‘... constructed a pantomime dragon on the pattern of the real article.’
Besides the monsters of the land and air there were, of course, mediæval varieties of the sea-serpent. Matthew Paris records that in 1255 a monster bigger than the biggest whale was thrown up on the coast of Norfolk. As this was the year in which the first elephant came over I almost wondered if two had started and one had fallen overboard and been drowned, but quite by accident I came upon a legal case connected with this very sea monster, arising out of foreshore rights and rights of wreck, which showed that the creature, whatever it was, was very much alive when first seen, as no less than six boats were sunk in effecting its capture. Unfortunately no description of the monster is given, but probably it was a great sperm whale. Fifteen years earlier, in 1240, according to the same chronicler, there was a great battle of whales off the mouth of the Thames, and one of the wounded came up the river, just managed to squeeze through the arches of London Bridge and got as far as Mortlake before it was killed. A fresh-water monster, or at least one which started life in a river and developed in a well but afterwards took to the land, was the terrible Lambton worm, which seems after all to have been more of a nuisance than a danger, as, so long as it got its trough full of milk regularly, it was content to lie about, coiled round Lambton Hill.
Terrible beasts were the basilisk—for which I have always felt an affection since I saw his portrait by Carpaccio in the church of St. George of the Sclavs (after much furious argument with a gondolier who knew no St. George but S. Giorgio Maggiore) at Venice—the cockatrice, and that strange hybrid of the two, the basilcok, known chiefly for its mean and unrelenting enmity to the centichore or yale, the strange pig-antelope who now sits once more as he sat of yore on the bridge at Hampton Court. Terrible beasts all; but none so morally destructive as that noble friend of man, the horse. Everybody knows the famous derivation of hypocrite, ‘from two Greek words—hippos, a horse, and krites, a judge: a horse-dealer, therefore, a deceiver.’ The Archbishop of York would seem to have been of the same opinion when he inhibited the cellarer of Newburg from dealing in horses, on the ground that it was not fitting for a man of religion, because in the negotiations between buyer and seller it is almost impossible to avoid sin. It would have been well if John Hill, vicar of Coliton in Devon in 1426, had considered this before he sold a horse to Walter Trouns, ‘knowing the horse to have contracted divers diseases and to be incapable of working.’ From the description the horse would seem to have been of the same breed as the ‘hakeney’ hired by William Driffeld from Thomas Plevener, a London innkeeper, who ‘promysed and warantized the said hakeney to be of helth and of habilitie and well and trewlay’ to carry Master William to Walsingham, whither he was going, no doubt, on pilgrimage. In spite of the warranty, the hackney, before he had covered twenty miles, ‘wold nor myght go no ferther’ and had to be left at Ware, where he died ‘of dyverse infyrmytes.’ Richard Chapman had a similar experience when he hired a horse from Christopher Thomas to carry him to York; at the end of the first day it ‘failed hym and was morefounded.’ Probably the hirers out of the horses threw the blame on their clients, as did Robert Grene, ‘corsour’ (i.e. horse-dealer, not to be confused with corsair, a pirate), who, having sold a horse to John Bonauntre, complained that ‘the said John rode upon the said hors’ with the result that it was ‘perished and utterly destroyed,’ though whether that was due to the delicacy of the horse, which was only intended for ornament, or to the ‘unresonable and outrajus rydyng’ of the purchaser is not clear. Mules, as we might expect, occasionally gave as much trouble as horses. There was a Welsh clergyman in the fifteenth century, John Yevan by name, upon whom a brother clerk, John Grigge, managed to plant a mule ‘the whiche he wold not have had, but through the gret labour and desyre of the said Sir John Grigge he toke the same mule upon his warantie that he shuld bere hym from Rome to London, orells not to paye therefore.’ Exactly what happened on that journey is not revealed, but the mule would seem to have proved several degree more aggravating than Modestine in the Cevennes, for John Yevan ‘was fayne and glad to make a cambicion (exchange) by the waye, to his gret hurte and hynderance,’ and felt much injured at being called upon to account for the missing mule on his return. The good man’s knowledge of legal jargon seems to have been oral rather than literary, as he invoked the magic of the law by demanding a ‘wryte of sorserare,’ in which it is not easy to recognise a writ of certiorari.
‘Hakeney.’
One of the most deadly of vicarious insults was to crop the tails of your adversary’s horses; it would seem to have been as bad as the biblical custom of cutting off the skirts of his messengers. John Enot, archdeacon of Buckingham in the fifteenth century, complained tearfully that one Thomas Coneloye (was he a lawless Irish Connelly?) prevented him from carrying out his duties in the punishment of sinners and had caused the tails of his horses to be cut. It was a similar insult to the hot-tempered Thomas Becket that caused that archbishop’s furious denunciation of his enemies and led to his murder and so to his canonisation, from which it follows that we owe Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to the curtailment of the archbishop’s horses. From insult to assault is a short journey, and horses have brought so many to the ‘demnition bow-wows,’ that I am reminded at this point of the adventure of the vicar and the dog and the door-key, which fell out in this wise. William Russell, vicar of Mere in Somerset, some time during the reign of Henry VI., left his church at five o’clock one Good Friday evening, having been ‘bysyly occupyed all that day before in hyryng of confessions.’ He locked up his church and turned homewards, but on his way met one of his parishioners, John Totyn, an evil man, ‘not dredyng God ne the censers of the chirche.’ Totyn had in his hand a seven-foot staff with ‘a grete pyke of yren’ at one end and with him was ‘an horryble grete Dogge called a lymer,’ and he at once attacked the vicar and ‘provoked and stered his saide dogge to renne upon hym, callyng hym by his name and saide Hay Dewgarde.’ I am not clear whether the dog’s name was Dieugarde, which seems rather unlikely, or Dugald, which is possible, but I rather incline to the idea that Totyn really said ‘good dog,’ with a provincial accent—‘Hey! gude darg!’ in fact. Anyhow, ‘the saide dogge, knowyng the condicions of his maister, ran upon (the vicar) and bote hym by the arme in iij places and pullyd hym downe to grounde twyes and so was likely then to have been murthored by the saide John Totyn and his dogge,’—the good vicar at the recollection of the exciting incident becomes oblivious of grammar and changes the subject of his verbs—‘but as God woold he smote the said dogge with the chirche dore key under his ere, and with that the said dogge departed.’ Next day worthy William Russell trotted off to his patron, the Abbot of Glastonbury, and showed him his injuries—‘his shurte beyng full of blode, his gowne to torne, his arme sore byten’; but he got cold comfort and scant sympathy. Totyn was the abbot’s servant and the abbot said, ‘that that was doon it was doon in the defence of my man, and it shall coste me xlli or thou shalte do my man any wrong, for I lete the wete I wyll defende hym.’
‘... showed him his injuries.’
Dogs of all kinds,—