There were striped stuffs, piled velvet, rich-patterned silks, and homespun cloths and wool to choose from. Long-peaked shoes, of course, and wooden clogs out of doors.
The town and country maids, the merchants’ wives, and the poor generally, each and all according to purse and pride, dressed in humbler imitation of the cut of the clothes of the high-born, in quite simple dresses, with purse, girdle, and apron, with heads in hoods, or twisted wimples of coarse linen.
Well, there you lie, ladies, 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.