CHAPTER I HERBALISTS, CHARLATANS, MINSTRELS, JUGGLERS, AND TUMBLERS

The most popular of all the wanderers were naturally the most cheerful, or those held to be the most beneficent. These latter were the folks with a universal panacea, very numerous in the Middle Ages; they went about the world selling health. They established themselves in the village green, or the market place, on holidays, spreading a carpet or a piece of cloth on the ground; they displayed their drugs, and began to harangue the people. Their numbers go diminishing nowadays, for the laws are more and more unkind to them, but they have not yet entirely disappeared, so natural to man {184} are credulity and the longing for health. One may still hear at the present day discourses not very different from those they spoke in the fourteenth century in England, France, or Italy; their profession is one that has changed less than any. In the thirteenth century the herbalist of Rutebeuf spoke like Ben Jonson’s mountebank of the seventeenth, like the charlatan who yesterday a few steps from our door attracted the crowd to his trestle, limiting however his sales, on account of the churlishness of the legislator, to tonics, tooth pastes and the like. Big words, marvellous tales, praise of their noble and distant origin, enumeration of the extraordinary cures they have made, ostentatious display of an unbounded devotion to the public good, and of entire pecuniary disinterestedness: all this is found, and always will be found, in the talk of these insinuating itinerants, as it is also found to-day in the advertisements, on walls or in newspapers, of wondrous cures discovered by a priest, by a convent, by a gentleman of worth and disinterestedness; which advertisements have, to some extent, replaced the itinerant healer of olden times.

“Good people,” said Rutebeuf’s medicinal herb-seller six hundred years ago, “I am not one of those poor preachers, nor one of those poor herbalists who stand in front of churches with their miserable ill-sown cloak, who carry boxes and sachets and spread out a carpet. Know that I am not one of these; but I belong to a lady whose name is Madame Trote de Salerno, who makes a kerchief of her ears, and whose eyebrows hang down as silver chains behind her shoulders: know that she is the wisest lady that is in all the four parts of the world. My lady sends us into different lands and countries, into Apulia, Calabria, Burgundy, into the forest of Ardennes to kill wild beasts in order to extract good ointments from them, and give medicine to those who are ill in body. . . . And because she made me swear by the saints when I {185} parted from her, I will teach you the proper cure for worms, if you will listen. Will you listen?

“. . . Take off your caps, give ear, look at my herbs which my lady sends into this land and country; and because she wishes the poor as well as the rich to have access thereto, she told me that I should make pennyworths of them, for a man may have a penny in his purse who has not five pounds; and she told and commanded that I might take pence of the current coin in the land and country wherever I should come. . . .

“These herbs, you will not eat them; for there is no ox in this country, no charger, be he never so strong, who if he had a bit the size of a pea upon his tongue would not die a hard death, they are so strong and bitter. . . . You will put them three days to sleep in good white wine; if you have no white take red, if you have no red take fine clear water, for one may have a well before his door who has not a cask of wine in his cellar. If you breakfast from it for thirteen mornings you will be cured of your various maladies. For if my father and mother were in danger of death and they were to ask of me the best herb I could give them, I should give them this. This is how I sell my herbs and my ointments; if you want any, come and take them; if you don’t, let them alone.”[231]

This herbalist was of those early maligned in France and England by royal ordinances for the illegal practice of medicine. Philip the Fair in 1311, John the Good in 1352, had issued severe decrees against them. They were berated with being “ignorant of men’s temperament, of the time and mode of administering, of the virtues of medicines, above all, of laxative ones in which lies danger of death.” These people “often come from abroad,” go through town and suburbs, and venture to administer to the confiding sick, “clisteria multum laxativa et alia {186} eis illicita,”[232] at which the royal authority was justly indignant.

In England the itinerant drug-sellers had no better reputation; the popular songs, satires and farces always show them associating in taverns with the meanest rabble, and using—true to nature—the most ridiculous rant. Master Brundyche’s man, in a play of the fifteenth century, thus prepares the minds of the hearers for the advent of the “leech,” his master, deriding both:

What dysease or syknesse y^t ever ye have,

He wyl never leve yow tylle ye be in your grave.[233]

To have an idea of what their recipes might be, one must recall what the medicine was that the statutes of the kingdom protected. John of Gaddesden, court doctor under Edward II, got rid of the marks of the small-pox by wrapping the sick man in red cloths, and he thus cured the heir to the throne himself.[234] He had for a long time been troubled how to cure stone: “At last,” says he, in his “Rosa Anglica,” “I bethought myself of collecting {187} a good number of those beetles which in summer are found in the dung of oxen, also of the crickets which sing in the fields. I cut off the heads and the wings of the crickets and put them with the beetles and common oil into a pot; I covered it and left it afterwards for a day and night in a bread oven. I drew out the pot and heated it at a moderate fire, I pounded the whole and rubbed the sick parts; in three days the pain had disappeared”; under the influence of the beetles and the crickets the stone had broken into bits.[235] It was almost always thus, by a sudden illumination, bethinking himself of beetles or of something else, that the learned man discovered his most efficacious remedies: Madame Trote de Salerno never confided to her agents in the various parts of the world the secret of more marvellous and unexpected recipes.

The law, however, made a clear distinction between a court physician and a quack of the cross-ways. Kings and princes had their own healers, attached to their persons, whom they trusted more than they did their ministers. Securing by indentures of 1372 and 1373 the services of “frere William de Appleton, phisicien et surgien,” and of “Maistre Johan Bray,” granting them forty marks yearly pension with the “bouche en court,” or right to be fed at his tables, and other advantages, John of Gaunt, “roy de Castille,” was careful to bind those men of learning to attend on him “in peace and in war, so long as they lived,” a pledge which his brother, King Edward, never exacted from his chancellors. A Gaddesden had the support of an established reputation to apply any medicament to his patients, and he offered the warranty of his high position. He had studied at Oxford, and he was an authority; a grave physician like Chaucer’s “doctour,” who had grown rich during the plague, his wealth increasing his repute— {188}

“For gold in physik is a cordial,”

had not neglected to pore over the works of “Gatesden.”

With lesser book-knowledge but an equal ingenuity, the wandering herbalist was not so advantageously known: he could not, like the royal physician, rely on his good reputation and his “bouche en court” to make his patients swallow glow-worms, rub them with beetles and crickets, or give them “seven heads of fat bats”[236] as remedies. The legislator kept his eye on him. In the country, like most of the other wayfarers, the man nearly always found means to escape the rigour of the laws; but in towns the risk was greater. The unhappy Roger Clerk was sued in 1381 for the illegal practice of medicine in London, because he tried to cure a woman by making her wear a certain parchment on her bosom. Though such a nostrum could not possibly be more hurtful than the use of fat bats, he was carried to the pillory “through the middle of the city, with trumpets and pipes,” on a horse without a saddle, his parchment and a whetstone round his neck, unseemly pottery hanging round his neck and down his back, in token that he had lied.[237]

Uneasy at the increase of these abuses, Henry V issued in 1421 an Ordinance against the meddlers with physic and surgery, “to get rid of the mischiefs and dangers which have long continued within the kingdom among the people by means of those who have used the art and practice of physic and surgery, pretending to be well and sufficiently taught in the same arts, when of truth they are not so.” Henceforth there would be severe punishments for all practitioners who have not been approved in their speciality, “that is to say, those of physic by the universities, and the surgeons by the masters of that art.”[238] The mischief {189} continued just as before; which seeing, in order to give more authority to the medicine approved by the State, Edward IV, in the first year of his reign, erected the Company of Barbers of London using the faculty of surgery, into a corporation.[239]

The Renaissance came and found barbers, quacks, empirics, and sorcerers continuing to prosper on British soil, and still the subject of song, satire and play. John Heywood’s Pothecary is a lineal descendant of Rutebeuf’s herbalist; he sells a wonderful Syrapus de Byzansis, and advertises it in such a way that, anything that happens, he is right:

“These be the thynges that breke all stryfe

Betweene mannes sycknes and his lyfe;

From all payne these shall you delever

And set you even at reste for ever.”[240]

Henry VIII deplored the hold those men kept on the common people, and on some of their betters too; he considered it his duty to enact new rules. “The science and connyng of physyke and surgerie,” said the king in his statute, “to the perfecte knowlege wherof bee requisite bothe grete lernyng and ripe experience, ys daily within this Royalme exercised by a grete multitude of ignoraunt persones, of whom the grete partie have no maner of insight in the same nor in any other kynde of lernyng; some also can no lettres on the boke, soofarfurth that common artificers, as smythes, wevers, and women boldely and custumably take upon theim grete curis and thyngys of great difficultie, in the which they partely use sorcery and which-crafte, partely applie such medicine unto the disease as be verey noyous and nothyng metely therfore, to the high displeasoure {190} of God . . . and destruccion of many of the kynge’s liege people, most specially of them that cannot descerne the uncunnyng from the cunnyng.”[241] The examples above have shown how difficult it must often have been to “descerne” between them.

Consequently, the king continues, every one who may wish to practise in London or seven miles round, must previously submit to an examination before the bishop of that city, or before the Dean of St. Paul’s, assisted by four “doctors of phisyk.” In the country the examination will take place before the bishop of the diocese or his vicar-general. In 1540, the same prince united the corporation of the barbers and the college of surgeons, and granted each year to the new association the bodies of four condemned criminals “for anathomies.”

Hardly were all these privileges conceded than doubts filled the mind of the legislator himself, and who, it may be wondered, did he regret? precisely those old unregistered quacks, those possessors of infallible secrets, those village empirics so harshly treated in the statute of 1511. A new law was enacted, which is but one long enumeration of the guilty practices of qualified doctors; they poison their clients as thoroughly as the quacks of old, the chief difference is that they take more for it, refusing even to interfere if the patient is poor:

“Mynding oonelie theyre owne lucres, and nothing the profite or ease of the diseased or patient, [they] have sued, troubled and vexed divers honest persones aswell men as woomen, whome God hathe endued with the knowledge of the nature, kinde, and operacion of certeyne herbes, rotes, and waters, . . . and yet the saide persones have not takin any thing for theyre peynes and cooning, but have mynistred the same to the poore people oonelie for neighbourhode and Goddes sake, and of pite and {191} charytie; and it is nowe well knowen that the surgeons admytted wooll doo no cure to any persone, but where they shall knowe to be rewarded with a greater soome or rewarde than the cure extendeth unto, for in cace they wolde mynistre theyre coonning to sore people unrewarded, there shoulde not so manye rotte and perishe to deathe for lacke of helpe of surgerye as dailie doo.” Besides, in spite of the examinations by the Bishop of London, “the most parte of the persones of the said crafte of surgeons have small coonning.” For which cause all the king’s subjects who have, “by speculacion or practyse,” knowledge of the virtues of plants, roots, and waters, may as before, notwithstanding enactments to the contrary, cure any malady apparent on the surface of the body, by means of plasters, poultices, and ointments “within any parte of the realme of Englande, or within any other the kinges dominions.”[242]

A radical change, as we see; the secrets and “speculacions” of country people were no longer those of sorcerers, but precious recipes which they had received from God by intuition; the poor, subject to die without a doctor, rejoiced, the quacks breathed once more—but were led again onto the boards of the comic stage just as before. Ben Jonson, that bold pedestrian who walked all the way from London to Scotland, and who, in his long rambles through villages or cities, had become familiar with the variegated characters haunting their market places, painted, in his turn, the portrait of the “mountebank doctor,” one of the best, not better however than Rutebeuf’s, and very similar to it, for, as we said, the type passed on from century to century, unchanged.

Old Ben, as usual, paints from life, having seen and heard more than once at Bartholomew and other fairs the drug-seller pacing his scaffold and exclaiming, “O, health, health! the blessing of the rich! the riches of the {192} poor! who can buy thee at too dear a rate, since there is no enjoying this world without thee.” Upon which the man makes game of the despicable “asses” his rivals, boasts of his incomparable panacea, into which enters a little human fat, which is worth a thousand crowns, but which he will part with for eight crowns, no, for six, finally for sixpence. A thousand crowns is what the cardinals Montalto and Farnese and his friend the Grand Duke of Tuscany have paid him, but he despises money and he makes sacrifices for the people. Likewise he has a little of the powder which gave beauty to Venus and to Helen; one of his friends, a great traveller, found it in the ruins of Troy and sent it him. This friend also sent a little of it to the French Court, but that portion had become “sophisticated,” and the ladies who use it do not obtain from it such good results.[243]

Three years later, an English traveller, finding himself at Venice, was filled with wonder at the talk of the Italian mountebanks, and describing them, he too, from life, gave another copy of the same immutable original. “Truely,” wrote Coryat, “I often wondered at many of these natural orators. For they would tell their tales with such admirable volubility and plausible grace, even extempore, and seasoned with that singular variety of elegant jests and witty conceits, that they did often strike great admiration into strangers that never heard them before.” They sell “oyles, soueraigne waters, amorous songs printed, apothecary drugs, and a common-weale of other trifles. . . . I saw one of them holde a viper in his hand, and play with his sting a quarter of an houre together, and yet receive no hurt. . . . He made us all beleeve that the same viper was lineally descended from the generation of that viper that lept out of the fire upon St. Paul’s hand, in the island of Melita, now called Malta.”[244] {193}

No doubt the loquacity, the volubility, the momentary conviction, the grace, the insinuating tone, the light, winged gaiety of the southern charlatan were not found so fully or so charmingly at the festivals of old England. These festivals were, however, merry and boisterous, attended by large crowds, among which moved many an artful character so full of jest and guile that Shakespeare thought them worthy of immortality; he gave it them indeed in creating, as a model of those men whose “revenue is the silly cheat,” his incomparable “Autolycus, a rogue.”

Country labourers went in numbers to these meetings, to stand jests which, aimed at them, were an amusement even to themselves, and to buy some drug which would do them good: they are to be seen there still. At the present day they continue to collect before the vendors of cures for the toothache and other troubles. Certificates abound round the booth; it seems as though all the illustrious people in the world must have been benefited by the discovery; the man now addresses himself to the rest of humanity. He talks, gesticulates, gets excited, leans over with a grave tone and a deep voice. The peasants press around, gaping with inquisitive eye, uncertain if they ought to laugh or to be afraid, and in the end get confident. The large hand fumbles in the new coat, the purse is drawn forth with an awkward air, the piece of money is held out and the medicine received, while the shining eye and undecided physiognomy say plainly that the cunning and the habitual practical sense are here at fault; that these good souls, clever and invincible in their own domain when it is a question of a sheep or a cow, are the victims of every one in an unknown land, the land of medical lore. The vendor bestirs himself, and now, as formerly, triumphs over indecision by means of direct appeals.

In England the incomparable Goose Fair at {194} Nottingham should be chosen as the place to see these spectacles, which shine there in all their infinite variety, with quacks as racy as those of pristine days, scenes reminding one of Rubens’ great “Kermesse” at the Louvre, and at every turn and before every shop living confutations of St. Evremond and others’ ideas of the temper of the English, ever lost in their thoughts, as if merry England were no more.[245]

Greater still was, in the Middle Ages, the popularity of those wayfarers, numerous too at the Goose Fair, who came not to cure, but to amuse, and who, if they did not offer remedies for diseases, at least brought forgetfulness of troubles; the minstrels, tumblers, jugglers, and singers. Minstrels and jongleurs, under different names, exercised the same profession, that is, they chanted songs and romances to the accompaniment of their instruments, as is still done in the East, in Persia for instance, where poems are not told but chanted, in various keys according to the subject. At a time when books were rare, and the theatre, properly so called, did not exist, poetry and music travelled with the minstrels and gleemen along the roads; such guests were always welcome. They were to be found at every feast, wherever there were rejoicings; it was expected from them, as from wine or beer, that care would be lulled to sleep, and merriment would replace it. They had many ways to fulfil the expectation, some dignified, some not. Of the first sort was the singing and reciting, either in French or English, of the loves and deeds of ancient heroes.

This was a grand part to play, one held in much reverence; the harpers and minstrels who arrived at the castle gates, their heads full of war stories, or sweet tales, or lively songs to excite laughter, “ad ridendum,” were received with the highest favour. On their coming they announced themselves without by some “murie {195} singing” overheard in the house; soon came the order to bring them in; they were ranged at one end of the hall, and every one gave ear to them.[246] They preluded on their instruments, and then began to sing. On what subject?

“Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow

For old unhappy far off things

And battles long ago:

Or is it some more humble lay

Familiar matter of to-day?

Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain

That has been and may be again?”[247]

Like Taillefer at Hastings, they told of the prowess of Charlemagne and of Roland, or they spoke of Arthur, or of the heroes of the wars of Troy, undoubted ancestors of the Britons of England:

“Men lykyn jestis for to here,

And romans rede in diuers manere

Of Alexandre the conqueroure,

Of Julius Cesar the emperoure,

Of Grece and Troy the strong stryf,

There many a man lost his lyf, {196}

Of Brute that baron bold of hond

The first conqueroure of Englond,

Of kyng Artour that was so riche,

Was non in his tyme him liche,

•••••

How kyng Charlis and Rowlond fawght

With Sarzyns nold they be cawght,

Of Tristrem and of Ysoude the swete

How they with love first gan mete,

Of kyng John and of Isombras,

Of Ydoyne and of Amadas,

Stories of diuerce thynggis

Of pryncis, prelatis, and of kynggis,

Many songgis of diuers ryme,

As english, frensh, and latyne.”[248]

In the fourteenth century most of these old romances, heroic, forceful, or touching, had been re-cast and put into new language; florid descriptions, complicated adventures, marvels and prodigies had been added to them; many had been turned into prose, and instead of being sung they were read.[249] The lord listened with pleasure, and his taste, palled by surfeit, caused him to take delight in the strange entanglements with which every event was henceforth enveloped. He now lived a more complex life than formerly; being more refined he had more wants, and grand, simple pictures in poems like the Song of Roland no longer satisfied his imagination: he preferred variety to grandeur. The heroes of romance {197} found harder and harder tasks imposed on them, and were obliged to triumph over more and more marvellous enchantments. As the hand became more alert the modelling improved; the softer-hearted heroes of amorous adventures were endowed by the poet with that charm, at once mystic and sensual, so characteristic of the sculptured figures of the fourteenth century. The author of “Sir Gawayne” takes a scarcely concealed pleasure in describing the visits which his knight receives, in painting his lady, so gentle, so pretty, with easy motions and gay smile; he puts into his picture all his art, all his soul; he finds words which seem caresses, and verses which shine as with a golden gleam.[250]

These pictures, not rare in the thirteenth century, greatly multiplied in the fourteenth, but toward the end thereof passed from the romance into the tale, or into poems, half tale, half romance, such as the “Troilus” of Chaucer. After many transformations the metrical romance was gradually giving way to new forms and styles which better suited the tastes of the hour. A hundred years earlier such a man as Chaucer would have taken up the Arthur legends in his turn, and would have written some splendid long-winded poetical romance for the minstrels; but he left us tales and lyric poems because his own taste and that of the age were different, and he felt that people were still curious but not enthusiastic about old heroic stories, that few any longer followed them with passion to the end, and that they were rather made the ornament of libraries than the subject of daily thought.[251] Thenceforward men liked to find separately in {198} ballads and in tales the lyric breath and the spirit of observation formerly contained with all the rest in the great metrical romances, the poetical summæ of earlier days; and these, abandoned to the less expert of the itinerant rhymers, became such wretched copies of the old originals that they were the laughing-stock of people of sense and taste.

Many of the grand French epics were thus abridged and put into skipping, barren English verse, the epics being out of fashion, their substitutes valueless. So, when Chaucer, surrounded by his fellow pilgrims, favoured them with a story of Sir Thopas, popular good sense, personated by the host, rebelled, and the performance was rudely interrupted. Yet from Sir Thopas to many of the romances which ran the streets or the roads the distance is small, and the laughable parody was hardly more than a close imitation. Robert Thornton, in the first half of the fifteenth century, copied from older texts a good number of these remodelled romances. In turning their pages one is struck by the excellence of Chaucer’s jesting, his caricature being almost a portrait.

These poems are all cut after one and the same pattern, tripping and sprightly, with little thought and less sentiment; the cadenced stanzas march on, clear, easy, and empty; no constraint, no effort; one may open and close the book without a sigh, without regret, with no positive weariness nor really-felt pleasure. Were it not for the proper names, the reader might pass chancewise from one romance to another without noticing the change. Take no matter which, “Sir Isumbras” for example: {199} after a prayer for form’s sake, the rhymer vaunts the valour of the hero, then praises a quality of especial value, with which he was happily endowed, his fondness for minstrels and his generosity towards them:

“He luffede glewmene well in haulle

He gafe thame robis riche of palle (fine cloth)

Bothe of golde and also fee;

Of curtasye was he kynge,

Of mete and drynke no nythynge,

On lyfe was none so fre.”

Isumbras, his wife, and his son, are without peers; he is the most valiant of knights, his wife the most lovely of women:

“I wille yow telle of a knyghte

That bothe was stalworthe and wyghte,

And worthily undir wede;

His name was hattene syr Ysambrace.”

So is also Sir Eglamour:

“Y shalle telle yow of a knyght

That was bothe hardy and wyght,

And stronge in eche a stowre.”

So is also Sir Degrevant:

“And y schalle karppe off a knyght

That was both hardy and wyght,

Sire Degrevaunt that hend hyght,

That dowghty was of dede.”[252] {200}

So is also Chaucer’s Sir Thopas:

“. . . I wol telle verrayment

Of myrthe and of solas,

Al of a knyght was fair and gent

In batail and in tornament,

His name was Sir Thopas.”

And though Sir Thopas almost comes within the scope of the present work, being an adventure seeker, “a knight auntrous,” ever on his way, never sleeping in a house—

“And for he was a knight auntrous,

He nolde slepen in non hous,

But liggen in his hode;

His bright helm was his wonger (pillow),”

yet must we abide by the ruling of mine host and leave him alone:

“No more of this for Goddes dignitee.”

But, even at a comparatively late date, the inmate of an out of the way castle usually proved more lenient. He welcomed the minstrel, his verse and his viol as he welcomed change; he lent a complacent ear to his commonplace romances, his ballads on every subject, his praise of flowers, women, wine, spring, heroes and saints, his goliardic dispraise of women,[253] monks and friars, his tales of love or laughter, his patriotic songs the rarest of all, for the Hundred Years War was for the English chiefly a royal and not a national war, and this alone can explain the scant place occupied in the songs of the time by Crécy {201} and Poictiers, never mentioned by Chaucer, never mentioned by Langland (who disapproved of the war), celebrated only by one solitary songster known by name and otherwise unknown, the unimitated and ungifted Laurence Minot.[254] The noble listened; he had few intellectual diversions; he gave little time if any to reading, which was not for him then an unmixed pleasure, and needed effort; there was no theatre for him to go to. At long intervals only, when the great yearly feasts came round, the knight might go, in company with the crowd, to see Pilate and Jesus on the boards. There he found sometimes not only the crowd but the king too. Richard II, for example, witnessed a religious play or mystery in the fourteenth year of his reign, and had ten pounds distributed among several clerks of London who had played before him at Skinnerwell “the play of the Passion and of the creation of the world.”[255] A few years later he saw the famous York plays, at the feast of Corpus Christi, performed in the streets of that city.[256] In ordinary times the knight was only too happy to receive in his home men of vast memory, who knew more verse and more music than could be heard in a day.

The king himself liked their coming. He had them sometimes brought up to him in his very chamber, where he was pleased to sit and hear their music. Edward II received four minstrels in his chamber at Westminster and heard their songs, and when they went he ordered twenty ells of cloth to be given them for their reward.[257] No one thought in those days of rejoicings without minstrels; there were four hundred and twenty-six of them {202} at the marriage of the Princess Margaret, daughter of Edward I.[258] Edward III gave a hundred pounds to those who were present at the marriage of his daughter Isabella,[259] some figured also at his tournaments.[260] When a bishop went on his pastoral rounds he was occasionally greeted by minstrels, hired on purpose to cheer him; they were of necessity chosen among local artists, who were apt to fiddle cheap music to his lordship. Bishop Swinfield, in one of his rounds, gave a penny a piece to two minstrels who had just played before him; but on another occasion he distributed twelve pence a piece.[261]

When men of importance were travelling they sometimes had the pleasure of hearing minstrels at the inn, and in that manner whiled away the long empty evenings. In the curious manual already quoted, called “La manière de langage,” composed in French by an Englishman of the fourteenth century, the traveller of distinction is represented listening to the musicians at the inn, and mingling his voice at need with their music: “Then,” says our author, “come forward into the lord’s presence the trumpeters and horn-blowers with their frestels (pipes) and clarions, and begin to play and blow very loud, and then the lord with his squires begin to move, to sway, to dance, to utter and sing fine carols till midnight without ceasing.”[262]

In great houses minstrels’ music was the usual seasoning of meals. At table there are only two amusements, {203} says Langland, in his “Visions”: to listen to the minstrels, and, when they are silent, to talk religion and to scoff at its mysteries.[263] The repasts which Sir Gawain takes at the house of his host the Green Knight are enlivened with songs and music. On the second day the amusement extends till after supper; they listen during the meal and after it to many noble songs, such as Christmas carols and new songs, with all possible mirth:

“Mony athel songez,

As coundutes of kryst-masse, and carolez newe,

With all the manerly merthe that mon may of telle.”

On the third day,

“With merthe and mynstralsye, with metez at hor wylle,

Thay maden as mery as any men moghten.”[264]

In Chaucer’s “Squire’s Tale,” King Cambynskan gives a

“Feste so solempne and so riche

That in this worlde ne was ther noon it liche.”

And this prince is shown sitting after the third course among his nobles, listening to the music:

“. . . So bifelle after the thridde cours,

Whil that the kyng sit thus in his nobleye,

Herkyng his mynstrales her thinges pleye

Byforn him atte boord deliciously. . . .”

During all these meals the sound of the viol, the voice of the singers, the “delicious things” of the minstrels, were interrupted, it is true, by the crunching of the bones {204} gnawed by the dogs under the tables, by the quarrels of the same, or by the sharp cry of some ill-bred falcon; for many noblemen kept during dinner these favourite birds on a perch behind them. Their masters, enjoying their presence, were indulgent with the liberties they took.

The minstrels of Cambynskan are represented as attached to his person; those belonging to the King of England also had permanent functions. The sovereign was seldom without them, and even when he went abroad was accompanied by them as well as by his hawks and hounds, a complete orchestra. Henry V engaged eighteen, who were to follow him to Guyenne and elsewhere.[265] Their chief is sometimes called king or marshal of the minstrels.[266] On May 2, 1387, Richard II gave a passport to John Caumz (? Camuz), “rex ministrallorum nostrorum,” who was setting out for a journey beyond the sea.[267] On January 19, 1464, Edward IV grants a pension of ten marks “to our beloved Walter Haliday, marshall of our minstrels.”[268] The Roll of Thomas Brantingham, treasurer to Edward III, bears frequent mention of royal minstrels, to whom a fixed salary of seven pence-halfpenny a day is paid.[269] King Richard II had in the same manner minstrels in his pay, and enjoyed their music {205} when travelling. When he went for the last time to Ireland he had to wait for ten days at Milford on account of contrary winds. That French gentleman, Créton, who was with him, and wrote afterwards a most interesting account of what befell the unfortunate king during the last year of his reign, states in his chronicle that the time was merrily passed at Milford while expecting a change in the weather, and that day and night they had music and songs of minstrels.[270]

The richer nobles imitated, of course, the king, and had their own companies, whom they allowed to play at times in various parts of the country (as was the case later with regular actors), and whom they supplied with testimonial letters vouching for them and their artistic ability.[271] The accounts of Winchester College under Edward IV show that this college recompensed the services of minstrels belonging to the king, the Earl of Arundel, Lord de la Ware, the Duke of Gloucester, the [Earl] of Northumberland, and the Bishop of Winchester; these last often recur. In the same accounts, time of Henry IV, mention is made of the expenses occasioned by the visit of the Countess of Westmoreland, accompanied by her suite. Her minstrels formed part of it, and a sum of money was given them.[272] {206}

When visiting towns and performing before the citizens, itinerant troups made a collection among the bystanders, having, however, themselves a fee to pay for the privilege. A curious example of this is recorded in John of Gaunt’s register,[273] where his seneschal of Newcastle-under-Lyme is ordered to see to it that 4d. be paid to William de Brompton a burgess of that city and Margery his wife, “by every minstrel coming there to make his minstralcy against the feast of St. Giles the Abbot,” and that a payment be also made to the same for every bear brought there to be baited, a regular inquest having shown that such fees had been paid to that couple and to Margery’s ancestors from time immemorial.

Like lords and princes, from the early fifteenth century at least, cities themselves had their troups of minstrels: “London, Coventry, Bristol, Shrewsbury, Norwich, Chester, York, Beverley, Leicester, Lynn, Canterbury, had them, to name no others. They received fixed fees or dues, wore the town livery and badge of a silver scutcheon, played at all local celebrations and festivities and were commonly known as waits.”[274]

Besides money and good meals, those musical wanderers often received a variety of gifts, such as cloaks, furred robes, and the like. Langland alludes more than once to these largesses, which proves that they were considerable, and he regrets that all this was not distributed to the poor who go, they too, from door to door, and are the minstrels of God: {207}

“Clerkus and knyghtes · welcometh kynges mynstrales,

And for love of here lordes · lithen hem at festes:

Much more, me thenketh · riche men auhte

Have beggers by-fore hem · whiche beth godes mynstrales.”[275]

38. PLAYING UPON THE VIELLE.

(From the MS. 10 E.IV; English; early Fourteenth Century.)

But his advice was not heeded, and long after his time the minstrels continued to be admitted to the castle halls. In erecting the hall the builder took into account the probable visits of musicians, and often raised a gallery for them above the entrance door, opposite to the dais, the place where the master’s table was set.[276] This custom long survived the Middle Ages. At Hatfield a minstrels’ gallery of the seventeenth century adorns the hall of that beautiful place, and is still, on great occasions, put to the use it was originally intended for.

The classic instrument of the minstrel was the vielle, a kind of violin or fiddle with a bow, something like ours, a drawing of which, as used in the thirteenth century, is to be found in the album of Villard de Honnecourt.[277] It was delicate to handle, and required much skill; in proportion therefore as the profession lowered, the good performer on the vielle became rarer; the common tambourine or tabor, which needed but little training, replaced the vielle, and true artists complained of the music and the taste of the {208} day. It was a tabor that the glee-man of Ely wore at his neck when he had his famous dialogue with the King of England, which proved so bewildering for the monarch: “He came thence to London; in a meadow he met the king and his suite; around his neck hung his tabor, painted with gold and rich azure.”[278]

The minstrels played yet other instruments, the harp, the lute, the guitar, the bag-pipe, the rota (a kind of small harp, the ancient instrument of the Celts), and others.[279]

39. THE MINSTRELS’ GALLERY AT EXETER.

(Fourteenth Century.)

The presents, the favour of the great, rendered enviable the lot of the minstrels; they multiplied accordingly, and the competition was great, which made the trade less profitable. In the fifteenth century, the king’s minstrels, clever and able men, protested to their master against the increasing audacity of the false minstrels, who deprived them of the greater part of their revenues. “Uncultured peasants,” said the king, who sided with his own men, “and workmen of different trades in our kingdom of England have passed themselves off as minstrels; some have worn our livery, which we did not {211} grant to them, and have even given themselves out to be our own minstrels.” By means of these guilty practices, they extorted much money from the king’s subjects, and although they had no understanding nor experience of the art, they went from place to place on festival days and gathered all the profits which should have enriched the true artists, those who had devoted themselves entirely to their profession, and did not exercise any low trade.

The king, to protect his men against such unlawful competition, authorized them to reconstitute and consolidate the pre-existing gild of minstrels; no one could henceforth exercise this profession, whatever his talent, if he had not been admitted into the gild. A power of inquiry was granted to the members of the society, who had the right to have false minstrels fined, the money to be applied to candles lit in the chapel of the Holy Virgin at St. Paul’s and in the “royal free chapel of St. Anthony.” For a pious motive was associated then with most actions, and minstrels, so badly treated by the generality of religious writers, were in this case bound, says the king, to pray in those two chapels for him while alive and for his soul when dead, for his “dearest consort Elizabeth queen of England,” and for the soul of his “dearest lord and father”; this till the end of time. Women were, as well as men, admitted into the fraternity.[280]

Such was the will of the king; in the same manner, and without any better success, the price of bread and the wage for a day’s labour were lowered by statute, all of which had but a limited and temporary effect. {212}

The authorities had other reasons for watching over singers and itinerant musicians; while they showed indulgence to the armed retainers of the great, they feared the rounds made by those glee men with no other arms than their vielle or tabor, but sowing sometimes strange disquieting doctrines under colour of songs. These were more than liberal, and went at times so far as to recommend social or political revolt. The Commons in parliament denounced by name, at the beginning of the fifteenth century, the Welsh minstrels as fomentors of trouble and causes of rebellion. Their political songs encouraged the insurgents to resistance; and parliament, who bracketed them with ordinary vagabonds, knew well that in having them arrested on the roads, it was not simple cut-purses whom it sent to prison. “Item: That no westours and rimers, minstrels or vagabonds, be maintained in Wales to make kymorthas or quyllages on the common people, who by their divinations, lies, and exhortations are partly cause of the insurrection and rebellion now in Wales. Reply: Le roy le veut.”[281]

Popular movements were the occasion for satirical songs against the great, songs composed by minstrels and soon known by heart among the crowd. It was a popular song which furnished to John Ball the text for his famous speech at Blackheath in the revolt of 1381:

“When Adam delved and Eve span,

Who was then the gentleman?”

Again, under Henry VI, when the peasants of Kent rose, and their allies the sailors took and beheaded the Duke of Suffolk at sea, a satirical song was composed, became popular and has come down to us. As before killing him they had given a mock trial to the king’s favourite, so in the song they present the comedy of his funeral; {213} nobles and prelates are asked to come and sing their responses, and in this pretended burial service, which is in reality a hymn of joy and triumph, the minstrel calls down heavenly blessings on the murderers. At the end the Commons are represented coming in their turn to sing a sarcastic Requiescant in pace over all English traitors.[282]

The renown of the popular rebel, Robin Hood the outlaw, who lived in the twelfth century if he ever lived at all, went on increasing. His manly virtues were extolled; picturesque companions were, later, invented for him: Friar Tuck, Maid Marian, Little John and all the imaginary inhabitants of Sherwood Forest; listeners were told how this pious man, who, even in the worst danger, waited till mass was over before thinking of his safety, boldly robbed great lords and high prelates, but was merciful to the poor;[283] which was an indirect notice to the brigands of the time that they should be careful to discern in their rounds between the tares and the wheat.

