“Thou’lt easily ken him when once thou art there; The King will be covered, his nobles all bare.”
Together the two ride through the merry greenwood, and come upon the nobles, when the Tinkler again asks to be shown the King.
The King did with hearty good laughter reply, “By my soul! my good fellow, its thou or its I! The rest are bare-headed, uncovered all round.” With his bag and his budget he fell to the ground,
and beseeches mercy. Then says James—
“Come tell me thy name?” “I am John of the Dale, A mender of kettles, a lover of ale.” “Rise up! Sir John, I will honour thee here, I make thee a Knight of three thousand a year.”
{407}
“This was a good thing for the Tinkler indeed,” writes the poet, who concludes with the verse:—
Sir John of the Dale he has land, he has fee, At the Court of the King who so happy as he? Yet still in his hall hangs the Tinkler’s old sack, And the budget of tools which he bore at his back.
There are two instances on record of ale being used to extinguish fire. One January in the seventeenth century occurred a devastating fire which burnt down the greater portion of the Temple in the neighbourhood of Pump Court. “The night was bitterly cold,” writes Mr. Jeafferson, in Law and Lawyers, “and the Templars, aroused from their beds to preserve life and property, could not get an adequate supply of water from the Thames, which the unusual severity of the season had frozen. In this difficulty they actually brought barrels of ale from the Temple butteries, and fed the engines with the malt liquor.” If the ale was old and potent the flare up thereof must have been great indeed.
In the year 1613 the Globe Theatre was burnt down in consequence of the wadding from a cannon fired off during the performance of Henry VIII., setting fire to the thatched roof. Sir Henry Wotton, in a letter to his nephew giving an account of the occurrence, wrote: “One man had his breeches set on fire that perhaps had broiled him if he had not by the benefit of a provident wit put it out with bottle ale.” To what base uses may we return!