CHAPTER II THE PARDONERS

“Indulgence” was at first simply a commutation of penance. The pun­ish­ments inflicted for sins were of long duration; fasting and mort­i­fi­ca­tion had to be carried on for months and years. The faithful were permitted to transform these interminable chas­tise­ments into shorter expiation. Thus a clerk might exchange a year of penance against three hundred lashes, reciting a psalm at each hundred.[432] Tables of such exchanges were drawn up by competent prelates. The learned and autocratic Theodore, born at Tarsus, Cilicia, an en­cyc­lo­pædic mind and a strong dis­ci­pli­nar­ian, arch­bishop of Cant­er­bury from 669 to 690, who left on the British church a permanent mark, had published a tariff allowing people to be excused of a month’s penance on bread and water if they sang instead twelve hundred psalms with bended knees; for a year’s penance the singing was increased, and each course of psalter singing was accompanied with three hundred strokes in the palm of the hand (palmatæ). But it was possible to compensate {313} a year’s penance and escape at the same time the psalms, fasts and strokes by paying a hundred shillings in alms.[433] In another such table, drawn up in the ninth century by Halitgarius, bishop of Cambrai, is found this additional facility, that if the sinner, sentenced to a month’s penance on bread and water, chooses rather the singing of psalms he may be allowed not to kneel while he sings, but then instead of twelve hundred he will have to sing fifteen hundred and eighty psalms. He may in the same manner be excused of more than one month, up to twelve, in which last case, if he chooses not to kneel, he will have to sing no less than twenty thousand one hundred and sixty psalms.[434]

Laymen, who had their choice, frequently preferred a payment in money, the rich having to pay more than the poor, and the sums thus obtained were usually well employed. We have seen them serve for the support of roads and bridges; they were also applied in reconstructing churches, in helping the sick of a hospital, and in covering the expenses of numerous public enterprises. The entirety of punishments was taken off by a plenary indulgence; thus the French pope, Urban II, at the Council of Clermont, in 1095, granted one to all those who, through pure devotion and not to acquire booty or glory, should go to Jerusalem to fight the infidel; and this was the first crusade.

Little by little the idea of an actual commutation vanished, and was replaced by a different system, known as the theory of the “Treasury.” It had indeed become obvious as the use of indulgences spread, and they were more and more easily gained, that they could no longer be justified as offering to the sinner only his choice between {314} several sorts of even penances. They were something else. A short, well selected prayer, a small gift in money, would now exempt devout people from the greatest penalties and from numberless years of a possible purgatory; the one could scarcely be considered as the equivalent of the other; how was the equilibrium established between the two scales? The answer was that the deficiency was made up by the application to the sinner of merits, not indeed his own, but of Christ, the Virgin, and the saints, of which there was an inexhaustible “treasury,” the dispensation of which rested with the Pope and the clergy.

This theory was acted upon long before being put forth in express words; it does not appear to have been more than vaguely alluded to before the fourteenth century, when Pope Clement VI, the “Doctor Doctorum,” gave a perfectly clear definition and exposition of the “treasury” system. In a bull of the year 1350, he explains that the merits of Christ are infinite, and those of the Virgin and the saints, superabundant. This excess of unemployed merit has been constituted into a treasury, “not one that is deposited in a strong room, or concealed in a field, but which is to be usefully distributed to the faithful, through the blessed Peter, keeper of heaven’s gate, and his successors.” However largely employed, there ought to be “no fear of an absorption or a diminution of this treasury, first on account of the infinite merits of Christ, as has been said before, then because the more numerous are the people reclaimed through the use of its contents, the more it is augmented by the addition of their merits.”[435] The treasury had therefore no chance of ever being found empty, since the more was drawn from it the more it grew. Such is in all its simplicity the theory of the “treasury,” which has ever since been maintained, with no change in the theory but much in the practice. {315}

With so much to distribute among the faithful, the Church had recourse, for insuring its repartition, to certain people who went about, supplied with official letters, and who offered to good Christians a particle of the heavenly wealth placed at the disposal of the successors of Peter. They expected in return some portion of the earthly riches their hearers might be possessed of, and which could be applied to more tangible uses than the “treasury.” The men entrusted with this mission were called sometimes questors, on account of what they asked, and sometimes pardoners, on account of what they gave.[436]

