CHAPTER XX.
The so-called “Tales of Skelton”—Specimens of them—Sir Thomas More and the Lunatic—The Foolish Duke of Newcastle—Pennant the Antiquary—The “Gothamite Tales”—Stories connected with Wales and Scotland.
BESIDES these two repertories, the Merry Tales of Skelton contain a racy and diverting account of a trick played by the poet on a Kendal man, with whom he was riding from Oxford to London. They baited at Uxbridge, and while his companion was out of the room, Skelton took his cap, which he had left behind on the table, inserted some butter inside the lining, and put it back in its place. When the owner returned, he placed it on his head, of which the warmth soon had the anticipated effect. The butter ran down the fellow’s face and neck, and Skelton assured him that he had the sweating sickness. The Kendal man was in great terror of his life, and Skelton advised him to go to bed at once. A little hot water applied to the cap and its proprietor set matters right; the joke was explained and forgiven, and the two rode on to town the next morning. Such practical hoaxes were doubtless frequent enough; and the laureated parson of Diss was never, one is apt to apprehend, so thoroughly at home as when he had something of the kind in hand.
The modern works offer in a similar manner, and perhaps, on the whole, to a greater extent, authentic examples of local occurrences. There is the celebrated adventure of Sir Thomas More with the lunatic on the flat roof of his house at Chelsea, which runs somewhat parallel to one which the Duke of Wellington had with a crazy fellow at Apsley House:—
“When Sir Thomas More was one day on the flat-leaded roof of his house at Chelsea, a lunatic succeeded somehow in getting to him, and tried to throw him down, crying, ‘Leap, Tom, leap!’ The Chancellor was in his dressing-gown, and, besides, was too old a man to have any chance against the madman. Sir Thomas had a little dog with him. ‘Let’s throw him down first,’ said he, ‘and see what good fun that will be’; so the fellow took up the animal, and threw him down. ‘Now,’ said More, ‘run and fetch him back, and let us try again, for I think it is good sport.’ The madman went, and as soon as he had disappeared, More rose and secured the door.”
As representatives of the same class, belonging to different periods, the subjoined must serve:—
“A gentleman, who possessed a small estate in Gloucestershire, was allured to town by the promises of the Duke of Newcastle, who, for many months, kept him in constant attendance, until, the poor man’s patience being quite exhausted, he one morning called upon his patron, and told him that he had at length got a place. The Duke very cordially shook him by the hand, and congratulated him on his good fortune, telling him that in a few days a good thing would have been in his gift; ‘but pray, sir,’ added he, ‘where is your place?’ ‘In the Gloucester coach,’ replied he: ‘I secured it last night.’”
“Pennant, the antiquary, had an unaccountable antipathy to wigs. Dining at Chester with an officer who wore this covering for the head, when they had drunk pretty freely, after many wistful looks, Pennant started up, seized the caxon, and threw it into the fire. The wig was in a moment in flames, and so was the officer, who immediately drew his sword. Downstairs flies Pennant, and the officer after him, through all the streets of Chester; but the former escaped through superior local knowledge.”
“A quack-doctor, haranguing the populace at Hammersmith, said, ‘To this village I owe my birth and education; I dearly love it and its inhabitants, and will cheerfully give a present of a crown to every one who will accept it.’ The audience received this notice with infinite satisfaction. ‘Here, ladies and gentlemen,’ added he, putting his hand into a bag, and taking out a parcel of packets, ‘these inestimable medicines I usually sell for five and sixpence each, but in favour, of this, my native village, I will take sixpence apiece.’”
Where the profusion of illustrative matter is inexhaustible, a survey of a subject is bound to limit itself to suggestion and sample. But the remarks and indications which have been afforded, must testify at any rate to the residence in these vast stores, on which I have been drawing, of a utility and dignity in numerous cases beyond their value as mere temporary vehicles for distraction and mirth, and to their claim to a subsidiary place among historical and social monuments.
