The authorities tried to get these canons observed. Grostête sent back a curate who came to him for ordination "dressed in rings and scarlet like a courtier."[301] Some of the vicars of York Cathedral[302] were presented in 1362 A.D. for being in the habit of going through the city in short tunics, ornamentally trimmed, with knives and baselards[303] hanging at their girdles. But the evidence before us seems to prove that it was not only the acolyte-rectors, and worldly-minded clerics, who indulged in such fashions, but that the secular clergy generally resisted these endeavours to impose upon them anything approaching to a regular habit like those worn by the monks and friars, and persisted in refusing to wear sad colours, or to cut their coats differently from other people, or to abstain from wearing a gold ring or an ornamented girdle. In the drawings of the secular clergy in the illuminated MSS., we constantly find them in the ordinary civil costume. Even in representations of the different orders and ranks of the secular clergy drawn by friendly hands, and intended to represent them _comme il faut_, we find them dressed in violation of the canons. We have already had occasion to notice a bishop in a blue-grey gown and hood, over a blue under-robe; and a prior performing a royal baptism, and canons performing service under the presidency of their bishop, with the blue and red robes of every-day life under their ritual surplices. The MSS. furnish us with an abundance of other examples, _e.g._--In the early fourteenth-century MS., Add. 10,293, at f. 131 v., is a picture showing "how the priests read before the barony the letter which the false queen sent to Arthur." One of the persons thus described as priests has a blue gown and hood and black shoes, the other a claret-coloured gown and hood and red shoes. [Illustration: _Dns. Ricardus de Threton, Sacerdos._]