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-The Project Gutenberg EBook of Mediæval Byways, by Louis F. Salzmann
-
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
-almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
-re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
-with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
-
-
-Title: Mediæval Byways
-
-Author: Louis F. Salzmann
-
-Illustrator: George E. Kruger
-
-Release Date: June 18, 2013 [EBook #42975]
-
-Language: English
-
-Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
-
-*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MEDIÆVAL BYWAYS ***
-
-
-
-
-Produced by Chris Curnow and the Online Distributed
-Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
-produced from images generously made available by The
-Internet Archive.)
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-MEDIÆVAL BYWAYS
-
-
-
-
-[Illustration: '_... sat for its portrait to Matthew Paris._']
-
-
-
-
-  MEDIÆVAL BYWAYS
-
-
-  BY L. F. SALZMANN F.S.A.
-
-  AUTHOR OF
-  'ENGLISH INDUSTRIES OF THE MIDDLE AGES'
-
-
-  ILLUSTRATED BY
-  GEORGE E. KRUGER
-
-
-  BOSTON AND NEW YORK
-  HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
-  1913
-
-
-
-
-  TO WHOM
-  SHOULD I DEDICATE
-  THESE STUDIES OF THE LIGHTER SIDE
-  OF THE MIDDLE AGES
-  IF NOT TO
-  MY WIFE
-  WHOSE STUDY IT IS TO LIGHTEN
-  MY OWN MIDDLE AGE?
-
-
-
-
-FOREWORDS
-
-BEING SUNDRY PERSONAL OBSERVATIONS OF NO IMPORTANCE
-
-
-Original research amongst the legal and other documents preserved in the
-Public Record Office, and similar depositories of ancient archives is a
-pursuit which our friends politely assume 'must be very interesting,'
-chiefly because they cannot believe that any one would undertake so dull
-an occupation if it were not interesting. And it must be admitted that
-there are grounds for looking askance at such work. To begin with, the
-financial results of historical research are usually negligible or even
-negative, and it is therefore clearly an undesirable, if not positively
-reprehensible, employment. Then it is perfectly true that the vast
-majority of these records are as dry as the dust which accumulates upon
-them, and that in many cases such interest as they possess is
-adventitious, being due to their association with some particular person
-or place whose identity appeals to us. Thus even the most trivial
-technical details of a suit by William S. against Francis B. for forging
-his signature would become of absorbing interest if S. stood for
-Shakespeare and B. for Bacon, but the chances are a hundred to one that S.
-will stand for Smith and B. for Brown. At the same time the thoroughly
-unpractical searcher, who allows his attention to be distracted and does
-not confine himself to the strict object of his search, is constantly
-rewarded by the discovery of entries, quaint, amusing, or grimly
-significant, throwing a light upon the lives of men and women whose very
-names perished out of memory centuries ago. Dim the light may be, but yet
-it is an illumination not to be got elsewhere, for the writers of History,
-with a big H, are concerned only with the doings of kings and statesmen,
-and other people of importance, while these records tell us something of
-the life of those who in their day, like most of us, were each the centre
-of their own microcosm but made no figure in the eyes of the world. It is,
-I think, not too much to claim that only through intimacy with the
-nation's records, and I would use the word in the widest sense to include
-also the records written on the face of our land in stone and timber and
-even in earthen bank and hedgerow, that some conception can be obtained of
-the mediæval spirit. That same spirit is so subtle a thing, though one of
-its leading characteristics is an extraordinary directness and simplicity,
-that it is more easily understood than explained. But even if it were an
-easy matter to dissect and analyse the mediæval spirit, ticketing so much
-as simplicity, such a percentage as humour, so many parts as fear of God,
-and so many as fear of the Devil, and so forth, it should not be done
-here. For though this book was written with a purpose, that purpose was
-not to instruct and edify, but rather to interest and amuse, which is a
-far higher mission, and if the reader on laying it down feels that he has
-acquired knowledge it will probably be due in a large measure to the work
-of the artist, who has translated into line something more than the
-material details of the incidents which the writer has strung together.
-
-So far as the half-dozen essays which follow are concerned their origin
-was almost as spontaneous as Topsy's; like her, they grew. It has been my
-fortune to spend much time searching ancient documents of every kind, and
-indeed there is probably hardly a single class of pre-Reformation records
-preserved between Chancery Lane and Fetter Lane into which I have not
-delved. Being, moreover, of an unmethodical nature it has been my
-practice, even when hard pressed for time, to allow my eye to be caught by
-any strange or unusual entry which had nothing to do with the object of my
-search;--I may admit in passing that I can rarely look up a word in the
-_New English Dictionary_, because there are so many more interesting words
-on the other pages. In this way my notebooks became full of queer and
-fascinating little bits of ancientry, many of them clad in that quaint
-garb of archaic English which lends a piquancy, and occasionally a touch
-of unintentional humour, to their presentment. Feeling that it was a pity
-that such treasures should continue in concealment I strung some of them
-together, amplifying my material with parallel passages from some of the
-less known Chronicles and other printed sources. The resulting essays were
-published in the _Oxford and Cambridge Review_, and, I believe, gave a
-certain amount of pleasure to some of their readers. At any rate I was
-urged to republish them in book form, which I had all along intended to
-do, and the editor-proprietor of the _Oxford and Cambridge Review_ kindly
-gave me not only permission but even encouragement. I decided to have the
-book illustrated, and one or two attempts to procure the services of
-various artists having providentially failed I was introduced in a
-fortunate hour to Mr. George Kruger, whose work it would be superfluous
-for me to praise.
