Our pristine chronicler, as we have seen, has received hard measure from the two eminent critics of the eighteenth century, who have censured as a history that which is none. Chronicles were written when the science of true history had yet no existence; a chronicle then in reality is but a part of history. Every fact dispersed in its insulated state refuses all combination; cause and effect lie remote and obscured from each other; disguised by their ostensible pretexts, the true motives of actions in the great actors of the drama of history cannot be found in the chronological chronicler. The real value of his diligence consists in copiousness and discrimination; qualities rather adverse to each other. Fabyan betrays the infirmities of the early chronicler, not yet practised even in the art of simple detail, without distinction of the importance or the insignificance of the matters he records: his eager pen reckoned the number without knowing to test the weight; to him all facts appeared of equal worth, for all alike had cost him the same toil; and thus he yields an abundance without copiousness. In raising the curiosity which he has not satisfied for us, his mighty tome shrinks into a narrow scope, and his imperfect narratives, brief and dry, offer only the skeletons of history. The mere antiquarian indeed prefers the chronicle to the history; the acquisition of a fact with him is the limit of his knowledge, and he is apt to dream that he possesses the superstructure when he is only at work on the foundations.
The Chronicle of Fabyan attracts our notice for a remarkable incident attending its publication. The Chronicle was finished in 1504, and remained in manuscript during the author’s life, who died in 1512. The first edition did not appear till 1516. The cause which delayed the printing of an important work, for such it was in that day, has not been disclosed; yet perhaps we might have been interested to have learned whether this protracted publication arose out of neglect difficult to comprehend, or from the printer, reluctant to risk the cost, or from any impediment from a higher quarter.
Be this as it may, we possess the writer’s genuine work, for the printer, Pynson, was faithful to his author. The rarity of this first edition Bale, on a loose rumour which no other literary historian has sanctioned, ascribes to its suppression by Cardinal Wolsey, who is represented in his fury to have condemned the volume to a public ignition, which no one appears to have witnessed, for its “dangerous exposition of the revenues of the clergy,” which is not found in the volume. Fabyan truly was ter Catholicus; he was of the old religion, dying in the odour of sanctity, and was spared the trial of the new. The alderman’s voluminous will is now for us at least as curious as anything in his chronicle.[1] We here behold the play of the whole machinery of superstition, when men imagined that they secured the repose of their souls by feeing priests and bribing saints by countless masses. This funereal rite was then called “the month’s mind,” and which, at least for that short period, prolonged the memory of the departed. For this lugubrious performance were provided ponderous torches for the bearers, tapers for shrines, and huge candlesticks to be kept lighted at the altar. Three trentballs—that is, thirty masses thrice told—were to be chorused by the Grey Friars; six priests were to perform the high mass, chant the requiem, and recite the De Profundis and the Dirige; and for nine years, on his mortuary day, he charges his “tenement in Cornhill” to pay for an Obite! But not only friars and priests were to pray or to sing for the repose of the soul of Alderman Fabyan, all comers were invited to kneel around the tomb; and at times children were to be called in, who if they could not read a De Profundis from the Psalter, the innocents were to cry forth a Pater-Noster or an Ave! There was a purveyance of ribs of beef and mutton and ale, “stock-fish, if Lent,” and other recommendations for “the comers to the Dirige at night.” The Alderman, however, seems to have planned a kind of economy in his “month’s mind,” for not only was the repose of his soul in question, but also “the souls of all above written”—and these were a bead-roll of all the branches of Fabyan’s family.
The Chronicle of Fabyan was not long given to the world when it encountered the doom of a system at its termination, just before the beginnings of a coming one; that fatal period of a change in human affairs and human opinions, usually described as a state of transition. But in this particular instance, the change occurred preceded by no transitional approach; for within the small circuit of thirty years it seemed as if the events of whole centuries had been more miraculously compressed, than any in those “lives of the saints” whose legendary lore, provided the saints were English, Master Fabyan had loved to perpend. It was Henry the Eighth who turned all the sense of our chronicler into nonsense, all his honest faith into lying absurdities, all his exhortations to maintain “religious houses” into treasonable matters.
Successive editors of the editions of 1533, 43, and 55, surpassed each other in watchfulness, to rid themselves of the old song. Never was author so mutilated in parts, nor so wholly changed from himself; and when, as it sometimes happened, neither purgation nor castration availed the reforming critics, the author’s sides bore their marginal flagellations. The corrections or alterations were, however, dexterously performed, for the texture of the work betrayed no trace of the rents. The omission of a phrase saved a whole sentence, and the change of an adjective or two set right a whole character. It is true they swept away all his delightful legends, without sparing his woful metres of “the seven joys of the Blessed Virgin,” and his appreciation of some favourite relics. They disbanded all the saints, or treated them as they did “the holy virgin Edith,” of whom Fabyan has recorded that “many virtues be rehearsed,” which they delicately reduced to verses. His Holiness the Pope is simply “the Bishop of Rome;” and on one memorable occasion—the Papal interdiction of John—this “Bishop” is designated in the margin by the reformer as “that monstrous and wicked Beast.” The narrative of Becket cost our compurgators, as it has many others, much shifting, and more omissions. In the tale of the hardy and ambitious Archbishop murdered by knightly assassins, Fabyan said, “They martyred the blessed Archbishop;” our corrector of the press simply reads, “They slew the traitorous Bishop.” The omissions and the commissions in the Chronicle of Fabyan are often amusing and always instructive; but these could not have been detected but by a severe collation, which has been happily performed. When the antiquary Brand discovered that Fabyan had been “modernized” in later editions, his observation would seem to have extended no further than to the style: but the style of Fabyan is simple and clear even to modern readers: modernized truly it was, not however for phrases, but for notions—not for statements, but for omissions—not for words, but for things.
[1] We are indebted to the zealous research of Sir Henry Ellis for the disinterment of this document as well as for the collations which appear in his edition.
HENRY THE EIGHTH; HIS LITERARY CHARACTER.