Page:The English Peasant.djvu/382

 poor commons and labourers of France given by Monstrelet, in his Chronicles, commencing with a doleful ''Hélas! hélas! hélas! hélas! and in which they cry to all the classes above them to regard their visages si pitieux et si palles'', and their limbs which are no longer able to sustain them. As they go from house to house every one tells them God will provide. "Alas!" they cry, "we are not dogs but Christians, and in God we are all brothers!"

Little chance had the labourer in making his appeal on such grounds. For if the agonies of feudalism had rendered its " rude men of the country" "insolent," and changed some of the trembhng "gaspers" into greedy "graspers," it had produced in the wealthier classes a kind of delirium. A glance at the fashions of the age is sufficient. A bal masqué in a lunatic asylum, a congregation of fiends; such is the effect of its civil and military costume. Brandt says:—

Add to this, tight-fitting hose coming up over the haunches, the two halves of the body being of different and incongruous colours, Absolom-like curls, surmounted by a jaunty hat with a peacock's feather, shoes snouted with a metal pike, a finger long, looking upwards, and ugliness inconceivable, wearing over them a clog also snouted and piked, these courtiers of the fifteenth century looked more like great winged insects than men. Every one, says Brandt, dressed above their station, and many mortgaged their land or sold it outright to keep up these outrageous fashions.

The military costume seemed expressly devised to terrorize. The helmets were in some cases arranged so as to give their wearers the appearance of a grimacing monster; in others a horrifying effect was produced by surmounting them with all kinds of outrageous forms, coloured brilliantly, and rendered dazzling by long mantlets streaming and curling. There is a battle by Uccello in the Louvre, in which the head-dresses of the combatants dance about on the black background like great Chinese lanterns. The whole harness was in keeping: if the feet did not look like a ponderous wedge, they took the form of a vulture's claw.