There was a certain costume appropriate to the pilgrim, which old writers speak of under the title of pilgrims' weeds; the illustrations of this paper will give examples of it. It consisted of a robe and hat, a staff and scrip. The robe called _sclavina_ by Du Cange, and other writers, is said to have been always of wool, and sometimes of shaggy stuff, like that represented in the accompanying woodcut of the latter part of the fourteenth century, from the Harleian MS., 4,826. It seems intended to represent St. John Baptist's robe of camel's hair. Its colour does not appear in the illuminations, but old writers speak of it as grey. The hat seems to be commonly a round hat, of felt, and, apparently, does not differ from the hats which travellers not uncommonly wore over their hoods in those days.[183] The pilgrim who was sent on pilgrimage as a penance seems usually to have been ordered to go barefoot, and probably many others voluntarily inflicted this hardship upon themselves in order to heighten the merit and efficacy of their good deed. They often also made a vow not to cut the hair or beard until the pilgrimage had been accomplished. But the special insignia of a pilgrim were the staff and scrip. In the religious service with which the pilgrims initiated their journey, we have seen that the staff and scrip are the only insignia mentioned, except in the case of one going to the Holy Land, who has a robe signed with the cross; the staff and the scrip were specially blessed by the priest, and the pilgrim formally invested with them by his hands. The staff, or bourdon, was not of an invariable shape. On a fourteenth-century grave-stone at Haltwhistle, Northumberland, it is like a rather long walking-stick, with a natural knob at the top. In the cut from Erasmus's "Praise of Folly," which forms the frontispiece of Mr. Nichols's "Pilgrimages of Canterbury and Walsingham," it is a similar walking-stick; but, usually, it was a long staff, some five, six, or seven feet long, turned in the lathe, with a knob at the top, and another about a foot lower down. Sometimes a little below the lower knob there is a hook, or a staple, to which we occasionally find a water-bottle or a small bundle attached. The hook is seen on the staff of Lydgate's pilgrim (p. 163). Sir John Hawkins tells us[184] that the staff was sometimes hollowed out into a kind of flute, on which the pilgrim could play. The same kind of staff we find in illuminated MSS. in the hands of beggars and shepherds, as well as pilgrims.