And so with all the rest, they are clearly described in the ordinary dress of their class, which the pilgrim's robe would have concealed. It seems very doubtful whether they even bore the especial insignia of staff and scrip. Perhaps when men and women went their pilgrimage on horseback, they did not go through the mere form of carrying a long walking-staff. The equestrian pilgrim, of whom we shall give a woodcut hereafter, though he is very correctly habited in robe and hat, with pilgrim signs on each, and his rosary round his neck, does not carry the bourdon. The only trace of pilgrim costume about Chaucer's Pilgrims, is in the Pardoner-- "A vernicle hadde he sewed in his cappe"-- but that was a sign of a former pilgrimage to Rome; and it is enough to prove--if proof were needed--that Chaucer did not forget to clothe his personages in pilgrim weeds, but that they did not wear them. But besides the ordinary insignia of pilgrimage, every pilgrimage had its special signs, which the pilgrim on his return wore conspicuously upon his hat or his scrip, or hanging round his neck, in token that he had accomplished that particular pilgrimage. The pilgrim who had made a long pilgrimage, paying his devotions at every shrine in his way, might come back as thickly decorated with signs as a modern soldier, who has been through a stirring campaign, with medals and clasps. The pilgrim to the Holy Land had this distinction above all others, that he wore a special sign from the very hour that he took the vow upon him to make that most honourable pilgrimage. This sign was a cross, formed of two strips of coloured cloth sewn upon the shoulder of the robe; the English pilgrim wore the cross of white, the French of red, the Flemish of green. Some, in their fierce earnestness, had the sacred sign cut into their flesh; in the romance of "Sir Isumbras," we read-- "With a sharpe knyfe he share A cross upon his shoulder bare."