we are told in a lively line at this point of the narrative. The storm that follows is described with such a sense of reality that it has been suggested that the poet himself must have experienced some such tempest when making a pilgrimage to Compostella, “the favourite journey of Englishmen at the time,” and a journey of the ancient popularity of which we are still reminded in the streets of London once a year when children set up their grottoes on the footpaths as an excuse for begging pennies. Mr. Bateson attempts to bring home to us the desperate circumstances of seafaring in the Middle Ages by quoting the statement that “John of Gaunt, on one occasion, was tossing about in the Channel for nine months, unable to land at Calais.” I confess I cannot believe the story in this form, and we need no such incredible example to enable us to realise the terrors of the storm that swept down on Jonah, when the frightened sailors attempted to lighten the ship by throwing overboard
Her bagges, and her feather-beddes, and her bryght wedes.
The introduction of the feather-beds into the narrative would alone be a sufficient reason for welcoming the Lancashire version of the Jonah story. The description of the panic-stricken sailors “glewing,” or calling, on their very various gods (who included Fernagu, a French giant) is another addition that pleases by its strangeness:
Bot vchon glewed on his god thet gayned hym beste;
Summe to Vernagu ther vouched avowes solemne,
Summe to Diana deuout, and derf Nepturne,
To Mahoun and to Mergot, the Mone and the Sunne.
Both in Tertullian and in Patience Jonah is made not only to sleep but to snore while the others pray during the storm. Tertullian puts it:
Sternentem inflata resonabat nare soporem.
The English poet writes still more vividly that Jonah lay in the bottom of the boat,