No. 274. Tullia Riding over her Father’s Body.
As yet carriages seem not to have been used in travelling, which was performed on horseback or on foot. During the century of which we are speaking, especially after the accession of Henry VI. to the English throne, the roads were extremely insecure, the country being infested by such numerous bands of robbers that it was necessary to travel in considerable companies, and well armed. From this circumstance, and from the political condition of the age, the retinue of the nobility and gentry presented a very formidable appearance; and such as could only afford to travel with one or two servants generally attached themselves to some powerful neighbour, and contrived to make their occasions of locomotion coincide with his. We find several allusions to the dangers of travelling in the Paston Letters. In a letter dated in 1455 or 1460 (it is uncertain which), Margaret Paston desires her husband, then in London, to pay a debt for one of their friends, because, on account of the robbers who beset the road, money could not be sent safely from Norfolk to the capital. A year or two earlier, we hear of a knight of Suffolk riding with a hundred horsemen, armed defensively and offensively, besides the accompaniment of friends. As travelling, however, became frequent, it led to the multiplication of places of entertainment on the roads, and large hostelries and inns were now scattered pretty thickly over the country, not only in all the smaller towns, but often in villages, and sometimes even in comparatively lonely places. In the manuscript of the French Boccaccio in the Imperial Library (No. 6887), there is a picture (copied in our cut [No. 275]) representing a publican serving his liquor on a bench outside his door.
No. 275. A Publican.
The tavern was the general lounge of the idle, and even of the industrious, during their hours of relaxation; and in the towns a good part of the male population who had not domestic establishments of their own appear to have lived at the taverns and eating-houses, the allurements of which drew them into every sort of dissipation, which ended in the ruin of men’s fortunes and health. The poet Occleve, in his reminiscences of his own conduct, describes the life of the riotous young men of his time. The sign which hung at the tavern door, he says, was always a temptation to him, which he could seldom resist. The tavern was the resort of women of light character, and was the scene of brawls and outrages; by the former of which he was frequently seduced into extravagant expenditure, but his want of courage, he confesses, kept him out of the latter. Westminster gate was then celebrated for its taverns and cooks’ shops, at which the poet Occleve’s lavishness made him a welcome guest:— Wher was a gretter maister eek than y,
Or bet acqweyntid at Westmynsler yate,
Among the taverneres namely (especially)
And cookes? Whan I cam, eerly or late,
I pynchid nat at hem in myne acate (purchase of provisions),
But paied hem as that they axe wolde;
Wherfore I was the welcomer algate (always),
And for a verray (true) gentilman yholde.
Here he spent his nights in such a manner that he went to bed later than any of his companions, except perhaps two, whose time of going to bed he says that he did not know, it was so late, but he asserts that they loved their beds so well that they never left them till near prime, or six o’clock in the morning, which thus appears, at the beginning of the fifteenth century, to have been considered an excessively late hour for rising.
The tavern was also the resort of women of the middle and lower orders, who assembled there to drink, and to gossip. It has been already stated that, in the mysteries, or religious plays, Noah was represented as finding his wife drinking with her gossips at the tavern when he wanted to take her into the ark. The meetings of gossips in taverns form the subjects of many of the popular songs of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, both in England and France. It appears that these meetings of gossips in taverns were the first examples of what we now call a pic-nic, for each woman took with her some provisions, and with these the whole party made a feast in common. A song of perhaps the middle of the fifteenth century, printed in my collection of “Songs and Carols,” edited for the Percy Society, gives us rather a picturesque description of one of these gossip-meetings. The women, having met accidentally, the question is put where the best wine was to be had, and one of them replies that she knows where could be procured the best drink in the town, but that she did not wish her husband to be acquainted with it:— I know a drawght of mery-go-downe,
The best it is in all thys towne;
But yet wold I not, for my gowne,
My husbond it wyst, ye may me trust.
The place of meeting having thus been fixed, they are represented as proceeding thither two and two, not to attract observation, lest their husbands might hear of their meeting. “God might send me a stripe or two,” said one, “if my husband should see me here.” “Nay,” said Alice, another, “she that is afraid had better go home; I dread no man.” Each was to carry with her some goose, or pork, or the wing of a capon, or pigeon pie, or some similar article— And ich (each) off them wyll sumwhat bryng,
Gosse, pygge, or capons wyng,
Pastés off pigeons, or sum other thyng.
Accordingly, on arriving at the tavern, they call for wine “of the best,” and then Ech off them brought forth ther dysch;
Sum brought flesh, and sume fysh.
Their conversation runs first on the goodness of the wines, and next on the behaviour of their husbands, with whom they are all dissatisfied. In one copy of the song, a harper makes his appearance, whom they hire, and dance to his music. When they pay their reckoning, they find, in one copy of the song, that it amounts to threepence each, and rejoice that it is so little, while in another they find that each has to pay sixpence, and are alarmed at the greatness of the amount. They agree to separate, and go home by different streets, and they are represented as telling their husbands that they had been to church. This is no doubt a picture of a common scene in the fifteenth century. Among the municipal records of Canterbury, there is preserved the deposition of a man who appears to have been suspected of a robbery, and who, to prove an alibi, describes all his actions during three days. On one of these, Monday, he went after eight o’clock in the evening to a tavern, and there he found “wyfes” drinking, “that is to say, Goddardes wyfe, Cornewelles wyfe, and another woman,” and he had a halfpennyworth of beer with them. This was apparently at the beginning of the reign of Henry VIII.
No. 276. A Scribe, in Spectacles, from the tapestry of Nancy.
It has been intimated before, that literature and reading had now become more general accomplishments than formerly. We can trace among the records of social history a general spreading of education, which showed an increasing intellectual agitation; in fact, education, without becoming more perfect, had become more general. I have already given figures of the implements of writing at an earlier period. In one of the compartments of the tapestry of “Nancy” (of the latter part of this century), engravings of which have been published by M. Achille Jubinal, we have a figure of a scribe (cut No. 276) with all his apparatus of writing,—the pen, the penknife, and the portable pen-case with ink-stand attached. But the most curious article which this scribe has in use is a pair of spectacles. Spectacles, however, we know had been in existence long before this period. A century earlier, Chaucer’s “Wife of Bath” observed rather sententiously:— Povert ful often, whan a man is lowe,
Maketh him his God and eek himself to knowe.
Povert a spectacle is, as thinketh me,
Thurgh which he may his verray frendes se.
Lydgate, addressing an old man who was on the point of marrying a young wife, tells him to Loke sone after a potent (staff) and spectacle;
Be not ashamed to take hem to thyn ease.
John Baret, of Bury St. Edmunds, in 1463, left by will to one of the monks of Bury, his ivory tables (the tabulæ for writing on), and a pair of spectacles of silver-gilt:—“Item: To daun Johan Janyng, my tablees of ivory, with the combe, and a payre spectacles of sylvir and ovir-gilt.” This shows that already in the middle of the fifteenth century, a pair of spectacles was not an uncommon article.