Many a man lives in our remembrance owing to his portrait. If his image had not been preserved by an artist of genius his memory would have been abolished. Who would remember, but for her tomb at Lucca, lovely Ilaria del Carretto? Many among us would not suspect that the long vanished pardoner ever existed if the master-painter, Chaucer, had not drawn, from life, his unlovely portrait. “Lordyngs,” says the one in the “Canterbury Tales”:

“Lordyngs, quod he, in chirches whan I preche,

I peyne me to have an hauteyn speche,

And ryng it out, as lowd as doth a belle,

For I can al by rote which that I telle.

My teeme is alway oon, and ever was;

Radix omnium malorum est cupiditas.”

In the pulpit he leans to the right, to the left, he gesticulates, wanders in his talk; his arms move as much as his tongue; it is a wonder to see and hear him:

“I stonde lik a clerk in my pulpit,

And whan the lewed people is doun i-set,

I preche so as ye have herd before,

And telle hem an hondred japes more. {316}

Than peyne I me to strecche forth my necke

And est and west upon the people I bekke,

As doth a dowfe (pigeon), syttyng on a berne;

Myn hondes and my tonge goon so yerne,

That it is joye to se my businesse.

•••••

I preche no thyng but of coveityse.

Therefor my teem is yit, and ever was,

Radix omnium malorum est cupiditas.”

The description may seem to-day improbable and exaggerated, but it is not. A verifying from authentic sources and a search for documents only shows once more Chaucer’s marvellous exactness; not a trait in his picture that may not be justified by letters from papal or episcopal chanceries.

These quæstores, or quæstiarii, as they were officially called, were, says Boniface IX, speaking at the very time that the poet wrote his tales, sometimes secular clerics and sometimes friars, most of them extremely impudent. They dispensed with ecclesiastic licences, and went from place to place delivering speeches, showing their relics and selling their pardons. It was a lucrative trade and the competition was great; the success of authorized pardoners had caused a crowd of self-appointed ones to issue from the school or the priory, or from mere nothingness, greedy, with glittering eyes, as in the “Canterbury Tales”: “suche glaryng eyghen hadde he as an hare”; true vagabonds, infesters of the highroads, who having, as they thought, nothing to fear, boldly carried on their impostor’s traffic. They overawed their listeners, spoke loud, and unbound upon earth without scruple all that might be bound in heaven. Much profit arose therefrom; Chaucer’s pardoner got a hundred marks a year, which was easy enough for him, since, having received no authority from any one, to no one did he render any accounts, but kept all the gains for {317} himself. In his measured language the Pope tells us as much as the poet, and it seems as though he would duplicate, line by line, the portrait drawn by the story-teller, his contemporary.

First, says the pontifical letter, these pardoners swear that they were sent by the Court of Rome. “Certain religious, who even belong to one or the other of the mendicant orders, and some secular clerks, even endowed with privileged benefices, affirm that they are sent by us or by the legates or the nuncios of the apostolic see, and that they have received a mission to treat of certain affairs, . . . to receive money for us and the Roman Church, and they go about the country under these pretexts.”

From Rome also comes Chaucer’s personage; he moves about the country, and in exchange for his pardons tirelessly asks for goods and money, which certainly will not go to Rome:

“a gentil pardoner . . .

That streyt was comen from the court of Rome . . .

His walet lay byforn him in his lappe,

Bret-ful of pardoun come from Rome al hoot.”

•••••

“What! trowe ye, whiles that I may preche

And wynne gold and silver for I teche,

That I wil lyve in povert wilfully?

•••••

For I wol preche and begge in sondry londes,

I wil not do no labour with myn hondes . . .

I wol noon of thapostles counterfete,

I wol have money, wolle, chese, and whete.”

“Thus,” continues the Pope, “they proclaim to the faithful and simple people (“the lewed people,” says Chaucer’s man) the real or pretended authorizations which they have received; and irreverently abusing those which are real, in pursuit of infamous and hateful {318} gain, they carry further their impudence by mendaciously attributing to themselves false and pretended authorizations of this kind.”

