Defences of plate armour for the feet are called sollerets, and are first, if somewhat indistinctly, visible in the small equestrian figure on the canopy of the tomb of Edmund Crouchback, Earl of Lancaster, in Westminster Abbey, the mail not being continued over the front of the feet as in the older effigies. One of the small equestrian figures of the adjoining tomb of Aymer de Valence has the feet, though mutilated, distinctly covered with small rectangular plates, arranged longitudinally in continuation of the greaves. In the D'Abernon and other brasses of the second quarter of the fourteenth century laminar plates are fastened across the upper part of the foot. Other varieties are the scaled sollerets of the De Cheney brass, 1375; the De Sulney brass, with sollerets of laminar plates, and one large plate over the instep; the Littlebury effigy, with longitudinal plates like those of De Valence. In the effigy of John of Eltham, 1334, we seem for the first time to meet with the whole foot visible incased in plate, as it continued to be during the rest of the century. In the Warwick collection a pair of sollerets are made each of one piece like sabots. The long curved sollerets with pointed toes of the second half of the fourteenth century are called pouleynes or poulaines, from the souliers à la Polaine, and differ slightly from those known as Cracowes, introduced by Richard II. from Bohemia. There are two fine pointed sollerets at Warwick, one measuring twenty-five inches from toe to heel, or with the spur thirty-two and a half inches. Another beautifully-made one attached to leg armour has the plates scalloped along the edges, and is attributed to Edward, son of Henry VI. [Illustration: FIG. 16.--_Effigy of the Black Prince on his tomb in Canterbury Cathedral. From the cast in the Crystal Palace, Sydenham._] The gilt spur was the honorific and distinguishing badge of the knight, and was put on in the ceremony of investiture, and hacked off by the king's cook if the knight was formally degraded. An immense spoil of gilt spurs fell to the victors after the battle of Courtrai. Both the goad and rowel forms were in use throughout the century, and when knights habitually dismounted to fight, they were taken off. Froissart mentions instances where they were fixed in the ground like caltrops. The extravagantly long, rowelled spurs of Henry VI.'s time must have been peculiarly inconvenient.