take a stiff piece of wire and curve it into the segment of a
circle, so that you may bend the horns as much or as little as you
will, fasten the centre of this to the band across the forehead, or on
to the side-boxes, and over it place a large wimple with the front
edge cut. Again, for further enhancement of this delectable piece of
goods, you may fix a low gold crown above all--a crown of an
elliptical shape--and there you will have as much magnificence as ever
graced lady of the fifteenth century.

[Illustration: A WOMAN OF THE TIME OF HENRY VI. (1422-1461)

Her head-dress is very high, and over it is a coloured and jagged
silk wimple, a new innovation, being a change from the centuries of
white linen wimples. Her waist is high, after a long period of low
waists.]

September 28, 1443, Margaret Paston writes to her husband in London

'I would ye were at home, if it were your ease, and your
sore might be as well looked to here as it is where ye
be now, liefer than a gown though it were of scarlet.'

[Illustration: {A woman of the time of Henry VI.}]

My dear diplomatist, I have forgotten if you got both your husband and
the gown, or the gown only, but it was a sweetly pretty letter, and
worded in such a way as must have caused your good knight to smile,
despite his sore. And what had you in your mind's eye when you wrote
'liefer than a gown though it were of scarlet'? It was one of those
new gowns with the high waist and the bodice opening very low, the
collar quite over your shoulders, and the thick fur edge on your
shoulders and tapering into a point at your bosom. You wanted sleeves
like wings, and a fur edge to the bottom of the gown, besides the fur
upon the edges of the sleeves--those quaint sleeves, thin to your
elbows, and then great and wide, like a foresail. I suppose you had
an under-gown of some wonderful diapered silk which you thought would
go well with scarlet, because, as you knew, the under-gown would show
at your neck, and its long train would trail behind you, and its skirt
would fall about your feet and show very bravely when you bunched up
the short upper gown--all the mode--and so you hinted at scarlet.

[Illustration: {A woman of the time of Henry VI.}]

Now I come to think of it, the sleeve must have been hard to arrive
at, the fashions were so many. To have had them tight would have
minimized the use of your undergarment; to have had them of the same
width fr