During the period of the Napoleonic wars, a number of French prisoners were installed in England at Norman Cross near Peterborough, Porchester Castle, and Edinburgh Castle, and during their confinement introduced the process of straw marquetry, which had been practised on the Continent since the time of Henry III., and possibly earlier. Boxes, trays, decorative pictures, nick-nacks, and hand-screens were made. Towards the end of the eighteenth century straw plaiting became vastly fashionable, and straw was adopted for hats, ribbons, plumes, girdles, and tassels. The fan was not behindhand, but followed the prevailing taste. Several of these objects appear in the Victoria and Albert Museum, amongst them being two hand-screens with plaited views. The fashion lasted well into the nineteenth century, when an extensive manufacture was also carried on in India (Bengal) for exportation to Europe. This chiefly consisted of hand-screens of the pear-shaped gourd type, rush being the material employed. [Illustration: OSTRICH FEATHER FOLDING-FAN (From the portrait group by Van Loon at Amsterdam.)] The people of the Netherlands have been famous, from the Middle Ages onwards, for the splendour of their costumes. We have an account of Jane of Navarre, wife of Philippe le Bel, who, upon the occasion of a visit to Bruges in 1301, was so much struck by the pomp and magnificence displayed by the inhabitants, particularly the ladies, that she exclaimed, ‘What do I see! I thought I alone was Queen, but here I find them by whole hundreds.’ The fact that fans were largely used in the Low Countries during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is evidenced by the frequency of their appearance in painted and engraved representation. In the ‘Omnium pene Europæ, Asiæ, Aphricæ, atque Americæ Gentium habitus,’ engraved by A. de Bruÿn, and published at Antwerp in 1581, nine years anterior to the earliest edition of Vecellio, the long-handled plumed fan appears in the hands of a Belgian lady; the shorter-handled tuft-fan is also carried by noble ladies of England and France. In the works of the great Flemish painters, Vandyck and Rubens, the rigid feather-fan constantly occurs. [Illustration: An Offering to Ceres, stick ivory painted with a rustic scene. German or Dutch, 21” × 11”. From Queen Victoria’s collection. H.R.H. Princess Louise, Duchess of Argyll.] In the engraving by ‘J. Côyens et C. Mortier,’ of the family of Frederick and Elizabeth, King and Queen of Bohemia, the young Princess Louysa holds a dark ostrich feather-fan with a mirror in the centre. In the large portrait group by Van Loon at Amsterdam, of the family of Jan Miense Molenaer, a lady holds a folding-fan of white ostrich feathers, the wavy ivory sticks numbering five; in the same picture another lady holds a small rigid feather-fan composed of the feathers of one of the smaller birds.