During the period of which we are now speaking--the twelfth and thirteenth centuries--the use of dice had spread itself from the highest to the very lowest class of the population. In its simpler form, that of the game of hazard, in which the chance of each player rested on the mere throw of the dice, it was the common game of the low frequenters of the taverns,--that class which lived upon the vices of society, and which was hardly looked upon as belonging to society itself. The practice and results of gambling are frequently referred to in the popular writers of the later middle ages. People could no longer stake their personal liberty on the throw, but they played for everything they had--even for the clothes they carried upon them, on which the tavern-keepers, who seem to have acted also as pawnbrokers, readily lent small sums of money. We often read of men who got into the taverner’s hands, playing as well as drinking themselves naked; and in a well-known manuscript of the beginning of the fourteenth century (MS. Reg. 2 B. vii. fol. 167 v^o) we find an illumination which represents this process very literally (cut No. 150). One, who is evidently the more aged of the two players, is already perfectly naked, whilst the other is reduced to his shirt. The illuminator appears to have intended to represent them as playing against each other till neither had anything left, like the two celebrated cats of Kilkenny, who ate one another up until nothing remained but their tails. [Illustration: _No. 150. Mediæval Gamblers._] [Illustration: _No. 151. A Dice-Player._] A burlesque parody on the church service, written in Latin, perhaps as early as the thirteenth century, and printed in the “_Reliquiæ Antiquæ_,” gives us rather a curious picture of tavern manners at that early period. The document is profane,--much more so than any of the parodies for which Hone was prosecuted; but it is only a moderate example of the general laxness in this respect which prevailed, even among the clergy, in what have been called “the ages of faith.” This is entitled “The Mass of the Drunkards,” and contains a running allusion to the throwing of the three dice, and to the loss of clothing which followed; but it is full of Latin puns on the words of the church service, and the greater part of it would not bear a translation.