"Et avoient les dames et damoyselles de chacun coste, deux grandes oreilles si larges, que quand elles vouloient passer par l'huis d'une chambre il fallait qu'elles se tournassent de coste et baisassent, ou elles n'eussent pu passer:" that is, "on every side old ladies and young ladies were seen with such high and monstrous ears (or horns), that when they wanted to enter a room they were obliged perforce to stoop and crouch sideways, or they could not pass." At last a regular attack was made on the high head-gear of the fifteenth century by a popular monk, in his sermons at Notre Dame, in which he so pathetically lamented the sinfulness and enormities of such a fashion, that the ladies, to show their contrition, made _auto da fes_ of their Syrian bonnets in the public squares and market-places; and as the Church fulminated against them all over Europe, the example of Paris was universally followed. Many attempts had previously been made by zealous preachers to effect this alteration. In the previous century a Carmelite in the province of Bretagne preached against this fashion, without the power to annihilate it: all that the ladies did was to change the particular shape of the huge coiffures after every sermon. "No sooner," says the chronicler, "had he departed from one district, than the dames and damoyselles, who, like frightened snails, had drawn in their horns, shot them out again longer than ever; for nowhere were the _hennins_ (so called, abbreviated from _gehinnin_, incommodious,) larger, more pompous or proud, than in the cities through which the Carmelite had passed. "All the world was totally reversed and disordered by these fashions, and above all things by the strange accoutrements on the heads of the ladies. It was a portentous time, for some carried huge towers on their foreheads an ell high; others still higher caps, with sharp points, like staples, from the top of which streamed long crapes, fringed with gold, like banners. Alas, alas! ladies, dames, and demoiselles were of importance in those days! When do we hear, in the present times, of Church and State interfering to regulate the patterns of their bonnets?"[95] It is no wonder that fashions so very extreme and absurd should call forth animadversion from various quarters. Thus wrote Petrarch in 1366:--