THE FIRST PRINTED CHRONICLE.
The first chronicle in our vernacular prose, designed for the English people, was the earnest labour of one of themselves, a citizen and alderman, and sometime sheriff of London, Robert Fabyan. Here, for the first time, the spectacle of English affairs, accompanied by what he has called “A Concordance of Stories,” which included separate notices of French history contemporaneous with the periods he records, was opened for “the unlettered who understand no Laten.” Our chronicler, in the accustomed mode, fixes the periods of history by dates from Adam or from Brute. He opens with a superfluous abridgment of Geoffry of Monmouth—the “Polychronicon” is one of his favourite sources, but his authorities are multifarious. His French history is a small stream from “La Mere des Chroniques,” and other chronicles of his contemporary Gaguin, a royal historiographer who wandered in the same taste, but who, Fabyan had the sagacity to discover, carefully darkened all matters unpleasant to Frenchmen, but never “leaving anything out of his book that may sound to the advancement of the French nacyon.”
It was a rare occurrence in a layman, and moreover a merchant, to have cultivated the French and the Latin languages. Fabyan was not a learned man, for the age of men of learning had not yet arrived, though it was soon to come. At that early day of our typography, when our native annalists lay scattered in their manuscript seclusion, it was no ordinary delving which struck into the dispersed veins of the dim and dark mine of our history. So little in that day was the critical knowledge of our writers, that Fabyan has “quoted the same work under different appellations,” and some of our historical writers he seems not to have met with in his researches, for the chronicles of Robert of Gloucester and of Peter Langtoft, though but verse, would have contributed some freshness to his own. In seven unequal divisions, the chronicle closes with the days of the seventh Henry. These seven divisions were probably more fantastical than critical; the number was adopted to cheer the good man with “the seven joys of the Virgin,” which he sings forth in unmetrical metre, evidently participating in the rapturous termination of each of his own “seven joys.”
Our grave chronicler, arrayed in his civic dignities, seems to have provoked the sensitiveness of the poetical critic in Warton, and the caustic wit in Horace Walpole. “No sheriff,” exclaims Walpole, “was ever less qualified to write a history of England. He mentions the deaths of princes and revolutions of government with the same phlegm and brevity as he would speak of the appointment of churchwardens.”
We may suspect that our citizen and chronicler, however he might be familiar with the public acts of royalty, had no precise notions of the principles of their government. We cannot otherwise deem of an historical recorder whose political sagacity, in that famous interview between our Edward the Fourth and Louis the Eleventh, of which Comines has left us a lively scene, could not penetrate further than to the fashion of the French monarch’s dress. He tells us of “the nice and wanton disguised apparel that the King Louys wore upon him at the time of this meeting, I might make a long rehearsal, apparalled more like a minstrel than a prince.” Fabyan shared too in the hearty “John Bullism” of that day in a mortal jealousy of the Gaul, and even of his Sainte Ampoule. Though no man had a greater capacity of faith for miracles and saints on English ground, yet for those of his neighbours he had found authority that it was not necessary for his salvation to believe them, and has ventured to decide on one, that “they must be folys (fools) who believe it.” Had the Sainte Ampoule, however, been deposited in Westminster Abbey for our own coronations, instead of the Cathedral at Rheims for a French king, Fabyan had not doubted of the efficacy of every drop of the holy oil.
But the dotage of Fabyan did not particularly attach to him; and though his intellectual comprehension was restricted to the experience of an alderman, he might have been the little Machiavel of his wardmote—for he has thrown out a shrewd observation, which no doubt we owe to his own sagacity. In noticing the neglect of a mayor in repairing the walls which had been begun by his predecessor, he observes that this generally happens, for “one mayor will not finish that thing which another beginneth, for then they think, be the deed ever so good and profitable, that the honour thereof shall be ascribed to the beginner, and not to the finisher, which lack of charity and desire of vainglory causeth many good acts and deeds to die, and grow out of mind, to the great decay of the commonwealth of the city.” A profound observation, which might be extended to monarchs as well as mayors.
Indulging too often the civic curiosity of “a citizen and alderman,” Fabyan has been taunted for troubling posterity. “Fabyan,” says Warton, “is equally attentive to the succession of the mayors of London and the monarchs of England. He seems to have thought the dinners at Guildhall and the pageantries of the city companies more interesting transactions than our victories in France and our struggles for public liberty at home.”
This seems to be a random stricture. The alderman, indeed, has carefully registered the mayors and the sheriffs of London; and the scientific in “high and low prices” perhaps may be grateful that our pristine chronicler has also furnished the prices of wheat, oxen, sheep, and poultry—but we cannot find that he has commemorated the diversified forms these took on the solemn tables of the Guildhall, nor can we meet with the pasteboard pomps of city pageants, one only being recorded, on the return of Henry the Sixth from France.
Our modern critic, composing in the spirit of our day, alludes to “the struggle for public liberty”; but “public liberty” must have been a very ambiguous point with the honest citizen who had been a sad witness to the contests of two murderous families, who had long sought their mutual destruction, and long convulsed the whole land. We may account for the tempered indifference, and “the brief recitals” for which this simple citizen is reproached, who had lived through such changeful and ensanguined scenes, which had left their bleeding memories among the families of his contemporaries.
The faculties of Fabyan were more level with their objects when he had to chronicle the “tempestuous weathering of thunder and lightning,” with the ominous fall of a steeple, or “the image of our Lady” dashed down from its roof; or when he describes the two castles in the air, whence issued two armies, black and white, combating in the skies till the white vanished! Such portents lasted much later than the days of Fabyan, for honest Stowe records what had once ushered in St. James’s night, when the lightning and thunder coming in at the south window and bursting on the north, the bells of St. Michael were listened to with horror, ringing of themselves, while ugly shapes were dancing on the steeple. Their natural philosophy and their piety were long stationary, yet even then some were critical in their remarks; for when Fabyan recorded “flying dragons and fiery spirits in the air,” this was corrected by omitting “the fiery spirits,” but agreeing to “the flying dragons.” Fabyan, however, has preserved more picturesque and ingenious visions in some legends of saints or apparitions—still delightsome. These legends formed their “Works of Fiction,” and were more affecting than ours, for they were supernatural, and no one doubted their verity.