People adorn their bodies as well as their houses; luxury in dress is carried to such an excess that Parliament finds it necessary to interfere, and forbids women of the lower classes to wear any furs except cat and rabbit.[442] Edward III. buys of master Paul de Monteflor gowns for the queen, in "stuffs from over the sea," to the enormous amount of 1,330 pounds. He himself wears a velvet waistcoat, on which he has caused golden pelicans to be embroidered by William Courtenay, a London embroiderer. He gives his mistress Alice Perrers 21,868 large pearls, and thirty ounces of smaller ones. His daughter Margaret receives from him two thousand pearls as a wedding present; he buys his sister Alienor a gilded carriage, tapestried and embroidered, with cushions and curtains of silk, for which he pays one thousand pounds.[443] At that time one might for the same sum have bought a herd of sixteen hundred oxen. The sense of beauty, together with a reverence for and a worship of it, was spreading among the nation whose thoughts shortly before used to run in quite different lines. Attention is paid to physical beauty, such as it had never received before. Men and women wear tight garments, showing the shape of the figure. In the verses he composed for his tomb at Canterbury, the Black Prince mourns over "his beauty which has all gone." Richard II., while still alive, has graven on his tomb that he was "corpore procerus."[444] The taste of the English for finery becomes so well known, that to them is ascribed, even in France, the invention of new fashions. Recalling to his daughters, in order to teach them modesty, that "the deluge in the time of Noah happened for the pride and disguises of men, and mostly of women, who remodelled their shapes by means of gowns and attire," the Knight de la Tour Landry gives the English ladies the credit, or rather the discredit, of having invented the immeasurable head-dresses worn at that day. It is an evil sign; in that country people amuse themselves too much: "In England many there are that have been blamed, the report goes, I know not whether it is wrongly or rightly."[445] Owing to the attention paid to physical beauty in England, sculptors now begin--a rare thing at that time--to have living models, and to copy the nude. In the abbey of Meaux, "Melsa," near Beverley, on the banks of the Humber, was seen in the fourteenth century a sight that would have been rather sought for by the banks of the Arno, under the indulgent sky of Italy. The abbot Hugh of Leven having ordered a new crucifix for the convent chapel, the artist "had always a naked man under his eyes, and he strove to give to his crucifix the beauty of form of his model."[446]