The sympathy of the minstrels for ideas of emancipation, which had made such progress in the fourteenth century, was not only evinced in these songs, but also in the remodelled romances recited by them in presence of the nobles, and which henceforth were full of high-flown declarations on the equality of men. The hearer did not take offence; the greater poets, favourites of all that counted, the king himself in his public statements proclaimed liberal truths which it was hardly expected would be acted upon literally. Thus Chaucer {214} celebrates in his most eloquent verse the only true nobility in his eyes, that which comes from the heart.[284] Thus also King Edward I, on summoning the first true English parliament in 1295, declared that he did so inspired by the old maxim which prescribes that what concerns all should be approved by all, proclaiming a principle whence have since issued the most radical reforms of society, and on which the American insurgents founded, centuries later, their claim to independence.[285]

Such direct appeals from the king to his people contributed early to develop among the English the sense of duty, of political rights and responsibilities. In days of trouble, when parliament scarcely yet existed, the same king thought he should explain his conduct to the people and allow them to form an opinion: “The king about this, and about his estate and as to his kingdom, and how the business of the kingdom has come to naught, makes known and wishes that all should know the truth of it; which ensues . . .”[286]

In France the enunciation of liberal principles was frequent in royal edicts, but the emptiness of these fine words and the interested motives which caused them to {215} be used were scarcely veiled at all. Louis X, “le Hutin,” in his ordinance of July 2, 1315, declares that, “as according to the law of nature every one is born free,” he has resolved to enfranchise the serfs on his own estates. He adds, however, that he will do so for money. Three days later, fearing that his benefit is not sufficiently prized, he supplements his first statement by a new one in which his exalted ideas and his present needs are boldly intertwined: “It may be that some, ill-advised and in default of good counsel, might misunderstand such great benefit and favour and wish rather to remain in the baseness of servitude than to come to free estate: wherefore we order and commit to you that, for the aid of the present war, you levy on such persons according to the amount of their property, and the conditions of servitude of each one, as much and sufficiently as the condition and riches of those persons may bear and as the necessity of our war may require.”[287]

Well then might the minstrels imitate the king himself in repeating axioms so well known, and which, according to appearance, there was so little chance of seeing carried out. But ideas, like the seeds of trees falling on the soil, are not lost, and the noble who had gone to sleep to the murmur of verses chanted by the glee-man waked up one day to the tumult of the crowd collected before London, with the refrain of the priest John Ball for its war-cry. And then he had to draw his sword and show by a massacre that the time was not yet come to apply these axioms, and that there was nothing in them save song.

Still were the trees dropping their seeds. Poets and popular singers had thus an influence over social movements, less through the maxims scattered throughout their great works than by those little unpolished pieces, struck off on the moment, which the lesser among them composed and sang for the people, at the cross-roads in {216} times of trouble, or by the peasants’ hearth in ordinary times, as a reward for hospitality.[288]

40. A FOURTEENTH-CENTURY JUGGLER.

(From MS. 10 E. IV.)

Minstrels, however, as singers of songs, propagators of thoughts, tellers of romances, were to disappear. An age was beginning when books and the art of reading spread among the people, and a more and more numerous public would read and cease to listen; the theatres were, moreover, about to offer a spectacle much superior to that of the little troop of musicians and wandering singers, and would compete with them more powerfully than the “rude husbandmen and artificers of various crafts,” against whose impertinence Edward IV was so indignant. Replaced, unwanted, the minstrels proper ceased to exist as a class, leaving however behind them a variety of men who could claim them as ancestors, street musicians, mirth mongers, or the “blind crouder with no rougher voice then rude stile,” who sang for Sir Philip Sidney “the olde song of Percy and Douglas.”

In fact, the period of the Taillefers who would go to death in the fight while singing of Charlemagne was a limited one; the lustre which the jongleurs or trouvères of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, who confined themselves to the recitation of poetry, had shed on their profession, was effaced in proportion as they associated {217} more closely with the mannerless bands of tumblers, jugglers, leaders of performing bears (ursinarii, the Latin documents of the time name them),[289] conjurors, and ribalds of all kinds.[290]

These bands had always existed, but the chanters of romances, tellers of knights’ high deeds, and of saints’ edifying examples, admitted even into the cloister, finding grace before St. Thomas Aquinas,[291] had, in the heyday of their fame stood above them, or apart from them. At all times, however, in castles and at fairs, were to be found buffoons and jugglers, whose coarseness exhilarated the spectators. The precise details which the contemporaries give as to their performances show not only that their jokes would not be tolerated among the rich of to-day, but that there are even few out of the way villages where {218} peasants on a festival would accept them without disgust. The great of former days found pleasure, however, in them, and in the troop of mummers and tumblers who went about wherever mirth was wanted, there always were some who excited laughter by the ignoble means described in John of Salisbury’s “Polycraticus”—“so shameful that even a cynic would blush at seeing them.”[292] But people of high degree did not blush, they laughed. Two hundred years later, some sacrilegious clerks, out of hate for the Archbishop of York, made themselves guilty of the same monstrous buffooneries in his very cathedral, and the episcopal letter relating their misdeeds with the precision of a legal report, adds that they were committed more ribaldorum.[293] Langland, at the same epoch, shows that one of his personages is not a true minstrel, either of the higher or of the lower sort, since he is neither able to “telle faire gestes,” nor to practise those welcome turpitudes.[294]

The greater was the feast, the coarser were often the deeds and songs of the mirth-mongers. In this way, in particular, were they accustomed to celebrate Christmas. Thomas Gascoigne, in the sort of theological dictionary compiled by him, beseeches his readers to abstain from hearing such Christmas songs, for they leave on the mind images and ideas which it is almost impossible afterwards to wash out. He adds as a warning the story of a man he personally knew: “I have known, I, Gascoigne, Doctor in Divinity, who am writing this book, a man who had heard at Christmas some of those repulsive songs. {219} It so happened that the shameful things he had heard had made such a deep impression on his mind that he could never in after time get rid of those remembrances nor wipe away those images. So he fell into such a deep melancholy that at length it proved deadly to him.”[295]

41. FAVOURITE DANCES IN MEDIÆVAL ENGLAND.

(From MS. 10 E. IV.)

The representations of the dance of Salome to be found in mediæval stained glass or manuscripts give an idea of the sort of tricks and games considered the fittest to amuse people of importance while sitting in their hall or having their dinner. It is by dancing on her hands, head downwards, that the young woman gains the suffrages of Herod. As the idea of such a dance could not be drawn from the Bible, it obviously arose from the customs of the time. At Clermont-Ferrand, in the stained glass of the cathedral (thirteenth century), Salome dances on knives which she holds with each hand, she also having her head downwards. In a window at the Lincoln cathedral she has no knives, but her “dance” is of the same sort and her red-stockinged feet touch the upper line of the glass panel. At Verona, she is represented on the {220} most ancient of the bronze gates of St. Zeno (ninth century) bending backwards and touching her feet with her head. Those standing by are filled with surprise and admiration, one puts his hand to his mouth, the other to his cheek, in an involuntary gesture of amazement. She may be seen in the same posture in several manuscripts in the British Museum; Herod is sitting at his table with his lords, while the young woman dances head downwards.[296] In another manuscript, also of the fourteenth century, minstrels are shown playing on their instruments, while a professional dancing girl belonging to their troop performs as usual head downwards, but this time, as at Clermont, her hands rest on two swords. The accounts of the royal exchequer of England sometimes mention sums paid to passing dancers, who, no doubt, must also have performed surprising feats, for the payments are considerable. Thus, in the third year of his reign, Richard II pays to John Katerine, a dancer of Venice, six pounds thirteen shillings and fourpence for having played and danced before him.[297]

42. FAVOURITE DANCES IN PERSIA.

(From a pencil-case.)

In the East, where, in our travels, we have sometimes the surprise of finding ancient customs still living {221} which we can at home only study in books, the fashion for buffoons and mimics survives, and even remains the great distraction of princes. The Bey of Tunis, when I was there years ago, had fools to amuse him in the evening, who insulted and diverted him by the contrast between their permitted insolence and his real power. Among the rich Moslem women of the same city, few of whom could read, the monotony of days spent by them till death came under the shadow of the same walls, behind the same gratings, was broken by the tales of the female fool, whose duty was to enliven the harem by sallies of the strangest liberty. As for dances, they frequently consist, in the East, in performances similar to that of Salome, such as shown in our manuscripts. Women dancing head downwards constantly appear in Persian pictures; several examples may be seen in the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the same subject often occurs on the valuable pencil-cases formerly made with so much taste and art in Persia.

If our ancestors of the fourteenth century could enjoy such pleasures, no wonder that moralists declared more and more openly against both minstrels and mimics and ranked them with those rogues and vagabonds denounced as a public danger by parliament. As years pass the discredit grows. In the sixteenth century Philip Stubbes saw in minstrels the personification of all vices, and he justified in bitter words his contempt for “suche drunken sockets and bawdye parasits as range the cuntreyes, ryming and singing of uncleane, corrupt and filthie songes in tavernes, ale-houses, innes, and other publique assemblies.” Their life is like the shameful songs of which their heads are full, and they are the origin of all abominations; the more dangerous because their number is so great:

“Every towne, citie, and countrey is full of these minstrelles to pype up a dance to the devill: but of dyvines, so few there be as they maye hardly be seene. {222}

“But some of them will reply, and say, What, sir! we have lycences from justices of peace to pype and use our minstralsie to our best commoditie. Cursed be those lycences which lycence any man to get his lyving with the destruction of many thousands!

“But have you a lycence from the archjustice of peace, Christe Jesus? If you have not . . . than may you, as rogues, extravagantes, and straglers from the heavenlye country, be arrested of the high justice of peace, Christ Jesus, and be punished with eternall death, notwithstanding your pretensed licences of earthly men.”[298]

Such was the state of degradation the noble profession of the old singers had reached; the necessity either of obtaining a licence or of joining a gild, as prescribed by Edward IV, had been powerless to check the decay. With new manners and inventions their raison d’être disappeared; the ancient reciters of poems, after having mingled with the disreputable troops of caterers to public amusement, saw these troops survive them, and, regular players apart, there henceforth only remained upon the roads those coarse buffoons, bearwards, and vulgar music makers whom thoughtful men held as reprobates.

43. A PERFORMING BEAR.

(From MS. 10 E. IV.)

44. A SHAM MESSENGER.

(From MS. 10 E. IV.)

CHAPTER II MESSENGERS, ITINERANT MERCHANTS AND PEDLARS

All his life long, kind, loving, merry Chaucer, a good observer, a good listener and good talker, was fond of travels and travellers, of roamers and tale-tellers, of people who came from afar, bringing home with them many stories if little money, stories in which much invention no doubt was mingled with a little truth: but what is the good of raising a protest against harmless invention? Is not sometimes their mixture with “sooth” a pleasant one? Thus, he said:

“Thus saugh I fals and sothe compouned

Togeder fle for oo (one) tydynge.”

Interested in all that was human he studied ordinary types and rare ones; he observed mine Host, and looked also for seekers of adventure, and was never tired of hearing their tales: {224}

“Aventure,

That is the moder of tydynges,

As the see is of welles and of sprynges.”

No greater pleasure for him than to see:

“Winged wondres faste fleen,

Twenty thousand in a route,

As Eolus hem blew aboute.”

He was in this a real connoisseur, fully appreciating the merit of a well-told fable and knowing how useful and pleasant some such may be found to beguile slow-winged time. Long before he started from the Tabard, “faste by the Belle,” for a journey which millions of Englishmen have since performed at his heels, allured by the music or merriment of his word, he had this same taste for “unkouthe syghtes and tydynges,” as well as for “thinges glad.” Finding himself once in great “distresse” of mind, with a heavy heart, “disesperat of all blys,” what did he dream of to “solace” himself, but of meeting and hearing the whole innumerable tribe of tale-tellers, wayfarers, and adventure seekers, by fancy assembled in an immense house, “made of twigges, salwe, rede and green eke?” He wanted us to know, and he wrote of the “House of Fame,” where after having met the bard “that bare of Thebes up the fame” (Statius), and “gret Omere,” and “Venus’ clerke Ovide,” “Englyssh Gaunfride” (of Monmouth, of Arthurian fame), and many more, he thought that there was no room for him, and feeling his distress as keen as ever, dreamed of something else, willing

“Somme newe tydyngis for to lere,

Somme newe thinge, Y not what,

Tydyngs other this or that,

Of love, or suche thinges glad.”[299]

In this he had full satisfaction; his dream took another turn, and he was led towards the place he wanted, where things glad were to be found, a temple not of fame, but of tales and tidings, of noise and merriment:

“And theroute come so grete a noyse,

That had hyt stonde upon Oyse,

Men myght hyt have herd esely

To Rome, Y trowe sikerly.”

The noise went up to the sky from innumerable apertures, for

“This hous hath of entrees

As feele (many) as of leves ben on trees,

In somer whan they grene ben.”

Never for one instant is the place quiet nor silent; it is always

“Filde ful of tydynges,

Other loude or of whisprynges;

And over alle the houses angles,

Ys ful of rounynges and of jangles,

Of werres, of pes, of mariages,

Of restes, of labour and of viages.”

War and peace, and love and travels, all this he was to make in after-time the subject of his “Canterbury Tales,” and he represents himself in this earlier poem as if coming to the well and spring of all tales, placed somewhere in the land of dreams and fancy, yet surrounded by people who were neither fanciful nor dreamy creatures, but bony beings, on the contrary, with strong muscles and alert tongues, and the dust of the road to Rome or the East on their feet; surrounded, in fact, by these very roamers we are now trying to call up one by one from the past, and who receive in the “House of Fame” such an apotheosis as befits their quaint if rather questionable character. Good Chaucer {226} lends a willing ear, and the ways of speech of these people are carefully preserved in his verse for those who after him may find interest in them. In this manner they spoke: every person, says the poet,

“Every wight that I saugh there

Rouned (muttered) in eche others ere,

A newe tydynge prevely,

Or elles tolde alle oppenly

Ryght thus, and seyde; ‘Nost not thou

That ys betyd, late or now?’

—‘No,’ quod he, ‘Telle me what.’

And than he tolde hym this and that,

And swore therto that hit was sothe;

‘Thus hath he sayde’ and ‘Thus he dothe,’

And ‘Thus shal hit be’ and ‘Thus herde Y seye.’”

And the delight is that the tale repeated by many is always new, for it is never exactly the same; the fib fattens as it grows old, so that it may serve your pleasure many a time and oft:

“Whan oon had herde a thinge ywis,

He come forthright to another wight,

And gan him tellen anon ryght,

The same thynge that him was tolde,

Or hyt a forlonge way was olde,

But gan sommewhat for to eche (increase)

To this tydynge in this speche

More than hit ever was . . .

As fire ys wont to quyk and goo

From a sparke sprongen amys,

Tille alle a citee brent up ys.”

That there may be no mistake about the sort of people to whom the pleasant art of stretching a lie is so familiar, Chaucer is careful to name them, and there we find almost every one of our friends already mentioned or hereafter described, the sea or land wayfarers:

“And lord! this hous in alle tymes

Was ful of shipmen and pilgrimes,

With scrippes (bags) bret-ful of leseyngs (lies)

Entremedled with tydynges, {227}

And eke allone be hemselve,

O many a thousand tymes twelve

Saugh I eke of these pardoners,

Currours, and eke of messangers

With boystes crammed ful of lyes.”

What Chaucer gathered from these shipmen, pardoners, couriers, and messengers, he assures us it was not his intention to tell the world,

“For hit no nede is redely;

Folke kan hit synge bet than I.”

Whether or not some doubt may have afterwards entered his mind about the great poetical faculty of “folke,” certain it is that, for the delight of future ages, he did not stick to his word, as every reader of the “Canterbury Tales” well knows.

45. A PROFESSIONAL MESSENGER.

(From the MS. 10 E. IV.)

These “boystes” which Chaucer represents, carried by messengers and couriers, were filled in the way he describes only in a metaphorical sense, and this left room for more solid ware, for letters and parcels too, since in those old simple days, the messengers were the only equivalent for mail and for parcels post. They were to be found in the service of abbots, bishops, nobles, sheriffs, courts of justice,[300] and of the king. Such a costly forerunner of the post was not, of course, available for everybody; people did as they best could. The poor man {228} waited till some friend was going a journey; the rich only had express messengers, entrusted with their errands to distant places and with the carrying of their letters, generally written at dictation by a scribe on a sheet of parchment, and then sealed in wax with the master’s signet.[301] The king kept twelve messengers with a fixed salary; they followed him everywhere, in constant readiness to start; they received threepence a day when they were on the road, and four shillings and eightpence a year to buy shoes.[302] They were entrusted with letters {229} for the kings of France and Scotland; sent to call together the representatives of the nation for Parliament; to order the publication of the papal sentence against Guy de Montfort; to call to Windsor the knights of St. George; to summon the “archbishops, earls, barons, and other lords and ladies of England and Wales” to London to be present at the funeral of the late queen (Philippa); to prescribe the proclamation in the counties of the statutes made in Parliament; to command the “archbishops, bishops, abbots, priors, deans, and chapters of the cathedral churches of all the shires to pray for the soul of Anne, late Queen of England, deceased.”[303]

Edward III sends messengers or heralds to foreign parts, viz., France, Germany, Brabant, Flanders, Scotland, to call the nobility of these countries to a great tournament, a sort of international match to be held on St. George’s Day. The amount of the expense so incurred, which is not less than thirty-two pounds, shows that the messengers must have had long protracted journeys and must have had to visit every part of the countries allotted to each of them.[304]

Sometimes the king got into trouble with his Commons on account of expenses for messengers, which he did not always feel inclined to pay from his own purse. Such a case happened in 1378, and the Commons took this opportunity to once more assert their views about {230} the French and other foreign possessions of their sovereign, Ireland being included among them. They plainly state, as they had before, that these countries and the expenses concerning them are a matter for the king, not for them; it is a sort of kingly luxury with which they will have nothing to do. They remonstrate, therefore, that about forty-six thousand pounds sterling have been spent and entered as an item of national expense “for the safeguard of certain countries, places and fortresses, for which the Commons ought in no way to be charged. These are partly in the march of Calais and partly at Brest, Cherbourg, in Gascony, and in Ireland; and also expenses over certain messengers to Flanders, Lombardy, Navarre, and Scotland.”

