Ivory handles were usual for the fly-fan, or flabellum, used at
the altar, to keep flies and other insects away from the Elements.
One entry in an inventory in 1429 might be confusing if one did not
know of this custom: the article is mentioned as "one muscifugium
de pecock" meaning a fly-fan of peacock's feathers!

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