s, on the tops of cold tombs, stiff and
sedate, your hands uplifted in prayer, your noses as often as not
knocked off by later-day schoolboys, crop-headed Puritans, or Henry
VIII.'s sacrilegious hirelings. Lie still in your huge head-dresses
and your neat-folded gowns--a moral, in marble or bronze, of the pomps
and vanities of this wicked world.

EDWARD THE FOURTH

Reigned twenty-two years: 1461-1483.

Born 1441. Married, 1464, Elizabeth Woodville.

THE MEN

[Illustration: {A man of the time of Edward IV.}]

I invite you to call up this reign by a picture of Caxton's shop: you
may imagine yourself in the almonry at Westminster, where, in a small
enclosure by the west front of the church, there is a chapel and some
almshouses. You will be able to see the rich come to look at Mr.
Caxton's wares and the poor slinking in to receive alms.

'If it please any man, spiritual or temporal, to buy any
pyes of two or three commemorations of Salisbury use
emprynted after the form of this present letter, which
be well and truly correct, let him come to Westminster
into the Almonry at the red pale, and he shall have them
good cheap.'

This was Caxton's advertisement.

As you watch the people going and coming about the small enclosure,
you will notice that the tonsured hair has gone out of fashion, and
that whereas the merchants, citizens, and such people wear the
roundlet hat, the nobles and fine gentlemen are in black velvet caps,
or tall hats with long-peaked brims, or in round high hats with fur
brim close to the crown of the hat, or in caps with little rolled
brims with a button at the top, over which two laces pass from back to
front, and from under the brim there falls the last sign, the dying
gasp of the liripipe, now jagged and now with tasselled ends.

We have arrived at the generally accepted vague idea of 'medieval
costume,' which means really a hazy notion of the dress of this date:
a steeple head-dress for ladies, a short waist, and a train; a tall,
sugar-loaf hat with a flat top for the men, long hair, very short and
very long tunics, long-pointed shoes, and wide sleeves--this, I think,
is the amateur's idea of 'costume in the Middle Ages.'

You will notice that all, or nearly all, the passers-by Caxton's have
long hair; that the dandies have extra-long hair brushed out in a
cloud at the back; that the older men wear long, very simple gowns,
which they belt in at t