What does the poet say? That the charlatan has ever fine things to show, that he knows how to dazzle the simple, that he has his bag full of parchments with awe-inspiring seals, maybe genuine, maybe not;[437] that the people look on and admire, and the parson gets angry but holds his tongue:

“First I pronounce whennes that I come,

And thanne my bulles schewe I alle and some;

Oure liege lordes seal upon my patent

That schewe I first, my body to warent,

That no man be so hardy, prest ne clerk,

Me to destourbe of Cristes holy werk.

And after that than tel I forth my tales.

Bulles of popes and of cardynales,

Of patriarkes, and of bisshops, I schewe,

And in Latyn speke I wordes fewe

To savore with my predicacioun,

And for to stere men to devocioun.”

As for that “turpem et infamem quæstum” branded by the Pontiff, it is the ever-recurring burden of the unholy discourse:

“Now good men, God foryeve yow your trespas,

And ware yow fro the synne of avarice.

Myn holy pardoun may you alle warice (redeem),

So that ye offren noblis or starlinges,

Or elles silver spones, broches, or rynges.

Bowith your hedes under this holy bulle.”

60. READING IN CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL OF A FABRICATED PAPAL BULL, A.D. 1399.

(From the MS. Harl. 1319.)

The effect of solemn parchments and large seals displayed from the pulpit rarely failed upon the crowd, and in some circumstances of more importance than the retail selling of the merits of saints in heaven, recourse was had to such exhibitions. When Henry of Lancaster came to turn his cousin Richard II out of the English throne, the first thing he did, according to Créton, was to have a pretended papal bull, granting a plenary indulgence, read from the pulpit of Canterbury cathedral and commented by Archbishop Arundel (whose brother, the earl, King Richard had caused to be summarily executed). As Créton was not present when this scene, which he describes only on hearsay, took place, the speech he gives is the more interesting, for it may be considered an average speech, such a one as was usual and likely to have been pronounced on the occasion.

“My good people,” the Archbishop is supposed to have said, “hearken all of you here: you well know how the king most wrongfully and without reason has banished your lord Henry; I have therefore obtained of the holy father who is our patron, that those who shall forthwith bring aid this day, shall every one of them have remission of all sins whereby from the hour of their baptism they have been defiled. Behold the sealed bull that the Pope of renowned Rome hath sent me, my good friends, in behalf of you all. Agree then to help him to subdue his enemies, and you shall for this be placed after death with those who are in Paradise.”

“Then,” continues the narrator, describing the effect of the speech, “might you have beheld young and old, the feeble and the strong, make a clamour, and regarding neither right or wrong, stir themselves up with one accord, thinking that what was told them was true, for such as they have little sense or knowledge. The archbishop invented this device . . .”[438] {322}

The burst of eloquence of Chaucer’s pardoner is a caricature, but not an unrecognizable one, of the grave discourses of this sort.

The Pope has still more to say: “For some insignificant sum of money, they extend the veil of a lying absolution not over penitents, but over men of a hardened conscience who persist in their iniquity, remitting, to use their own words, horrible crimes without there having been any contrition nor fulfilment of any of the prescribed forms.” It almost seems as if the Pope himself had listened in disguise, on the road to Canterbury, to Chaucer’s man saying:

“I yow assoile by myn heyh power,

If ye woln offre, as clene and eek as cler

As ye were born.

•••••

I rede that oure hoste schal bygynne,

For he is most envoliped in synne.

