Habits and men, with remnants of record touching the makers of both

by Dr. Doran

Ascend to ev’ry part, to make it green

And pay your love with fruit, when harvest comes.”

Love Tricks, by Shirley, a pupil of M. T.

I regret to say it, but the Rev. H. B. Wilson, the reverend author of that half-hundredweight quarto which gives the history of the Merchant Tailors, and which the author hoped would find its way into our villages, is ashamed of the origin of his heroes. He has even enough of false pride to beg that writers will spell Merchant Taylors with a y, and not with an i! Tailors with an i, he says, may be mistaken for a trade; while Taylors with a y may be taken for a name! So was Sir Piercie Shafton ever blushing at the idea of his father’s calling; and so do the Smiths with an i, fancy that they glide into gentility and euphony by becoming Smyths with a y.

How long the City guild of tailors has sustained a corporate dignity it would be hard to say; we know however that Edward I. confirmed the guild under their old name of “Merchant Tailors and Linen Armourers.” Their symbolic shield bore a tent between two mantles, denoting that the honest men of the guild made cloaks for all customers, and tents for the royal army. Many a marquis has not half so delicate a device; and the Mercatores Scissores have been worthily translated by those far less useful gentlemen,—the members of the College of Arms. The oath of the livery bound the new brother to the utmost possible respectability of life; but the oath was not broken when the taker of it, in a fit of enthusiastic pride, broke the head of a “Merchant Skinner” who dared claim precedency over the “Tailor.” A “bloody coxcomb” was too often the crest of the valiant Mercatores Scissores.

Of the members of the company, in the olden time, the most illustrious was Hawkwood, to whom I have assigned a chapter, as becoming his super-sartorial dignity. Here I will only briefly speak of the school, and the more illustrious men whom it has furnished to the public service. The latter are bound to drink the immortal memory of the royal founder of the “Merchant Tailors and Linen Armourers.”

The school was established by the company in 1560-1, “for children of all nations and countries indifferently;” a liberal provision, which was contracted in 1731 by an order of court, whereby express exclusion was made of the children of Jews. Among the statutes, there is especial injunction that, “in the schoole, at noe time of the yere, they shall use tallow candle in noe wise, but wax candles only;” an injunction which shows less regard for grammar than gentility. The school rather tripped at the beginning; for though Mulcaster, the head master, was an accomplished scholar, the ushers brought with them from the north such a Bœotian accent, that the boys went home talking “broad Yorkshire!”

Mulcaster, the master, too could occasionally indulge in very harsh English of the vulgar tongue, abusing the “visitors” roundly,—a rudeness that ought not to have been seen at a school lit only with wax candles, and having six or seven and thirty scholarships at St. John’s. Mulcaster was a choleric man; but in his mastership of a quarter of a century he “turned out” four bishops. These, when boys, had been the widest awake, while the master slept; for, as Fuller tells us, “he slept his hour (custom made him critical to proportion it) in his desk in the school, but woe be to the scholar that slept the while. Awaking, he heard them accurately; and Atropos might be persuaded to pity, as soon as he to pardon. The prayers of cockering mothers prevailed with him as much as the requests of indulgent fathers, rather increasing than mitigating his severity on their offending children.” In our days, Dr. Hessey can make good scholars by a more merciful and dignified process.

Wilkinson, the successor of Mulcaster, had the famous Whitelock for a pupil; and under the third master, Smith, we find at the school a boy named Juxon, who afterwards stood on the scaffold with Charles I., and smoothed the sovereign’s path from time into eternity. Boyle and Dee were also at this time young “Merchant Tailors,” whose subsequent manly merits reflected lustre on the old foundation. Smith’s successor, Haynes, was, like Mulcaster, rather ready with his tongue and heavy with his hand. He chastised unmercifully; and, on being menaced with complaint to the wardens, he was so audacious as to declare that he did not care a “phillip” for them. His ushers, too, appear to have been rough of speech; and “Bridewell rogue” was the tutorial epithet for a rebellious pupil. Haynes too was accused of encouraging little lotteries for his own profit, and not for the recreation of the pupils. “For,” says the complaint, “you suffer none to drawe any one lott, but those that bring xiiᵈ. or above. Your biggest lot is one grammer of xᵈ. which is the greate lott; the rest are ink-hornes, hobby-horses, gingerbread, paints, and puddings of very small value.” The master of Merchant Tailors’ is indignant thereat, and protests that not only is the matter one of pure entertainment, but that he makes nothing by it, and that he finds the drawers in “dyett bread, comfitts of all sorts, ffiggs, raysonnes, allmonds, stewed prunes, wiggs, beare, and some wine, and all kinds of ffrute, which the season of the yeare affordes.”