A rather rude illumination is one of the manuscripts, of which M. Barrois has given a fac-simile in his edition of this romance, representing Charles striking his opponent with the rook. According to another version of the story, the young prince, using the rook as a missile, threw it at him. An incident in the romance of the “Quatre Fils d’Aymon,” where the agents of Regnault go to arrest the duke Richard of Normandy, and find him playing at chess, is thus told quaintly in the English version, printed by Copeland:--“When duke Richarde saw that these sergeauntes had him thus by the arm, and helde in his hande a lady of ivery, wherewith he would have given a mate to Yonnet, he withdrew his arme, and gave to one of the sergeauntes such a stroke with it into the forehead, that he made him tumble over and over at his feete; and than he tooke a rooke, and smote another withall upon his head, that he all to-brost it to the brayne.” [Illustration: _No. 144. An Early Chess-board and Chess-men._] The chess-boards were naturally large, and were sometimes made of the precious metals, and of other rich materials. In one romance, the chess-board and men are made of crystal; in another, that of “Alexander,” the men are made of sapphires and topazes. A chess-board, preserved in the museum of the Hôtel de Cluny, at Paris, and said to have been the one given by the old man of the mountains (the sheikh of the Hassassins) to St. Louis, is made of rock-crystal, and mounted in silver gilt. In the romances, however, the chess-board is sometimes spoken of as made of _ormier_, or elm. In fact, when the game of chess came into extensive use, it became necessary not only to make the chess-board and men of less expensive materials and smaller, but to give to the latter simple conventional forms, instead of making them elaborate sculptures. The foundation for this latter practice had already been laid by the Arabs, whose tenets, contrary to those of the Persians, proscribed all images of living beings. The mediæval conventional form of the rook, a figure with a bi-parted head, somewhat approaching to the heraldic form of the fleur-de-lis, appears to have been taken directly from the Arabs. The knight was represented by a small upright column, the upper part of it bent to one side, and is supposed to have been meant for a rude representation of the horse’s head. The aufin, or bishop, had the same form as the knight, except that the bent end was cleft, probably as an indication of the episcopal mitre. The accompanying figure of a chess-board (No. 144), taken from a manuscript of the earlier part of the fourteenth century (MS. Cotton. Cleopat. B. ix.), but no doubt copied from one of the latter part of the thirteenth century, when the Anglo-Norman metrical treatise on chess which it illustrates was composed, gives all the conventional forms of chess-men used at that time. The piece at the left-hand extremity of the lower row is evidently a king. The other