have no reason a priori to expect to meet with an effigy of a child attired as a knight or priest.
If there be any instance of an effigy in which the features and proportions, or if the features be wanting, the proportions, are those of a child, while the habit is that of a knight, priest, monk, or nun, it presents a curious subject for enquiry; it is, however, surely to be regarded as an exception to the rule, and not as proving a general practice, so much at variance with what we know of the usages of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; especially as, a little later, small representations of grown-up persons on brasses were very common, and there is no good reason why the same practice should not have prevailed in stone.
The story of the boy-bishop at Salisbury cathedral needs confirmation.
Lysons describes the little effigy at Haccombe, Devon, as measuring 2 ft. 2 in. long, in armour, without a helmet. But I learn from the notes of a friend, who has had an opportunity of examining this figure, that instead of being in armour he wears close hose and a tight-fitting jupon, fastened all down in front.
The effigies of the two sons of Edward III., William of Hatfield and William of Windsor, on their tombs in York minster and Westminster abbey, are in a civil costume, which we may without difficulty imagine to have been worn by princes verging towards youth. But the former is said to have died at eight years of age: the age of the latter I have not been able to ascertain.
As to civil costume, I would remark that the boy, the youth, and the man may have been attired very much alike in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; and, seeing the early age at which girls married, they, with some slight differences, probably dressed as women at a time when we now should call them children: hence perhaps the effigy said to represent Blanch, daughter of Edward III., is in the costume of an adult female, although if she died in 1340, she must have been a mere child.
Any child dying under puberty would, probably, be spoken of by the early writers as dying young, or even as dying an infant.
Mere infants were represented swaddled, especially on brasses. Stothard has given an example of a lady of the