Come forth, sire ost, and offer first anoon,

And thou schalt kisse the reliquis everichoon,

Ye for a grote; unbocle anone thi purse.”[439]

Boccaccio, in one of the tales which he represents himself as telling under the name of Dioneo, pictures, he too, an ecclesiastic of great resemblance, moral and physical, to Chaucer’s man. He was called Frà Cipolla, and was accustomed to visit Certaldo, Boccaccio’s village on the hill top, still very much now as it was then, with the writer’s house conspicuous in the main street. “This Frà Cipolla was little of person, red-haired (Chaucer’s pardoner had “heer as yelwe as wex”) and merry of countenance, the jolliest rascal in the world, and to boot, for all he was no scholar, he was so fine a talker and so ready of wit that those who knew him not would not only have esteemed him a great rhetorician, but had {323} avouched him to be Tully himself, or maybe, Quintilian; and he was gossip, or friend, or well-wisher, to well-nigh every one in the country.” If his hearers gave him a little money or corn or anything, he would show them the most wonderful relics; and besides they would enjoy the special protection of the patron saint of his order, St. Anthony: “Gentlemen and ladies, it is, as you know, your usance to send every year to the poor of our lord Baron St. Anthony of your corn and of your oats, this little and that much, according to his means and his devoutness, to the intent that the blessed St. Anthony may keep watch over your beeves and asses and swine and sheep; and, beside this, you use to pay, especially such of you as are inscribed into our company, that small due which is payable once a year.”[440]

Such people had few scruples and knew how to profit by those of others. They released their customers from all possible vows, and remitted any penance, for money; they were a living encouragement to sin, making it so easy to atone for. The more prohibitions, obstacles, or penances were imposed, the more their affairs prospered; they passed their lives undoing what the real clergy did, the richer for it, and the clergy the poorer. The Pope again tells us: “For a small compensation they remit vows of chastity, of abstinence, of pilgrimage beyond the sea to Sts. Peter and Paul of Rome, or to St. James of Compostela, and any other vows.” They allow heretics to re-enter the bosom of the Church, illegitimate children to receive the sacred orders, they remove excommunications and interdicts; in short, as their power comes from themselves alone, they see no reason to restrain it and they use it to the full and without stint. Lastly, they affirm that “it is in the name of the apostolic chamber that they take all this money, and yet they are never known {324} to give an account of it to any one: ‘Horret et merito indignatur animus talia reminisci.’”[441]

They went yet further; they had formed regular associations for systematically speculating on public credulity; thus Boniface IX orders in 1390, that bishops should make an inquiry into everything that concerns these “religious or secular clerics, their people, their accomplices, and their associations”; that they should imprison them without other form of law, “de plano ac sine strepitu et figura judicii”; should make them render accounts, confiscate their receipts, and if their papers be not in order hold them under good keeping, and refer the matter to the sovereign pontiff.

There were indeed authorized pardoners who paid the produce of their receipts into the treasury of the Roman Court. The learned Richard d’Angerville, otherwise de Bury, Bishop of Durham, called by Petrarch, whom he had met at Avignon in 1330, “vir ardentis ingenii,” speaks, in a circular of December 8, 1340, of apostolic or diocesan letters, subject to a rigorous visa, with which the regular pardoners had to be furnished.[442] But many did without them, and the bishop notices one by one the same abuses as the Pope and as Chaucer. “Strong complaints have come to our ears that the questors of this kind, not without great and rash boldness, of their own authority, and to the great danger of the souls who are confided to us, openly setting at nought our jurisdiction, distribute indulgences to the people, dispense with the execution of vows, absolve the perjured, homicides, usurers, and other sinners who confess to them; and, for a little money paid, grant remission for ill-atoned crimes, and are given to a multitude of other abuses.” Henceforward all curates, vicars and chaplains must refuse to admit these pardoners to preach or to bestow indulgences, {325} whether in the churches or anywhere else, “if they be not provided with letters or a special licence” from the bishop himself. And this was a most proper injunction, for with these bulls brought from far-off lands, adorned with unknown seals “of popes and of cardynales, of patriarkes and of bisshops,” it was easy to make people believe that all was in order. Meanwhile let all those who are now wandering round the country be stripped of what they have taken, and let “the money and any other articles collected by them or on their behalf,” be seized: the common people not being always possessed of actual cash, Chaucer’s pardoner contented himself with “silver spones, broches, or rynges.” One more allusion is to be noticed in this text to those associations of pardoners which must have been so harmful.

