xury in dress is
carried to such an excess that Parliament finds it necessary to
interfere, and forbids women of the lower classes to wear any furs
except cat and rabbit.[442] Edward III. buys of master Paul de Monteflor
gowns for the queen, in "stuffs from over the sea," to the enormous
amount of 1,330 pounds. He himself wears a velvet waistcoat, on which he
has caused golden pelicans to be embroidered by William Courtenay, a
London embroiderer. He gives his mistress Alice Perrers 21,868 large
pearls, and thirty ounces of smaller ones. His daughter Margaret
receives from him two thousand pearls as a wedding present; he buys his
sister Alienor a gilded carriage, tapestried and embroidered, with
cushions and curtains of silk, for which he pays one thousand
pounds.[443] At that time one might for the same sum have bought a herd
of sixteen hundred oxen.

The sense of beauty, together with a reverence for and a worship of it,
was spreading among the nation whose thoughts shortly before used to run
in quite different lines. Attention is paid to physical beauty, such as
it had never received before. Men and women wear tight garments, showing
the shape of the figure. In the verses he composed for his tomb at
Canterbury, the Black Prince mourns over "his beauty which has all
gone." Richard II., while still alive, has graven on his tomb that he
was "corpore procerus."[444] The taste of the English for finery becomes
so well known, that to them is ascribed, even in France, the invention
of new fashions. Recalling to his daughters, in order to teach them
modesty, that "the deluge in the time of Noah happened for the pride and
disguises of men, and mostly of women, who remodelled their shapes by
means of gowns and attire," the Knight de la Tour Landry gives the
English ladies the credit, or rather the discredit, of having invented
the immeasurable head-dresses worn at that day. It is an evil sign; in
that country people amuse themselves too much: "In England many there
are that have been blamed, the report goes, I know not whether it is
wrongly or rightly."[445]

Owing to the attention paid to physical beauty in England, sculptors now
begin--a rare thing at that time--to have living models, and to copy the
nude. In the abbey of Meaux, "Melsa," near Beverley, on the banks of the
Humber, was seen in the fourteenth century a sight that would have been
rather sought for by the banks of the Arno, under the indulgent sky of
Italy. The