Further on (chap. xiii) another hostelry is described, and the conversation between two travellers who have just slept in the same bed shows what a trouble the fleas were: “William, undress and wash your legs, and then dry them with a cloth, and rub them well for love of the fleas, that they may not leap on your legs, for {133} there is a peck of them lying in the dust under the rushes. . . . Hi! the fleas bite me so! and do me great harm, for I have scratched my shoulders till the blood flows.” [Illustration 28. ON THE ROADSIDE. THE ALEHOUSE. (_From the MS. 10 E. IV.; English; Fourteenth Century._)] Beer was drunk along the way, and was found in other places besides the inn where travellers slept at night. At the cross-roads, in the more frequented parts of the country, alehouses, with a long projecting pole above the door and a bush at the end of it, invited the traveller to have a rest and a drink. Chaucer’s pilgrims, riding on the way to Canterbury, dismounted at a house of this kind. The pardoner, who had his habits, would not begin his tale without a little comfort: “But first, quod he, her at this ale-stake I wil bothe drynke and byten on a cake.” A miniature of the fourteenth century, of which we give a reproduction, represents the alehouse with its long horizontal pole holding its bush well out in front above the road. The house consists but of one storey, a woman stands before the door with a large beer-jug, and a hermit is drinking from a large cup. It was the fashion to have extremely long poles, which offered no inconvenience in the country, but in town they had to be regulated, and a maximum length fixed. According to the wording of the Act, poles so long were used, that they “did tend to the great deterioration of the houses in which they {134} were placed,” and they reached so far and had signs so low, that they were in the way of the riders’ heads. The Act of 1375 relating these grievances orders that in future poles shall not extend more than seven feet over the public way,[145] which was enough to give picturesqueness to streets not so wide as ours.