Mediæval Byways

by L. F. Salzman

IVORY AND APES AND PEACOCKS

There is a sentence in the biblical account of the wonders of Solomon’s reign that has always had a fascination for me. ‘Once in three years came the navy of Tarshish bringing gold and silver, ivory and apes and peacocks.’ And the fascination lies not in the crude magnificence of tusks and ingots, the burnished brilliance of peacocks, or the uncanny, too human, grotesqueness of apes, but in all the varied multitude of unnamed articles which must have constituted the cargo of those far-faring ships of Tarshish—gaudy tissues interwoven with bettle-wings, strange shells, jewel-crusted swords, carvings in sandal-wood and in the wood of the mysterious almug tree. Possibly the almug tree is not mysterious to the well-informed man, but I admit that I have always carefully avoided looking it up; I might say, as was said of the purple cow, ‘I never saw an almug tree, I never want to see one,’ because I am certain that it would prove a vast disappointment. The unlading of a ship is an enlarged and, it must be admitted, less personal version of the unpacking of a Christmas hamper, a joy apportioned to childhood, not, in nine cases out of ten, because in our maturer years we lose the appreciation of disinterring the unexpected from swathings of paper, string, and straw, but because the opportunities are denied us. Of course, it is given to few to unpack a ship, and there may be persons of little imagination to whom a bill of lading seems dull and uninspiring, but to me every such list is a potential hamper. When the bill of lading is of the fifteenth century there is added something of the feeling which we have when turning out a drawer in an old forgotten bureau of our great-grandmother’s. The everyday objects of that time are now unfamiliar, and our ingenuity is taxed to guess the use of some of them, while on the other hand it is quite a shock to find that other things which we still use were known so long ago.

‘latten “Agnus Dei.”’

The hold of a ship, like poverty, makes strange bed-fellows acquaint. A hundred distaves, emblems of peaceful home-life, came into London port in 1390 side by side with ninety-three dozen swords, these latter for Gerard van Barle, who must have been either an armourer in business on a very large scale, or else an army contractor. Six hundred oranges, at fifteen a penny, we find sandwiched between eight barrels of varnish and nine glass cups; a jar of preserved dates is thrust in between twelve yards of linen cloth and a barrel containing seven and a half dozen beaver hats. A ship of Dieppe came into Winchelsea harbour in 1490 with damask and satin and pipes of wine, razors and needles and mantles of leopard skins, five gross of playing-cards and eight gross of latten ‘Agnus Dei.’ These last, which I regret to say seem to have been considerably less valued than the ‘devil’s books’ which accompanied them, were plaques stamped with the figure of the holy Lamb, and it would seem that they were so common that the word became a synonym for a plaque, as in an inventory of the jewels of Henry VII. occurs ‘an Agnus of the Salutation of Our Lady.’ In the same way the component parts of the rosary became so intimately associated in men’s minds with prayers that when we read in a list of cargo of ‘pater-nosters’ or ‘bedys’ of amber, coral, tin, or ‘tree’ it is impossible to be sure whether they were rosaries or beads in the modern sense of ornaments. Devotional objects naturally figured largely in the imports of mediæval days, images of painted wood or tin occurring with frequency in the London customs accounts of 1390, and the alabaster carvings for which England, and in particular Nottingham, was famous form quite the most interesting of our exports in the fifteenth century. As a whole it must be admitted that our exports at that time were very dull compared to our imports; cloth, hides, and corn are but uninspiring merchandise, and although the frequent mention of ale and beer might cheer the heart of Mr. Belloc or the late Mr. Calverley it leaves me cold. One item, however, is interesting in the fifteenth-century exports from Bristol, and that is the constant occurrence in cargoes for Ireland, and for nowhere else, of casks of ‘corrupt wine.’ This looks like ‘another injustice to Ireland.’ With this untempting liquor went a good quantity of honey, possibly to counteract its acidity, and of ‘battery-ware,’ which was really such things as kettles, but may have been endeared to the Irish from an imaginary connection with assault.

If the exported cloth was uninspiring in its lack of variety the same charge cannot be brought against the imported stuffs. There is some room for imagination in the cargo of Matthew Clayson’s boat, which brought kerchiefs of Cyprus and Syria (so at least I interpret cirian), oriental kerchiefs and glittering (relusant) kerchiefs, with 707 lb. of pins wherewith to fasten them. There is also something satisfactory about baudrik powdered with Cyprian gold, and even about chamelet and sarcenet. I own to a delight in the old drapery terms, and, whatever their merits as materials, I feel that our modern trade terms such as viyella and eoline (if these be their names) are feeble and finicking besides arras, bayes, bewpers, boulters, borratoes, buffins, bustyans, bombacyes, calimancoes, carrells, dornicks, frisadoes, fustians, grograines, mockadoes, minnikins, makarells, oliotts, pomettes, plumettes, perpetuanas, rashes, russells, sayes, stamells, tukes, tamettes, and woadmolles. But if these and similar words have a fascination it is partly a fascination of the unknown, and I should be grateful to any one who could tell me what it was that Walter Hake brought into London port in 1390, for, besides two barrels with fourteen nests of mazer cups and other recognisable goods, he carried three thousand five hundred ‘redwark,’ ten hundred ‘ruskyn,’ as much ‘popl,’ and, most puzzling of all, eight thousand ‘of good work’ (boni operis). I admit the temptation to endow the work with plurality and to set this load of good works in opposition to a contemporary Rabelaisian cargo of ‘fartes of Portingale.’

