Page:A History of Domestic Manners and Sentiments in England During the Middle Ages.djvu/255

 and Sentiments. 235 a6live games — among which we may mention efpecially different games with the ball, and alfo, perhaps, the whipping-top. We learn from many fources that hand-ball was from a very early period a favourite recrea- tion with the youth of both fexes. It is a fubje6t not unfrequently met with in the marginal drawings of mediaeval manufcripts. The annexed example (cut No. 164), from MS. Harl. No. 656.3, reprefents aj^pa- rently two ladies playing with a bail. In other inftances, a lady and a gentleman are fimilarly occupied. Our cut No. 165 is taken from one of the carvings of the m'lfe- rere feats in Gloucefter cathedral. The long tails of the hoods belong to the coftume of the latter part of the four- teenth century. The whipping-top was alfo a plaything of confiderable antiquity; I think it maybe traced to the Anglo-Saxon period. Our No. 164. Ball- Flaying. No. 165. A Game at Ball. cut No. t66 is taken from one of the marginal drawings of a well-known manufcript in the Britilh Mufeum (MS. Reg. 2 B. vii.) of the beginning of the fourteenth century. It may be remarked that the knots on the lafhes merely mark a conventional manner of reprefenting a whip, for every boy knows that a knotted whip would not do for a top. Mediaeval art was full of fuch conventionalities. Moft