[88] A shape in use from the remotest times. Carriages quite similar to those painted in our mediæval MSS. are to be seen on the alabaster funeral chests of Etruscan days, for example at the Guarnacei Museum, Volterra, in Italy, where there is an abundance of them, showing the dead, in their own round-topped, richly ornamented carriage, on their way to the other world.
[89] Representations of carriages of this kind are frequent in manuscripts. Many are to be found, with two wheels and an abundance of ornamentation, in the romance of King Meliadus (MS. of the fourteenth century in the British Museum, Add. 12,228, fos. 198, 243). The celebrated four wheeled carriage of the Louterell psalter, also of fourteenth century, is here reproduced. It is drawn by five horses harnessed single file. On the second sits a postilion with a short whip of several thongs; on the fifth, that is, the nearest to the carriage, sits another postilion with a long whip of the shape in use at the present day.
[90] La Tour-Landry relates a story of a holy hermit who saw in a dream his nephew’s wife in purgatory. The demons were pushing burning needles into her eyebrows. An angel told him that it was because she had trimmed her eyebrows and temples, and increased her forehead, and plucked out her hair, thinking to beautify herself and to please the world. “Le livre du Chevalier de La Tour-Landry,” ed. Montaiglon, Paris, 1854. An English translation of the fifteenth century was published by the Early English Text Society in 1868.
[91] The king’s sister. Devon’s “Issues of the Exchequer,” 1837, p. 142. As Englished by Devon, the Latin text referred to would mean that the receiver of the money and maker of the carriage was Master la Zousche, but la Zousche was the clerk of the wardrobe, who had the money from the Exchequer to give it to John le Charer, “per manus John le Charer.” Per has here the meaning of pro, a use of the word of which several instances may be found in Du Cange. This indication of Devon’s mistake is due to the late Mr. Bradshaw, of Cambridge.
[92] Thorold Rogers, “History of Agriculture and Prices,” i. pp. 361–363.
[93] Curious representations of such litters are to be found in mediæval manuscripts; for instance, the one here reproduced from the MS. 118 Français, in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, fol. 285, where two persons are to be seen using the litter, a lady and a wounded knight (Romance of Lancelot, fourteenth century); or in the MS. Roy, 18 E. II, in the British Museum, fol. 7 (Chronicles of Froissart).
[94] “Paston Letters,” 1422–1509, edited by Jas. Gairdner, 1872, vol. i. p. 49; spelling modernized.
[95] Roy. 10 E. IV.
[96] Fol. 310.
[97] “A Description of the Patent Rolls . . . to which is added an Itinerary of King John,” by T. Duffus Hardy, London, 1835.