Page:A History of Domestic Manners and Sentiments in England During the Middle Ages.djvu/459

 and Sef2time?its. 439 feparate, and go home by different ftreets, and they are reprefented as telling their hulbands that they had been to church. This is no doubt a pidure of a common Icene in the fifteenth century. Among the municipal records of Canterbury, there is preferved the depofition of a man who appears to have been fufpefted of a robbery, and who, to prove an alibi, defcribes all his a6tions during three days. On one of thefe, Monday, he went after eight o'clock in the evening to a tavern, and there he found " wyfcs" drinking, " that is to fay, Goddardes wyfe, Corne- welles wyfe, and another woman," and he had a halfpennyworth of beer with them. This was apparently at the beginning of the reign of Henry VIII. It has been intimated before, that literature and reading had now become more general accomplilhments than formerly. We can trace among the records of focial hiftory a general fpreading of education, which lliowed an increafing intelleftual agitation; in fa6t, education, without becoming more perfed, had become more general. I have already given figures of the implements of writing at an earlier period. In one of the com- partments of the tapeflry of "Nancy" (of the latter part of this century), engravings of which have been pubhflied by M. Achille Jubinal, we have a figure of a fcribe (cut No. 276) with all his apparatus of writing, — the pen, the penknife, and the portable pen-cafe with ink-ftand attached. But the moft curious article which this fcribe has in ufe is a pair of fpeSiacles. Spedacles, however, we know had been in exiffence long before this period. A century earlier, Chaucer's " ^^'ife of Bath" obferved rather fententioully : — Po-vertful often, whan a man is lo-zve, Maketh him his God and eek himjelf to kncwe. Po'vert a spectacle is, as thinketh me, Thurgh lohich he may his -uerray frcndes je. No. 276. yl Scribe, in SpeSiacles, from the tapejiry of Nancy. Lydgate,