The localisation of interest in an adventure or incident does not seem at first to have struck those who laboured for the public entertainment as a commercial expedient deserving of study and trial. But as the volume of jocular and anecdotal literature swelled, and the competition for favour and novelty grew keener in proportion, the resort to new devices for imparting a relish and edge to old properties comprised the association of jests which had weathered numberless seasons, with some fresh person or neighbourhood. Hence arises the multitude of collections and headings identifying books of the present class or portions of their contents with particular places and particular individuals, such as the Cobbler of Canterbury, the Footpost of Dover, and the Gravesend Tilt-Boat, or, in the case of personality, the numerous entries in Pasquil’s Jests of stories of Merry Andrew of Manchester, Coomes of Stapforth, and so on, all of which are resuscitations of stale and bygone material.
The work which led the way and set the mode in this direction was perhaps The Merry Tales of the Mad Men of Gotham, by Andrew Borde. It was a dexterous and attractive method of substituting for the vague generalisations of anterior compilers “a local habitation and a name.” It fixed the geography of the event, and established its authenticity beyond dispute; for, as the phrase is in the narratives of early murders and other phenomena, any gentleman, who doubted the veracity of the writer, might go and inquire for himself on the spot.
The idea of lending a local colouring and flavour to anecdotes originated, however, probably among the early Italian collectors of burle and facetie, of which some are transferred to our own miscellanies; and the practice dates back to a period when the literary life was bounded by the walls of capitals, or did not at most overstep their outskirts.
The stories, which present themselves in this class of book about the inhabitants of Scotland and Wales, generally bear on the pilfering propensities occasioned by poverty, facilitated by geographical position, and justified by the sense of wrong. Their habits of parsimony were acquired by the Scots during centuries of miserable and oppressive misgovernment, and survived the stern necessity out of which they arose. The Welsh borderer, if one judges from the tales current about him in the old facetiæ, and from what history itself reveals, combined with an addiction to “lifting” and drunkenness a certain pusillanimity of spirit, which may be less injurious to the community, but is more to be contemned in the individual. He was too often, besides being a thief and a sot, a sneaking rascal. The nursery rhyme about Taffy is a piece of veracious tradition, an accurate reflex of the state of society in the lower grades in the Principality down to the last century, or even until Wales was brought within the operation of more stringent laws and a more efficient police. The humorous side of the numberless legendary anecdotes about the Cambro-Britons has been rendered abundantly visible by the gatherers of Ana; but when we regard this material in the aggregate, and explore a little beneath the surface, we arrive at the interesting discovery that in this, as in every other group of similar relics, there is a good deal deserving of careful study and collation, and that the whole body of such literature ought henceforth to be, much more than it has, I think, hitherto been, treated as a branch of the national Folk-lore.
The merriments at the expense of Taffy, if they do not turn on his dishonesty, are pretty sure to deal with his passion for liquor and toasted cheese. Congruity and fitness are seldom respected in this line of literary work; and in one of the Hundred Merry Tales, St. Peter, upon the representation of God that the Welshmen in heaven, with their noisy ways, were a nuisance to all the rest, engages to get rid of them. He goes to the entrance-gates and shouts Cause bobe! and forthwith every Cambro-Briton rushes out to see where his favourite delicacy is to be had. The sly apostle, the moment they are all outside, closes the door, and the Christian Elysium is its old self again.
This whimsical piece of invention may be bracketed with a second narrated in the so-called Tales of Skelton, in which the other gastronomic failing of the Principality is amiably depicted; although the two stories are of different types, the one being a pleasant extravagance, while the other, which I now give, may have been an actual incident.
It professes to be an account “how the Welshman did desire Skelton to aid him in his suit to the king for a patent to sell drink.”
