Small round ivory boxes elaborately sculptured were used both for Reserving the Host and for containing relics.  In the inventory of the Church of St. Mary Hill, London, was mentioned, in the fifteenth century, “a lytill yvory cofyr with relyks.”  At Durham, in 1383, there is an account of an “ivory casket conteining a vestment of St. John the Baptist,” and in the fourteenth century, in the same collection, was “a tooth of St. Gendulphus, good for the Falling Sickness, in a small ivory pyx.”

[Illustration:  IVORY MIRROR CASE; EARTH 14TH CENTURY]

Ivory mirror backs lent themselves well to decorations of a more secular nature:  these are often carved with the Siege of the Castle of Love, and with scenes from the old Romances; tournaments were very popular, with ladies in balconies above pelting the heroes with roses as large as themselves, and the tutor Aristotle “playing horse” was a great favourite.  Little elopements on horseback were very much liked, too, as subjects; sometimes rows of heroes on steeds appear, standing under windows, from which, in a most wholesale way, whole nunneries or boarding-schools seem to be descending to fly with them.  One of these mirrors shows Huon of Bordeaux playing at chess with the king’s daughter:  another represents a castle, which occupies the upper centre of the circle, and under the window is a drawbridge, across which passes a procession of mounted knights.  One of these has paused, and, standing balancing himself in a most precarious way on the pommels of his saddle, is assisting a lady to descend from a window.  Below are seen others, or perhaps the same lovers, in a later stage of the game, escaping in a boat.  At the windows are the heads of other ladies awaiting their turn to be carried off.

[Illustration:  IVORY MIRROR CASE, 1340]

An ivory chest of simple square shape, once the property of the Rev. Mr. Bowle, is given in detail by Carter in the Ancient Specimens, and is as interesting an example of allegorical romance as can be imagined.  Observe the attitude of the knight who has laid his sword across a chasm in order to use it as a bridge.  He is proceeding on all fours, with unbent knees, right up the sharp edge of the blade!

Among small box shrines which soon developed in Christian times from the Consular diptychs is one, in the inventory of Roger de Mortimer, “a lyttle long box of yvory, with an ymage of Our ladye therein closed.”

The differences in expression between French, English, and German ivory carvings is quite interesting.  The French faces and figures have always a piquancy of action:  the nose is a little retroussee and the eyelids long.  The German shows more solidity of person, less transitoriness and lightness about the figure, and the nose is blunter.  The English carvings are often spirited, so as to be almost grotesque in their strenuousness, and the tool-mark is visible, giving ruggedness and interest.