The Schildburgers met with further difficulties before they completed their council-hall. They sowed a field with salt, and when the salt-plant grew up next year, after a meeting of the council, at which it was stiffly disputed whether it ought to be reaped, or mowed, or gathered in in some other manner, it was finally discovered that the crop consisted of nothing but nettles. After many accidents of this kind, the Schildburgers are noticed by the emperor, and obtain a charter of incorporation and freedom, but they profit little by it. In trying some experiments to catch mice, they set fire to their houses, and the whole town is burnt to the ground, upon which, in their sorrow, they abandon it altogether, and become, like the Jews of old, scattered over the world, carrying their own folly into every country they visit.
The earliest known edition of the history of the Schildburgers was printed in 1597,[75] but the story itself is no doubt older. It will be seen at once that it involves a satire upon the municipal towns of the middle ages. A similar series of adventures, only a little more clerical, bore the title of “Der Pfarrherrn vom Kalenberg,” or the Parson of Kalenberg, and was first, as far as we know, published in the latter half of the sixteenth century. The first known edition, printed in 1582, is in prose. Von der Hagen, who reprinted a subsequent edition in verse, in a volume already quoted, seems to think that in its first form the story belongs to the fourteenth century.
The Schildburgers of Germany were represented in England by the wise men of Gotham. Gotham is a village and parish about seven miles to the south-west of Nottingham, and, curiously enough, a story is told according to which the folly of the men of Gotham, like that of the Schildburgers, was at first assumed. It is pretended that one day king John, on his way to Nottingham, intended to pass through the village of Gotham, and that the Gothamites, under the influence of some vague notion that his presence would be injurious to them, raised difficulties in his way which prevented his visit. The men of Gotham were now apprehensive of the king’s vengeance, and they resolved to try and evade it by assuming the character of simpletons. When the king’s officers came to Gotham to inquire into the conduct of the inhabitants, they found them engaged in the most extraordinary pursuits, some of them seeking to drown an eel in a pond of water, others making a hedge round a tree to confine a cuckoo which had settled in it, and others employing themselves in similar futile pursuits. The commissioners reported the people of Gotham to be no better than fools, and by this stratagem they escaped any further persecution, but the character they assumed remained attached to them.
This explanation is, of course, very late and very apocryphal; but there can be little doubt that the character of the wise men of Gotham is one of considerable antiquity. The story is believed to have been drawn up in its present form by Andrew Borde, an English writer of the reign of Henry VIII. It was reprinted a great number of times under the form of those popular books called chap-books, because they were hawked about the country by itinerant booksellers or chap-men. The acts of the Gothamites displayed a greater degree of simplicity even than those of the Schildburgers, but they are less connected. Here is one anecdote told in the unadorned language of the chap-books, in explanation of which it is only necessary to state that the men of Gotham admired greatly the note of the cuckoo. “On a time the men of Gotham fain would have pinn’d in the cuckow, that she might sing all the year; and, in the midst of the town, they had a hedge made round in compass, and got a cuckow and put her into it, and said, ‘Sing here, and you shall lack neither meat nor drink all the year.’ The cuckow, when she perceived herself encompassed with the hedge, flew away. ‘A vengeance on her,’ said these wise men, ‘we did not make our hedge high enough.’” On another occasion, having caught a large eel which offended them by its voracity, they assembled in council to deliberate on an appropriate punishment, which ended in a resolution that it should be drowned, and the criminal was ceremoniously thrown into a great pond. One day twelve men of Gotham went a-fishing, and on their way home they suddenly discovered that they had lost one of their number, and each counted in his turn, and could find only eleven. In fact, each forgot to count himself. In the midst of their distress—for they believed their companion to be drowned—a stranger approached, and learnt the cause of their sorrow. Finding they were not to be convinced of their mistake by mere argument, he offered, on certain conditions, to find the lost Gothamite, and he proceeded as follows. He took one by one each of the twelve Gothamites, struck him a hard blow on the shoulder, which made him scream, and at each cry counted one, two, three, &c When it came to twelve, they were all satisfied that the lost Gothamite had returned, and paid the man for the service he had rendered them.
As a chap-book, this history of the men of Gotham became so popular, that it gave rise to a host of other books of similar character, which were compiled at a later period under such titles—formerly well known to children—as, “The Merry Frolicks, or the Comical Cheats of Swalpo;” “The Witty and Entertaining Exploits of George Buchanan, commonly called the King’s Fool;” “Simple Simon’s Misfortunes;” and the like. Nor must it be forgotten that the history of Eulenspiegel was the prototype of a class of popular histories of larger dimensions, represented in our own literature by “The English Rogue,” the work of Richard Head and Francis Kirkman, in the reign of Charles II., and various other “rogues” belonging to different countries, which appeared about that time, or not long afterwards. The earliest of these books was “The Spanish Rogue, or Life of Guzman de Alfarache,” written in Spanish by Mateo Aleman in the latter part of the sixteenth century. Curiously enough, some Englishman, not knowing apparently that the history of Eulenspiegel had appeared in English under the name of Owlglass, took it into his head to introduce him among the family of rogues which had thus come into fashion, and, in 1720, published as “Made English from the High Dutch,” what he called “The German Rogue, or the Life and Merry Adventures, Cheats, Stratagems, and Contrivances of Tiel Eulespiegle.”
