That the banded defences under consideration were of pourpointing is still more unlikely; for a gamboised garment, whether of velvet, silk, cloth, or whatever material, would, in painted representations, exhibit those various _colours_ which are so lavishly displayed in the other portions of the knightly attire. Yet a careful examination of many hundred figures in illuminated manuscripts has failed in detecting a single instance of positive colour on banded-mail, except such as may be referred to the metals. Green, scarlet, crimson, diaper or ray, never appear. But gold or a golden tincture, silver or white, and grey of various shades, occur continually. And all these seem to indicate a fabric in which metal plays at least a conspicuous part. The examples among vellum-paintings, in which the banding is tinted grey or left white, are so numerous that one can scarcely open a manuscript of the period without finding them. Instances of it in silver may be seen in Cotton MSS., Vitellius, A. xiii., and Nero, D. vi.; in Roy. MS. 20, D. i., and Add. MS. 12,228. On folio 217^{ vo}. of the last-named book will be found the figure of a knight whose banded-mail is gilt. The same kind of armour, in gold colour, appears in the windows of Beer Ferrers Church, Devonshire, and of Fulborn Church, Cambridgeshire. See Lysons' Devonshire, p. 326, and Kerrich Collections, Add. MS. 6,730, fol. 61, for faithful copies of these examples. If from the foregoing evidences we derive the belief that the basis of this fabric was metal, from a monument figured in the superb work of Count Bastard, _Peintures des Manuscrits, &c._, we gather that the lines of arcs were rings; for the fillet that binds the coif round the temples is clearly passed through alternate groups of rings, exactly as in the ordinary mail-hood. The figure is from a French Bible of the beginning of the fourteenth century, and occurs in the seventh number of the _Peintures_. In fairness we must admit that this example is not altogether inadmissible as an evidence in favour of the theory of common chain-mail. And on that side may be ranged the very curious figure of Offa the First, given in our woodcut, No. 80, from the "Lives of the Two Offas," by Matthew Paris (Cott. MS., Nero, D. i. fol. 7); where the upper part of the warrior's coif is of "banded-mail," while the lower portion is marked in the manner usually adopted to express the ordinary chain-mail.