Note 9 — I. THE ROLL.

Strutt thus disposes of a difficulty which may occur to some minds.—“If any one should say, by way of objection to this established rule, that though the illuminator has not given us the customs, habits, &c., of those people he designed to picture out, yet is it not most likely that such dresses as are given should be fictitious, agreeable rather to his own wild fancy than to the real customs and habits of his own times? To answer their objection, (and that because the chief materials of the present work are collected from the ancient MSS.) the reader must be informed, that many of these MSS. (especially such as are illuminated) were done as presents, or at the command of kings and noblemen, who are generally represented in the frontispiece in their proper habits receiving the particular MS. done for them from the author, and they are generally pictured attended by their court, or retinue. That these figures should be habited in the true dress of the times will not be doubted; and then, as far as the anonymous illuminations which may chance to follow in the MS. shall agree with those figures in the frontispiece, so far they may be allowed as authentic; other MSS. were done for particular abbeys and monasteries, in the embellishments of which no pains were spared. But a still greater proof of the authenticity of these delineations is, that on examining all the illuminated MSS. of the same century together, which, tho’ various, every one written and ornamented by different hands, yet on comparing the several delineations with each other, they will be found to agree in every particular of dress, customs, &c., even in the minutiæ, which perfect similitude it would have been impossible to have preserved, had not some sure standard been regularly taken for the whole; therefore the fancy of the painter will be found to have little share in these valuable delineations. Besides, these pictures constantly agree with the description of the habits and customs of the same period, collected from the old historians.”—Strutt’s Manners, Customs, &c., of the Inhabitants of England, vol. i, p. 3.