The Government peremptorily refuses to accept this kind of reasoning, and returns a spirited reply: “To which it was answered that Gascony and the other forts which our lord the king has in the parts beyond, are and must be as barbicans for the kingdom of England, and if the barbicans are well kept, with the safeguard formed by the sea, the kingdom will be secure of peace. Otherwise we shall never find rest nor peace with our enemies; for then they would push hot war to the thresholds of our houses, which God forbid. Besides, through these barbicans our said lord the king has convenient gates and entrances towards his enemies to grieve them when he is ready and can act.” Telling reasons are also given for retaining among public expenses the costs of the journeys of messengers north and south.[305] None the less did the Commons of England long continue to consider the French wars, glorious perhaps, but undoubtedly expensive, as a personal quarrel of their sovereign, and as, in fact, little more than a rivalry between two French sovereigns speaking the same language and belonging to the same family. {231}

Besides letters, couriers and messengers had many strange parcels to carry from one place in the country to another: presents to fair ladies, commodities of all sorts for their own masters. Thus, in the year 1396, we find a servant of the Duke de Berri sent as a messenger to Scotland, and travelling all the way thither from France across England to fetch certain greyhounds of which his master was especially fond. He is accompanied by three men on horseback, to help him in taking care of the hounds, and he carries a safe-conduct from Richard II, to travel without hindrance through the English dominions with his followers and their belongings.[306]

Among the missions given by the king to his servants are some which, at the present day, would seem singularly repugnant. He might, for instance, charge one of his faithful retainers to carry the quarters of a criminal’s body executed for treason to the great towns of England. In this case he did not employ simple messengers; they were personages of trust, followed by an escort to convey the remains. Thus Edward III, in the fifty-first year of his reign, paid not less than twenty pounds to “Sir William de Faryngton, knight, for the costs and expenses he had incurred for transporting the four quarters of the body of Sir John of Mistreworth, knight, to different parts of England.”[307]

Of all travellers, the messenger was the swiftest; first, because travelling was his business; he was a good horseman, an experienced person, clever in getting out of trouble on the road and at the inns; then he had the right of way; woe to whoever thought to stop him; there were immense fines if the master were powerful, still more if the man were the king’s messenger. A messenger of the queen, who had been imprisoned by {232} the constable of Roxburgh Castle, did not hesitate to claim £10,000 sterling for contempt of his sovereign, and £2,000 as indemnity for himself.[308]

When, on August 7, 1316, Jacques d’Euse, cardinal-bishop of Porto, was chosen pope at Lyons, and assumed the name of John XXII, Edward II being at York learnt the news ten days afterwards through Laurence of Ireland, messenger of the house of the Bardi. And indeed we find by the accounts of the king’s household that this prince paid Laurence twenty shillings on the 17th of August to reward him for his trouble. It was only on the 27th of September that, being still at York, the king received by Durand Budet, a messenger of cardinal de Pelagrua, the official letters announcing the election; he gave five pounds to the messenger. Finally, the pope’s nuncio having arrived in person shortly afterwards, bearing the same news no longer so fresh, the king made him a present, inversely proportionate to his speed, of a hundred pounds.[309]

Such was the custom, presents were made to the bringers of good news; royal messengers had thus a chance of casually increasing their meagre pay of threepence a day. Most fortunate were those who brought word to the king himself of happy events. Edward III gave a forty marks pension for life to the queen’s messenger who came announcing the birth of the Prince of Wales, the future Black Prince; he gave thirteen pounds, three shillings and fourpence to John Cok of Cherbourg, who told him of the capture of King John at Poictiers; he settled a pension of one hundred shillings upon Thomas of Brynchesley who brought him the good news of the capture of Charles of Blois.[310] {233}

Sometimes messengers, in spite of their privileges and cleverness, were liable to find themselves in very difficult plight. In time of war they had to conceal their real function, and were in constant danger of being stopped and having their bag searched and their letters opened. People felt strongly about foreigners living in England, many of them being friars who might disclose the secrets of the realm in their private correspondence. The Commons therefore asked for very strict rules to be passed in order to remedy this possible evil, and we find them, in the year 1346, when England was at war with France, recommending the creation of something like the cabinets noirs of a later date.[311]

Langland in his “Visions” graphically compares the different modes of travelling of messengers and such other wayfarers as merchants going with their goods from one place to another. The one is the swiftest of all, no one would dare to stop him; the other is retarded by his pack, his debts, his fear of robbers which prevents his travelling at dark, the impossibility for him to use short cuts across the fields, while short {234} cuts are freely allowed to messengers: no hayward would disturb them; no man in his senses, no “wys man” would “wroth be” on account of his crops being spoiled by a messenger; the messenger shows his letters and is free to go:

“ . . . Yf a marchaunt and a messager · metten to-gederes,

And scholde wende o way · where both mosten reste . . .

The marchante mote nede be lette (kept) · lengere then the messagere;

The messager doth na more · bote with hus mouthe telleth

Hus erande and hus lettere sheweth · and is a-non delyvered.

And thauh thei wende by the wey · tho two to-gederes,

Thauh the messager make hus wey · a-mydde the whete,

Wole no wys man wroth be · ne hus wed (pledge) take;

Ys no haiwarde yhote (bidden) · hus wed for to take:

Necesitas non habet legem.

Ac yf the merchaunt make hus way · overe menne corne,

And the haywarde happe · with hym for to mete,

Other hus hatt, other hus hode · othere elles hus gloves

The marchaunt mot for-go · other moneye of hus porse . . .

Yut thauh thei wenden on way · as to Wynchestre fayre,

The marchaunt with hus marchaundise · may nat go so swithe

As the messager may · ne with so mochel ese.

For that on (one) bereth bote a boxe · a brevet (letter) ther-ynne,

Ther the marchaunt ledeth a male (trunk) · with meny kynne thynges,

And dredeth to be ded there-fore · and (if) he in derke mete

With robbours and revers (thieves) · that riche men dispoilen;

Ther the messager is ay murye · hus mouthe ful of songes.”[312]

Wayfarers there were in whom both characteristics were united, the slowness of pace of the merchant and the lightness of heart of the messenger. These were the pedlars, a very numerous race in the Middle Ages, one of the few sorts of wanderers that have not yet entirely disappeared. A jovial race they seem to have been; they are so now, most of them, for their way to success is through fair speech and enticing words; and how could they be enticing if they did not show good humour and jollity? “Gaiety” mends their broken wares, and colours the faded ones, and blinds customers to otherwise {235} obvious defects. They have always been described thus; they were merry and sharp-tongued; such was Shakespeare’s Autolycus; such is, in a novel of our time, the jovial owner of the dog Mumps, Bob Jakin of “The Mill on the Floss.” “ ‘Get out wi’ you, Mumps,’ said Bob, with a kick; ‘he is as quiet as a lamb, sir’—an observation which Mumps corroborated by a low growl, as he retreated behind his master’s legs.” About the exact scrupulousness prevailing among the tribe the opinion has perhaps not been quite so consistent, which is the best that can be said for it.

One good point about them, however, is that in mediæval England, whatever may have been their reputation, they entirely escaped legislation. Very possibly they were impliedly included in statutes against vagrants and rovers; but they may at least argue that as a matter of fact they are not named in any Act of Parliament, and pass unobserved or nearly so by the Westminster legislator down to a comparatively recent date. They are for the first time named in a statute during the reign of Edward VI, in which, it is true, they are treated in a contemptuous manner, being described as more “hurtful than necessary to the common wealth.” This is called “an acte for tynkers and pedlers,” and is to the following effect: “For as muche as it is evident that tynkers, pedlers and suche like vagrant persons are more hurtfull than necessarie to the Common Wealth of this realm, Be it therefore ordeyned . . . that . . . no person or persons commonly called pedler, tynker or pety chapman shall wander or go from one towne to another or from place to place out of the towne, parishe or village where such person shall dwell, and sell pynnes, poyntes, laces, gloves, knyves, glasses, tapes or any suche kynde of wares whatsoever, or gather connye skynnes or suche like things or use or exercise the trade or occupation of a tynker,” except those that shall have a licence from two justices {236} of the peace; and then they will be allowed to travel only in the “circuyte” assigned to them.[313]

Queen Elizabeth, too, had a word for pedlars, and it was not more complimentary than what her brother had to say about them, although “scollers of the Universityes” joined them on her list of disreputable roamers. They figure in her “Acte for the punishment of vacabondes”; and a very curious list of wanderers is found in it: “It ys nowe publyshed,” says the queen, “that . . . all ydle persones goinge aboute in any countrey of the said Realme, using subtyll craftye and unlawfull games or playes, and some of them fayninge themselves to have knowledge in phisnomye, palmestrye, . . . and all fencers, bearwardes, comon players in interludes and minstrels not belonging to any baron of this realme . . . all juglers, pedlars, tynkers, and petye chapmen . . . and all scollers of the Universityes of Oxford or Cambridge y^t goe about begginge . . . and all shipmen pretendinge losses by sea . . . shalbee deemed roges vacabounds and sturdy beggers intended of by this present act.”[314] But the case of pedlars was not seriously taken in hand before the reign of William III who put a tax upon them and, ominously enough, bound them to certify commissioners for transportation how they travelled and traded.[315]

The late date of this statute of pedlars, if it may be called so, is the more remarkable that they swarmed along the roads in the Middle Ages, more numerous than tinkers or any other wandering representatives of petty trades. There were not then as now large shops in every village with all the necessaries of life ready provided for the inhabitants. The shop itself was itinerant, being nothing else than the pack of travelling chapmen. In the same way {237} as the literature propagated by the minstrels, as news, tales, and letters, pardons from Rome and many other commodities, so household wares were carried about the country by indefatigable wayfarers. A host of small useful things, or sometimes useless, but so pleasing! were concealed in their unfathomable boxes. The contents of them are pretty well shown by a series of illuminations in a fourteenth-century manuscript, where a pedlar is represented asleep at the foot of a tree, while monkeys have got hold of his box and help themselves to the contents. They find in it vests, caps, gloves, musical instruments, purses, girdles, hats, cutlasses, pewter pots, and a number of other articles.[316]

As to the means by which pedlars came by their goods, a variety seem to have been used by them, and purchase was only one among several. A proverbial saying preserved for us by Langland shows how they secured furs for their country customers. The author of the “Visions” states how Repentance came once to Avarice, and examined him as to his usurious doings:

“ ‘Hastow pite on pore men · that mote nedes borwe?’

‘I have as moche pite of pore men · as pedlere hath of cattes,

That wolde kille hem, yf he cacche hem myghte · for coveitise of here skynnes.’ ”[317]

a practice which cannot fail to be deeply resented by all lovers of cats.

The regular merchants whom Langland and Chaucer describe, so splendid to look at that no one knew they were “in dette,” adorned with Flaundrish hats and “botes clasped faire and fetisly,” were a very different sort of {238} people; but though no mere wanderers, they were, too, great wayfarers. Many of them had had to visit the continent to find markets for their goods, and for their purchases. Through them too, and it was in fact, perhaps, the safest and most reliable among many such channels of information, ideas of what was going on in the outer world and how things were managed in France and elsewhere, points of similitude and comparison, were introduced into England and made the subject of thought and discussion.

46. A PEDLAR ROBBED BY MONKEYS.

(From MS. 10 E. IV.)

During the fourteenth century the foreign trade of England had greatly increased; there was a constant intercourse with Flanders, with Bruges above all other towns, for the sale of home produce: wools especially, and woolfels, cheese, butter, tin, coal,[318] etc., with the {239} Rhine country, with Gascony, with Spain, for the purchase of wines;[319] with the Hanse towns, Lombardy, Venice, and the East. Unintelligent regulations constantly interfered, it is true, with this development, but so strong was the impulse that it went on steadily. One of the most persistent and most noxious of these regulations was the prohibition to export money or bullion, which governments were never tired of renewing.[320] English merchants were forbidden, when purchasing goods in foreign countries, to pay for them with money; they had to pay in kind, with wools, cheese and other home produce, which of course might or might not be found acceptable by the vendor. It was, in other words, forbidden to use money as a means of facilitating exchange, which is its very raison d’être, and people had to return to the primitive practice of troc, or exchange in kind. It had sometimes worse effects than that of impeding transactions; foreign merchants might, as once did the Flemings, show their appreciation of the rules imposed on their English purchasers by answering their proffer of wools and cheese with a beating and imprisonment until they would alter their laws or their minds. For {240} which treatment, English merchants sent doleful complaints to Parliament. In such cases retaliation upon Flemings in England might be demanded, but no thought was entertained, even by the injured party, of repealing laws considered as an indispensable safeguard for the kingdom.[321]

Not much wiser were the rules applied to merchant shipping, made worse by constant change, a defect which was noticeable in every trade regulation of that time. Some are curious as being an attempt to establish the long lived, but more moderate rules devised by Cromwell in 1651: “Item, to increase the navy of England which is now greatly diminished, it is assented and accorded, that none of the king’s liege people do from henceforth ship any merchandize in going out or coming within the realm of England in any port, but only in ships of the king’s liegeance.” But the very next year this impossible statute was altered so as to practically annul it: “It is ordained and granted that the said ordinance only have place as long as ships of the said ligeance in the parts where the said merchants happen to dwell be found able and sufficient.”[322] The same unsteadiness of purpose was shown in almost every branch of the yet unbaptized science of political economy.

Not less worthy of notice than this attempt at a Navigation Act is the claim made, even then, by the Commons of England to a traditional supremacy over the seas. In one of their innumerable petitions concerning the decay of the navy, which seems to have been a favourite complaint in England from the remotest period down to our own time, they state that the rash and often {241} useless pressing of ships for the king’s service had brought about a most dangerous decrease of the navy; many mariners addicting themselves to other trades, while only “twenty years ago, and always before, the shipping of the Realm was in all the ports and good towns upon the sea or rivers, so noble and plenteous that all the countries held and called our said sovereign: the King of the Sea (le Roi de la Mier).”[323] As these were trading ships, only occasionally used for war purposes, this gives an idea of the importance to which British merchant shipping had risen in the fourteenth century and which it desired to recover.

The rules concerning foreign merchants coming to England were in the same manner constantly changed; sometimes the hardest restrictions were put upon them, and sometimes everything was done to allure them to come. The result was the same; trade was impeded doubtless, but it went on, and in spite of the unsteadiness of legislation, of retaliatory measures (as when, for instance, Hanse merchants were imprisoned in England and their goods seized on account of misdeeds committed by Prussians, “ceux de la seigneurie de Pruys,” no reason of complicity being alleged, but only it seems one of geographical vicinity[324]), in spite of restrictions innumerable, the intercourse steadily increased, to the great benefit of the community and the wider diffusion of ideas. In the ninth, the twenty-fifth, the twenty-seventh, and other years of his reign, King Edward III again and again stated that he took foreign merchants under his special protection: “To replenish the said realm and lands,” he said on one of these occasions, “with money and {242} plate, gold and silver and merchandises of other lands, and to give courage to merchants strangers to come with their wares and merchandises into the Realm and lands aforesaid, we have ordained and established that all merchants strangers which be not of our enmity, of what land or nation that they be, may safely and surely, under our protection and safe conduct, come and dwell in our said realm and lands, where they will, and from thence [freely] return,” selling their goods to whom they please, being exempted from purveyance and only paying the ordinary customs.[325] If war is declared between England and their country, they will have forty days to quit the realm, during which time they shall be allowed to continue their sales, and even more delay will be allowed them in case they are ill, or are detained by bad weather. This last was, as we have seen, a very necessary proviso, for a merchant coming with his goods in the depth of winter to a broken bridge might be stopped a rather long time; as also if, reaching the sea-coast, he found contrary winds. The statute of the twenty-fifth year provided that the liberal intentions of the king towards foreign merchants should be brought by way of proclamation to the notice of the officers and inhabitants of all the English counties, trading cities, seaports, etc.[326]

Thus protected and impeded by turns, foreign trade jogged on, and as common interest was, after all, stronger than popular prejudice and narrow regulations, it managed to thrive in England. Foreign gilds were established in London; foreign settlements were created in several trading towns,[327] foreign fleets visited the English coasts {243} at regular intervals, none with more important results than the fleet of the Venetian Republic. It began to call regularly at the ports of Flanders, England, and the North, in the year 1317; each ship had on board thirty archers for its defence, commanded by young Venetian noblemen. There was in the fourteenth century a Venetian consul at Bruges, and the commander of the galleys did not fail to put himself in communication with him. The fleet, or “galleys of Flanders,” as it was called, brought to England cotton from Egypt, cloth of silk from Venice, cinnamon, pepper, cloves, saffron, camphor, musk, and other drugs or spices from the East, sugar from Egypt and Sicily, etc. The trade of Venice in the eastern Mediterranean was very extensive; it was carried on freely, except during occasional wars with the Saracens, and the commercial interest that the Italian Republics had in the continuation of a good understanding with the infidel was one of the principal causes of the cessation of crusades. From England the Venetian galleys took back wools and woollen cloths, leather, tin, lead, sea-coal, cheese,[328] etc.

