These canons may usually be recognised in pictures by their costume. The most characteristic features were the square cap and the furred amys. The amys was a fur cape worn over the shoulders, with a hood attached, and usually has a fringe of the tails of the fur or sometimes of little bells, and two long ends in front. In the accompanying very beautiful woodcut we have a semi-choir of secular canons, seated in their stalls in the cathedral, with the bishop in his stall at the west end. They are habited in surplices, ornamented with needlework, beneath which may be seen their robes, some pink, some blue in colour.[227] One in the subsellæ seems to have his furred amys thrown over the arm of his stall; his right-hand neighbour seems to have his hanging over his shoulder. He, and one in the upper stalls, have round skull caps (birettas); others have the hood on their heads, where it assumes a horned shape, which may be seen in other pictures of canons. The woodcut is part of a full-page illumination of the interior of a church, in the Book of Hours of Richard II., in the British Museum (Domit. xvii.). [Illustration] These powerful ecclesiastical establishments continued to flourish throughout the Middle Ages; their histories must be sought in Dugdale's "Monasticon," or Britton's or Murray's "Cathedrals," or the monographs of the several cathedrals. In the registers of the cathedrals there exists also a vast amount of unpublished matter, which would supply all the little life-like details that historians usually pass by, but which we need to enable us really to enter into the cathedral life of the Middle Ages. The world is indebted to Mr. Raine for the publication of some such details from the registry of York, in the very interesting "York Fabric Rolls," which he edited for the Surtees Society. To return to the Saxon rectors. By the end of the Saxon period of our history we find the whole kingdom divided into parishes, and in each a rector resident. Probably the rectors were often related to the lords of the manors, as is natural in the case of family livings; they were not a learned clergy; speaking generally they were a married clergy; in other respects, too, they did not affect the ascetic spirit of monasticism; they ate and drank like other people; farmed their own glebes; spent a good deal of their leisure in hawking and hunting, like their brothers, and cousins, and neighbours; but all their interests were in the people and things of their own parishes; they seem to have performed their clerical functions fairly well; and they were bountiful to the poor; in short, they seem to have had the virtues and failings of the country rectors of a hundred years ago.