THE STORY OF CRISPIN AND CRISPIANUS.
A Recitation for the 25th of October, and other Convivial Meetings of Shoemakers.
"The Crispin trade! What better trade can be?
Ancient and famous, independent, free!
No other trade a brighter claim can find;
No other trade display more share of mind!
No other calling prouder names can boast,—
In arms, in arts,—themselves a perfect host!
All honour, zeal, and patriotic pride;
To dare heroic, and in suffering tried!
But first and chief—and as such claims inspire—
Our Patron Brothers, who doth not admire?
Crispin and Crispianus! they who sought
Safety with us, and at the calling wrought:
Martyrs to Truth, who in old times were cast
Lorn outcasts forth to labour at the last!
Mould the stout sole, sew with the woven thread,
Make the good fit, and win their daily bread.
This was their strait and doing—this their doom;
They sought our shelter, and they found a home!
Helpless and hapless, wandering to and fro,
Weary they came and hid them from the foe;
Two high-born youths, to holy things impell'd,
Hunted from place to place, though still they held
Their sacred faith, and died for it, and threw
The glory of that death on all who made the Shoe!
"Such is the story—so behaved our trade;
And then the Church its zealous homage paid,
And made their death-day holy, as we see
Still in the Calendar, and still to be!
And long the Shoemaker has felt the claim,
And proved him joyful at such lofty fame;
For theirs it was by more than blood allied,
Alike they worshipp'd, and alike they died!
Nor minded how the Pagan nipp'd their youth—
They are not dead who suffer for the Truth!
The skies receive them, and the earth's warm heart
In grateful duty ever plays its part,
Embalms their memory to all future time,
And thus, in love, still punishes the crime;
Sees, though the corse be trampled to the dust,
The murder'd dead have retribution just!
"Where are they now who wrought this fiendish wrong?
We hate the actors, and have hated long.
And where are they, the victims? Always here;
We feel their glory, and we hold it dear!
Oh yes, 'tis ours! that glory still is ours,
And, lo! how breaks it on these festive hours;
Each heart is warm, each eye lit up with pride,
'Tis sanction'd in our loves and sanctified!
Far o'er the earth—the Christianised—where'er
The Saviour's name is hymn'd in daily prayer,
The winds of heaven their memories tender waft,
Commix'd with all the sorceries of the craft.
The little leather artizan—the boy
To whom the shoe is yet but as a toy,
A thing to smile and look at, ere the day
Severer task will make it one of pay
(A constant duty and a livelihood),—
He, the young Crispin, emulous and good,
Is told of the Prince Martyrs—sometimes Royal!
(The trade, in its devotion, being so loyal,
It fain would stretch the fact or trifle still,
Eager, as 'twere, to get on highest hill.)
Through the fair France, through Germany, and Spain,
The blue-skied Italy, the Russias twain,
And farther still, across the Western Main.
There is the story known, engraft, 'tis true,
With things, as often is, of weight undue;
Yet still's enough, when sifted to the most,
To make the trade rejoice, and as a toast,
Now, as is wont, and ever to be given,
Hail to the memory of our friends in heaven!
Crispin and Crispianus—they, the two,
Who, like ourselves, have made the Boot and Shoe!"
The story as told in these verses is not exactly the same as the one current among the makers of the boot and shoe in our own island, an account in an old book called The History of the Gentle Craft (the production, no doubt, of the well-known Thomas Delony) being the basis of the tradition as received now by the British shoemaker. In the Golden Legende, one of the earliest of our printed books, and in Alban Butler's Lives of the Saints, as compiled from the Roman Martyrologies, as also in the inscriptions of some pieces of ancient tapestry formerly belonging to the shoemakers' chapel in the Cathedral of Notre Dame, Paris, but, when I saw them, in one of the galleries of the Louvre, is the like version as the one here given. The authority, too, of the Church Calendar of England, even as it still remains after the loppings of the Reformation, is another corroboration that Crispin and Crispianus, brothers, were early martyrs to the Christian faith, and through that chiefly honoured, and not because the one became a redoubted general and the other a successful suitor to the daughter of some all-potent emperor. In the Delony version—itself, in every probability, a borrowing from the popular mind of the Elizabethan period,—these things are put forth; while in trade paintings and songs the Prince Crispin is assumed to have a wife or sister, one can hardly tell which, in the person of a princess, the Princess Crispianus, and who figures as the patron of the women's branch of the shoemakers' art; Crispin himself presiding over the coarser labour for the rougher sex. This artifice, if not purely historical, is at least very excusable, because so natural, seeing that the duplex principle has such an extensive range; that even the feet themselves come into the world in pairs, and so shoes must be produced after the same fashion—paired, as the shoemakers have done by their adored Crispin and Crispianus.
It has now but to be stated that the writer of the foregoing lines (a long time now the common property of his fellow-workmen) and this present paragraph, has for many years contemplated the production of something, which might assume even the size of a book, in connexion with the various curious particulars which may be affiliated with this Crispin story, and therefore would be glad to find some of the numerous erudite renders of "N. & Q." helping his inquiries either through the medium of future Numbers, or as might be addressed privately to himself, care of Mr. Clements, bookseller, 22. Little Pulteney Street, Regent Street.
J. Davies Devlin.