The peculiar folds at the sides of the tablecloth, which appear in many MSS., must, I think, have been purposely made for ornament, as we sometimes still see waiters crease cloths in various devices.
The sweet herbs strewn on the floor denote summer-time, in contradistinction to straw, which was used in the winter.
III.—LADY CROSSING STREET.
The background of shops and other buildings is borrowed mainly from the decapitation of G. de Pommiers at Bordeaux in 1377 (Froissart’s Chronicle, No. 2644, Bibl. Imp. de Paris).
The costumes are those of middle-class persons. The clogs were in vogue with the long-toed boots.
Some of the streets were paved with large round stones, as in many French towns at the present day; others were not paved at all, and were, during wet weather, many feet deep with mud. An open channel or sewer ran along the midroad, which did not greatly add to the felicity of ‘a walk down Fleet Street.’
IV.—FAIR EMELYE.
Emelye’s garb is that common to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries—a simple form with double sleeves. It will be remembered that Palamon mistook Emelye at first sight for a goddess; Arcite perceived her to be human. I have endeavoured to give the two men’s views of her—each quite possible according to her position in the garden. Palamon may have caught sight of her just at a turn where the dazzle of sunrise behind the tree would be certain to lend a kind of halo to the outline of a head against it. An instant afterwards Emelye may have moved aside, the false halo disappearing, and she would seem what she truly was, simply an attractive maiden.
It is disappointing to find how very few were the flowers that adorned a mediæval garden. Our handsomest flowers were of course unknown—e.g., the immense catalogue of plants introduced from America and elsewhere. Many that ‘have had their day and ceased to be’ in fashion, were as yet unknown too; such as the sunflower, which was imported about the sixteenth century. The red and white may, the dogrose, primrose, and the flowers that we banish to the kitchen garden or admire only in the fields, formed the chief ornaments. We find nettles and nightshade reckoned among garden plants; the dandelion, which appears in the place of honour in many old tapestries, was then counted as a flower.
The big round tower is one of the chain of fortresses linked by a solid wall running around the domain, from one of which the captive knights saw Emelye, her garden being within the walls, and, as the castle was generally built on an eminence, on higher ground than the flat country beyond.