Chaperonne, or Chaperoon, properly signifies a sort of hood or covering for the head, anciently worn both by men and women, the nobles and the populace, and afterwards appropriated to the doctors and licentiates in colleges. Hence the name passed to certain little shields, and other funeral devices, placed on the foreheads of horses which drew the hearses in pompous funerals, and which are still called chaperons or shafferons, because such devices were originally fastened on the chaperones or hoods worn by those horses with their other coverings of state.