They employed, in fact, inferior agents; the general credulity and the widespread wish to get rid of religious trammels which men had imposed on themselves, in the shape of vows or otherwise, or which had been imposed on them on account of their sins, were a mine for the perverse band, the veins of which they carefully worked. By means of these subordinate representatives of their fanciful power, they easily extended the field of their operations, and the complicated threads of their webs covered the whole kingdom, sometimes too strong to be broken, sometimes too fine to be perceived.

Occasionally, too, the bad example came from very high quarters; all had not the Bishop of Durham’s virtue. Walsingham relates with indignation the behaviour of a cardinal who made a stay in England when the marriage between Richard II and the emperor’s sister, Anne of Bohemia, was being negotiated. For money this prelate, just like the common pardoners, removed excommunications, dispensed people of pilgrimages to St. Peter, St. James, or Jerusalem, and had the sum that would have been spent on the journey duly computed and given {326} to him;[443] and it is much to be regretted from every point of view that the curious tariff of the expenses of a journey thus estimated has not come down to us.

The list of the misdeeds of pardoners was in truth enormous, and it is found even larger on exploring the authentic ecclesiastical documents than in the work of Chaucer himself. Thus in a bull of Pope Urban V, dated 1369, mention is made of practices apparently untried by the otherwise experienced “gentil pardoner of Rouncival.” These doings were customary with those employed by the Hospitallers of St. John of Jerusalem in England. Helped by the connivance of the “very priors” of the order, they pretended to be “privileged” and exempted from the formality of showing apostolic letters before they were allowed to proceed with their preachings and to offer to the people their “negotia quæstuaria.” The parish rectors and curates naturally enough objected to such pretensions, but their complaints were ill received, and the pardoners, to get rid of them, sued them before some distant authority for contempt of their cloth and privileges. While the suit was being determined they remained free to act as they liked. Sometimes they were so lucky as to secure sentence against the priest who had tried to do his duty, and even succeeded in having him excommunicated: which could of course but be a cause of great merriment among the unholy tribe.

“Very often, also,” adds Pope Urban, “when they mean to hurt a rector or his curate, they go to his church on some feast-day, especially at such time as the people are accustomed to come and make their offerings. They {327} begin then to make their own collections or to read the name of their brotherhood or fraternity, and continue until such an hour as it is not possible to celebrate mass conveniently that day. Thus they manage perversely to deprive these rectors and vicars of the offerings which accrue to them at such masses.” They have, on the other hand, Divine service performed “in polluted or interdicted places, and there also bury the dead; they use, as helps to their trade, simple and almost illiterate subordinates, who spread errors and fables among people as ignorant as themselves.”

Such abuses and many others, constantly pointed out by councils, popes, and bishops, moved the University of Oxford to recommend, in the year 1414, the entire suppression of pardoners, as being men of loose life and lying speeches, spending their profits “with the prodigal son,” remitting to sinners their sins as well as their penances, encouraging vice by the ease of their absolutions, and drawing the souls of uneducated people “to Tartarus.” But this request was not listened to, and pardoners continued to prosper for the moment.[444]

At the same time that they sold indulgences, the pardoners showed relics. They had been on pilgrimage and had brought back pieces of bone and fragments of all kinds, of holy origin, they said. But although the credulous were not lacking among the multitude, the disabused among the better sort were numerous and they scoffed without mercy. The pardoners of Chaucer and Boccaccio, and in the sixteenth century of Heywood and Lyndsay,[445] exhibited the most unexpected trophies. The Chaucerian one, who possessed a piece of the sail of St. {328} Peter’s boat is surpassed by Frate Cipolla, who had brought back much better from Jerusalem. “I will, as an especial favour, show you,” said he, “a very holy and goodly relic, which I myself brought aforetime from the Holy Lands beyond seas, and that is one of the Angel Gabriel’s feathers, which remained in the Virgin Mary’s chamber, whenas he came to announce to her in Nazareth!”[446] The feather, which was from the tail of a parrot, through some joke played upon him was replaced in the holy man’s box by a few coals; when he perceived the metamorphosis he showed no embarrassment, but began the narrative of his long voyages, and explained how, instead of the feather, the coals on which St. Lawrence was grilled would be seen in his coffer. He had received them from “My Lord Blamemenot Anitpleaseyou,” the worthy patriarch of Jerusalem, who also showed him “a finger of the Holy Ghost as whole and sound as ever it was, . . . and one of the nails of the cherubim, . . . divers rays of the star that appeared to the three Wise Men in the East, and a vial of the sweat of St. Michael whenas he fought with the devil”; he possessed also “somewhat of the sound of the bells of Solomon’s Temple in a vial.”