-
-As to the particular sources from which my tales are drawn, they range
-wide, but it may interest the curious to know that the proceedings of the
-Court of Chancery, which at a later date, in _re_ Jarndyce and Jarndyce,
-afforded Dickens material for _Bleak House_, proved the most fruitful
-class for my purposes. This is due to the fact that in this class of
-records, more than in any other of equally early date, the vernacular is
-of common occurrence, and it must be admitted that many incidents which
-would read but dully in formal Latin or in that atrocious language legal
-French acquire merit by being told in the vulgar tongue and eccentric
-orthography of the fifteenth or sixteenth century. From a historical point
-of view there is one great thing to be said for legal records of this
-type:--they are completely free from unprejudice. No one expects a
-plaintiff or defendant to be impartial. And there is nothing so hopelessly
-misleading, speaking historically, as impartiality. For one thing the
-unprejudiced historian is practically bound to be uninteresting; the works
-of the most judicially impartial historian of the present time--so far as
-English history goes--are unreadable. Moreover, although he is carefully
-accurate and painstaking, they give a totally wrong impression so far as
-they give any at all. A 'History of the Reformation,' were such to be
-written by him, would be infinitely farther from the truth than one by
-Froude or Gasquet. To illustrate my meaning from contemporary events: some
-future historian will undoubtedly write fairly and impartially about
-Tariff Reform, Women's Suffrage, and National Insurance. He will thereby
-completely miss the significance of those movements; for the propaganda
-and personalities of Mr. Lloyd George, Mrs. Pankhurst, and Mr. Joseph
-Chamberlain are not matters for cool and impartial consideration, and it
-will only be by the blessed gift of prejudice that the future historian
-will be able to enter into the feelings of the present generation and
-obtain the true neo-Georgian atmosphere.
-
-The Chronicles which form the chief of my subsidiary sources are
-sufficiently full of life and prejudice. Very human were many of those old
-writers, from that brilliant Welsh proto-journalist Gerald de Barri down
-to those worthy Londoners Gregory and Fabyan. Best of all are the
-rhymesters; there is a vigour and a wealth of detail in their work which
-endears them to me, and I could view the loss of Lydgate's _Siege of
-Troye_ or of the unreadable grandfather of English poetry, Beowulf, with
-greater equanimity than the loss of such pieces as the account of the
-Siege of Rouen which John Page wrote
-
-  'Alle in raffe and not in ryme
-   By cause of space he hadde no tyme.'
-
-Few poems can equal this piece in its spirited portrayal of military
-operations in the fifteenth century, the two sides to the picture, the
-pageantry of the army and the sufferings of the non-combatants, being
-contrasted with remarkable dramatic power in the passage which tells how
-two pavilions were pitched between the English camp and the walls of the
-city for the delegates appointed by the rival nations to discuss terms of
-peace.
-
-  'That was a syght of solempnyte,
-   To beholde eyther other parte,
-   To se hir pavylyons in hir araye
-   The pepylle that on the wallys laye,
-   And oure pepylle that was with owte,
-   Howe thycke they stode and walkyd abowte.
-   Also hyt was solas to sene
-   The herrowdys of armys that went by twyne;
-   Kyngys, herrowdys and pursefauntys
-   In cotys of armys suauntys,
-   The Englysche beeste, the Fraynysche floure,
-   Of Portynggale castelle and toure;
-   Othyr in cotys of dyversyte,
-   As lordys berys in hys degre.
-   Gayly with golde they were begon,
-   Ryght as the son for sothe hyt schone.
-   Thys syght was bothe joye and chere;
-   Of sorowe and payne the othyr were.
-   Of pore pepylle there were put owte
-   And nought as moche as a clowte
-   But the clothes on there backe
-   To kepe them from rayne I wotte.
-   The weder was unto them a payne,
-   For alle that tyme stode most by rayne.
-   There men myght se grete pytte,
-   A chylde of ij yere or iij
-   Go aboute to begge hyt brede.
-   Fadyr and modyr bothe were dede.
-   Undyr sum the watyr stode;
-   Yet lay they cryyng aftyr foode.
-   And sum storvyn unto the dethe,
-   And sum stoppyde of ther brethe,
-   Sum crokyd in the kneys,
-   And sum alle so lene as any treys,
-   And wemmen holden in thir armys
-   Dede chyldryn in hyr barmys.
-
-      *       *       *       *       *
-
-   Thes were the syghtys of dyfferauns,
-   That one of joye and that other of penaunce,
-   As helle and hevyn ben partyd a to,
-   That one of welle and that othyr of wo.'
