he
Plantagenet kings to aspire, as early as the fourteenth century, to be
the "Rois de la Mier."

Trade brings luxury, comfort, and the love of art in its train. The same
happened in London as in Venice, Florence, and Bruges; these merchants
and nobles were fond of beautiful things. It is an era of prosperity for
imagers, miniaturists, painters, and sculptors.[431] The wealthy order
to be chiselled for themselves ivory Virgins whose tender, half-mundane
smile, is not less charming for the doubt it leaves whether it is of
earth or of heaven; devotional tablets in painted ivory, in gold, or
translucid enamels; golden goblets with figures, silver cups "enamelled
with children's games," salt-cellars in the shape of lions or dogs,
"golden images of St. John the Baptist, in the wilderness,"[432] all
those precious articles with which our museums are filled. Edward II.
sends to the Pope in 1317, among other gifts, a golden ewer and basin,
studded with translucid enamels, supplied by Roger de Frowyk, a London
goldsmith, for the price of one hundred and forty-seven pounds, Humphrey
de Bohun, who died in 1361, said his prayers to beads of gold; Edward
III. played chess on a board of jasper and crystal, silver mounted. The
miniaturists represent Paradise on the margin of missals, or set forth
in colours some graceful legend or fantastic tale, with knights,
flowers, and butterflies.[433] In spite of foreign wars, local
insurrections, the plague that returns periodically, 1349, 1362, 1369,
1375, the great uprising of the peasantry, 1381, the troubles and
massacres which followed, art prospers in the fourteenth century, and
what chiefly characterises it is that it is all a-smile.

That such things were coeval is not so astonishing as it may seem. Life
was still at that time so fragile and so often threatened, that the
notion of its being suddenly cut off was a familiar one even from
childhood. Wars, plagues, and massacres never took one unawares; they
were in the due course of things, and were expected; the possibility of
such misfortunes saddened less in prospective than it does now that they
have become less frequent. People were then always ready to fight, to
kill, and to be killed. Games resembled battles, and battles games: the
favourite exercises were tournaments; life was risked for nothing, as an
amusement. Innumerable decrees[434] forbade those pastimes on account of
the deaths they caused, and the troubles they occasioned;