EDWARD F. RIMBAULT.

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BEAVER HATS—­PISAN.

Allow me to say a few words in reply to your correspondent “GASTROS.”  His quotation from Fairholt (Costume in England), who cites Stubbes’s Anatomy of Abuses as the earliest authority for the use of beaver hats in England, is not a satisfactory reply to my query; inasmuch as I am aware that beaver hats were occasionally worn by great people in this country some centuries before Stubbes was born.  For example, Henry III. possessed “unum capellum de Bevre cum apparatu auri et lapidibus preciosis;” as appears from the “Wardrobe Account,” of the 55th year of his reign.  I have, therefore, still to ask for the earliest instance of the use of hats or caps of this material in England; such hats, as well as gloves, are mentioned in several English inventories made between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries.  Is there any example earlier than the time of Henry III.?

“GASTROS” has also obligingly replied to my query as to “the meaning of the term Pisan, used in old records for some part of defensive armour,” but he seems to have forgotten that I expressly stated that term had no relation to “the fabrics of Pisa;” at least such is my belief.  With regard to the inventory of the arms and armour of Louis le Hutin, taken in 1316, printed in Meyrick’s Ancient Armour, to which he kindly refers me, it may be observed that the said inventory is so perversely translated in the first edition of that work (just now I have no means of consulting the second), as to be all but useless; indeed it might be termed one of the most extraordinary literary performances of modern times, as the following instance may suffice to show.  One of the items of the inventory is, “une cote gamboisee a arbroissiaus d’or broudees a chardonereus;” and it is thus rendered into English, “a gamboised coat with a rough surface (like a thicket;—­note) of gold embroidered on the nap of the cloth!” The real signification is “a gamboised coat embroidered in gold, with little bushes (or trees), with gold-finches [on them].”  But I am rather wandering from my point:  I never could ascertain on what authority Sir Samuel Meyrick asserted that “jazeran armour,” as he calls it, was formed of “overlapping plates.”  The French word jazeran was derived from the Italian ghiazarino, or ghiazzerino, which signified “a gorget of mail,” or what some of our antiquaries have termed “a standard of mail;” in France this word always preserved its relation to mail, and in process of time came to be applied to so lowly an object as a flagon-chain:  see Cotgrave’s Fr. Dict. ed. 1673.  Roquefort, indeed, says a “jaserans” was a cuirass, but to my apprehension the passage which he quotes from the Roman d’Alexandre—­

  “Es haubers, jazerans, et es elmes gemez”—­