And let me tell you, the people of this country have a custom of rubbing their houses all over with cow-dung.[NOTE 11] Moreover all of them, great and small, King and Barons included, do sit upon the ground only, and the reason they give is that this is the most honourable way to sit, because we all spring from the Earth and to the Earth we must return; so no one can pay the Earth too much honour, and no one ought to despise it.

And about that race of Govis, I should tell you that nothing on earth would induce them to enter the place where Messer St. Thomas is—­I mean where his body lies, which is in a certain city of the province of Maabar.  Indeed, were even 20 or 30 men to lay hold of one of these Govis and to try to hold him in the place where the Body of the Blessed Apostle of Jesus Christ lies buried, they could not do it!  Such is the influence of the Saint; for it was by people of this generation that he was slain, as you shall presently hear.[NOTE 12]

No wheat grows in this province, but rice only.

And another strange thing to be told is that there is no possibility of breeding horses in this country, as hath often been proved by trial.  For even when a great blood-mare here has been covered by a great blood-horse, the produce is nothing but a wretched wry-legged weed, not fit to ride. [NOTE 13]

The people of the country go to battle all naked, with only a lance and a shield; and they are most wretched soldiers.  They will kill neither beast nor bird, nor anything that hath life; and for such animal food as they eat, they make the Saracens, or others who are not of their own religion, play the butcher.

It is their practice that every one, male and female, do wash the whole body twice every day; and those who do not wash are looked on much as we look on the Patarins. [You must know also that in eating they use the right hand only, and would on no account touch their food with the left hand.  All cleanly and becoming uses are ministered to by the right hand, whilst the left is reserved for uncleanly and disagreeable necessities, such as cleansing the secret parts of the body and the like.  So also they drink only from drinking vessels, and every man hath his own; nor will any one drink from another’s vessel.  And when they drink they do not put the vessel to the lips, but hold it aloft and let the drink spout into the mouth.  No one would on any account touch the vessel with his mouth, nor give a stranger drink with it.  But if the stranger have no vessel of his own they will pour the drink into his hands and he may thus drink from his hands as from a cup.]

They are very strict in executing justice upon criminals, and as strict in abstaining from wine.  Indeed they have made a rule that wine-drinkers and seafaring men are never to be accepted as sureties.  For they say that to be a seafaring man is all the same as to be an utter desperado, and that his testimony is good for nothing.[1] Howbeit they look on lechery as no sin.