There are sometimes seen around St. Aliquis certain obnoxious people who are compelled to wear conspicuous garments in order that others may be warned and thus avoid physical or moral contamination. If you meet a man with a gray coat and a scarlet hat, pass at a distance--he is a leper. If he has a big circle of saffron cloth sewed on his breast, look to your money--he is a Jew. If he has a cross sewed on each side of his breast, say a prayer--he is a released heretic. Finally, if you go to Pontdebois and come upon sundry unveiled females in scarlet dresses, accost them not if you are a decent man--they are women of the town. At last we have seen the general nature of the garments which are to make gay Alienor's wedding. It is time for the wedding itself. Marriage, in noble families often does not mean the union of two souls, but of two fiefs. The average baron marries to extend his seigneury and to rear up sons to defend it. A wife represents an estate and a castle. Not many young men marry before they have been knighted. After that they are glad to enter into holy wedlock, for the normal way an aspiring young cavalier whose father is living can gain independence is through his wife's dowry, unless his father allows him a share of the barony. [Sidenote: Ages for Marriage] Since young men are not often knighted until late in their teens or even beyond twenty, weddings on their side seldom take place early. Girls, however, become marriageable sooner. South Country troubadours assert that love can begin to claim a girl when she is thirteen; she is then eligible for marriage. If she has not "given her heart" by the time she is twenty-one there is no hope for her, save in a nunnery; and old maids find no recognized place in society whether in castle, city, or peasant hut.[26] [Illustration: A ROYAL MARRIAGE IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY From a manuscript preserved in the British Museum (Green).] Of course, couples can marry younger than that. Not many years earlier Count Baldwin VI of Hainault was wedded to Countess Marie of Champagne. The bride was only twelve, the bridegroom only fourteen. Boys and girls are thus sometimes merely "so many pieces on a chessboard," to suit the ambitions of guardians.