The Comic History of England

by Gilbert Abbott À Beckett

OTWITHSTANDING that in a previous book we brought down the fashions and furniture of our forefathers to the fourteenth century, in the present chapter we shall have the pleasure of laying before our readers some considerably later intelligence. We left our ancestors lying upon very uncomfortable beds, but the year 1415 introduces us to some luxuries in the way of curtains and counterpanes. The Duke of York set forth his bedding in his will, which bears the date we have named, ana he seems to have died worth some thousands of pounds—of superior goose feathers. At a somewhat later period the sheet burst upon the page of history, and a blank is supplied by the sudden appearance of the blanket.

It was about the same period that clocks with strings and weights began to have a striking influence on the time, and Edward the Fourth used to carry one about with him wherever he went, but we do not believe that he wore it in a watchpocket, from which, instead of key and seals, there hung a couple of weights and a pendulum.

Costume seems to have been curtailed of very little of its exuberant absurdity in the reigns of Henry the Fourth and Fifth, though reform was carried to extremes, for it cut off the surplus hair from the head, and took away at least half a yard from the foot by relieving the shoes of their long points, a fashion which had always been remarkable for extreme pointlessness.

In the reign of Edward the Fourth there appears to have been a practice prevalent of making a shift to go without a shirt, when those who had such a thing to their backs were seized with a spirit of self-assertion, and began to slash open their sleeves for the purpose of showing their possession of that very useful article. The desire to prove the plenteousness and perhaps also the propreté of the under linen, led to a further ripping up of other parts of the dress, and the fops of the day began to outslash each other by opening the seams of their clothes in the most unseemly fashion.

Richard the Third and his "cousin of Buckingham" were notorious for their love of finery, and the term "buck," which is used at the present day, is evidently an abbreviation of Buckingham, Richard, probably, invented the Dicky or false front, which gave him the appearance of having always a clean breast, though the fact is that he was reduced to the expedient of wearing a false front, because the stains of guilt upon his bosom were utterly indelible.

The appetite of the fifteenth century seems to have been uncommonly good, for we find our ancestors eating four meals a day, beginning with breakfast at seven, dinner at ten, supper at four, and a collation taken in bed—oh, the cormorants!—between eight and nine in the evening. The meal taken in bed may have consisted of a blanquette de veau, or perhaps now and then a bolster pudding, while the ladies may have indulged themselves with a côtelette en papillotes. Earl Percy and his countess used to absorb between them a gallon of beer and a quart of wine, and before being tucked up for the night would tuck in a loaf of household bread, with other trifles to follow. A dinner in the days to which we are reverting generally lasted three hours, but tumblers and dancers were employed to amuse the feasters, so that a kind of caper sauce was served out with every dish that came to table.

Nothing in the whole annals of ancient and modern gluttony can exceed the dinner said to have been given by George Neville, the brother of the King-maker, on his induction to the Archbishopric of York, in the fifteenth century. It opened with a hundred and four oxen (au naturel), six wild bulls (a la ménagère), three hundred and four calves (en surprise), with innumerable entrées of pigs, bucks, stags, and roes, to an extent that is not only almost but quite incredible.

The pictures of the period represent a very inconvenient mode of laying the table, for we find a fish served up in a slop-basin, or rather laid across the top of that article of china-ware, which was much too small to admit the body of the animal. As far as we can discern the intention of the artist, we fancy we recognise in one of his pictures of a feast a duck lying on its back in a sort of sugar-basin or salt-cellar. This and a kind of mustard-pot, with an empty plate and half of a dinner-roll, may be said to constitute the entire provision made for a party of seven, who are standing up huddled together on one side of the table, in an existing representation of a dinner of the period.

The sports of the people were very numerous in the fifteenth century; but if we may judge by the pictures we have seen of the games, there was more labour than fun in the frolics of our forefathers. The contortions into which they seem to have thrown themselves while playing at bowls are quite painful to contemplate; and the well-known game of quarter-staff consisted of a mutual battering of shins and skulls, with a pole about six feet in length and some inches in circumference. Tennis was introduced at this early date, and it is therefore erroneous to assign its invention to Archbishop Tennison,—a report which has been spread by some unprincipled person, whose career of crime commencing in a pun has ended in a falsehood.

The professional fool was a highly respectable character in the middle ages; and the court jester was a most influential personage, who was allowed to criticise all the measures of the ministry. He was a sort of supplementary premier; but, in later administrations—the present always excepted—the office of fool has merged among the members of the Government. It is a curious fact, that, judging from the portraits which have been preserved, the fools seem to have been the most sensible-looking persons of their own time; and the proverb, that "it takes a wise man to make a fool," was, no doubt, continually realised. The practical jokes of the jester were sometimes exceedingly disagreeable, for they consisted chiefly of blows and buffets, administered by a short wand, called a bauble, which he was in the habit of carrying. It was all very well when the fool's sallies happened to be taken in good part, but a witticism coming mal-a-propos, would often prove no joke to the joker, who would get soundly thrashed' for his impertinence. An ancient writer * describes the functions of a fool to have consisted chiefly of "making mouths, dancing about the house, leaping over the tables, outskipping men's heads, tripping up his companions' heels," and indulging in other similar facetio, which, though falling under the head of fun for the fool himself, might have been death to the victims of his exuberant gaiety. His life must have been one unbroken pantomime; though its last scene was seldom so brilliant as those bowers of bliss and realms of delight in the island of felicity, which owe their existence to the combined ingenuity of the painter and the machinist.