_Pertica diversos pannos retinere solebat._
[Illustration: _No. 92. Walter de Hamuntesham attacked by a Mob._]
Our cut No. 93, taken from a manuscript of the _Roman de la Rose_, written in the fourteenth century, and now preserved in the National Library in Paris (No. 6985, fol. 2, v^o), represents a perche, with two garments suspended upon it. The one represented in our next cut (No. 94) is of rather a different form, and is made to support the arms of a knight, his helmet, sword, and shield, and his coat of mail; but how the sword and helmet are attached to it is far from clear. This example is taken from an illuminated manuscript of a well-known work by Guillaume de Deguilleville, _Le Pelerinage de la Vie humaine_, of the latter end of the fourteenth century, also preserved in the French National Library (No. 6988): another copy of the same work, preserved in the same great collection (No. 7210), but of the fifteenth century, gives a still more perfect representation of the perche, supporting, as in the last example, a helmet, a shield, and coats of mail. In the foreground, a queen is depositing the staff and scrip of a hermit in a chest, for greater security. This subject is represented in our cut No. 95.
[Illustration: _No. 94. Another Perche._]
[Illustration: _No. 95. Scene in a Chamber._]
Furniture of every kind continued to be rare, and chairs were by no means common articles in ordinary houses. In the chambers, seats were made in the masonry by the side of the windows, as represented in our cut No. 88, and sometimes along the walls. Common benches were the usual seats, and these were often formed by merely laying a plank upon two trestles. Such a bench is probably represented in the accompanying cut (No. 96), taken from a manuscript of the romance of Tristan, of the fourteenth century, preserved in the National Library at Paris (No. 7178). Tables were made in the same manner. We now, however, find not unfrequent mention of a _table dormant_ in the hall, which was of course a table fixed to the spot, and which was not taken away like the others: it was probably the great table of the _dais_, or upper end of the hall. To “begin the table dormant” was a popular phrase, apparently equivalent to taking the first place at the feast. Chaucer, in the prologue to the Canterbury Tales, describing the profuse hospitality of the Frankeleyn, says--
