A 1627 English dictionary, quoted by Murray, describes the chess 'Bishop' as 'cloven in the head like a miter,' textually attested from 1499

John Minsheu's Ductor in Linguas (2nd ed., 1627, London) — an English multilingual dictionary — contains an entry, s.v. "Bishop," that Minsheu himself dates to usage from 1499: it describes the chess piece as "cloven in the head like a miter." H.J.R. Murray quotes this entry as a footnote in [[entity-h-j-r-murray|A History of Chess]] (1913, p. 425, n. 27), in a discussion of how the Aufin (the Arabic al-fil/"elephant" piece) came to be renamed "Bishop" in England. The same entry separately records that the Italian and Spanish descendants of the piece's name (Alfiere, Arfilo) were popularly believed to derive from Latin infula ("a miter") — a derivation Murray explicitly frames as "popular etymology," i.e., probably false as word-history. That etymological doubt does not extend to the shape description itself: "cloven... like a miter" is a period textual attestation of the English piece's appearance, independent of whether the infula word-derivation holds.

This is, at present, the earliest documented English source connecting the piece's split-top shape to a bishop's mitre — dated by Minsheu to at least 1499, printed in 1627, and read here at one remove via Murray's 1913 quotation rather than from Minsheu's dictionary directly. It grounds the English half of claim-chess-bishop-renamed-for-local-resemblance-not-elephant at Tier 1, though the French half of that claim (the piece renamed fou, "jester," for an alleged jester's-cap resemblance) is not addressed by this source — see claim-murray-1913-no-shape-mechanism-for-french-fou. Compare the Portuguese line of evidence for the same mitre association (a 19th-century attestation in Murray's notation, in a separate footnote, n. 24, p. 424) at claim-portuguese-chess-used-mitra-as-alternate-bishop-name.