Now if the romance whence the above lines are extracted is to be considered as a picture of the earliest days of chivalry it is certainly incorrect, for it was not before the middle age of knighthood that the face was concealed by a vizor, the earlier defence of the nasal piece certainly not serving as a mask. The romances are unexceptionable witnesses for the general customs of chivalry, but we cannot fix their statements to any particular time, for they were varied and improved by successive repetitions and transcriptions, and when they were rendered into prose still further changes were made in order to please the taste of the age. Thus, in an old Danish romance, a knight fighting for his lady remains on his horse; but when in the fifteenth century the tale was translated into the idioms of most chivalric countries, he is represented as alighting from his milk-white steed and giving it to his fair companion to hold; and the reason of this departure from the old ballad was, that the translators, wishing to make their work popular, adapted it to the manners of the age; and it was the general fashion then for the knights to dismount when they fought. [Sidenote: Its general features interesting] In spite of all our attempts at chronological accuracy, something or other is perpetually baffling us. We commonly think that mixed armour was the defensive harness in the days of our Edward the Third; but in Chaucer's portrait of the knightly character of that time, only the haubergeon is assigned to the cavalier. Plate-armour seems to have been the general costume of the fifteenth century; and in any pictorial exhibition of the murder of John Duke of Burgundy in the year 1419, the artist who should represent the Duke as harnessed in chain-mail, would be condemned by a synod of archæologists as guilty of an unpardonable anachronism; yet we know, on the unquestionable authority of Monstrelet, that when the Duke lay on the ground, Olivier Layet, assisted by Pierre Frotier, thrust a sword under the haubergeon into his belly; and that after he had been thus cruelly murdered, the Dauphin's people stripped from him his coat of mail.[115] But though it is difficult to determine the fashion of any part of armour in any particular century, and life may afford nobler occupations than considering the precise year and month when the Normans gave up the clumsy expedient of inserting the sword through a hole in the hauberk, and adopted the more graceful and convenient form of a belt[116], yet viewing the subject of armour in some of its broad features, matter of no slight interest may be found. We may not regard the precise form and fashion of a warrior's scarf, or care to enquire whether the embroidery were worked with gold or silver, but the general fact itself involves the state of manners and feelings among our ancestors: it carries us to the lady's bower where she was working this token of love;