A knight’s lady was like the mistress of a boarding-school, and a very stern mistress she often proved to be. Rank and birth did not exempt her pupils from strict discipline and hard work. While their brothers were learning to ride and to wrestle, to shoot, and to handle the battle-axe, to sing and to learn to bear themselves gallantly like gentlemen, the maidens were being initiated into the mysteries of weaving, spinning, brewing, distilling, salting, and many other processes which were then performed by each family for itself. To these occupations was added needlework of all kinds, from the making of plain serviceable smocks and cloaks to embroidering banners and altar-cloths; for all wearing apparel, as well as everything required for household use, was manufactured and made up at home. If the male members of the establishment were numerous, a busy time the lady and her maidens must have had. Well might the poet write-- “Mult doit fame estre chier tenue Par li est tout gent vestue. Bien sai que fame file et œuvre Les dras dont l’en se vest et cuevre “Et toissus d’or et drap de soie Et por ce dis-je où que je soie, A toz cels qui orront cest conte, Que de fame ne dient honte.”[1] No doubt the coarser kinds of work, such as the clothes for dependants, were given out to the servants; but every young gentlewoman had to learn the process, so as to be able in her turn to superintend a household. Tailors were also employed for the making of both women’s and men’s garments. In royal households there were regular tailors who made feminine as well as masculine garments. A tailor was called a cissor. In the time of Edward I., the King, the Queen, and the Prince of Wales each had their separate tailors. There were large establishments of celibate priests, like that of Bishop Swinfield who lived in the thirteenth century, where no female servants were permitted to enter, and men performed all the domestic work. Unless the nuns of some neighbouring convent were employed in working for these semi-monastic households, there must have been a supply of masculine weavers and spinners. Curiously enough, the only in-door employment in these priests’ houses for which female labour was engaged was that of brewing. The brewing was always exclusively in the hands of women, and it is thought possible that even in ecclesiastical establishments the old custom was followed. In the Middle Ages it was not usual for women to be employed about the royal palaces except to attend on the queen and princesses. In France, says Meiners, in his “History of the Female Sex”--