Poets’ jests; but less exaggerated than might be thought. Was there not shown to the pilgrims at Exeter a bit “of the candle which the angel of the Lord lit in Christ’s tomb”? This was one of the relics brought together in the venerable cathedral by Athelstan, “the most glorious and victorious king,” who had sent emissaries at great expense on to the Continent to gather these precious spoils. The list of their treasure-troves, which has been preserved in a missal of the eleventh century, comprises also a little of “the bush in which the Lord spoke to Moses,” and a lot of other curiosities.[447] Some {329} of the Virgin’s milk was, as all know, venerated at Walsingham and in various other places.

Matthew Paris relates that, in his time, the friar preachers gave to Henry III a piece of white marble on which there was the trace of a human foot; nothing less, according to the testimony of the inhabitants of the Holy Land, than the mark of one of the Saviour’s feet, left by Him as a souvenir to His apostles after His Ascension. “Our lord the king had this marble placed in the church of Westminster, to which he had already lately offered some of the blood of Christ.”[448]

In the fourteenth century kings continued to set the example to the common people, and to collect relics of undemonstrable authenticity. In the accounts of the expenses of Edward III, in the thirty-sixth year of his reign, a hundred shillings are put down for a messenger who had brought him a vest of St. Peter’s.[449] In France, at the same period, King Charles V “le sage” had one day the curiosity to visit the cupboard at the Sainte Chapelle, where the relics of the passion were kept. He found there a phial with a Latin and Greek inscription indicating that it contained some of the blood of Jesus Christ. “Then,” relates Christine de Pisan, “that wise king, because some doctors have said that, on the day that our Lord rose, nothing was left on earth of His worthy body that was not all returned into Him, would hereupon know and inquire by learned men, natural philosophers, and theologians, whether it could be true that upon earth there were some of the real pure blood of Jesus Christ. Examination was made by the said learned men assembled about this matter; the said phial was seen and visited with great reverence and solemnity of lights, in which when it was hung or lowered could {330} be clearly seen the fluid of the red blood flow as freshly as though it had been shed but three or four days since: which thing is no small marvel, considering the passion was so long ago. And these things I know for certain by the relation of my father who was present at that examination, as philosophic officer and counsellor of the said prince.”

After this examination made by great “solemnity of lights,” the doctors declared themselves for the authenticity of the miracle;[450] which was not in reality more surprising than that at the cathedral at Naples, where the blood of the patron saint of the town may still be seen to liquify several times a year, and for several days each time.

In every country of Europe the pardoners en­joyed, not to say en­dured, the same rep­u­ta­tion and acted in the same man­ner. Be it France, Germany, Italy, or Spain, they were found living, so long as there re­mained any, as Chaucer’s par­don­er did. In France, Rabelais has the cheaters cheated by his beloved Panurge. The clever vaurien used to place his penny in their plate so skil­fully that it seemed to be a silver piece: for which he made bold to take change, leaving only a farth­ing. “ ‘And I did the same,’ said he, ‘in all the churches where we have been.’—‘Yea, but,’ said I, ‘you . . . are a thief, and com­mit sac­ri­lege.’—‘True,’ said he, ‘as it seems to you; but it does not seem so to me. For the par­don­ers give it me as a gift when they say, in of­fer­ing me the relics to kiss: Cen­tup­lum ac­ci­pies—that is, that for one pen­ny I take a hundred; for ac­ci­pies is spok­en by them ac­cord­ing to the man­ner of the He­brews, who use the fu­ture tense in­stead of the im­per­a­tive, as you have in the book, Dil­iges Dom­i­num, id est, dilige.’ ”[451] {331}

Pardoners, of course, never appear on the boards of the old French theatre, but to be derided:

“Pardoner: I mean to show you the comb of the cock that crowed at Pilate’s, and half a plank of Noah’s great ark. . . . Look, gentlemen, here is a feather of one of the seraphs near God. Don’t think it is a joke; here it is for you to see.

