Page:A History of Domestic Manners and Sentiments in England During the Middle Ages.djvu/235

 a?id Sefiti??tents. 215 to be the fon of the duchefs Parife. A party of robbers (which appears not to have been a fpecially difreputable avocation among the Hungarians of the romance) are employed, firft to feduce the youth to " the chefs and the dice," and afterwards to lead him againft his will to a thieving expedition, the obje6t of which was to rob the treafury of the king, his godtather. They made a great hole in the wall, and thruft Hugues through it. The youth beheld the heaps of gold and filver with aflonilli- ment, but, refolved to touch none of the wealth he faw around him, his eyes fell upon a cotter on which lay three dice, " made and pointed in fine ivory" — Garde for i. efcrin,Ji a 'veu iij. dez, ^liii font de fin yvoire et fait et po'inture. — Parise la Duchesse, p. 94. Hugues feized the three dice, thruft them into his bofom, and, returning through the breach in the wall, told the robbers that he had carried away "the worth of four cities." When the robbers heard his explanation, they at once concluded, from the tafte he had difplayed on this occafion, that he was of gentle blood, and the king formed the fame opinion on the refult of this trial. During the period of which we are now fpeaking — the twelfth and thirteenth centuries — the ufe of dice had fpread itfelf from the higheft to the very loweft clafs of the population. In its Ampler form, that of the game of hazard, in which the chance of each player refted on the mere throw of the dice, it was the common game of the low frequenters of the taverns, — that clafs which lived upon the vices of fociety, and which was hardly looked upon as belonging to fociety itfelf. The pra6tice and refults of gambling are frequently referred to in the popular writers of the later middle ages. People could no longer ftake their perfonal liberty on the throw, but they played for everything they had — even for the clothes they carried upon them, on which the tavern-keepers, who feem to have afted alfo as pawnbrokers, readily lent fmall funis of money. We often read of men who got into the taverner's hands, playing as well as drinking themfelves naked 3 and in a well-known manufcript of the beginning of the fourteenth century (MS. Reg. 2 B. vii. fol. 167 v°) we find an illumination which reprefents this procefs very literally (cut No. 150).