THE STORY OF THE
"LONG-TAIL" MYTH
The 17th of December, 1566, was the christening day of Mary Stuart's infant son. Amongst the festivities arranged in celebration of the event, there was a "great banquet", to which the representatives of foreign sovereigns had been invited, and at which a foremost place had been assigned to Hatton and the Englishmen who had accompanied him to Scotland. To enliven the entertainment, George Buchanan had written a masque, in which the actors were satyrs who, whilst reciting his complimentary verses, were to bring various symbolical gifts to the royal infant. The performance of this interlude had been entrusted to a Frenchman named Bastien. As the meat was being brought through the great hall, on a "trim engine", that seemed to move of itself, he made his appearance with a band of men disguised to represent the mythological monsters, and wearing long tails, in keeping with their assumed character. But he and his associates "were not content only to red roun". Whether merely acting on a mischievous impulse or deliberately carrying out a preconcerted joke, the mummers, as they passed near the English guests, put their hands to their tails and began wagging them. Hatton and his party "daftly apprehending that which they should not seem to have understood", and placing the worst construction on the silly and unseemly trick, chose to believe that it had been planned in derision of them and out of spiteful jealousy "that the Queen made more of them than of the Frenchmen". To mark their sense of the insult offered them, "they all set down upon the bare floor behind the back of the board, that they should not see themselves scorned, as they thought". In relating the incident to Sir James Melville, who records it in his Memoirs, Hatton added that, if it had not taken place in the Royal palace and in presence of the Queen herself, he would "have put a dagger to the heart of the French knave Bastien".[291]
Coarse and unmannerly as was the satyrs' by-play, it would hardly seem to have deserved to be taken so seriously and so ill by the English guests, if it were not remembered that it expressed in dumb show what had for centuries been looked upon by Englishmen as a deadly insult—a reference to the popular belief that they were distinguished from the natives of other countries by the physical monstrosity of bearing tails. That this was accepted as an actual and disgraceful fact there is abundant evidence to prove. In a medieval Latin poem[292] devoted to an enumeration of the distinctive characteristics of the various nations of Europe, the unflattering lines that fall to the share of the English, jeer at them for this deformity, whilst not omitting to denounce the treachery so commonly and so spitefully attributed to them by their enemies:
A brute beast is the Englishman, For he doth bear a tail; Beware, and treat him as a foe, E'en when he bids thee "Hail!"[293]
The anonymous satirist, however, was not original. He had not the merit, such as it might be, of having invented the slander which he flung as an insult at the people against whom he obviously entertained a bitter animosity. If, as there is reason to believe, he was a Frenchman, he merely repeated a gibe which had long been one of the commonplaces of vulgar vituperation amongst his compatriots. In the description which the thirteenth-century chronicler, Jacques de Vitry, gives of the depraved state of Paris in his day, and more particularly of the rude behaviour and coarse jests of the students who flocked to its famous university, he states that diversity of nationality aroused amongst them dissensions, hatred and violent animosities, to which they gave vent by indulging in all kinds of invectives against each other. As an example of their scurrility, he mentions that they called the English drunkards and "tailards".[294] To suppose, from the very absurdity of the imputation, that it was merely cast as a taunt, and that no actual belief lay behind it, would be to ignore all that medieval credulity was capable of. Moreover, the attitude taken up by the English themselves, implied shame at an alleged deformity fully as much as anger at a wanton insult. On this point evidence is supplied by the Dominican monk Etienne de Bourbon, a moralist who flourished about the middle of the thirteenth century. In a treatise which is devoted to the exposition of subjects suitable for the pulpit, and which abounds in quaint stories as well as in caustic commentaries on contemporary manners, he does not omit to deal with the inordinate love of dress displayed by women, and to denounce the prevailing fashion of wearing extravagantly long trains to their gowns. He rebukes them for impiously presuming to better God's work, for doing away with the honourable distinction conferred upon them as human beings, and for deliberately assuming that which brings them down to the same level as brute beasts. As a climax, he inveighs against their shamelessness in making themselves what the English blush to be called—"tailards".[295]
The events that were chiefly instrumental in bringing the English into either contact or conflict with Continental nations, during the Middle Ages, were the Crusades and the Hundred Years' War. The chronicles that deal with these are not wanting in instances from which it may be gathered how readily the obnoxious gibe came to the lips of those that wished to show their contempt for the islanders. Richard of Devizes, who wrote one of the earliest and most authentic narratives of the reign of Richard I, with whom he was contemporary, describes how, in 1190, the inhabitants of Messina manifested their hatred for the strangers whom the King had brought to their shores, and how they tried to wreak vengeance on him and his "tailards"; for, explains the chronicler, the Greeks and the Sicilians gave the name of "tailards" to all who followed the English monarch.[296]
Another very early reference to the use of the term "tailard" as an opprobrious synonym for "Englishmen" is that which occurs in a metrical romance dealing with the same period and also recording, but with poetical freedom, the life and exploits of Richard Cœur de Lion. The exact date of the poem is unknown; but the fact of its being mentioned in the Chronicles of Richard of Gloucester and in those of Robert de Brunne, supplies evidence of its having been written earlier than the year 1300. It is confessedly a translation from the French; and that may account for the appearance in it of an insulting epithet which an English writer might have hesitated to use, even as an invective in the mouth of an enemy. The Second Book of this romance is devoted to a journey to the Holy Land, which the English King is supposed to have undertaken prior to the actual crusade, but which is, however, made to include the well-known incident of his capture. The poet tells how, when returning from Palestine, with "Sir Foulke Doyly of renown, and Sir Thomas of Multoun", Richard was betrayed, captured, and brought as a prisoner before the King of Allemayne; and how, when he represented himself and his companions as pilgrims,
"The Kyng callid Rychard be name, And clepyd him 'taylard', and sayde him schame."[297]