“I have good ale, gossip,” says the ale-wife, “will you assay it?” And so glutton, instead of going to church, takes himself to the ale-house, and many after him. A miscellaneous company that was. There, with Cicely the woman-shoemaker, were all manner of humble, and some disreputable, persons, among whom we are surprised to find a hermit. What should a hermit be doing in an ale-house? But, according to Langland’s own showing elsewhere, the country was infested with hermits who, refusing restriction to their damp and lonely hermitages, frequented the alehouses, and only went home, generally intoxicated, to their mouldy pallets after they had drunk and eaten their fill and roasted themselves before the fire.
Here, then:
Cesse the souteresse[1] sat on the bench,
Watte the warner[2] and hys wyf bothe
Thomme the tynkere, and tweye of hus knaues,
Hicke the hakeneyman, and Houwe the neldere,[3]
Claryce of Cockeslane, the clerk of the churche,
An haywarde and an heremyte, the hangeman of Tyborne,
Dauwe the dykere,[4] with a dozen harlotes,
Of portours and of pyke-porses, and pylede[5] toth-drawers.
A ribibour,[6] a ratonere,[7] a rakyer of chepe,
A roper, a redynkyng,[8] and Rose the dissheres,
Godfrey of garlekehythe, and gryfin the walshe,[9]
An vpholderes an hepe.
All day long they sat there, boozing, chaffering, and quarrelling:
There was laughing and louring, and “let go the cuppe,”
And seten so till euensonge and son gen vmwhile,
Tyl glotoun had y-globbed a galoun and a Iille.
By that time he could neither walk nor stand. He took his staff and began to go like a gleeman’s bitch, sometimes sideways and sometimes backwards. When he had come to the door, he stumbled and fell. Clement the cobbler caught him by the middle and set him on his knees, and then, “with all the woe of the world” his wife and his wench came to carry him home to bed. There he slept all Saturday and Sunday, and when at last he woke, he woke with a thirst—how modern that is, at any rate! The first words he uttered were, “Where is the bowl?”
A hundred and fifty years later than Piers Plowman we get another picture of an English ale-house, by no less celebrated a poet. This famous house, the “Running Horse,” still stands at Leatherhead, in Surrey, beside the long, many-arched bridge that there crosses the river Mole at one of its most picturesque reaches. It was kept in the time of Henry the Seventh by that very objectionable landlady, Elynor Rummyng, whose peculiarities are the subject of a laureate’s verse. Elynor Rummyng, and John Skelton, the poet-laureate who hymned her person, her beer, and her customers, both flourished in the beginning of the sixteenth century. Skelton, whose genius was wholly satiric, no doubt, in his Tunning (that is to say, the brewing) of Elynor Rummyng, emphasised all her bad points, for it is hardly credible that even the rustics of the Middle Ages would have rushed so enthusiastically for her ale if it had been brewed in the way he describes.
His long, rambling jingles, done in grievous spelling, picture her as a very ugly and filthy old person, with a face sufficiently grotesque to unnerve a strong man:
For her viságe
It would aswage
A manne’s couráge.
Her lothely lere
Is nothyng clere,
But vgly of chere,
Droupy and drowsy,
Scuruy and lowsy;
Her face all bowsy,
Comely crynkled,
Woundersly wrynkled,
Lyke a rost pygges eare
Brystled wyth here.
Her lewde lyppes twayne,
They slauer, men sayne,
Lyke a ropy rayne:
A glummy glayre:
She is vgly fayre:
Her nose somdele hoked,
And camously croked,
Neuer stoppynge,
But euer droppynge:
Her skin lose and slacke,
Grayned like a sacke;
Wyth a croked backe.
Her eyen jowndy
Are full vnsoundy,
For they are blered;
And she grey-hered:
Jawed like a jetty,
A man would haue pytty
To se how she is gumbed
Fyngered and thumbed
Gently joynted,
Gresed and annoynted
Vp to the knockels;
The bones of her huckels
Lyke as they were with buckles
Together made fast;
Her youth is farre past.
Foted lyke a plane,
Legged lyke a crane;
And yet she wyll iet
Lyke a silly fet.
·····
Her huke of Lincoln grene,
It had been hers I wene,
More than fourty yere;
And so it doth apere.
For the grene bare thredes
Loke lyke sere wedes,
Wyddered lyke hay,
The woll worne away:
And yet I dare saye
She thinketh herselfe gaye.
·····
She dryueth downe the dewe
With a payre of heles
As brode as two wheles;
She hobles as a gose
Wyth her blanket trose
Ouer the falowe:
Her shone smered wyth talowe,
Gresed vpon dyrt
That bandeth her skyrt.
