“Anno 1350 is this sculptured, Tyle Ulenspegel lies here under buried. Mark well and think thereover what I have been....” (rest too fragmentary). But to be restored thus:
“Gedenk daran
Wat ick gwest sivp ... e
... de her vor (uber)
(Gh) an moten mi
glich wer (den).”
“Think thereover, what I have been ... who passeth by may to me become alike.”
At Damme, in Belgium, there is another gravestone with which tradition connects our hero, but unsatisfactorily. A writer in Meyer’s “Conversations Lexicon,” vol. ix. p. 331, thinks this gravestone is that of Eulenspiegel’s father, who might have died at the date of it, 1301.
APPENDIX C.
Of Dr. Thomas Murner, the author of Eulenspiegel.
As the author of Eulenspiegel, and also as a not unknown man in his own country, as well as in England, it may be not unwelcome to print here a few brief notes concerning Thomas Murner. He was born at Ehenheim, south of Strasburg, the 24th December, 1475, his father being a cobbler at that place. He was educated in a school of the Franciscans at Strasburg, and seems afterwards to have visited, in the capacity of travelling student, the Universities of Paris, Freiburg, Rostock, Prague, Vienna, and Cracow, and in his nineteenth year (1494) appears already to have taken orders. In 1499 he published his first work, his Invectiva contra Astrologos, and another piece, the Tractatus perutilis de phitonico contractu, and thenceforward lived a life of extreme literary activity. Having similar tastes to Sebastian Brandt, author of the “Ship of Fools,” we find Murner printing similar works—works of a satirical kind, such as the Narrenbeschwerung (“Conjuration of Fools”), the Schelmenzunft (“Knave Corporation”), and the Gäuchmatt, in which the various classes of society are bitterly treated, but in a way not interesting to modern persons. The most memorable thing which can connect Murner with England, is the part he took in the dispute between Henry the Eighth and Luther; and a book which he published under the title of “Is the King of England a liar or is Luther?” (Ob der Kunig usz Engelland ein lügner sey oder der Luther?), obtained favour for him from Henry.