Some seigneurs will actually rise considerably before sunup, hear mass, mount their high turret, survey the landscape, then descend to order the washing horn to be blown. We hear, too, of ladies who rise at dusk, have chaplains chant matins while they are throwing on some clothes, then go to the regular chapel mass, next complete their toilet and take a walk in their garden, all before breakfast. There are, indeed, stories of noble folk sleeping even in summer right up to 6 A.M., but these backslidings follow only a deplorable carouse. Conon and Adela are neither indefatigable risers, nor among the slothful. They are seldom found in bed at cock-crow, and the baron is already warning his young sons that "he who sleeps too long in the morning becomes thin and lazy." So at gray dawn William, Conon's first body squire, has yawned on his pallet by the chamber door, tugged on his own clothes, then hastened to the great bed to assist his master to dress. This is one of a good squire's prime duties, but he need not divest his lord of any nightgown. Nightdresses are no more used in the thirteenth century than are table forks. Conon has been sleeping between the sheets, with only the clothing of a newborn babe, although, curiously enough, he wraps around his head a kind of napkin, precursor of the later nightcap. When the baron has donned a part of his clothes Gervais, the second squire, brings in a metal basin of water and a white towel. The age is one of great contradictions in matters of cleanliness. Baron Conon washes his face and hands carefully and frequently. He also takes complete baths pretty often, using large wooden tubs filled with hot perfumed water. Personally he seems an extraordinarily neat man, and so are all the higher-rank people. But the age has never heard of polluted wells and other breeding spots for malignant fevers. Flies are harmless annoyances. Numerous evil smells can hardly be prevented, any more than cold weather--the saints give us grace to bear them! In short, cleanliness stops with care of the person. Preventive sanitation is as unknown as are the lands which may lie across the storm-tossed Atlantic--"the Sea of Darkness." There is an old rhyme which is supposed to give the right times for the routine of the day: "Rise at five, dine at nine, Sup at five, to bed at nine, Is the way to live to be ninety and nine." Sometimes dinner came later than nine, but never, if possible, much after ten. People have sometimes become distressed because the meal had to be postponed until noon. This was natural, for everybody is stirring at daybreak and for breakfast probably has had only a few morsels of bread washed down with thin wine--a poor substitute even for the coffee and rolls of the later continental breakfast. [Sidenote: A Baron's Routine Business and Diversions]