One of the greatest of the North Sea chieftains derived his name from his dress, and Ragner Lodbroch means Ralph Leatherbreeches. The Lethbridges of Somersetshire are _said_ to be descendants from this worthy. They might go further in search of an ancestor and fare worse. Lodbroch delighted in blood and plunder; wine he drank by the quart; wealth he acquired by “right of might;” he believed in little, and feared even less. A family anxious to assert its nobility could hardly do better than hold fast by such a hero. Many a genealogical tree springs from a less illustrious root. The submission with which England received laws of fashion from France is seen in the circumstance that even before the Conquest the English imported the “mode” from beyond Channel, and universally adopted it. This was the case both in speech and dress. The Saxon tongue became as mute at the court of Edward the Confessor as the Flemish language has around the throne of Leopold of Belgium. The respectable sires however of the period did not make themselves so “outlandish” in their garb as did their sons; yet when William tumbled on the sands at Pevensey, half the hostile array prepared to resist his coming, as well as those who looked on and awaited the course of events, were familiar with his form of speech and accustomed to his fashion of dress. The fact that when William was agitated he invariably occupied himself in lacing and untying his cloak, is at least as well worth knowing as that the great Coligny under similar circumstances used to insert two or three toothpicks into his mouth, and there champ them into pulp. Let us add, that the Normans shaved close and washed thoroughly; and the dirty Saxons might have found consolation in the circumstance that their throats were cut by cleanly gentlemen. They were a costly people however, those Normans; and they not only ruined the Saxons, but themselves, by the extravagance of their dress, and the ever-varying fashions to which they bore an alacrity of allegiance. Some of our wealthiest men of Norman descent, or fancying themselves to be so, adopt in these days a fashion common enough in the period of the Norman Kings, wearing a plumed helm on parade for show, and a “wide-awake” elsewhere for comfort. The Normans even took the venerated smock-frock of the Saxons, and modifying it a little, and lining it with fur for the winter, they wore it as a surcoat over their armour, and called it by the name of _bliaus_. Any gentleman therefore who wears a blouse and a wide-awake may fancy himself, if he please, as being attired like a Norman knight. Well, in spite of the strength of his fancy and the sameness of the articles in question, he will be as little like to Norman cavalier “as I to Hercules.”