It is to be observed that in these quotations both Chaucer and Shakespeare call these diptychs by the name “tables,” a word which had several meanings formerly in England. We have seen already that the game of draughts was so called, and it was also frequently applied in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to carvings in alabaster or to paintings on boards in churches. In 1458 money was bequeathed to the church of Dunwich in Suffolk, “ad novam tabulam de alabastro de historia sanctæ Margaretæ,” and a “table of St. Thomas of Ynde” was left in 1510 by Robert Clerk to Batfield church, in Norfolk. An interesting paper in the Archæologia, read before the Society of antiquaries in 1843 by Mr. Albert Way, on the famous golden _Tabula_ of Basle may also be referred to. The writer concludes by expressing his wish that such a monument, then in private hands, “could be deposited in a national collection,” and he complains that “England alone, of all the countries of western Europe, possesses no national collection which exhibits a series of specimens illustrative of the character and progress of the arts of the middle ages, and of the taste and usages of our ancestors.” Happily, this is a complaint which cannot be made now. Chaplets of ivory beads for private devotion were very common in the middle ages, and are often mentioned in letters and other documents. Some good examples still exist in various collections. The woodcut on the next page represents a set, and a girdle with ivory clasps, in the collection of M. Achille Jubinal. [Illustration: CARVED IVORY CHAPLET OF BEADS AND GIRDLE OF AN ABBESS: SIXTEENTH CENTURY.] Another class of small works in ivory was to be found in England from an early period, namely seals. Some have been preserved. One is in the Ashmolean at Oxford; oval, of the archdeaconry of Merioneth, in the thirteenth century; another, walrus ivory, of the abbey of St. Alban is in the British museum. Robert Fabyan the chronicler, in his will dated 1511 leaves to one of his sons “that other signet of gold, with my puncheon of ivory and silver.” [Illustration] There are several very fine horns in the South Kensington collection, more especially no. 7954, engraved in the accompanying woodcut, and which is unequalled by any other of its kind known. The style and workmanship are rare; one, probably by the same hand, was lately in the possession of a noble English family. The horns which we find frequently mentioned in mediæval wills and inventories are hunting horns. For example, Sir John de Foxle in 1378 leaves to the king his great bugle horn, ornamented with gold. “The ivory horn of St. Oswald the king” was preserved at Durham in the year 1383. Near the end of the thirteenth century there were two ivory horns kept in the treasury of St. Paul’s: “Item, cornu eburneum gravatum bestiis et avibus, magnum. Item, aliud cornu eburneum planum et parvum.”