The importance of this intercourse with the continent, which fortunately the variations in the laws of the land were unable to check, gave prominence in the community to the English merchant. He is already in the fourteenth century, and has been ever since, one of the main supports of the State. While the numerous applications of Edward III to Lombard bankers for ready money are well known, it is sometimes overlooked how often he had recourse to English merchants, who supplied him with that without which his archers’ bows would have remained unstrung. The advice and goodwill of the {244} whole class of merchants could not be safely ignored; therefore their attendance was constantly requested at Westminster to discuss money and other State matters. Some families among them rose to eminence, like the De la Poles of Hull, who became earls of Suffolk with descendants destined to die at Agincourt, to be checked by Joan of Arc at Orleans, to be made dukes, and to be impeached for high treason. It was, too, the time of “thrice Lord Mayor of London”[329] Dick, afterwards Sir Richard Whittington, who, if we trust the legend, did not entertain the same feeling as the above-mentioned pedlars for cats. Another man of the same sort a little later was the famous William Canynge, of Bristol, who made a large fortune there in trading with foreign countries. One of his ships was called the Mary Redcliffe, a name as well as his own since associated with the memory of the Bristol boy-poet, Thomas Chatterton.

The feeling that the king of England should be le Roi de la Mier goes on increasing. The “Libelle of Englyshe Polycye,” a sort of consular report, written however in verse, about 1436, is quite positive:

“Kepte (keep) than the see about in specialle,

Whiche of England is the rounde walle;

As thoughe England were lykened to a cité,

And the walle enviroun were the see.

Kepe than the see that is the walle of Englond,

And than is Englonde kepte by Goddes sonde (decision).”[330]

And those traditions having been continued, Montesquieu was able to write, in his “Esprit des Lois”: “Other nations have made the interests of commerce yield to political interests. England has always made her political interests yield to her commercial ones. {245}

“This is the people in the world that has best known how to avail itself of these three great things: religion, commerce, and liberty.”[331]

47. A RICH MERCHANT TRAVELLING (CHAUCER’S MARCHAUNT).

(From the Ellesmere MS.)

Below men in such exalted situations as a Whittington (praised to the skies in the “Libelle”) or a Canynge, the bulk of the merchant community throve as best they could. One of the necessities of their avocation was constant travelling. They were to be met along the roads almost as much as their poorer brothers the pedlars. They also made great use of the water-courses, and carried their goods by boat whenever possible. Hence the constant interference of the Commons with the erection of new mills, weirs, and other hindrances on rivers by the owners of the adjoining lands. The “Rolls of Parliament” are full of petitions asking for the complete suppression of all new works of this sort as being detrimental to the “common passage of ships and boats on the great rivers of England,” or stating that “the merchants who {246} frequent the water between London and Oxford used to have free passage on the Thames from London to Oxford, with their ships to carry their goods and to serve the commonalty and the people, but now they are disturbed by weirs, locks, mills, and many other hindrances.”[332] The reasons why merchants preferred such a conveyance were that the cost of carriage was less; that, save for the occasional meeting of unexpected locks and weirs, they were more certain than on ordinary roads to find before them a clear course; and that they were better able to protect themselves against robbers.

They could not, however, go everywhere by water, and willingly or not they had then to betake themselves to the roads, and incur all the mischances that might turn up on the way or at the inn. In his “Visions,” Langland describes how one of his mischievous characters once rifled at the inn the boxes of travelling chapmen:

“ ‘Thus, ones I was herberwed,’ quod he · ‘with an hep of chapmen,

I roos whan thei were arest (having their rest) · and yrifled here males’ ” (their trunks).

Repentance, who had just been asking if his interlocutor had never made “restitucioun,” wonders at this strange statement as to how things went on at the inn:

“That was no restitucioun, quod Repentance · but a robberes thefte.”

To which the careless creature retorts in a way that reminds one of Chaucer’s French of Stratford-atte-Bow:

“ ‘I wende (believed) ryflynge were restitucioun,’ quod he · ‘for I lerned nevere rede on boke,

And I can no Frenche in feith · but of the ferthest end of Norfolke.’ ”[333]

Between the “male” of these chapmen and the mere pack of the pedlar the difference is not considerable; it is not very great either if compared to the “male” of the merchant we have met before, who travels slowly on account of an encumbrance represented by the poet as the emblem of “men that ben ryche.” So that these three links kept pretty close together the chain of the itinerant trading community. They all had to go about and to experience the gaieties or dangers of the road, the latter being of course better known to the richer sort than to the poor Bob Jakin of the day. The reasons for this constant travelling were numerous; the same remark applies to merchants of the fourteenth century as to almost all other classes: there was much less journeying than to-day for mere pleasure’s sake, but very much more, comparatively, out of necessity. We cannot underrate the causes of personal journeys suppressed by the post and telegraph (and telephone, unheard-of when the present work was first published), with the money and other facilities they have introduced. But besides the lack thereof, the staple and fairs were, in the fourteenth century, potent causes impelling merchants to move about.

The staple was the subject of constant regulations, complaints, new regulations and new complaints. The fundamental law concerning it is the well-known statute of 1353, the mechanism of which the following extracts will show:

“We (i.e. the king and Parliament) have ordained . . . first, that the staple of wools, leather, woolfels, and lead, growing or coming forth within our said realm and lands, shall be perpetually holden at the places underwritten, that is to say, for England at Newcastle-upon-Tyne, York, Lincoln, Norwich, Westminster, Canterbury, Chichester, Winchester, Exeter, and Bristow; for Wales at Kaermerdyn; and for Ireland at Dublin, Waterford, {248} Cork, and Drogheda, and not elsewhere; and that all the said wools, as well old as new, woolfels, leather, and lead, which shall be carried out of the said realm and lands shall be first brought to the said staples, and there the said wool and lead, betwixt merchant and merchant or merchant and others, shall be lawfully weighed by the standard; and that every sack and sarpler of the same wools so weighed be sealed under the seal of the mayor of the staple.”

Any English may bring and sell wool at the staple; but only foreign merchants are allowed to take it out of the realm. It is prohibited to stop carriages and goods going to the staple. It is ordained also “that in every town where the staple shall be holden, shall be ordained certain [streets] and places where the wools and other merchandises shall be put; and because that the lords or guardians of the houses and places, seeing the necessity of merchants do set percase their houses at too high ferm, we have ordained that the houses which be to be leased in such manner, shall be set at a reasonable ferm,” after the estimation of the local authority, assisted by four discreet men of the place.[334] It need scarcely be said that the staple was often removed from one town to another, from England to Calais and from Calais to England, etc., according to inscrutable whims and fancies, and with very detrimental results for all traders.

The fairs, the very name of which can scarcely fail to awaken ideas of merry bustle, gay clamour, and joyous agitation, were subjected to no less stringent regulations, so that the word reminded many people not merely of pleasure but also of fines, confiscations, and prison. {249} When the time came for a fair, no sale was permitted in the town except at the fair, under pain of the goods exhibited being seized. All the ordinary shops were to be closed. Such regulations were meant not only to insure the largest possible attendance at the fair, but also to secure for the lord of it the entirety of the tolls he had a right to.

An inquest holden at Winchester, famous for its St. Giles’s fair, gives an idea of the manner in which these commercial festivities were solemnized. The fair belonged to the Bishop of Winchester. On the eve of St. Giles’s Day, at early dawn, the officers of the bishop went about the town announcing the conditions of the fair, which were these: no merchant was to sell or exhibit for sale any goods in the town, or at a distance of seven leagues round it, except inside the gates of the fair. The same proclaimed the assise of bread, wine, and ale; tasted the wine, broke the casks where they detected “insufficient” wine. They proved all weights and measures; they destroyed false ones and fined the owners. All merchants were to reach the fair not later than a certain time (the feast of the Nativity of the Virgin Mary); if they came later they were not admitted except with a special licence from the bishop. The usual allowance is made in case they may have been kept back by a storm at sea, or by some mischance on land, “infortunium in terra,” which in this time of bad roads, and of such determined robbers as Sir Robert de Rideware, was not infrequent. A court of “pie powder,” that is, “of the dusty feet,”[335] was held in the fair itself, and any suit arising from transactions or trouble there was determined {250} by this tribunal at once, and without appeal. Similar rules were in existence at the Westminster fair, and at many others.[336] The importance of these meetings is shown by the constant recurrence in the “Rolls of Parliament” of petitions concerning them, beseeching the king to grant a fair to a certain lord or to a certain town, or to suppress a neighbouring town’s fair, for fear it may hurt the petitioners’ own.

People from the counties and from the continent flocked to the fairs. The largest and the more widely known were those of Winchester,[337] Abingdon for cattle, Bartholomew fair[338] in Smithfield (London), Stourbridge fair, the most important of all, Weyhill, mentioned in Langland’s “Visions,”[339] etc. In the time of Elizabeth, {251} Harrison, describing England, could not help expressing his pride in the importance and renown of English fairs, about which he writes thus: “As there are no great towns without one weekelie market at the least, so there are verie few of them that have not one or two faires or more within the compasse of the yeare, assigned unto them by the prince. And albeit that some of them are not much better than Lowse faire or the common Kirkemesses beyond the sea, yet there are diverse not inferiour to the greatest marts in Europe, as Sturbridge faire neere to Cambridge, Bristow faire, Bartholomew faire at London, Lin mart (Linne), Cold faire at Newport pond for cattell, and diverse other.” In all of which people were kept merry with ales and beers of various flavour and strength known by as significant names as those of present day dances, fox-trot, mother’s rest, and others, which to-morrow will, they too, need interpretation: “Such headie ale and beere in most of them, as for the mightinesse thereof . . . is commonlie called huffe cap, the mad dog, father whoresonne, angels food, dragon’s milke, go by the wall, stride wide, and lift leg. . . . Neither did Romulus and Remus sucke their shee wolfe (or sheepheards wife) Lupa, with such eger and sharpe devotion, as these men hale at huf cap, till they be red as cockes and little wiser than their combs.”[340]

Stourbridge fair belonged to the city and corporation of Cambridge, and was held in September, lasting three weeks. Tents and wooden booths were erected at that time on the open fields, so as to form streets; each trade had its own street as in real cities, and as may still be seen now in the bazaars of the East. Among the principal articles sold at this fair were: “ironmongery, cloth, {252} wool, leather, books.” The last article became in several fairs an important one when the art of printing spread; there was in the North Hundred of Oxford, in the sixteenth century, a fair at which an extensive sale of books took place, and this, as Professor Thorold Rogers has observed, is the only way to account for the rapid diffusion of books and pamphlets at a time when newspapers and advertisements were practically unknown. “I have more than once,” adds the same authority, “found entries of purchases for college libraries, with a statement that the book was bought at St. Giles’ fair.”[341] No reader of Boswell needs to be reminded how the father of Dr. Johnson had a booth for book selling on market days at Uttoxeter, in doing which he was merely keeping up, as we see, a mediæval tradition of long standing. How young Samuel refused once to accompany his father to the market, and, in after-time, repaired on a rainy day to the spot, and there did penance, has been alluded to before.

Even at the present day books continue to be an article of sale at the fairs in many French villages, and sheets of printed matter are taken from thence to cottages, where, under the smoky light burning in winter by the fireside, people, not very dissimilar to their forefathers of five hundred years ago, look at the image of mediæval heroes and of the worthies of the world, by the side of whom now begins to appear that of the heroes of the Great War.

To the fairs, along with mummers, jugglers, tumblers, beggars, and the whole of the catchpenny tribe, the pedlar was sure to resort, in the approved Autolycus fashion. “He haunts,” says the clown in “Winter’s Tale,” “wakes, fairs, and bear-baiting.” There he might exhibit “ribands of all the colours i’ the rainbow; points, more {253} than all the lawyers in Bohemia can learnedly handle, though they come to him by the gross; inkles, caddisses, cambricks, lawns. Why, he sings them over, as they were gods or goddesses; you would think a smock were a she-angel, he so chants to the sleeve hand, and the work about the square on’t.”[342] So that everybody might remark, as does the honest clown to fair Perdita, “You have of these pedlars that have more in them than you’d think, sister.” A favourable view, adopted, magnified, sublimated by another great poet whose Wanderer is a pedlar, but what a pedlar and what a part does he not play in the community!

“By these Itinerants, as experienced men,

Counsel is given; contention they appease

With gentle language; in remotest wilds,

Tears wipe away, and pleasant tidings bring;

Could the proud quest of chivalry do more?”[343]

Less aspiring most of them, not unsatisfied with their lot, careless of robbers, having few wants, pedlars of the past plodded the miry roads of Plantagenet England, as they did in the time of Shakespeare, merrily singing some “Winter Tale” ditty:

“Jog on, jog on, the foot-path way,

And merrily hent the stile-a:

A merry heart goes all the day,

Your sad tires in a mile-a.”

48. FOREST LIFE. WOOD-CUTTERS.

(From the MS. 10 E. IV.)

CHAPTER III OUTLAWS, WANDERING WORKMEN, AND PEASANTS OUT OF BOND

The mountebanks, the musicians, and their fellows have stayed us at the street corners, in the castle halls and courtyards; the pedlars have led us to the peasants’ cots, the fairs and markets. With the outlaws we must leave the highroad for the pathless woods, fens and solitudes.

England at that time was not the immense meadow, furrowed by railways, of the present day; there still remained much of those forests spoken of by Cæsar in his Commentaries, and where the Plantagenet kings and their predecessors had so jealously maintained their rights of the chase. The woods were not so well policed as they are now; they offered to bandits and men fleeing from justice a more extensive asylum than any six-circled sanctuary. In the popular mind the idea of the great rustling forest, and the idea of the free life {255} that the outlaws led there, were often mingled in one and the same sentiment of sympathy. Besides, therefore, the praise of the Arthurian heroes, is found in the poetry of the time that of the trees and bushes, that of the valiant men who, dwelling in the copse, were supposed to have struggled for the public liberties, Hereward, Fulk Fitz-Warin, Robin Hood. Were a man pursued, if the sanctuary was too far or not to his taste, he took to the forest; it was easier to get there, he remained nearer to his kin, and was about as safe as if he had crossed over to the continent.

Robbers, bandits, poachers, knights in trouble might thus meet as comrades in the depths of the wood. The forest is the first thought of the proscribed squire in the “Nut Brown Maid,” the masterpiece of English poetry in the fifteenth century, a musical duet of love, full of the wild charm of the great forest, with a well-accented cadence, frequent rhymes and assonances charming the ear as the oft repeated rustling of the forest leaves. On the verge of capture, the poor squire is fain to choose between a shameful death and retreat into “the grene wode.” His betrothed, who is nothing less than a baron’s daughter, wishes to follow him; and then, in every couplet, her lover, in order to try her, pictures to her the terrors and dangers of the fugitive’s life; she may perhaps see him taken and die a robber’s death:

“For an outlawe this is the lawe, that men hym take and binde

Wythout pytee, hanged to bee, and waver with the wynde.”

With this, a thrilling description of the life in the woods, of the brambles, snow, hail, rain; no soft bed; for roof the leaves alone:

“Yet take good hede, for ever I drede, that ye coude not sustein

The thorney wayes, the depe valeis, the snowe, the frost, the reyn,

The cold, the hete; for drye or wete we must lodge on the playn;

And, us above, noon other roue (roof), but a brake, bussh or twayne.” {256}

No delicate food, but only such as the wood affords:

“For ye must there in your hande bere a bowe redy to drawe,

And as a theef thus must ye lyve, ever in drede and awe.”

Worse even, and the trial becomes harder; the young girl must cut off her lovely hair; life in the forest does not allow of that ornament. Lastly, to crown all: I have already in the forest another sweetheart, whom I love better, and who is more beautiful. But, as resigned as Griselda, the betrothed replies: I shall go none the less into the forest; I will be kind to your sweetheart, I will obey her, “for in my mynde, of all mankynde, I love but you alone.” Then the lover’s joy breaks out: “I wyl not too the grene wod goo, I am noo banysshyd man,” I am not an obscure squire, but the son of the Earl of Westmoreland, and the hour of our wedding is now come.[344]

All the fugitives whom the forest received into its depths were not romantic knights, followed by baronesses patient as Griselda and brave as Bradamante. To pass from poetry to real facts, they were for the greater part formidable rovers, the same against whom Edward I and Edward III had enacted the rigorous law for suspects[345] mentioned above. This caste was composed, first of the organized bands of brigands whom the statute calls Wastours, Roberdesmen, and Drawlatches, then of thieves, sharpers, and malefactors of all kinds, of outlaws of various sorts, suffering that civil death alluded to by the lover in the “Nut Brown Maid.”

The sentence of outlawry was usually the starting-point for a wandering life, which by necessity became a life of brigandage. To be declared an outlaw, a crime {257} or a misdemeanor must have been committed; a private suit of a purely civil character was not enough;[346] but to come within sight of the gallows, no great guilt was necessary; hence the large number of outlaws. In a criminal lawsuit of the time of Edward I[347] the judge explains from his bench that the law is this: if the thief has taken anything worth more than twelve pence, or if he has been condemned several times for little thefts, and the total may be worth twelve pence or more, he ought to be hanged: “The law wills that he shall be hanged by the neck.” Still, as the judge observes in the case of a woman who had stolen a carpet lying on a hedge, worth eightpence, the law is milder than in the days of Henry III, for then a theft of the value of fourpence would hang a man.[348]

49. FOREST LIFE—A SHOOTING CASUALTY.

(From the MS. 10 E. IV.)

