[81] Acts 5:38, 39.
[82] On the beach at Lidde, near Stonend, “there is yet to be seene,“ says Weever, in his ”Funeral Monuments,“ ”an heap of great stones which the neighbour inhabitants call St. Crispin’s and St. Crispinian’s tomb, whom they report to have been cast upon this shore by ship-wracke, and from hence called into the glorious company of the saints. Look Jacobus de Voraigne, in the legend of their lives, and you may believe perhaps as much as is spoken. They were shoemakers, and suffered martyrdom the tenth of the kalends of November (25th October), which day is kept holy to this day by all our shoemakers in London and elsewhere.“—Quoted in ”Crispin Anecdotes,” Sheffield, 1827, p. 18.
[83] For the legends of these saints, and much curious information respecting the craft and its guilds in early times, the reader may consult Lacroix, “Manners, Customs, and Dress in the Middle Ages;“ ”Histoire de la Chaussure,“ etc. That quaint old book, ”The Delightful, Princely, and Entertaining History of the Gentle Craft,” by T. Deloney, 1678, gives the story of the princely and saintly brothers in its English dress, and it is one of the strangest tales even in legendary lore. This story, Deloney tells us, accounts for the term “gentle craft” as applied to shoemaking, and explains the saying “a shoemaker’s son is a prince born.” The Princes Crispin and Crispinian becoming shoemakers sufficiently accounts for the former term, for
“The gentle craft is fittest then
For poor distressed gentlemen;”
and the marriage of Crispine to Ursula, the daughter of the Emperor Maximinus, and the birth of a son to the Prince, will explain the latter. See the stories and ballads thereanent in Campion’s “Delightful History of the Gentle Craft,” Northampton, Taylor & Son, 2d ed., 1876, pp. 25-35. A most interesting and valuable little book on shoes and shoemakers in ancient and modern times.
[84] Vol. ii. pp. 305, 306. London, Longmans, 1848.
[85] Another memorial of the saints, of a very different character, was the semi-sacred play entitled “The Mystery of St. Crispin and St. Crispinian,” which used to be performed on St. Crispin’s Day by the Guilds or Brotherhoods of Shoemakers in Paris and elsewhere.
[86] “Biographie Universelle.” Paris, 1811.
[87] Ibid.