In England gloves came in about the time the Heptarchy went out. The exact period is not known; but we _do_ know that when a society of German merchants sought protection for the trade which they carried on between their own country and England, they propitiated King Ethelred II. by presenting him with five pairs of gloves: their not being able to muster the half-dozen shows the rarity of the article. In the case mentioned the gloves were probably not so much a gift or bribe, as a portion of duty paid in kind. Prior to this period the hands of both sexes were covered, as I before observed, by the mantles; and some persons with rapidly progressing ideas, had donned an imperfect structure which presented a stall for the thumb, and a sort of stocking-foot for the rest of the fingers. They were like the mufflers which we place on the digits of young England; and when Mrs. Ramsbottom made the observation I quoted in the first paragraph, of “having had much walking on her hands lately,” she may have had these very mufflers in her eye. Gloves soon became fashionable among the higher classes; at least, Ordericus Vitalis tells us that when the Bishop of Durham escaped from the Tower, during the reign of Henry I., he had to slide down a rope; and as the bishop, in his hurry, had “forgotten his gloves,” he rubbed the skin off his hands to the bone, in descending from the window. Duke Charles of Guise, when he escaped in a similar manner, from the Château at Tours, in the days of Henri III., had better fortune; he descended more leisurely than the bishop, being lighter, and with no further detriment than a rent in his hose. Long before the period referred to by Ordericus, the French monks were the authorized glove-makers. They especially loved hunting, but respectability required that they should not love the sport merely for the sport’s sake. Accordingly, Charlemagne granted to the monks of Sithin especially, unlimited right of hunting, because of the skins of the deer killed by them they made gloves and girdles, and covers for books. I have before noticed, that by a subsequent decree of the Council of Aix, in the time of Louis le Débonnaire, monks were forbidden to wear any gloves but those made of sheep-skin. Gloves were popular new-year’s gifts, or sometimes “glove-money” in place of them; occasionally, these gloves carried gold pieces in them. When Sir Thomas More was Chancellor, he decided a case in favour of Mrs. Croaker against Lord Arundel; the former, on the following new-year’s day, gratefully presented the judge with a pair of gloves with forty angels in them. “It would be against good manners,” said the Chancellor, “to forsake a gentlewoman’s new-year’s gift, and I accept the gloves. The _lining_ you will elsewhere bestow.”