Early English Meals and Manners

by Unknown

not,”

altering not’s place to save the rhyme; or that when Russell had said of the Crane

The Crane is a fowle / that stronge is with to fare;

þe whynges ye areyse / fulle large evyñ thare;

of hyre trompe in þe brest / loke þat ye beware

Wynkyn de Worde directed his Carver thus: “A crane, reyse the wynges fyrst, & beware of the trumpe in his brest.” Let any one compare the second and third pages of Wynkyn de Worde’s text with lines 48-137 of Russell, and he will make up his mind that the old printer was either one of the most barefaced plagiarists that ever lived, or that the same original was before him and Russell too. May Mr Davenport’s hayloft, or some learned antiquarian, soon decide the alternative for us! The question was too interesting a “Curiosity of Literature” not to be laid before our Members, and therefore The Boke of Keruynge was reprinted—from the British Museum copy of the second edition of 1513—with added side-notes and stops, and the colophon as part of the title.

Then came the necessary comparison of Russell’s Boke with the Boke of Curtasye, edited by Mr Halliwell from the Sloane MS. 1986 for the Percy Society. Contrasts had to be made with it, in parts, many times in a page; the tract was out of print and probably in few Members’ hands; it needed a few corrections[14], and was worthy of a thousand times wider circulation than it had had; therefore a new edition from the MS. was added to this volume. Relying on Members reading it for themselves, I have not in the notes indicated all the points of coincidence and difference between this Boke and Russell’s. It is of wider scope than Russell’s, takes in the duties of outdoor officers and servants as well as indoor, and maybe those of a larger household; it has also a fyrst Boke on general manners, and a Second Book on what to learn at school, how to behave at church, &c., but it does not go into the great detail as to Meals and Dress which is the special value of Russell’s Boke, nor is it associated with a writer who tells us something of himself, or a noble who in all our English Middle Age has so bright a name on which we can look back

as “good Duke Humphrey.” This personality adds an interest to work that anonymity and its writings of equal value can never have; so that we may be well content to let the Curtasye be used in illustration of the Nurture. The MS. of the Curtasye is about 1460 A.D., Mr Bond says. I have dated it wrongly on the half-title.

The Booke of Demeanor was “such a little one” that I was tempted to add it to mark the general introduction of handkerchiefs. Having printed it, arose the question, ‘Where did it come from?’ No Weste’s Schoole of Vertue could I find in catalogues, or by inquiring of the Duke of Devonshire, Mr W. C. Hazlitt, at the Bodleian, &c. Seager’s Schoole of Vertue was the only book that turned up, and this I accordingly reprinted, as Weste’s Booke of Demeanor seemed to be little more than an abstract of the first four Chapters of Seager cut down and rewritten. We must remember that books of this kind, which we look on as sources of amusement, as more or less of a joke, were taken seriously by the people they were written for. That The Schoole of Vertue, for instance—whether Seager’s or Weste’s—was used as a regular school-book for boys, let Io. Brinsley witness. In his Grammar Schoole of 1612, pp. 17, 18, he enumerates the “Bookes to bee first learned of children”:— 1. their Abcie, and Primer. 2. The Psalms in metre, ‘because children wil learne that booke with most readinesse and delight through the running of the metre, as it is found by experience. 3. Then the Testament.’ 4. “If any require any other little booke meet to enter children; the Schoole of Vertue is one of the principall, and easiest for the first enterers, being full of precepts of ciuilitie, and such as children will soone learne and take a delight in, thorow the roundnesse of the metre, as was sayde before of the singing Psalmes: And after it the Schoole of good manners[15], called, the new Schoole of Vertue, leading the childe as by the hand, in the way of all good manners.”

I make no apology for including reprints of these little-known books in an Early English Text. Qui s’excuse s’accuse; and if these Tracts do not justify to any reader their own appearance here, I believe the fault is not theirs.