"Thou English 'tailard', hold thy tail with care, For fear it drop from thee, at unaware."
"By reason of their tails, the English race Must bear about a burden of disgrace."[335]
In whatever connection the lines may have appeared, they provoked "the noble poet Skelton", as he styles himself, to a reply which has for its heading the statement that, "The most vile Scot, Dundas, alleges that Englishmen have tails". Apostrophizing him as a "shameless, noxious, foul-mouthed, lying Scot", he asks him how he dares utter such a slander. Then, dropping into macaronic verses, he adorns them with such flowers of vituperation as these:
This Dundas, This Scottishe as, He rymes and railes That Englishmen have tailes.
Skelton Laureat After this rate Defendeth with his pen All Englishmen Agayn Dundas The Scottishe as. Shake thy tayle, Scot, like a cur, For thou beggest at every mannes dur. Tut, Scot, I sey, Go, shake the, dog, hey! Dundas of Galaway With thy versyfyeng rayles How they have tayles.[336]
Though recalled, some half a century later, by the insulting piece of by-play which it suggested to Mary Stuart's French courtiers, and at which, as we have already recorded, Hatton and his countrymen waxed so wroth, the "tailard" taunt is not again heard in the story of the old feud between England and Scotland. From the sixteenth century to its final disappearance from use and even from memory, it seems to have remained as exclusively French as it doubtless was in its origin.
PART II
The use which some of the Latin chroniclers and verse-makers make of the words caudatus and cauda suggests that the former of these may have been intended to bear the sense of "cowed" or "coward", and the latter to symbolize the evil qualities, more particularly, perhaps, the treachery ascribed to the English. Thus, in Matthew of Paris, one, at least, of Count Robert's insulting outbursts, though hardly both, remains perfectly intelligible even if a figurative rather than a literal meaning be given to the epithet.[337] And, again, when John Oxenedes, in his account of the battle of Lewes, fought, in 1264, between Henry III and the Barons, under Simon of Montfort, places it in immediate juxtaposition to "full of guile", "false", "unstable", and "dispirited", it seems more natural to interpret it as a reference to a moral defect than to take it as a taunt at a physical deformity.[338] As regards the substantive, a symbolical sense, not, indeed, excluding the primary meaning, but rather taken in combination with it, is obviously consistent with the anonymous poetaster's advice to "cut off that poisonous tail".[339] And the Annales Gandenses, the most noteworthy chronicle of the closing years of the thirteenth and the beginning of the fourteenth century, whilst doubtless alluding to the popular belief in a real caudal appendage worn by Englishmen, seem to employ the word metaphorically in the passage which records the incendiarism and the looting by which the troops of Edward I disgraced themselves in Ghent, where they had been cordially received and hospitably entertained by the inhabitants in 1298. "The English, like the most ungrateful men that they were," says the Minorite author, "dragging after them their habitual tail, and eager to plunder the town of Ghent and to slay those that resisted them, set fire to it in four places, at the four corners, so to speak, in order that the people of Ghent, whilst endeavouring to extinguish the conflagration, should be less careful about the custody of their property."[340] In the Eulogium Historiarum, too, there is a passage where the word cauda occurs in such a connection as to make it quite clear that the literal acceptation would be out of place, the more so, indeed, from the circumstance that the "tail" is bestowed, not on an Englishman, but on a Scot, and on a Scot no less genuine than Robert the Bruce. Referring to the capture and punishment of the Scottish King's adherents, the chronicler adds that Bruce himself found safety in flight and concealment, but that this did not in the least trouble Edward, who, now that his enemy's tail was completely cut off, was quite willing that he should wander about, wherever he found it easiest to save his life.[341] And if, in this instance, the amputation of the tail is a figure of speech intended to convey the notion of reducing to powerlessness, it might be argued, with some show of reason, that, even when applied to Englishmen, as in the lines which exultingly proclaim how the French King made them harmless by submitting them to similar treatment, the expression does not necessarily imply the actual possession of a real tail. This would add yet another passage to those which, if they stood by themselves, would justify some hesitation in accepting them as proofs of a serious conviction as to the alleged anatomical peculiarity of Englishmen. But when the fullest allowance has been made for all of them, they do not appreciably affect the evidence of the many witnesses who not only testify to the general acceptance of the phenomenon as an actual fact, but are also ready with a reason for its cause and an explanation of its origin. The first of these in age, and by no means the least in point of standing and respectability, is the biographer Goscelin. He is said to have been born at or near Terouanne, and was originally a monk in the monastery of St. Bertin, but was brought over to England, possibly as early as 1053, by Hermann, Bishop of Salisbury. Being a monk at Canterbury, he became interested in the founder of the see, and not only drew up an account of the translation of Augustine, a ceremony at which he was present, but also wrote a life of the Saint. He professes to have based this work on older records; and it may be assumed that it embodied local tradition as it existed prior to the Norman Conquest. It consists of two versions of the story of the life of the Apostle of England. One of them, known as the Historia Minor Sancti Augustini, is brief and compendious. The other, or Historia Major as it is called, which enjoys the distinction of having been selected by the Bollandists for inclusion in their Acta Sanctorum, whilst identical with it in substance, has that greater fulness of details which its title suggests.
Both texts relate an incident which is said to have taken place in the province of Dorset, in a little village which, for its heathenish impiety, is likened to the nether regions themselves. There, the devil-inspired inhabitants not only refused to give the messenger of the Gospel a hearing, but also raised a very storm of mocking and contumely against the Saint and his companions. In their shameless audacity, they fastened the tails of sea-fish to the garments of the holy men. Indignant at this sacrilegious outrage, the Spirit of the Lord, through the mouth of Augustine, condemned those who had committed it to perpetuate in themselves and in all their posterity the ignominy to which they had submitted the saints of God.[342]
Shorn of its miraculous and spiteful sequel, and presented in a form to which critical history is not compelled to raise objection, the same episode reappears about the middle of the twelfth century, that is, approximatively, a hundred years later, in the Gesta Pontificum of William of Malmesbury. The chronicler narrates how, at Cerne, in Dorsetshire, the infuriated inhabitants, at the instigation of the Evil One, attacked Augustine and his brethren, and expelled them from their midst, after having heaped insults upon them, and how they carried the indignity of their conduct so far as to fasten the tails of ray-fish, or skate, to the clothes of the holy missionaries. The attitude which William of Malmesbury credits Augustine with assuming in the circumstances seems less in keeping with what we elsewhere read of the Saint's temper than does the vengeful sentence which Goscelin makes him pronounce against the offenders. William says of him that, for Christ's sake, he bore their affronts patiently, modestly, and even joyfully, and shaking against them the dust of his feet, retired a distance of some three miles, as a precaution against further irritating the insane anger of the poor people.[343]