The man became an outlaw, and the woman a weyve, that is, abandoned to the mercy of every one and unable to claim the protection of justice. The author of “Fleta” expresses with terrible force the condition of persons so punished; they have wolves heads which may be cut off with impunity: “For she is a weyve whom no one will own, and it is equivalent to outlawry so far as penal consequences go. An outlaw and a weyve bear wolves {258} heads, which may be cut off by any one with impunity, for deservedly ought they to perish without law who would refuse to live according to law.”[349] The outlaw lost all his property and rights; all the contracts to which he was a party fell void; he was no longer bound to any one nor anybody bound to him. His goods were forfeit: “the chattels of an outlaw shall belong to our lord the king”; if he had lands the king kept the usufruct for a year and a day, at the end of which he restored them to the chief lord (capitalis dominus).[350] There were also hard legal rules on this subject; a man accused of murder and acquitted suffered confiscation nevertheless, if he had fled, fearing justice. Listen to the magistrate: “If a man be acquitted of manslaughter and of assent and help, the justices shall thereupon ask the jury if the prisoner took to flight; if they say No, let him go quits, if Yes, the king shall have his chattels.”[351] It may be {259} readily believed that the draconian severity of such regulations was not calculated to lessen the audacity of those whom they concerned, and that the excessive rigour of these penalties would often transform the fugitive of a day, who had doubted the clear-sightedness of the judge, into a professional brigand and highway robber.

Besides people of this kind there were the rovers, who, without being threatened with outlawry, had fled the village or the farm to which they belonged. The villein who, without special licence, left his master’s domain, could resume his previous life and intercourse with his kin, only by placing himself at his lord’s mercy, or, which was less risky, after having passed a year and a day in a free town without leaving it and without the lord, often unaware of the place, having interrupted the prescription. In this latter case he became a free man, and the ties which bound him to the soil were broken. But if he confined himself to wandering from place to place he might be re-taken any day that he reappeared at his own door.

An example of this may be seen in a characteristic lawsuit of the time of Edward I, a report of which has come down to us:—A presents a writ of imprisonment against B. Heiham, counsel for B, says: It is not for us to defend ourselves, A is our villein, his writ cannot take effect against us. This is verified, it is found that A is the son of a villein of B, that he ran away, and several years afterwards returned home, “to his nest,” where he was taken as a villein. The judge declares that this seizure was legal; that a villein might wander about during six, seven years or more, but if at the end he were found “in his own nest and at his hearth,” he might be seized as continuing to be his lord’s lawful property; the fact of his return put him into the condition he was {260} in before his departure. On hearing this decision the delighted counsel appropriately cites the scripture, “He fell into the pit which he hath digged.”[352]

At that period a villein could still be sold as chattel, given away as a present, donated to a convent for the benefit of one’s soul: “I Hugo de Ringesdon . . . gave and conceded . . . to God and Blessed Mary and the Abbot and convent of Sulby, for the salvation of my soul and that of my ancestors and successors, in perpetual frank almoigne, Robert son of Juliana de Walton, with all his sequel and all his chattels, nothing remaining of any bond with me or my successors for ever.”[353]

Or again: “Be it known to all, now and hereafter, that I John, son of Thomas [of Wurtham], have sold . . . to Hugo abbot of Saint Edmunds . . . Serval, son of William of Wurtham with all his sequel . . . and all the tenement which he held from me . . . for sixteen shillings of silver which the said abbot gave me.”[354]

If the actual sale of a man, sold as such, was infrequent, the transfer of a tenement, tenant included, {261} was of constant occurrence; the man and his kin changed hands as the plot of land to which he was bound. The monastery of Meaux, near Beverley, having claimed, against the abbot of St. Mary of York, the right to fish in the Wathsand and Hornsey meres, and no satisfactory proof being available on either side, recourse was had by the two religious disputants to judicial duel. The combat was severe: “It took place at York and lasted from morning to evening, our champion,” says the Meaux chronicler, “slowly succumbing.” Before complete defeat, however, “the duel was interrupted by the cleverness of a certain judge, Roger de Thurkelby, a friend of ours”; Meaux yielded the fishing rights to York, but York “granted us one toft, with a man holding that toft in villeinage, and his sequel.”[355]

The change in customs made the separate sale of the man himself practically impossible in the fourteenth century,[356] but the adscriptio glebæ remained imperative, and every means was taken to prevent the villeins from uprooting themselves and ceasing to be, like their own trees, fixtures liable to change masters with the trees.

The villein’s highest desire was of course manumission and complete independence: a dream so ambitious that most of them scarcely dared to form it, up to the time of the peasants’ revolt, when it became general, {262} and was realized—for a day. Second to that he wanted the commutation for a cash payment of the harassing personal labour due by him to his lord, a change which went on increasingly in the course of the fourteenth century.[357] When neither was possible and the burden became unbearable, he would, happen what may, try to escape and live elsewhere unknown and masterless.[358]

The villein, when in this mood, had two great temptations, the cities with their franchise, which even his master did not dare infringe,[359] and the forest, where he was out of reach. Noblemen sometimes allowed their villeins to become merchants and go from city to city. They were very near freedom, but not quite free; they had to pay “chevage” to their master as a sign of subjection, and if these serfs ceased to pay, the mere fact made them runaways, “just like domestic cerfs (red deer),” says Bracton, indulging in an, even then, antiquated pun. They can be run after and captured like any domestic animal.[360] {263}

Scarcely less tempting was the forest. Escaped peasants provided the wandering class with its most numerous recruits. In England several causes, the chief of which was the great plague of 1349,[361] had in the fourteenth century upset the relations of the working classes with the rich, and the proportions between the rate of wages and the cost of necessaries. Confronted with a longing for emancipation which arose on all sides, parliament—the House of Commons as willingly as the king—passed stern laws for the maintenance of the statu quo ante pestem. Thence came among the various sorts of peasants, both the villeins bound to their plot of land (“theirs” with the understanding they should perform the customary services due to the lord), and the landless labourers free to hire themselves out for wages, an immense desire to move about and see other parts. In their own hamlet, they found, nothing was to be got but the same obligations and the same wages as before the plague; but in such another county, they heard or supposed, there were better pay and less exacting masters[362]; besides, why not mingle with the class of free labourers? It was numerous and increased {264} unceasingly, in spite of the law. All did not succeed in concealing their past; and when the danger of being “put into stocks” and sent back to their masters became great, they fled again, changed county and became roamers. Others, discontented with or without cause, only quitted their place to become straightway homeless vagabonds of the most dangerous kind. Thus in the precincts of Westminster, the chapter house of the Abbey where the Commons sat, resounded with ever new complaints against the increasing lawlessness of peasants and labourers of all sorts. The Commons, who, generally speaking, represented the landowners of the country, and a trading bourgeoisie[363] with somewhat aristocratic tendencies, rose with force against the wishes for freedom of a class of workers whom they in no way represented. They were for the re-establishment of all the old laws and customs, and the strict rejection of new demands. But the current was too strong, and it swept by the laws, ever renewed and ever inefficient.

The plague was still raging, Parliament could not meet; the thinning of the ranks of the workers by death, and the excessive wage demands, or refusals to work at all, of the survivors, who preferred to live on alms, created such a dangerous state of confusion that the king issued, on his own authority and that of his council in June 1349, an ordinance which formed the basis of the famous Statute of Labourers of 1351[364] and of all the subsequent ones. {265} The most striking of its dispositions aimed at an outright conscription of labour, something like what we have seen of late, under the pressure of necessity, on the occasion of what has been for the world an even greater calamity:

“Any man or woman, in our realm of England, of whatever condition, either free or servile, sound in body and under the age of sixty years, living not by merchandise nor practising a definite craft, nor having personally wherewith to live, nor possessing land which he would cultivate, nor being somebody else’s servant, if he is requested to serve in a service congruent to his status, shall be bound to serve the one that shall thus request him.” He is moreover forbidden to receive any wages or compensations different from those of the twentieth year of the King’s reign, that is those which were barely sufficient before the plague and were entirely inadequate now. Later in the year, a new ordinance forbade any one to leave the desolated realm, “unless he were a merchant, a notary or an undoubted messenger.”[365]

The Commons could not imagine that, for mere villeins, there might be such a thing as necessity, and they uniformly attributed the new requests to the “malice of servants,” who exacted both higher wages and other terms of engagement than before. They would not work “without taking hire that was too outrageous.”[366] {266} Formerly they hired themselves for a year; now they wanted to remain their own masters and to hire themselves by the day: the statute forbids them to do so.

Three years later the complaints are renewed;[367] the value of corn is very low and labourers refuse to receive it as payment; they persist also in desiring day hire; all these doings are condemned once more. The quarrel continues and grows embittered. In the thirty-fourth year of his reign Edward III threatens to have the guilty branded on the forehead with an F, as a sign of “fauxine” (falsehood).[368] In 1372, Parliament declares that “labourers and servants flee from one county to another, some go to the great towns and become artificers, some into strange districts to work, on account of the excessive wages, none remaining for certain in any place, whereby the statute cannot be put in execution against them.”[369]

50. REAPING TIME.

(From the MS. 2 B. vii. Fourteenth Century.)

“We haue the payne and traveyle, rayne and wynd in the feldes.” (John Ball’s speech in Berner’s Froissart.)

The Commons of the Good Parliament of 1376 secured the confirmation of all the previous statutes. Prohibitions were renewed against any going out of their “own district” (pays propre), whether they were villeins proper, or “labourers and artificers and other servants.” The economic changes that had taken place had rendered possible, however, what was not so formerly; labourers were wanted, and it was not rare to find landowners who employed them in spite of the laws, even by the day, and at other wages than those of the tariff. The parliamentary petitions declare that “they are so willingly {269} received in strange places suddenly into service, that this reception gives example and comfort to all servants, as soon as they are displeased with anything, to run from master to master into strange places, as is aforesaid.” And this would not go on, observe the Commons, if when they offered their services in this fashion they were “taken and put in the stocks.” True, indeed, but the landowners who needed help, and whose crops were waiting on the ground, were too happy to meet with “servantz corores” (runaway), whoever they might be; and instead of taking them “to the nearest gaol,” to pay and use them. The labourers knew it, and their traditional masters had to show less severity. For on some unreasonable demand or over-strong reprimand, instead of submitting as formerly, or venturing a protest, the workman said nothing but, “par grande malice,” went away: “As soon as their masters challenge them with bad service or offer to pay them for their service according to the form of the said statutes, they flee and run away suddenly out of their service and out of their own district, from county to county, from hundred to hundred, from town to town, in strange places unknown to their said masters.”[370]

Worse still, and inevitable, many among them, unable or unwilling to work, took up begging or robbing as a profession. These “wandering labourers become mere beggars in order to lead an idle life, and betake themselves out of their district commonly to the cities, boroughs, and other good towns to beg, and they are able-bodied and might wel ease the community if they would serve.” {270}

So much for the beggars;[371] now for the robbers: “And the greater part of the said wandering servants commonly become strong robbers, and their robberies and felonies increase from one day to another on all sides,” acting in small bands of “two, three or four together,” and plundering “simple villages.” Energetic measures must be taken; let it be prohibited to give alms to this sort of people, and “let their bodies be put in the stocks or taken to the next gaol,” to be sent afterwards to where they belong. Edward III had already condemned to prison, by his ordinance of 1349, those who, under colour of charity “sub colore pietatis vel elemosine,” came to the aid of sturdy beggars, those vagabonds who went through the country “giving themselves to idleness and vice, and sometimes to theft and other abominations.” The same complaints recur in the time of Richard II. Hardly is he on the throne than they are repeated from year to year: 1377, 1378, 1379, revealing to us the existence of early unions and federations of villeins and labourers who, advised by men better informed than themselves, “lours counseillours, meyntenours et abettours,” defend their assumed freedom sometimes by force—“menassent les ministres de lours seignurs de vie et de membre”—sometimes by law, invoking written texts and “exemplifications” whose value they have learnt, and swear to remain “confederated” and to help each other at all cost against their masters.[372] {271}

Statutes multiplied to no purpose; the king had to recognize in his ordinance of 1383 that the “feitors (idlers) and vagrants” overran the country “more abundantly than they were formerly accustomed.”[373] In 1388 he renewed all the orders of his predecessors, re-enacting for rustics rules similar to those of the Inscription maritime still applied to-day in France, for what concerns seafaring, to the seaside population: any one who reached the age of twelve without having done anything else than “working at the plough and cart or other labor or service of husbandry,” will have to continue in this state his life long, “without being allowed to learn a trade or handicraft,” and if one is found to be a party to a contract of apprenticeship, the contract shall be void.

The king reminds, at the same time, the mayors, bailiffs, stewards, and constables of their duties, and asks them in particular to repair their stocks and keep them always ready for wanderers to cease in them their wanderings.[374]

No vain threats nor light penalties. The prisons of those days little resembled the well-washed buildings now to be seen in most English towns, at York for instance, where the guilty ones are apt to find more cleanliness and comfort than they ever knew before. They were mostly fetid dungeons, where the damp of the walls and the stationary position compelled by the irons corrupted the blood and engendered hideous maladies.

Many a wandering workman, accustomed to an active life and the open air, came thus, thanks to the incessant {272} ordinances of king and Parliament, to repent in the dark for his boldness, and during days and nights all alike, to regret his liberty, his family, and his “nest.” The effect of such a treatment on the physical constitution of the victims may be guessed or imagined, but without any imagining the reports of justice show it only too clearly. A roll of the time of Henry III reads, for instance, as follows:

“Assizes held at Ludinglond. The jury present that William le Sauvage took two men, aliens, and one woman, and imprisoned them at Thorlestan, and detained them in prison until one of them died in prison, and the other lost one foot, and the woman lost either foot by putrefaction. Afterwards he took them to the Court of the lord the king at Ludinglond to try them by the same Court. And when the Court saw them, it was loth to try them, because they were not attached for any robbery or misdeed for which they could suffer judgment. And so they were permitted to depart.”[375]

51. IN THE STOCKS.

(From the MS. 10 E. IV.)

How in such a condition the poor creatures could “depart,” and what became of them, the Assize Rolls do not say. Certain it is that no sort of indemnity was given {273} to help them out of trouble in their horrible condition. The justice of our fathers did not stop at trifles.

The stocks, which according to the laws of Richard II were always to be kept in good condition ready for use, consisted of two beams placed one on the other. At proper intervals round holes were cut; the upper beam was raised, and the legs of the prisoners were passed through the holes; sometimes there was a third beam, in the openings of which the wrists of the wretches were also caught; the body sometimes rested on a stool, sometimes on the ground. In certain places the stocks were pretty high; the sufferer’s legs were placed in them and he remained thus, his body stretched on the ground in the damp, his head lower than his feet; but this refinement of cruelty was not habitual.[376]

Stocks are still to be seen in many places in England; for instance, in the picturesque village of Abinger, where they stand on the green, near the churchyard. Others in a very good state of preservation are in existence at Shalford, near Guildford. They have not long ceased to be used in England; vagabonds and drunkards were seen in them within the memory of men who were not old when the present book was written. According to their remembrance people when released felt so benumbed that they were scarcely able to stand, and experienced great difficulty in getting away.

52. THE STOCKS AT SHALFORD, GUILDFORD.

(Present state.)

But the threat of prisons so unhealthy and of stocks so unpleasant did not hold back the labourers more and more weary of being tied to the soil. Every pretext for leaving their place was welcome; they even dared to use that of a devotional journey. They set out, staff in hand, “under colour of going far on a pilgrimage,” and {274} never returned. But a new restraint was to be applied to tame this turbulent spirit, the obligation for every one to furnish himself with a kind of letter of travel or passport, in order to move from one county to another. None might leave his village if he did not carry a “letter patent stating the cause of his going and the date of his return, if he were to return.” In other words, even with the right to go and settle definitively elsewhere, a permit for moving had to be procured. These letters would be sealed by a “good man” (prod homme), assigned in each hundred, city, or borough, by the justices of the peace, and special seals were to be expressly made, said the statute, bearing the king’s arms in the centre, the name of the county around, and that of the hundred, city, or borough across. Even the case of fabricating false letters was foreseen, which shows how well was realized the ardent desire of many men of this class to {275} leave the place where they were tied. Every individual surprised without regular papers would be sent to jail.

53. A CRIPPLE AND OTHER BEGGARS.

(From the MS. 10 E. IV.)

Beggars were treated as “servants” who had no “testimonial letters.”[377] What was wanted was to impose immobility upon as many people as possible, and thus hinder the disquieting peregrinations of so many rovers. As for beggars incapable of work, they must nevertheless cease frequenting the highroads, and must end their days in the cities where they chance to be at the time of the proclamation, or at most in some town near the spot where they were born; they shall be taken there within forty days, to stay “for the rest of their lives.”

