Studies in jocular literature

by William Carew Hazlitt

The idea of lending a local colouring and flavour to anecdotes originated, however, probably among the early Italian collectors of burle and facetie, of which some are transferred to our own miscellanies; and the practice dates back to a period when the literary life was bounded by the walls of capitals, or did not at most overstep their outskirts.

The stories, which present themselves in this class of book about the inhabitants of Scotland and Wales, generally bear on the pilfering propensities occasioned by poverty, facilitated by geographical position, and justified by the sense of wrong. Their habits of parsimony were acquired by the Scots during centuries of miserable and oppressive misgovernment, and survived the stern necessity out of which they arose. The Welsh borderer, if one judges from the tales current about him in the old facetiæ, and from what history itself reveals, combined with an addiction to “lifting” and drunkenness a certain pusillanimity of spirit, which may be less injurious to the community, but is more to be contemned in the individual. He was too often, besides being a thief and a sot, a sneaking rascal. The nursery rhyme about Taffy is a piece of veracious tradition, an accurate reflex of the state of society in the lower grades in the Principality down to the last century, or even until Wales was brought within the operation of more stringent laws and a more efficient police. The humorous side of the numberless legendary anecdotes about the Cambro-Britons has been rendered abundantly visible by the gatherers of Ana; but when we regard this material in the aggregate, and explore a little beneath the surface, we arrive at the interesting discovery that in this, as in every other group of similar relics, there is a good deal deserving of careful study and collation, and that the whole body of such literature ought henceforth to be, much more than it has, I think, hitherto been, treated as a branch of the national Folk-lore.

The merriments at the expense of Taffy, if they do not turn on his dishonesty, are pretty sure to deal with his passion for liquor and toasted cheese. Congruity and fitness are seldom respected in this line of literary work; and in one of the Hundred Merry Tales, St. Peter, upon the representation of God that the Welshmen in heaven, with their noisy ways, were a nuisance to all the rest, engages to get rid of them. He goes to the entrance-gates and shouts Cause bobe! and forthwith every Cambro-Briton rushes out to see where his favourite delicacy is to be had. The sly apostle, the moment they are all outside, closes the door, and the Christian Elysium is its old self again.

This whimsical piece of invention may be bracketed with a second narrated in the so-called Tales of Skelton, in which the other gastronomic failing of the Principality is amiably depicted; although the two stories are of different types, the one being a pleasant extravagance, while the other, which I now give, may have been an actual incident.

It professes to be an account “how the Welshman did desire Skelton to aid him in his suit to the king for a patent to sell drink.”

“Skelton, when he was in London, went to the King’s Court, where there did come to him a Welshman, saying, ‘Sir, it is so, that many do come up out of my country to the King’s Court, and some get of the King by patent a castle, and some a park, and some a forest, and some one fee and some another, and they live like honest men; and I should live as honestly as the best, if I might have a patent for selling good drink. Wherefore I pray you write a petition for me to give into the King’s hands.’ ‘Very good,’ said Skelton. ‘Sit down,’ said the Welshman, ‘and write, then.’ ‘What shall I write?’ asked Skelton. The Welshman said, ‘Write Drink. Now write More drink.’ ‘What now?’ said Skelton. ‘Write now A great deal of drink; and put to all this drink A little crumb of bread, and a great deal of drink to it, and read out what you have written.’ ‘Drink, more drink, and a great deal of drink, and a little crumb of bread, and a great deal of drink to it.’ Then quoth the Welshman, ‘put out the little crumb of bread, and set down all drink and no bread; and if I might have this petition signed by the King, I care for no more, as long as I live.’ ‘Well, then,’ said Skelton, ‘when you have got yours passed, I will try to get another for bread, that you with your drink, and I with my bread, may seek our living together with bag and staff.’”

Whether Andrew Borde, the pleasant Sussex Doctor of Physic, really wrote the little book of stories about Skelton, whom he might very well have personally known, must be numbered among the uncertainties; but Borde’s estimate of Taffy is cognate to that of Skelton himself, as delivered to us in the book and in the Hundred Merry Tales. For in his Introduction of Knowledge, 1542, the Doctor puts into the mouth of his Cambro-Briton these lines:—

“I am a Welshman, and do dwell in Wales;

I have loved to search budgets, and look in mails,”

which seems to portray the predatory borderer and the thief by breeding and instinct.