The foreign knights and visitors who came to Windsor in Edward the First’s reign, and brought with them a continual succession of varying fashions, turned the heads of the young with delight, and of the old with disgust. Douglas, the monk of Glastonbury, is especially denunciative and satirical on this point. He says that in the horrible variety of costume,—“now long, now large, now wide, now straight,”—the style of dress was “destitute and devert from all honesty of old arraye or good usage.” It is all, he says, “so nagged and knibbed on every side, and all so shattered and also buttoned, that I with truth shall say, they seem more like to tormentors or devils in their clothing, and also in their shoying and other array, than they seemed to be like men.” And the old monk had good foundation for his complaint; and the Commons themselves having, what the Commons now have not, a dread of becoming as extravagant as their betters in the article of dress, actually sought the aid of Parliament. That august assembly met the complaint by restricting the use of furs and furls to the royal family and nobles worth one thousand _per annum_. Knights and ladies worth four hundred marks yearly, were permitted to deck themselves in cloths of gold and silver, and to wear certain jewellery. Poor knights, squires, and damsels were prohibited from appearing in the costume of those of higher degree. As for the Commons themselves, they could put on nothing better than unadorned woollen cloth; and if an apprentice or a milliner had been bold enough to wear a ring on the finger, it was in peril of a decree that it should be taken off,—not the finger, but the ring,—with confiscation of the forbidden finery. The consequence was that the Commons, being under prohibition to put on finery, became smitten with a strong desire to assume it; and much did they rejoice when they were ruled over by so consummate a fop as Richard of Bordeaux. All classes were content to do what many classes joyfully do in our own days,—dress beyond their means; and we find in old Harding’s ‘Chronicle’ that not only were “Yemen and gromes in cloth of silk arrayed, Sattin and damask, in doublettes and in gownnes,”