What is stranger, and lacking other proofs, would show to what class students then belonged, is that they are included in the same category; they were accustomed, on returning to their homes, or on making pilgrimages, or going to the university, to hold out a hand for the charity of passers-by and to knock at the door of possible givers. They were ranked with the beggars, and put in irons if they lacked the regulation letter; this document was to be given them by the Chancellor, and that {276} was the only difference: “And that the scholars of the universities that go so begging have letters testimonial of their Chancellor upon the same pain.”[378]

Again, in the following year (1389), a new statute reproves the custom of “artificers, labourers, servants,” etc., who keep for their own use harriers and other dogs, and on “feast days, when good Christians are at church hearing Divine service,” get into the parks and warrens of the nobility and destroy the game. Much more, they avail themselves of these occasions when they meet together armed, without fear of being disturbed, to “hold their assemblies, conversations, and conspiracies, to rise against and disobey their allegience.” The thickets of the seignorial forests must have sheltered many a meeting of this kind during church services on the eve of the great revolt of 1381;[379] in such retreats no doubt were brought forth some of the living and stirring ideas which, transported from place to place by the wanderers, made the people of different counties understand that they were the same people, suffering from a variety of abuses, longing for relief.

In a revolt like this, the part played by the wandering class is considerable, and the historian should not neglect it. If we do not take this element into account, it is hard to explain the extent and importance of a movement which came near having consequences comparable to those of the French Revolution. “I had lost my heritage and the kingdom of England,” said Richard II {277} on the evening of the day when his presence of mind had saved him, and he was right. Why was the French Jacquerie a commonplace, powerless rising compared to the English revolt? The reasons are manifold, but one of the chief was the absence of a class of wayfarers as strong, active, and numerous as that of England. This class served to unite all the people: by its means those of the South learnt the ideas of those of the North, what each suffered and desired; the sufferings and wishes were not always identical, but it was enough to know that all had reforms to demand. Thus, when the news came that the revolt had begun, the people rose on all sides, and while it was apparent that the desires of each were not absolutely similar, yet the basis of the contention being the same, and all wishing for more independence, they went forth together without being otherwise acquainted than by the intermediary of the wayfarers. The kings of England, indeed, had perceived the danger, and on different occasions had promulgated statutes bearing especially on the talk indulged in by these wanderers about the nobles, prelates, judges, and all the depositaries of public power. Edward I had said in one of his laws:

“Forasmuch as there have been oftentimes found in the country devisors of tales, whereby discord, or occasion of discord, hath many times arisen between the king and his people, or great men of this realm; for the damage that hath and may thereof ensue, it is commanded, that from henceforth none be so hardy to tell or publish any false news or tales, whereby discord, or occasion of discord, or slander may grow between the king and his people, or the great men of the realm; and he that doth so, shall be taken and kept in prison, until he hath brought him into the court who was the first author of the tale.”[380]

The danger of such speeches, which touched the acts {278} and even the thoughts of the great men of the kingdom, became menacing anew under Richard II, and in the first years of his reign the following statute was enacted, reinforcing that of 1275:

“Item, Of devisors of false news and reporters of horrible and false lyes, concerning prelates, dukes, earls, barons, and other nobles and great men of the realm, and also concerning the chancellor, treasurer, clerk of the privy seal, steward of the king’s house, justices of the one bench or of the other, and of other great officers of the realm about things which by the said prelates, lords, nobles, and officers aforesaid were never spoken, done, nor thought . . . whereby debates and discords might arise betwixt the said lords or between the Lords and the Commons, which God forbid, and whereof great peril and mischief might come to all the realm, and quick subversion and destruction of the said realm, if due remedy be not provided: it is straitly defended upon grievous pain, for to eschew the said damages and perils, that from henceforth none be so hardy to devise, speak, or to tell any false news, lyes, or other such false things, of prelates, lords, and of other aforesaid, whereof discord or any slander might rise within the same realm; and he that doth the same shall incur and have the pain another time ordained thereof by the statute of Westminster the first.”[381] In vain: two years later broke out the revolt of the peasants, and the depositions of the rebels when brought before the judge leave no doubt as to the part played by wayfarers in the carrying of political news from one county to another.

The mason John Cole, of Lose, in the parish of Maidstone, Kent, turns informer, betrays twenty-seven of his companions, giving their names (some proved innocent), and saving his own head. Their plan was to make the otherwise unpopular John of Gaunt, king of England, {279} on the mere report that he had freed his “natives.” The rebels had decided to send to him in order to ascertain, and if the news proved true, to depose his nephew young Richard II. The report had been brought to the city of Canterbury by pilgrims, peregrini, arriving from the North, obviously to worship at the shrine of St. Thomas.[382]

In mediæval France during the endless wars, and the brief intervals between them, the roads were held by plundering brigands: labourers or knights by birth. Soldiers, the dregs of the lowest or highest classes, considered the rest of society as their devoted prey, the highway resounded with the noise of arms, the peasant fled. Troops originally equipped for the defence of the land attacked without scruple all whom they thought less strong than themselves and worth robbing. Such people “turned French,” as Froissart puts it, and “turned English” according to the interest of the moment.

The vagrants threatened with the stocks by the English law were of another kind, and whatever the number of brigands among them these were not the majority; the peasants mostly sympathized with, instead of fearing, them. Thus the English revolt was not a desperate enterprise; it was conducted with extraordinary coolness and practical sense. The insurgents showed a calm {280} consciousness of their strength which strikes us, and struck much more the anxious knights in London; they went with their eyes open, and, if they destroyed much, they wished also to reform. It was possible to treat and come to an understanding with them; truth to say, the word and pledge given them will be broken, and the prison, the rope and the block will quickly put an end to the revolt; but whatever the Lords and Commons sitting at Westminster may say,[383] the new bonds will not have the tenacity of the old ones, and a great step towards freedom, one with which the continent has nothing comparable, will have been made.

In France, the beast of burden, ill-nourished, ill-treated, fretted by the harness, trudged wearily along with shaking head, wan eye and a halting gait; his sudden bolts only caused new loads to be added to his fardel, and that was all; centuries were to pass before the day of accounting came and, in blood too, the account would be settled.

PART III RELIGIOUS WAYFARERS

54. A FRIAR ON A JOURNEY (CHAUCER’S “FRERE”).

(From the Ellesmere MS.)

CHAPTER I WANDERING PREACHERS AND FRIARS

While the inward consciousness of common wants and longings for better days spread everywhere, by means of that crowd of work-people whom we find in England ceaselessly on the move in spite of statutes, the guiding ideas were sown broadcast by another kind of roamer, the preachers. Sprung also from the people, they had studied; as we have seen it was not necessary to be rich in order to go through the course at Oxford; the villeins even sent their children there, and the Commons, of scant liberalism as we know, protested against this emancipation of another kind, this advancement by means of learning, “avancement par clergie.” Preventive measures, they thought, were indispensable to save “the honour” of the freemen of the realm, by which they meant privilege; ideas of honour have changed. But, even then, it was going too far, and the king, who had after all learnt a lesson in 1381, rebuked the Commons with a “le roi s’avisera” which {284} was then, and is to-day, the form of royal refusal.[384] These clerks knew what was the condition of the people; they knew the miseries of the poor, which were those of their father and mother and of themselves; the intellectual culture they had received enabled them to transform into precise conceptions the general aspirations of the tillers of the soil. The former are not less necessary than the latter to every important social movement; if both are indispensable to the making of the tool, handle and blade, it is these definite views which form the blade.

The roaming preachers knew how to sharpen it, and they were numerous. Those whom Wyclif sent to popularize his doctrines,[385] his “simple priests,” or “poor priests,” did just what others had done before them; they imitated their forerunners, and no more confined themselves to expounding the difficult and not always democratic theories of their master than the mendicant friars, or monks, or secular priests, friends of the revolution, strictly kept to the precepts of the gospel. Their sympathies were with the people, and they showed it in their discourses. Wyclif contributed to the increase of these wanderers; his people came from the same stock as the others; if it was easy for him to find clerks ready to act as his missionaries, the reason was that many in the kingdom were already prepared for such a task, and only awaited their opportunity.[386] The revolutionary {285} leader John Ball was a secular priest, and so was the well-known Lollard, William Thorpe.

All, in fact, did the same kind of work. For different motives and with different aims, they led to the same results: the belief that the State, the Church, the Government, the Court, the rule of the masters, whether spiritual or temporal, were not what they should be, and that a change must come. Doubts and discontents always help each other; whoever strikes at the tree shakes the tree. Wyclif’s theory, “both before and after the rising, was that temporal lords had a right to their property, but that churchmen had no right to theirs.”[387] His teachings helped, however, to spread doubts as to the legitimacy of both. Though it had nothing to do with Lollard tenets, the diffusion thereof was facilitated by the papal schism of 1378: another great tree that was shaken.

Men able to address a crowd scoured the country, drawing together the poor and attracting them by harangues filled with what people who suffer always like to hear. The statute passed just after the revolt clearly shows how much the influence of the wandering preachers was feared. Their dress even and manner of speech are described; these malcontents have an austere aspect, they go “from county to county, and from town to town in certain habits under dissimulation of great holiness.” They dispense of course with the ecclesiastical papers which regular preachers ought to carry; they are “without the licence of our Holy Father the Pope, or of the Ordinaries of the {286} places, or other sufficient authority.” They make themselves heard, and their successors to this day have never ceased to follow suit, “not only in churches and churchyards, but also in markets, fairs, and other open places where a great congregation of people is.” Their real subject is not dogma, but the social question; on their lips the religious sermon becomes a political harangue. “Which persons,” the statute says, “do also preach divers matters of slander, to engender discord and dissension betwixt divers estates of the said realm as well spiritual as temporal, in exciting of the people, to the great peril of all the realm.” They are cited to appear before the ecclesiastic authority, the ordinaries, but refuse to “obey to their summons and commandments.” Let the sheriffs and others of the king’s officers henceforth watch with care these wandering orators and send to prison those unable to show proper certificates.[388]

We may gain an idea of their speeches by recalling the celebrated harangue of the priest John Ball,[389] the most stirring of these travelling orators. Certainly, in the Latin phrase of the “Chronicle of England,” his thoughts are given too solemn and too correct a form, but all that we know of the circumstances matches so well his undoubted purports, that his actual speech cannot have differed, in its trend at least, from what the chronicler has transmitted to us. The popular saying quoted before serves as his text, and he developes it in this manner:

“At the beginning we were all created equal; it is the tyranny of perverse men which has caused servitude to arise, in spite of God’s law; if God had willed that there should be serfs He would have said at the beginning {289} of the world who should be serf and who should be lord.”[390]

55. “WHEN ADAM DELVED AND EVE SPAN.”

(The motto of John Ball’s speech illustrated from the MS. 2 B. vii. Fourteenth Century).

What made Ball powerful was that he found his best weapons in the Bible; quoting it he appealed to the good sentiments of the lowly, to their virtue, their reason; he showed that the Divine Word accorded with their interest; they would be “like the good father of a family who cultivates his field and plucks up the weeds.” The same ideas are attributed to him by almost all the chroniclers. Froissart uses to describe his doings almost the same words as the statute already quoted. He represents him when he found a congregation of people, especially on Sundays, after mass, preaching in the open air sermons similar to that in the “Chronicon Angliæ”: “This preest,” says Froissart, “used often tymes on the sondayes after masse, whanne the people were goynge out of the mynster, to go into the cloyster and preche, and made the people to assemble about hym, and wolde say thus: A ye good people, the maters gothe nat well to passe in Englande, nor shall nat do tyll every thyng be common, and that there be no villayns nor gentylmen. . . . What have we deserved or why shulde we be kept thus in servage? we be all come fro one father and one mother, Adam and Eve: whereby can they say or shewe that they be gretter lordes than we be, savynge by that they cause us to wyn and labour for that they dispende . . . They dwell in fayre houses, and we have the payne and traveyle, rayne and wynde in the feldes; and by that that cometh of our labours they kepe and maynteyne their estates. . . . Lette us go to the kyng, he is yonge, and shewn hym what servage we be in. . . . Thus Johan sayd on sondayes whan the people issued out of the churches in the vyllages . . . and so they wolde murmure one with another in the feldes and in the wayes as {290} they went togyder, affermyng howe Johan Ball sayd trouthe.”[391]

So the enthusiastic multitude promised to make him archbishop and chancellor of that kingdom in which he dreamed there should be “equal liberty, equal rank, equal power” for all; but he was taken, drawn, hanged, beheaded, and quartered,[392] and his dream remained a dream.

Meanwhile, politics apart, there might yet be found in the fourteenth century some of God’s elect who, alarmed by the crimes of the world and the state of sin in which men lived, left their cells or the paternal roof to go about among villages and towns and preach conversion. There remained some, but they were rare. Contrary to others, these did not speak of public affairs, but of eternal interests; they had not always received sacred orders; they acted as volunteers to the celestial army. Of this sort was the before mentioned Richard Rolle, of Hampole, whose life was partly that of a hermit, partly of a wandering preacher. He was neither monk, nor doctor, nor priest; when young, he had abandoned his father’s house to go and lead a contemplative life in solitude. There he meditated, prayed, and mortified himself; crowds came to his cell to listen to his exhortations; he had ecstatic trances; his friends took off his ragged cloak, mended it, and put it back on his shoulders without his perceiving it. He later left his retreat, and for a long time travelled over the north of England, becoming a wanderer, “changing place continually,” preaching to lead men to salvation. He finally settled at Hampole, where he ended his life in seclusion, writing incessantly, and edifying the neighbourhood by his devotion; he died the year of the great plague, 1349. Scarcely was he dead than his tomb attracted pilgrims, pious people brought offerings there, miracles were performed. In the {291} nuns’ convent at Hampole, which drew from the vicinity of his tomb great honour and profit, an “Office of St. Richard, the hermit,” was composed, as we have seen, to be sung when he should be canonized. But the office of the old hermit and itinerant preacher has never had occasion to be sung down to the present day.[393]

The wandering preachers met with in the villages were not always Lollards sent by Wyclif, nor inspired men who, like Rolle of Hampole, held their mission from their conscience and from God; they were often members of an immense and powerful caste sub-divided into several orders, that of the mendicant friars. The two principal branches were the Dominicans, Preachers, or Black friars, and the Franciscans, Friars minor or Grey friars, both established in England in the thirteenth century,[394] the “men of this [world] that most wide walken,” said Langland.[395]

The immortal satires of Chaucer should not blind us to the initial merit of these orders, nor cause us to see in the members thereof, at all times, nothing but impudent and idle vagabonds, at once impious, superstitious, and greedy—

“A Frere ther was, a wantoun and a merye;

•••••

Ful wel biloved, and famulier was he {292}

With frankeleyns overal in his cuntre,

And eek with worthi wommen of the toun;

•••••

Ful sweetly herde he confessioun,

And plesaunt was his absolucioun.

He was an esy man to yeve penance,

Ther as he wiste to han a good pitance;

For unto a povre ordre for to geve

Is signe that a man is wel i-shreve.

•••••

He knew wel the tavernes in every toun,

And every ostiller or gay tapstere.”[396]

56. A WORLDLY ECCLESIASTIC.

(From the MS. 10 E. IV.)

In Chaucer’s days, such friars were many, but some better ones could also be met; not only those, rare indeed in the fourteenth century, who continued the traditions of their founder, living among the poor, poor as they, and withal wise, devout, and compassionate: Chaucer’s friar was of a different sort; he avoided acquaintance with “a lazer or a beggere,” unwilling to deal “with such poraile.” But even among those who lived careless of the rule, some were at work whose thoughts, dangerous {293} as they might be, were not so base, those friars namely who, when the moment came, could be confounded with the simple priests of their enemy Wyclif, and who were certainly comprised along with them in the statute of 1382. Certain it is that many friars, in their roaming career, preached in the market place, just like John Ball, the new doctrines of emancipation. Hence they alone among the clergy, at the hour of the great revolt, still preserved a certain popularity among the lowly; and the monastic chroniclers, their natural enemies, complacently paraded in their narratives this new grievance against these detested orders.[397] Langland, who cursed the revolt, cursed also the friars for having a share of responsibility in it. Envy has whispered into their ears and said: study logic, law, and the hollow dreams of philosophers, and go from village to village proving that all property ought to be in common—the very teaching of John Ball:

“and proven hit by Seneca

That alle thyng under hevene · ouhte to beo in comune.”[398]

Always armed with good sense, Langland plainly declares that the author of these subversive theories lies; the Bible says, “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s goods.” Formerly the life of the friars was exemplary, Charity dwelt among them; this was in the days of the great saint of Assisi, the friend of men, the friend of birds, the friend of all that had been created and could suffer.[399] {294}

And, indeed, what a holy mission their founder had given them! Coarsely dressed, barefoot, getting only such food as was freely offered them, they were to go into the towns and visit the poorest, most densely populated and unhealthiest suburbs, to seek out the lost.

“And all the brothers,” said Francis, in his rule, “are to be clad in mean habits, and may blessedly mend them with sacks and other pieces; whom I admonish and exhort, that they do not despise or censure such men as they see clad in curious and gay garments and using delicate meats and drinks, but rather let every one judge and despise himself.” They must never quarrel, but be “meek, peacable, modest, mild and humble. . . . And they are not to ride unless some manifest necessity or infirmity oblige them. Whatsoever house they go into, they shall first say, ‘Peace be unto this house,’ and, according to the Gospel, it shall be lawful for them to eat of all meats that are set before them.” They must beg in order to get the necessaries of life, but they must receive them in kind, never in money. “The brothers shall not make anything their own, neither house nor place, nor any other thing; and they shall go confidently to beg alms like pilgrims and strangers in this world, serving our Lord in poverty and humility.”[400]

All the miseries, all the hideous blemishes of humanity, every kind of outcasts, the physical or moral lepers, were to have their sympathy; and the lower classes in return would love and venerate them, and grow morally better, owing to their word and example. Eccleston relates that a friar minor once put on his sandals without permission to go to matins. He dreamt afterwards that he was arrested by robbers, who cried out, “Kill him! Kill him!”

