t is the general custom of writers upon the dress
of this early time to dwell lovingly upon the colours of the various
parts of the dress as they were painted in the illuminated
manuscripts. This is a foolish waste of time, insomuch as the colours
were made the means of displays of pure design on the part of the very
early illuminators; and if one were to go upon such evidence as this,
by the exactness of such drawings alone, then every Norman had a face
the colour of which nearly resembled wet biscuit, and hair picked out
in brown lines round each wave and curl.

These woollen clothes--cap, tunic, semicircular cloak, and leg
coverings--have all been actually found in the tomb of a Briton of the
Bronze Age. So little did the clothes alter in shape, that the early
Briton and the late Norman were dressed nearly exactly alike.

When the tomb of William II. was opened in 1868, it was found, as had
been suspected, that the grave had been opened and looted of what
valuables it might have contained; but there were found among the
dust which filled the bottom of the tomb fragments of red cloth, of
gold cloth, a turquoise, a serpent's head in ivory, and a wooden spear
shaft, perhaps the very spear that William carried on that fatal day
in the New Forest.

Also with the dust and bones of the dead King some nutshells were
discovered, and examination showed that mice had been able to get into
the tomb. So, if you please, you may hit upon a pretty moral.

THE WOMEN

[Illustration: {A woman of the time of William II.}]

And so the lady began to lace....

A moralist, a denouncer of the fair sex, a satirist, would have his
fling at this. What thundering epithets and avalanche of words should
burst out at such a momentous point in English history!

However, the lady pleased herself.

Not that the lacing was very tight, but it commenced the habit, and
the habit begat the harm, and the thing grew until it arrived finally
at that buckram, square-built, cardboard-and-tissue figure which
titters and totters through the Elizabethan era.

Our male eyes, trained from infancy upwards to avoid gazing into
certain shop windows, nevertheless retain a vivid impression of an
awesome affair therein, which we understood by hints and signs
confined our mothers' figures in its deadly grip.

That the lady did not lace herself overtight is proved by the many
informations we have of her household duties; that she laced tight
enough for unk