“Triacleur: Gogsblood! ’tis the quill from a goose he has eaten at his dinner!” and so on.[452]

The same in Spain. Lazarillo de Tormes, the page of many masters, happens, at one time, to be in the service of a pardoner: the very same individual Chaucer had described two hundred years before. He, too, knows how to use Latin when profitable: “Hee woulde alwayes bee informed before he came, which were learned and which not. When he came to those which he understood were learned, he woulde be sure never to speake worde of Latin, for feare of stumbling: but used in suche places a gentle kind of Castilian Spanish, his tong alwayes at libertie. And contrariwise whensoever hee was informed of the reverend Domines (I meane such as are made priestes more for money than for learning and good behaviour), to hear him speake amongs suche men you would saye it were St. Thomas: for hee woulde then two houres together talke Latin, at lest which seemed to bee, though it was not.”[453] A trick which, as is well known, Sganarelle, many years after, did not disdain to use when put upon his last shifts as the “Médecin malgré lui.”

Pardoners lived merrily; certain it is that after a busy day they must have been cheerful companions at the inn. The thought of the multitude of sins they had pardoned, of excommunications they had removed, {332} of penalties they had remitted—themselves mere vagabonds threatened with the jail or gallows—the knowledge of their impunity, the strangeness of their existence, the triumphant success of the mad harangues in which they attributed to themselves the keys of heaven, must have made their hearts swell with uncontrollable merriment. Their heads were filled with anecdotes, sacred or profane; native coarseness and assumed devotion, the real and the artificial man, jostled each other to the sound of jugs and vessels clattering on the table. See in the margin of an old psalter the lean figure of Master Reynard[454]: a crozier between his paws, a mitre on his head, he is preaching a sermon to the wondering crowd of ducks and geese of the poultry yard. The gesture is full of unction, but the eye shaded by the tawny hair has a cruel glitter, which ought to give warning of the peroration. But no, the poultry yard clucks devoutly and fears nothing; woe to the ducks when the mitre has fallen: “And Thou, Lord, shalt laugh at them,” says the psalmist on the same page.

A singular knowledge of the human heart those individuals must have had, going through such strange experiences day by day. Never were more unworthy beings supposedly clothed with greater supernatural powers. The deformed monster squatting on the apse of the cathedral laughs and grimaces hideously on his airy pedestal. And up to the clouds rise the fretted spires; the chiselled pinnacles detach themselves like lace upon the sky; the saints pray their eternal prayer under the porch; the bells send forth their peals into space, and souls are seized with a thrill, with that mysterious awe caused by the sublime. The monster laughs; hearts believe themselves purified, but he has seen their ugly sores, a sinister hand will touch them and prevent their cure; the edge {333} of the roof reaches the clouds; but his look goes through the dormer window, he detects a cracking beam, worm-eaten boards giving way, and a host of obscure creatures slowly pursuing under the wooden shafts their secular labour of destruction: he laughs and grimaces hideously.

On the tavern bench the pardoner is still seated. There come Chaucer, the knight, the squire, the friar, the host—old acquaintances. We are by ourselves, no one need be afraid to speak, the foaming ale renders hearts expansive; and the unseen coils of that tortuous soul unfold to view, he gives the summary of a whole life, the theory of his existence, the key to his secrets. What matters his frankness? he knows that it cannot hurt him; time and again has the bishop brought his practices to light, but the crowd always troops around him. And who knows if his companions—who knows if his more enlightened companions, to whom he shows the concealed springs of the automaton—will, to-morrow, believe it lifeless? their memory, their reason will tell them so, yet still their heart will doubt. If custom is the half of belief, theirs is well-rooted; how much more that of the multitude! And the pardoner himself, do you suppose that he always sees clearly what he is, do you think that his scepticism is absolute? he for whom nothing is holy, whose very existence is a perpetual mockery of sacred things, he also has his hours of doubt and terror, he trembles before that formidable power which he said he held in his hands, and of which he has made a toy; he does not possess it, but others may, and he stands aghast; the monster looks upon himself and is afraid.