“But I am a friar minor,” said he, sure of being respected. {295}

“Thou liest, for thou art not barefoot.”[401]

The first of their duties was to remain poor, in order to be able, having nothing to lose, fearlessly to use firm language to the rich and powerful of the world. When on his death-bed, in 1253, wise and courageous Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln, a great friend of theirs, and because a friend of theirs, reminded them of their rule, appropriately quoting a line of Juvenal’s:

“Cantabit vacuus coram latrone viator.”

The friars were to be like the traveller without money, whose peace of mind is never disturbed by meeting robbers.[402]

St. Francis had not wished his friars to be men of learning and study; he was afraid especially of those subtle theological and metaphysical researches which uselessly absorbed the life of so many great clerics. Others enough, he thought, would devote themselves to such speculations; he wanted to fill a gap and in this line there was no gap. His rule was so strict that the famous Roger Bacon, who belonged to his order, had to apply to the pope to be permitted to use ink and parchment.[403] What the saint desired was to send throughout the world an army of missionaries who would devote themselves materially and morally to the welfare, body and soul, of all the weary, the derelict, the dregs of humanity. Thus practised, with no room left for the pride of knowledge, disinterestedness was the more absolute, servitude the {296} more voluntary, and the effect on the masses the greater. The subtlety of teachers was not necessary for the fulfilling of this task; and the striking example of the poverty of the consoler, heedless of his own troubles, was the best of consolations. Above all, the vanity of the apostle must be killed, the greatness of his merit must be apparent to God only. With a heart so purified he would necessarily have a sufficient comprehension of the problems of life and of the high moral aims accessible even to the lowest to be naturally eloquent; the study of the “Summæ,” in repute, was useless.

But too many dangers surrounded the sublime foundation, and the first was knowledge itself. “The Emperor Charles, Roland and Oliver,” once said the Saint, “and all the paladins and all strong men, have pursued the infidel in battle till death, and with great pains and labour have won their memorable victories. The holy martyrs died struggling for the faith of Christ. But in our days there are people who seek glory and honour among men simply by the narration of the deeds of heroes. In like manner there are some among you who take more pleasure in writing and preaching on the merits of the saints than in imitating their works.” This reply St. Francis made to a novice who wished to have a psalter. He humorously added, “When you have a psalter you will wish to have a breviary, and when you have a breviary you will sit in a chair like a great prelate, and will say to your brother, ‘Brother, fetch me my breviary.’”[404]

The popularity of the friars had soon become immense,[405] {297} and it was found that they had monopolized in England everything that concerned religion.[406] By a quite human contradiction—let Brutus be Cæsar—their poverty had invited riches, and their self-denial power; the hovels where they lodged at first had become sumptuous monasteries with chapels as large as cathedrals; the rich wanted to be buried there, in tombs chiselled with the latest refinements of the florid Gothic. Their apologists of the fifteenth century relate with admiration that in their fine library at London, for in spite of the rule they had a fine library, there was a tomb adorned with four cherubims;[407] that their church, begun in 1306, was three hundred feet long, ninety-five wide, and sixty-four feet high, with the columns all of marble as well as the pavement. Kings and princes had enriched the building; some had given the altars, others the stalls; Edward III, “for the repose of the soul of the most illustrious Queen Isabella, buried in the choir” (who had ended her immoral life in the habit of the Santa Clara nuns), repaired the great middle window, blown down by the wind. In the same church was preserved the heart of Queen Eleanor, mother of Edward I. Relating that it was there, Rishanger, a monk of Saint Albans and a contemporary, made thereupon a remark, which Walsingham, also a monk of St. Albans, gleefully reproduced in his “Historia Anglicana”: “Her body was buried in the monastery of Ambresbury, but her heart in London, in the church of the Minorites, who, like all friars of every order, claim for themselves something of the bodies of any powerful persons dying; after the manner of the dogs assembling {298} round corpses, where each one greedily awaits his portion to devour.”[408] Gilbert de Clare, Earl of Gloucester, had given for the same building twenty trees from his forest of Tunbridge. Rich merchants, the mayor, the aldermen, followed suit. The names of the donors were inscribed on the windows, and Langland was indignant, and recalled the precept, “Let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth.” We learn thus that the third window on the west had been given by Walter Mordon, “stoke-fyschmonger,” and Mayor of London. The second window on the south was due to John of Charlton, knight, and his wife, whose arms figured in it; the fourth to Walter de Gorst, fellmonger of London; the fifth to the Earl of Lancaster; the fourth on the west to “various collections, and thus it does not bear a name.” One of the donors is styled the special father and friend of the friars minor.

It could be but a delight for the Wyclifites to reproach the friars with all these mundane splendours; Wyclif revels in it:

“Freris bylden mony grete chirchis and costily waste housis, and cloystris as hit were castels, and that withoute nede. . . . Grete housis make not men holy, and onely by holynesse is God wel served.” Those convents are “Caymes Castelis.”[409]

57. PSALM SINGING. THE INTERIOR OF A FRIAR’S CHURCH.

(From the MS. Domit. A. xvii. in the British Museum.)

Interminable lists, too, of cardinals, bishops, and kings who have belonged to the order are drawn up, not forgetting even “certain persons of importance in the world,”—the very antithesis of their founder’s intent. Finally, they enumerate the dead who at the last moment assumed the habit of the friars: “Brother Sir Roger {301} Bourne, knight, buried at Norwich in the friars’ habit, 1334.”[410]

The pride and riches of the Dominicans are just as great. The author of “Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede,” towards the end of the fourteenth century, accurately describes one of their monasteries, the splendid columns to be seen there, the sculptures, paintings, and gildings that adorn the chapter house, so beautiful that it obviously reminds the author of the one at Westminster, or of the painted chamber, “la chambre peinte,” where at times Parliament sat:

“As a Parlement-hous · y-peynted aboute,”

the magnificent stained glass windows ornamented with the arms of the nobles or the mark of the merchants who have given them (“merkes of marchauntes”), and “lovely ladies,” their bronze figures lying on the slabs, “in many gay garmentes,” the imposing tombs of knights heightened with gold.[411]

The proportions are reversed; as great as the modesty required by the holy founder was now the pride. The faults Chaucer reproaches them with creep in among them; they become interested, greedy, coarse men of the world. The necessity for them to live among the laity had been one of their chief dangers; they were to save the laity, but were instead corrupted by it; they caught the plague that they were to cure. Before even the middle of the {302} thirteenth century, one of them had had a revelation that “Demons celebrated every year a council against the order, and had found three means (to pervert it), that is, intercourse with women, the receiving of useless persons, and the handling of money.”[412]

Mendicity is now their trade, which some practice well, others better; miracles of self-denial were demanded of them, and behold, on the contrary, prodigies of selfishness. It is no longer religion, it is their order which must be promoted; they preach not on behalf of Christ, but on behalf of their convent; the reversal is complete. All borrow largely from the treasure of good works amassed by their first apostles and spend it madly. The respect of the multitude lessens, their renown for holiness declines; they cast into the other scale of the balance so many faults and disorders that it overweighs. And what remains henceforth? Superstition replaces devotion; some, in spite of the rule, have studied metaphysics and sciences, the trivium, the quadrivium[413]; for a larger number, however, it is not learning but a gross materialism that veils the superhuman ideal of Francis of Assisi. Contact with their habit is equivalent to a good deed; if the dress is assumed on the death-bed the demons will take flight. Numberless visions have revealed to them these articles of a new faith: “Thei techen lordis and namely ladies,” says Wyclif, “that if they dyen in Fraunceys habite, thei schul nevere cum in helle for vertu thereof.”[414] {303}

And so it came to pass that, not only poets like Chaucer and Langland, not only reformers like Wyclif, but also the universities[415] and the monks of the old-established orders, waged open war against the friars. To which the monks were moved partly, it is true, by jealousy, when they saw these newly created brotherhoods rising in importance, in numbers and in wealth, but partly, also, by the sight of undeniable abuses and worldliness. In such an authoritative work as the “English History,” written in St. Albans Abbey by Chaucer’s contemporary, Thomas Walsingham, the present state and behaviour of the friars is thus described: “The friars, unmindful of their profession, have even forgotten to what end their orders were instituted; for the holy men their law-givers desired them to be poor and free of all kind of temporal possessions, that they should not have anything which they might fear to lose on account of saying the truth. But now they are envious of possessors, approve the crimes of the great, induce the commonalty into error, and praise the sins of both; and with the intent of acquiring possessions, they who had renounced possessions, with the intent of gathering money, they who had sworn to persevere in poverty, call good evil and evil good, leading astray princes by adulation, the people by lies, and drawing both with themselves out of the straight {304} path.” Walsingham adds that a familiar proverb in his time was, “He is a friar, therefore a liar.”[416]

58. SPRINKLING DINERS WITH HOLY WATER.

(From the MS. 10 E. IV.)

The sanctity of the institution and the unworthiness of many of its members caused it to be at once venerated and detested; however contemptible be the man, what if, after all, the keys of heaven were in his hand? Respect mingled with fear in the feeling for him. Thus poets laughed at the friars, popular story-tellers scouted them; distrust, doubt, contempt spread, extending from the lowly friar to the reverend bishop himself; churchmen were caricatured on the very stalls upon which they sat; Master Reynard was represented delivering a sermon while wearing episcopal insignia, and neither the miniaturist, charged with illuminating an imposing volume of Decretals, nor those who had entrusted him with the work, found anything improper in his satirising on the margin the whole ecclesiastical hierarchy, from bishops to monks or clerks. One of the latter is shown forgetting in the kitchen his sprinkler and bucket of holy water; {305} then remembering what he has come for and going to sprinkle the masters at table, then returning to the kitchen maid.[417] In the same ironical spirit the author of a popular song of the fourteenth century wrote:

“Preste ne monke ne yit chanoun,

Ne no man of religioun,

Gyfen hem so to devocioun

As done thes holy frers.

For summe gyven ham to chyvalry,

Somme to riote and ribaudery;

Bot ffrers gyven ham to grete study,

And to grete prayers.”

Several stanzas follow which cannot be quoted.[418]

The people, therefore, fitfully saw in the friars their protectors and allies in case of revolt, while at other times they pursued them in the streets with stones, struck them and lacerated their garments: angels or else devils? they were not sure. “At the same time the preaching friars took to flight because they feared to be maltreated and ruined, because the commonalty bore with them very reluctantly, on account of their proud behaviour, for they did not behave as friars ought.”[419]

“Know ye,” says the king, “that we have understood, that some persons of our kingdom of England, by the instigation of the evil spirit, . . . do and daily strive to do harm and scandal to our beloved in Christ, the religious men, friars of the order of minors, . . . openly and secretly stirring up our people against them to destroy the houses of the said friars, tearing their habits from them, striking some, and ill-treating them, against our peace.”[420]

From another point of view, that of public safety, the {306} Commons were indignant at the number of foreigners among the friars, whom they considered a permanent danger to the State. They requested “that all the alien friars, of whatever habit they might be, should void the realm before the Feast of St. Michael, and if they remained beyond the said feast they should be held as out of the common law,” that is, outlawed.[421]

The friars kept their assurance, they were blessed in the days of their good deeds; now they speak loud and make themselves feared; to the Pope alone they are amenable; they carry their heads high, their power is independent, they have become a church within the Church. Along with the priest who preaches and confesses in his parish is to be seen the wandering friar, who preaches and confesses everywhere; his universal presence and power are sources of conflict; the parish priest finds himself abandoned; the religious wayfarer brings the unknown, the extraordinary, and everybody runs to him. He lays down his staff and wallet and begins to talk; his language is that of the people, the whole parish is present; he busies himself with their eternal welfare, and also with their earthly interests, for lay life is familiar to him, and he can give appropriate advice. But his teaching is sometimes suspicious. “These false prophets,” says not Wyclif, but the Council of Saltzburg in 1386, “by their sermons full of fables often lead astray the souls of their hearers”; they make game of the authority of the parish priests.[422]

To stop their progress proved impossible. The tide rose and swept away the embankments; the excellent had become the worst, corruptio optimi pessima, and the old adage was verified to the letter. In spite of grievances, protests, derisive songs and stories, they were met everywhere, in the hut and in the castle, begging from the rich {307} and knocking also at the door of the poor. They sat at the board of the noble, who treated them with consideration; with him they played the part of the fashionable man of religion; they interested, they pleased. Wyclif shows them creeping into familiarity with the great, liking “to speke bifore lordis and sitte at tho mete with hom, . . . also to be confessoures of lordis and ladyes.”[423] Langland, in “Piers Plowman,” is equally severe on “frere Flaterere.” In a Wyclifite treatise of the same period we read, “Thei geten hem worldly offis in lordis courtis, and summe to ben conseilours and reuleris of werris, and also to ben chamberleyns to lordes and ladies.”[424]

Courting popularity among all people, they were different men and acted differently in the villages where they made their rounds; to their wallet they added store of thread, needles, ointments, with which they traded:

“Thei becomen pedleris, berynge knyves, pursis, pynnys and girdlis and spices and sylk and precious pellure and forrouris for wymmen, and therto smale gentil hondis (dogs), to gete love of hem.”[425]

They were more and more the subject of song and cause of mirth, but they did not mind, being the better advertised thereby:

“Thai wandren here and there,

And dele with dyvers marcerye,

Right as thai pedlers were.

Thai dele with purses, pynnes, and knyves,

With gyrdles, gloves, for whenches and wyves.”[426]

The anonymous author, a contemporary of Chaucer, adds:

“I was a frere ful many a day,

Therefor the sothe I wate (know).

But when I sawe that thair lyvyng

Acordyd not to thair preching,

Of I cast my frer clothing,

And wyghtly went my gate” (my way).[427]

Between the scepticism of the century and blind credulity, superstition flourished. The friars pretended they could sell the merits of their order at retail. They were so numerous and prayed so devoutly, that they had a surplus of piyers in store. Why not distribute this superfluous wealth to men of faith and good will? They did so, for cash of course; it was an exchange of wealth; like will to like. The friars went about the country discounting these invisible riches, and selling to pious souls, under the name of letters of fraternity, drafts upon heaven. What is the use of these parchments? they were asked. They give a share in the merits of the whole order of St. Francis.—What are they good for? Wyclif was asked. “Bi siche resouns thinken many men that thes lettris mai do good for to covere mostard pottis.”[428]

Discredited as they were at the end of the century, the friars had not, however, lost all hold over the people. Henry IV usurped the throne, and soon found that he must reckon with the friars. A good many among them were indignant at his enterprise, and some preached here and there, during the first years of his reign, that Richard II was still living and was the true king, and this was one more case, and a very important one, of political ideas vulgarised by wayfarers throughout the country. Henry IV sent them to gaol. One who was brought before him {309} reproached him violently for the deposition of Richard: “But I have not usurped the crown, I have been elected,” said the king.—“The election is null if the legitimate king is living; if he is dead he is dead by thy means; if he was killed by thee, thou canst have any title to the throne.”—“By my head,” cried the prince, “I will have thine cut off!”

The accused were advised to throw themselves on the king’s mercy; they refused, and requested to be regularly tried by a jury. Neither in the city nor in Holborn could any one be found to sit on that jury; inhabitants of Highgate and Islington had to be fetched for the purpose. These men declared the friars guilty; the poor wretches were drawn to Tyburn, hanged, then beheaded, and their heads were placed on London Bridge (1402). The convent was permitted to gather their remains, and bury them in holy ground. The Islington and Highgate jurors came weeping to the Franciscans to implore their pardon for a verdict of which they repented.

For several years, in spite of these punishments, friars continued to preach about the country in favour of Richard II, maintaining that he still lived, although Henry IV had taken care to have a public exhibition in London of the corpse of his assassinated predecessor.[429]

In the fifteenth century the reputation of the friars only grew worse. The abuses of which they were the living personification were among those which best served {310} to draw later adherents to Luther. If there remained in their ranks men who knew how to die, like that unfortunate friar Forest, who was hung alive by chains above a wood fire and slowly roasted, while Bishop Latimer, himself to be burnt later, addressed the dying man “with pious exhortations” to repentance,[430] the mass of them remained the object of universal contempt. This was one of the few points on which it sometimes happened that Catholics and Protestants agreed. Sir Thomas More, beheaded for the Catholic faith, spoke of the friars in the same strain as his adversary Tyndal, strangled for the Protestant faith. In his eyes they were but dangerous vagabonds. He relates, in his “Utopia,” the dispute between a friar and a fool, on the question of pauperism. “ ‘You will never,’ said the friar, ‘get rid of beggars, unless you also make an edict against us friars.’ ‘Well,’ said the fool, ‘it is already made, the cardinal passed a very good law against you when he decreed that all vagabonds should be seized and made to work, for you are the greatest vagabonds that can be.’ When this was said, and all eyes being turned on the cardinal, they saw he did not disown it; every one, not unwillingly, began to smile, except the friar.”[431]

A class, as historians have observed, which no longer justifies its privileges by its services, is in imminent danger; if it reforms in time, it may be saved; if it does not, it is doomed. In England, the friars were doomed. But nothing is ever entirely lost, and while, for centuries, Chaucer’s merriment made people merry at the expense of the begging orders, it is only fair, before parting with them, to recall such an unprejudiced testimony as that of {311} Bacon, in his essay “Of Love”: “There is in man’s nature a secret inclination and motion towards love of others, which, if it be not spent upon some one or a few, doth naturally spread itself towards many, and maketh men become humane and charitable; as it is seen sometime in friars.”

59. A GAME OF FOX AND GEESE.

(From the MS. 10 E. IV.)