For the period now to be examined, namely, from about the year 1066 to the close of the twelfth century, our chief evidences are still the illuminations of manuscripts, the writings of chroniclers and poets, tapestry-pictures, ivory carvings and metal chasings. The valuable testimonies of the graves are lost to us; but a new source of information is opened to our inquiries in the royal and baronial seals, which from the second half of the eleventh century appear in great abundance wherever the feudal system is in vogue. Among these various evidences, there are two which, for our particular purpose, are especially valuable,--the Bayeux tapestry and the Chronicle of Robert Wace. There seems to be no reasonable doubt of this tapestry having been embroidered at the close of the eleventh century; and whoever has carefully examined it, will be at once convinced that it was wrought, not by courtly ladies, but by the ruder hands of the ordinary tapestry-workers. Curious analogy is found in the decorations of _subsellæ_ of a somewhat later date[152]. The especial value of the Chronicle of the Dukes of Normandy is in the minuteness with which Wace delights to describe the incidents of knightly achievement. Taking his crude facts from William of Jumièges and Dudo of St. Quentin, he fills up their outlines with unwearying elaboration. Not content with drily noting the gathering of a host or the issue of an onslaught, he tells us how the levies came into the camp "by twos, and by threes, and by fours, and by fives," and with what weapons they contended, the material of their staves, and the length and breadth of their blades. He himself lived so near the time of which he writes, and the changes in the interval were so few, that his descriptions have, in most instances, the exactness of those of an eye-witness. The incidents of Duke William's Conquest of England he learns from the lips of his own father, who lived probably in the eleventh century:-- "---- jo oï dire à mon pere: Bien m'en sovint, maiz varlet ere." _Roman de Rou_, l. 11564. We must still, however, keep in view that Wace, like all writers and illuminators of the middle-ages, does not hesitate to fill up his pictures from the scenes around him; so that, while we concede him a large measure of authority, especially for the events near his own time, we must on some occasions withhold our confidence, when his testimony is not in accordance with evidence which is strictly cotemporary.