Very easy it was to lead the popular belief into the channel of the marvellous. Decrees had been deemed necessary to prevent the conjuring up of spectres or ghosts in those long watches passed with the dead; disobedience {334} was attempted, people believed they succeeded. In presence of the horrible a strange reaction of the heart would take place, a wind of madness passed predisposing men to see and believe anything, a nervous and demoniacal merriment seized upon all, and dances and lascivious games were started. Dancing went on in the cemeteries during the solemn vigils of religious feasts, there was dancing also during the watch for the dead. The Council of London, in 1342, prohibited “the superstitious customs which cause prayer to be neglected, and unlawful and indecent meetings” held in such places.[455] The Council of York, in 1367, also forbade “those guilty games and follies, and all those perverse customs . . . which transform a house of tears and prayers, into a house of laughing and excess.” The palmers’ gild of Ludlow allowed its members to go to night-watches of the dead, provided that they abstained from raising apparitions and from indecent games.[456] As to professional sorcerers, the belief in them was so profound that they were sent to the stake, as happened to Petronilla of Meath, convicted of having manufactured powders with “spiders and black worms like scorpions, mingling with them a certain herb called milfoil, and other detestable herbs and worms.”[457] She had also made such incantations that “the faces of certain women seemed horned like the heads of goats”; {335} therefore she had her due punishment and “was burnt before an immense multitude of people with all the accustomed ceremonial.” Such facts explain the existence of the pardoner.

Let us add that the search for the philosopher’s stone was the constant occupation of many renowned doctors; every one had not that clear good sense, good humour and penetrating spirit which permitted Chaucer to smilingly unravel before us the mysteries of the alchemist, shaking the alembics and retorts, and in the odd-shaped apparatus which frightened the imagination, showing not the newly created ingot of pure metal, but the mixture prepared beforehand by the impostor.[458] Not a plant or a stone without supernatural virtues; the vain beliefs inherited from the ancients had been rejuvenated and expanded. People thirsted for such pretended learning. Gower thinks he does well to insert in a love poem all he believes he knows on the constitution of the world and the virtues of things;[459] even with professionally learned men the mass of fabulous statements fills volumes. Bartholomew the Englishman, whose work is an encyclopædia of scientific knowledge in the thirteenth century, is positive that the diamond destroys the effect of venom and of magic incantations, and that it reveals its wearer’s fear; that the topaz prevents sudden death, etc.[460]

A pleasure it is, and like a whiff of fresh air when emerging from a damp cellar, to remember that in an age not totally exempt from these weaknesses no one condemned them with more eloquence than our Molière: “Without speaking of other things,” said he, “I have {336} never been able to conceive how even the smallest peculiarities of the fortune of the least man could be found written in the skies. What relation, what intercourse, what correspondence can there be between us and worlds separated from our earth by so frightful a distance? and whence can this fine science have come to men? What god has revealed it? or what experience can have shaped it from the observation of that great number of stars which have not been seen twice in the same arrangement?”

61. A PARDONER (CHAUCER’S PARDONER).

(From the Ellesmere MS.)

Trouble and eloquence lost; there will always be a Timocles to observe with a wise air: “I am incredulous enough as to a great many things, but for astrology, there is nothing more certain and more constant than the success of the horoscopes which it draws.”[461]

So vanished into smoke the tempests which Chaucer, Langland, and Wyclif raised against the hypocritical pardoners of their day. They lingered on till the {337} sixteenth century, and then were entirely suppressed in the twenty-first session of the œcumenical council of Trent, July 16, 1562, Pius IV being Pope. It is stated in the ninth chapter of the “Decree of Reform,” published in that session, that since “no further hope can be entertained of amending the questors of alms” (eleemosynarum quæstores), otherwise pardoners, “the use of them and their name are entirely abolished henceforth in all Christendom:”[462] the first of old-time wayfarers to entirely disappear.

62. A PILGRIMAGE TOWN, ROCAMADOUR, IN GUYENNE.

(Present state.)