Piers Plowman, Description of Meed (Bribery).
From Fra Angelico, Florence.
The hair was now wound up on either side of the head, the coils either worn without any covering or enclosed within a caul; the veil or curtain being extended at the sides. This marked the commencement of those horned head-dresses which were speedily developed to such an extravagant degree, and so excited the wrath of the satirists of the time.
John de Meun, who completed "The Romaunt of the Rose," observes that these horns appear to be designed to wound the men, and adds: "I know not whether they call gibbets or corbels that which sustains their horns, which they consider so fine, but I venture to say that St. Elizabeth is not in Paradise for having carried such baubles."
From Fra Angelico, Florence.
In a volume entitled "Jougleurs et Trouvères," by M. Jubinal, is a satire on horned head-dresses, under the title of "Des Cornetes," from a MS. in the Bibliothèque Royale at Paris, of the beginning of the fourteenth century. In this poem it appears that the Bishop of Paris had preached a sermon directed against extravagance in women's dress, their horns and the bareness of their necks. "If we do not get out of the way of the women we shall be killed; for they carry horns with which to kill men."
This same sermon is quaintly referred to by the Knight of la Tour-Landry in his advice to his daughters: "He said that the women that were so horned were lyche to be horned snails and hertis and unicornes." "I doute that the develle sitte not betwene her hornes, and that he make hem bowe doun the hede for ferde of the holy water." Also the good knight told how there was "onis a gentille woman that come to a fest so straungely atyred and queintly arraied to haue the lokes of the pepille, that all that sawe her come ranne towardes her to wonder lik as on a wilde beaste, for she was atyred with highe longe pynnes lyke a jebet, and so she was scorned of alle the company, and saide she bare a galous on her hede."[22]