Coventry that day was a city of the dead. None stirred, or might stir, out of doors while the pious Godiva rode her enfranchising pilgrimage, and all faces were turned from curtained and shuttered windows. All, that is to say, save one. A graceless tailor, whose name has been handed down to us as “Peeping Tom,” looked out from a hole he had bored in a shutter, and we are asked to believe that he was blinded by the wrath of Heaven for his presumption. “The story of Peeping Tom is well known,” says Wigstead, writing in 1797; adding, “This effigy is now to be seen next door to the ‘King’s Head’ inn, said to be the very house from whence he attempted to gratify his curiosity.” Peeping Tom, in fact, is a personage whom Coventry will not willingly resign to oblivion. Representations of that “low churl, compact of thankless earth,” have been numerous in the city. Not so long since there were three, all spying from their several positions down upon the streets, and certainly the one Wigstead mentions is still in evidence, not now “next door” to the “King’s Head,” but built into a blank window of that rebuilt hostelry. If tailors dressed thus in Saxon days, they must have been gorgeous persons. But the effigy, looking like that of an Admiral from some comic opera, is not older than a century and a half, and is perhaps a portion of a figure carried in the Godiva processions that at intervals have paraded Coventry’s streets for many years past. They do so now, but whether the obvious wig and the pink silk tights of the music-hall woman, representing Godiva, commend themselves as realising the old legend, is a matter of individual taste. [Illustration: PEEPING TOM.] To tell Coventry’s long story is not the purport of these pages. Much of it is inseparable from the history of England. History in that more spacious sort was making when, in the reign of Richard II., the Dukes of Hereford and Norfolk fought their duel on Gosford Green, in 1398. Richard banished both: Norfolk for life and Hereford for ten years; but Hereford was back within a year and proclaimed King, and Richard deposed and murdered in the dungeons of Pontefract.