The Coming of the Friars

by Augustus Jessopp

Oh, ho! friend Porter, what is it we have heard men tell? That when the Black Death came upon us, your house was left unto you desolate and there remained neither chick nor child. Who is this? Then some one told the steward, or told the lord, and thereupon ensued inquiry. What right had Thomas Porter to adopt the child? She belonged to the lord, and he had the right of guardianship. Aye! and the right of disposing of her in marriage too. Thomas Porter, with a heavy heart, was summoned before the homage. He pleaded that the marriage of the girl did not belong to the lord by right, and that on some ground or other, which is not set down, she was not his property at all. That might have been very true or it might not, but one thing was certain, Thomas Porter had no right to her, and so the invariable result followed--he had to pay a fine. What else ensued we shall never know.

The glimpses we get of the ways and doings of the old stewards of manors are not pleasing; I am afraid that as a class they were hard as nails. Perhaps they could not help themselves, but they certainly very rarely erred on the side of mercy and forbearance. Is not that phrase "making allowances for," a comparatively modern phrase? At any rate the _thing_ is not often to be met with in the fourteenth century. Yet in the plague year every now and then one is pleased to find instances actually of consideration for the distress and penury of the homagers at this place and that. Thus at Lessingham, when the worst was over and a court was held on the 15th of January, 1350, the steward writes down that only thirty shillings was to be levied from the customary tenants by way of tallage, "Because the greater part of those tenants who were wont to render tallage had died in the previous year by reason of the deadly pestilence."

Here and there, too, we come upon heriots remitted because the heir was so very poor, and here and there fines and fees are cancelled _causa miseriæ propter pestilentiam._ Surely it is better to assume that this kind of thing was done, as our friend Bonington puts it, _mero motu pietatis suæ_ than because there was no money to be had. Better give a man the benefit of the doubt, even though he has been dead five hundred years, than kick him because he will never tell any more tales.

If it happened sometimes that the plague brought out the good in a man, sometimes changed his life from one of covetous indifference or grasping selfishness into a life of earnestness and devout philanthropy, it happened at other times--and I fear it must be confessed more frequently--that coarse natures, hard and cruel ones, were made more brutal and callous by the demoralizing influences of that frightful summer.

I am sure it will be very gratifying to some enlightened and chivalrous people to learn that I have at least one bad story against a parson.

Here it is!

The rolls of the manor of Waltham show that the plague lingered about there till late in the spring of 1350. As elsewhere, there must needs have been much change in the benefices of the neighbourhood. Of course some of the new parsons were scamps, the laity who survived being, equally of course, models of all that was lovely and estimable. One of these clerical impostors had got a cure somewhere in the neighbourhood--where is not stated, but, inasmuch as his clerical income had not come up to his expectations or his necessities, or his own estimate of his deserts, he found it necessary to supplement that income by somewhat unprofessional conduct. In fact, the Rev. William--that was his name--seems actually to have thrown up his clerical avocations and by his flagrant irregularities had got to himself the notorious sobriquet of William the One-day priest. I should not be surprised to find out that this worthy was captain of a band of robbers who infested Epping Forest. In the end of January, 1351. Matilda, wife of John Clement de Godychester, was quietly riding homewards when, as she passed by the sheepfold of Plesset, out came the Rev. William and bade the lady stand and deliver. Her attendants, it is to be presumed, took to their heels, and the lady, being unable to help herself, delivered up her purse--the account says the Rev. William cut it off--and moreover surrendered a ring of some value, after which she continued her journey. She raised the hue and cry to some purpose, and the clerical king of the road was taken and... there is no more. No! It is a story without an end.

But there were then, as there are now, other ways of preying upon our fellow-creatures and levying blackmail from them, without going to the length of highway robbery--cold work, and a little risky at times.

Henry Anneys, at Lessingham, could work upon the fears of Alice Bakeman and extort a douceur from her without resorting to violence. Mrs. Bakeman had succeeded to the property of some dead kinsman, and Mr. Anneys heard of it. He called on the lady and informed her that for a consideration he would save her from paying any heriot to the lord; he had certain information which he could use either way. Finally, it was agreed that Alice should give the rogue a cow as hush-money, and with the cow Mr. Anneys departed. His triumph was brief. When the time for holding the next court arrived, others came round the poor woman, and made it quite evident that the lands she had succeeded to were not heriotable at all, and that Henry Anneys was a swindler. So the case was brought before the homage as usual, the cow was ordered to be returned, and a substantial fine imposed upon Anneys.

Almost the first thing that strikes a novice who looks into the village history of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries is the astounding frequency of bloody quarrels among the rustics. In the records of the Courts Leet for Norfolk it is very seldom indeed, that you can find a court held at which one or more persons, male and female, are not amerced for "drawing blood" from somebody. Whether it was by punching their opponents on the nose, or whether they used their knives, I hesitate to decide; but I suspect, from the frequent mention of knives and daggers, that sticking one's enemy with cold steel was not so very un-English a practice as popular prejudice is wont to assume it to be. One thing is very certain, and that is--that all over East Anglia, five hundred years ago, there was such an amount of bloodletting in village frays as would hardly have disgraced the University of Heidelberg. In Norfolk these sanguinary fights must have been a passion; but one would have thought that, while the plague was raging and after it had begun to subside, then, if ever, men and women would have become less savage and ferocious. So far from it, such records of the years 1349 and 1350 as I have examined are fuller than ever of fights and quarrels At Lessingham, about Christmas time, 1349, there was a free fight of a most sanguinary character, men and women joining in it freely. It seems to have arisen from some one finding a horse wandering about the deserted fields. As a stray it belonged to the lord--the finder took a different view, somebody cried "Halves!" and somebody else said, "Til give information," and somebody else replied, "So will I," whereupon arose a bloody battle as has been told. About the same time at Hunstanton, Catherine Busgey, evil-disposed old hag that she was, had stript a dead man of his leather jerkin. Did she proceed to wear the manly attire that she might be dagger-proof for the next encounter? Rash woman! The dead man's friends recognized the well-known coat, it was forfeited and delivered over to the lord.