The anonymous satirist, however, was not original. He had not the merit, such as it might be, of having invented the slander which he flung as an insult at the people against whom he obviously entertained a bitter animosity. If, as there is reason to believe, he was a Frenchman, he merely repeated a gibe which had long been one of the commonplaces of vulgar vituperation amongst his compatriots. In the description which the thirteenth-century chronicler, Jacques de Vitry, gives of the depraved state of Paris in his day, and more particularly of the rude behaviour and coarse jests of the students who flocked to its famous university, he states that diversity of nationality aroused amongst them dissensions, hatred and violent animosities, to which they gave vent by indulging in all kinds of invectives against each other. As an example of their scurrility, he mentions that they called the English drunkards and "tailards".[294] To suppose, from the very absurdity of the imputation, that it was merely cast as a taunt, and that no actual belief lay behind it, would be to ignore all that medieval credulity was capable of. Moreover, the attitude taken up by the English themselves, implied shame at an alleged deformity fully as much as anger at a wanton insult. On this point evidence is supplied by the Dominican monk Etienne de Bourbon, a moralist who flourished about the middle of the thirteenth century. In a treatise which is devoted to the exposition of subjects suitable for the pulpit, and which abounds in quaint stories as well as in caustic commentaries on contemporary manners, he does not omit to deal with the inordinate love of dress displayed by women, and to denounce the prevailing fashion of wearing extravagantly long trains to their gowns. He rebukes them for impiously presuming to better God's work, for doing away with the honourable distinction conferred upon them as human beings, and for deliberately assuming that which brings them down to the same level as brute beasts. As a climax, he inveighs against their shamelessness in making themselves what the English blush to be called--"tailards".[295]