The accompanying woodcut will admirably illustrate the ornamented girdle, purse, and knife, of which we have been reading. It is from a MS. of Chaucer's poem of the Romaunt of the Rose (Harl. 4,425, f. 143), and represents a priest confessing a lady in a church. The characters in the scene are, like the poem, allegorical; the priest is Genius, and the lady is Dame Nature; but it is not the less an accurate picture of a confessional scene of the latter part of the fourteenth century. The priest is habited in a robe of purple, with a black cap and a black liripipe attached to it, brought over the shoulder to the front, and falling over the arm. The tab, peeping from beneath the cap above the ear, is red; the girdle, purse, and knife, are, in the original illumination, very clearly represented. In another picture of the same person, at f. 106, the black girdle is represented as ornamented with little circles of gold. [Illustration: _A Priest Confessing a Lady._] Many of these clergymen had one black toga with hood _en suite_--not for constant use in divine service, for, as we have already seen, they are generally represented in the illuminations with coloured "togas" under their surplices,--but perhaps, for wear on mourning occasions. Thus, in the presentations of York Cathedral, A.D. 1519, "We thynke it were convenient that whene we fetche a corse to the churche, that we shulde be in our blak abbettes [habits] mornyngly, w{t} our hodes of the same of our hedes, as is used in many other places."[305]