and travel-stained--of the red-rusted armour and
the striped and chequered clothes, and now I must write of the women
and the ma