“Skelton, when he was in London, went to the King’s Court, where there did come to him a Welshman, saying, ‘Sir, it is so, that many do come up out of my country to the King’s Court, and some get of the King by patent a castle, and some a park, and some a forest, and some one fee and some another, and they live like honest men; and I should live as honestly as the best, if I might have a patent for selling good drink. Wherefore I pray you write a petition for me to give into the King’s hands.’ ‘Very good,’ said Skelton. ‘Sit down,’ said the Welshman, ‘and write, then.’ ‘What shall I write?’ asked Skelton. The Welshman said, ‘Write Drink. Now write More drink.’ ‘What now?’ said Skelton. ‘Write now A great deal of drink; and put to all this drink A little crumb of bread, and a great deal of drink to it, and read out what you have written.’ ‘Drink, more drink, and a great deal of drink, and a little crumb of bread, and a great deal of drink to it.’ Then quoth the Welshman, ‘put out the little crumb of bread, and set down all drink and no bread; and if I might have this petition signed by the King, I care for no more, as long as I live.’ ‘Well, then,’ said Skelton, ‘when you have got yours passed, I will try to get another for bread, that you with your drink, and I with my bread, may seek our living together with bag and staff.’”
Whether Andrew Borde, the pleasant Sussex Doctor of Physic, really wrote the little book of stories about Skelton, whom he might very well have personally known, must be numbered among the uncertainties; but Borde’s estimate of Taffy is cognate to that of Skelton himself, as delivered to us in the book and in the Hundred Merry Tales. For in his Introduction of Knowledge, 1542, the Doctor puts into the mouth of his Cambro-Briton these lines:—
“I am a Welshman, and do dwell in Wales;
I have loved to search budgets, and look in mails,”
which seems to portray the predatory borderer and the thief by breeding and instinct.
It is perhaps, at the same time, a matter for speculation whether these traits of Welsh character were not more current after the accession of the Tudors. Henry the Seventh, as his Privy Purse Expenses establish, was very lavish in his presents to his countrymen; and the royal partiality tended very possibly to render them unpopular in England, and to bring their foibles and frailties into print. The very tale above given reads like a burlesque on the importunity of Taffy for privileges and monopolies at Henry’s hands, and at the same time jeers pretty broadly at his propensity for intemperance.
There is a story of a Scottish minister who went South, and was invited to stay to dinner at an acquaintance’s. After they had dined, the whiskey was brought in; the minister took to it kindly, and accepted a proposal to remain till the morning. As the spare bed had to be aired, and there was not time to prepare the warming-pan, the lady of the house told Jenny the maidservant to undress, and get into the bed to warm the sheets for their guest; but Jenny unluckily (or otherwise) fell asleep, and when the visitor went up, he found her still in possession. “Well,” said he to himself, “the dinner was good; the whiskey was capital; but—this is hospitality indeed!”
We will not pursue the narration further. It is obviously a parody on the conventional order of things, having by possibility some indebtedness to the simple manners of a bygone time and less fastidious sleeping arrangements. The improvised warming-pan might have suggested itself to the guidwife; but we cherish a suspicion that the ex post facto improver is answerable for the pleasantry as it stands. In jocular history everybody is at angles to real life; people do precisely what they ought not to do, say what they ought not to say, are found where they ought not to be found. That is the soul of the matter; and therein lies the cunning of the wire-puller. He is for general purposes what Grobianus is for Cato and Mrs. Grundy. He seldom invents; he has a preference for ready-made material which he can employ as a groundwork or starting-point; for a familiar name goes a long way. The artist has to be wary how he deals with his puppet or lay-figure; he treads upon eggs a little; much depends on the turn given; the anecdote which he tells need not be true, God knows; it may be naughty within bounds; but it must be amusing. That is peremptory.
The Bull, in its jocular acceptation, has been commonly viewed as a genuine Irish product; but may it not be, on the contrary, of Italian and ecclesiastical descent? The papal brief, in the first place, borrowed its name from the leaden seal which was attached to it; the odium under which Popery and its supporters fell in the time of Elizabeth next led to the passage of the bull into our vocabulary as a term of ridicule or contempt; and, finally, when the strong political feeling had subsided, the expression stood for any piece of harmless extravagance or hyperbolical bravado. These side-growths of meaning are curious and instructive enough, and present many strange and unsuspected survivals. To go no farther than the word before us, the modern Italian attaches to his letter a bolla without reflecting on its actual and archaic significance, just as he perpetuates bygone methods of locomotion by continuing to call the railway carriage a poste.
Perhaps the characterisation of an imperial German decree of 1356 as “a golden bull” is not more alien to the original sense and function of the word than its pressure into service by the Italian of our day to signify a postage-stamp.