The fifteenth century was the period during which mediæval forms generally were changing into forms adapted to another state of society, and in which much of the popular literature which has been in vogue during modern times took its rise. In the fourteenth century, the fabliaux of the jougleurs were already taking what we may perhaps term a more literary form, and were reduced into prose narratives. This took place especially in Italy, where these prose tales were called novelle, implying some novelty in their character, a word which was transferred into the French language under the form of nouvelles, and was the origin of our modern English novel, applied to a work of fiction. The Italian novelists adopted the Eastern plan of stringing these stories together on the slight framework of one general plot, in which are introduced causes for telling them and persons who tell them. Thus the Decameron of Boccaccio holds towards the fabliaux exactly the same position as that of the “Arabian Nights” to the older Arabian tales. The Italian novelists became numerous and celebrated throughout Europe, from the time of Boccaccio to that of Straparola, at the commencement of the sixteenth century, and later. The taste for this class of literature appears to have been introduced into France at the court of Burgundy, where, under duke Philippe le Bon, a well-known courtier and man of letters named Antoine de La Sale, who had, during a sojourn in Italy, become acquainted with one of the most celebrated of the earlier Italian collections, the “Cento Novello,” or the Hundred Novels, compiled a collection in French in imitation of them, under the title of “Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles,” or the Hundred new Novels, one of the purest examples of the French language in the fifteenth century.[76] The later French story-books, such as the Heptameron of the queen of Navarre, and others, belong chiefly to the sixteenth century. These collections of stories can hardly be said to have ever taken root in this island as a part of English literature.
But there arose partly out of these stories a class of books which became greatly multiplied, and were, during a long period, extremely popular. With the household fool, or jester, instead of the old jougleur, the stories had been shorn of their detail, and sank into the shape of mere witty anecdotes, and at the same time a taste arose for what we now class under the general term of jests, clever sayings, what the French call bons mots, and what the English of the sixteenth century termed “quick answers.” The word jest itself arose from the circumstance that the things designated by it arose out of the older stories, for it is a mere corruption of gestes, the Latin gesta, in the sense of narratives of acts or deeds, or tales. The Latin writers, who first began to collect them into books, included them under the general name of facetiæ. The earlier of these collections of facetiæ were written in Latin, and of the origin of the first with which we are acquainted, that by the celebrated scholar Poggio of Florence, a curious anecdote is told. Some wits of the court of pope Martin V., elected to the papacy in 1417, among whom were the pope’s two secretaries, Poggio and Antonio Lusco, Cincio of Rome, and Ruzello of Bologna, appropriated to themselves a private corner in the Vatican, where they assembled to chat freely among themselves. They called it their buggiale, a word which signifies in Italian, a place of recreation, where they tell stories, make jests, and amuse themselves with discussing satirically the doings and characters of everybody. This was the way in which Poggio and his friends entertained themselves in their buggiale, and we are assured that in their talk they neither spared the church nor the pope himself or his government. The facetiæ of Poggio, in fact, which are said to be a selection of the good things said in these meetings, show neither reverence for the church of Rome nor respect for decency, but they are mostly stories which had been told over and over again, long before Poggio came into the world. It was perhaps this satire upon the church and upon the ecclesiastics which gave much of their popularity to these facetiæ at a time when a universal agitation of men’s minds on religious affairs prevailed, which was the great harbinger of the Reformation; and the next Latin books of facetiæ came from men such as Henry Bebelius, who were zealous reformers themselves.
Many of the jests in these Latin collections are put into the mouths of jesters, or domestic fools, fatui, or moriones, as they are called in the Latin; and in England, where these jest-books in the vernacular tongue became more popular perhaps than in any other country, many of them were published under the names of celebrated jesters, as the “Merie Tales of Skelton,” “The Jests of Scogin,” “Tarlton’s Jests,” and “The Jests of George Peele.”
John Skelton, poet-laureat of his time, appears to have been known in the courts of Henry VII. and Henry VIII. quite as much in the character of a jester as in that of a poet. Poet-laureat was then a title or degree given in the university of Oxford. His “Merye Tales” are all personal of himself, and we should be inclined to say that his jests and his poetry are equally bad. The former picture him as holding a place somewhere between Eulenspiegel and the ordinary court-fool. We may give as a sample of the best of them the tale No. 1.—
“How Skelton came home late to Oxford from Abington.