‘... playing innumerable pranks.’

So far the cargoes of our ships have not greatly resembled those of the ships of Tarshish, but, if the peacocks are to seek, we can easily find the ivory, in the shape of combs, and as to the apes the Clement of Rye in 1490 brought home four dozen baboons (baboynes). It must, however, be admitted that these baboons would not have found a home at the Zoo—they were in fact little grotesque figures, and in that sense the word occurs often in mediæval inventories. Edward III. had not only a number of pieces of plate with ‘babewyns’ upon them, but one cup described as gilt and enamelled with ‘diverse babwynrie.’ At the same time the real monkey was a common enough object; he figures in the margin of scores of illuminated manuscripts, playing innumerable pranks, not infrequently in the dress of a priest, a monk, or a friar. Monkeys were kept by many of the nobles, and when Thomas Becket went, as Chancellor of England, on an embassy to the court of France an ape sat on every pack horse of his gorgeous cavalcade. The merchandise of Venice in 1436 included ‘Apes and japes and marmusettes tayled,’ and so far was the ape a common import that at many seaports monkeys figured in the customs lists, the due at Norwich being 40d. each, no small sum. With the monkey in these lists is also found the bear, who at Norwich paid 42d. for admission to the country. Bears were even commoner sights than monkeys, for not only were there the performing bears in charge of itinerant showmen, but many of the poor brutes were kept for sport, to be baited by dogs. It was probably for purposes of sport that Sir John Bourchier, Earl of Bath, kept half-a-dozen bears, which after the Reformation he stabled in the dismantled priory of the Black Friars at Fisherton, near Salisbury. There they lived happily until, according to Harry Sutton, their keeper, John Davy and Agnes his wife with other naughty and evil-disposed persons broke into the close where they were kept, and Agnes, ‘being thene of most wyckyd and damnable disposicion,’ scattered poisoned bread on the ground and in the water where the bears drank. As a result three of the bears died, as did also a poor man’s sow that drank of the pond; and a poor woman who washed her face in the water ‘so swelled that she was like to have died,’ which I take leave to think was an exaggeration on the part of Harry Sutton. There is always another side to every story, and according to John Davy he had a lease of part of the friary lands, and his wife was quite peaceably walking there when Sutton, to frighten her away, untied ‘the grettyste and most terryble bere’ and set him at her, whereat she being ‘sore affrayed and abashed’ ran away and in running fell over a sow, not the poor man’s sow that died, but a sow of lead, and received a hurt from which she died. The two versions are singularly divergent, and if Sutton could show three dead bears and a sow in support of his story, Davy could show a dead wife in support of his.

Henry III. was the proud possessor of a polar bear, which used to be taken for a swim in the Thames to disport itself and to catch fish, no doubt to the great joy of the young Londoners. This was a present from the King of Norway, and gifts of strange beasts were often made to our kings, the favourites naturally being lions and leopards, in allusion to the royal arms, the Black Prince on one occasion sending his father a lion and a leopard. In passing it may be remarked that it is a curious trait of the heraldic lion that it cannot look a man in the face; when a lion looks at you it becomes a leopard. This, I admit, sounds rather like the schoolboy’s description of the tortuous river of Palestine, ‘The Jordan runs straight down the middle of the map, but when you look at it it wriggles,’—but it is none the less a fact. In early heraldry the lean and fearsome beast that does duty for a lion when seen in profile is called a leopard when its full face is shown; it is true that a later generation of heraldic writers converted the three golden leopards of England into ‘lions passant guardant,’ but leopards they were, and, for those of us who prefer the heraldry of the classic period to its debased and jargonised descendant, leopards they remain. At the same time, as the live lions could hardly be expected to look continuously over their left shoulders, the royal menagerie at the tower was usually stocked with real leopards as well as lions. For generations, and indeed centuries, the lions of the Tower enjoyed much the same privileged position as the eponymous bears of Berne, and were so emphatically the sight to which all country cousins, by a humane version of ‘Christianos ad leones,’ had to be taken that their name became, and remains, synonymous with all that is double-asterisked by Baedeker.