-
-The whole poem shows a Pre-Raphaelite love of detail combined with a
-remarkable appreciation of dramatic values, and the same is true of many
-of the other rhyming chronicles, political poems, and topical ballads. As
-an example of the value of these poems for interpreting the mediæval
-spirit I might instance the light thrown on 'the days of chivalry' by the
-'Maréchal' poem. In this glorification of the great Earl of Pembroke the
-business-like record of the monetary profits resulting from his prowess at
-tournaments takes the gilt off the gingerbread 'Knight errant' as
-completely as the details of the wholesale slaughter and subsequent sale
-of the bag after a fashionable _battue_ strip the gilt from the modern
-'sportsman.' In view of the eminently quotable character of these rhymes
-it is really rather remarkable that I should have made so little use of
-them in any of my essays, covering, as these do, so wide a range of
-subject. It is also a great pity that they are so much neglected by those
-whose business it is to teach history. The intelligent use of such
-materials as these would make history live, but unfortunately there is a
-widespread idea that dates are the be-all and end-all of history, which
-delusion is fostered by the importance attached to dates in the ordinary
-accursed examination. Whereas in reality dates are utterly unimportant and
-of no value in themselves, but useful solely as _memoriæ technicæ_ for
-grasping the sequence of events; there being, for instance, no
-significance whatever--except possibly for astrologers--in the isolated
-facts that the Black Death occurred in 1349, and that the Peasants' Rising
-happened in 1381, but very great significance in the fact that the one
-event was a generation after the other. However, a discussion of the right
-and wrong methods of teaching history is rather too big a subject to be
-dragged in at the end of these rambling remarks, which were intended to be
-an introduction to the essays which follow, so, if any readers have
-followed the unusual course of starting with the introduction, I will take
-my leave of them at this point and wish them a pleasant journey through
-these Mediæval Byways.
-
-
-
-
-CONTENTS
-
-
-                                              PAGE
-
-    I. WISE MEN--AND OTHERS                      1
-
-   II. HIGHWAYS                                 39
-
-  III. CORONATIONS                              66
-
-   IV. DEATH AND DOCTORS                        89
-
-    V. THOSE IN AUTHORITY                      125
-
-   VI. IVORY AND APES AND PEACOCKS             159
-
-
-
-
-ILLUSTRATIONS
-
-
-                                                                      PAGE
-
-  '... sat for its portrait to Matthew Paris'               _Frontispiece_
-
-  'A young novice of the priory'                                        10
-
-  Robert Berewold in the pillory                                        15
-
-  ... sware 'gret othes' and took himself by the hair                   21
-
-  '... caused to sytte down and in large wyse to gape'                  24
-
-  '... thrust a leaden bodkin into the head of that image'              29
-
-  'Diabolus ligatus'                                                    38
-
-  'A wonderful sight'                                                   44
-
-  'An impromptu entertainment by three minstrels'                       48
-
-  Pilgrims                                                              53
-
-  'St. Piran'                                                           59
-
-  '... crossed to England'                                              64
-
-  'Henry's badge'                                                       69
-
-  A 'herauld'                                                           70
-
-  'The young Edward III.'                                               76
-
-  Crowns ancient and modern                                             78
-
-  'Dymoke of Scrivelsby'                                                82
-
-  'The tiger and the mirror'                                            87
-
-  '... got his arms round a branch'                                     94
-
-  'The broken bough fell on the head of a man standing down below'      95
-
-  '... cast her into a cauldron'                                       102
-
-  '... called secretly at the chamber dore'                            110
-
-  '... gyrd abowte his bodye in iij places with towells and gyrdylls'  113
-
-  '... led through the middle of the city'                             123
-
-  '... failed to identify the geese'                                   132
-
-  '... ducking him in a horse-pond'                                    141
-
-  '... with drawn swords stood in the doorway'                         145
-
-  'He incontinently fled'                                              148
-
-  '... compellyd them for to devour the same writte'                   154
-
-  '... thrust him out of the church'                                   156
-
-  'latten "Agnus Dei"'                                                 162
-
-  '... playing innumerable pranks'                                     166
-
-  'When a lion looks at you it becomes a leopard'                      170
-
-  'The unfortunate "fowle" was "hurten so sore"'                       173
-
-  '... constructed a pantomime dragon on the pattern of the real
-  article'                                                             179
-
-  'Hakeney'                                                            184
-
-  '... showed him his injuries'                                        188
-
-  '... fully armed with swords and bucklers'                           191
-
-
-
-
-I
-
-WISE MEN--AND OTHERS
-
-
-THE ALCHEMISTS
-
-[Illustration]
-
-The cyclic tendency so obvious in Nature is not least notable in the
-domain of knowledge. The discovery of one era is lost in the next, only to
-reappear at a later day, welcomed as a triumph of modern ingenuity or
-science. In maps of three centuries ago the Nile is shown rising from
-great lakes, but in the atlases that our fathers used the lakes have
-vanished and a range of imaginary mountains lies like a little woolly
-caterpillar in the heart of Africa as the source of the Nile, only to be
-replaced once more in our own days by the great lakes. Dragons, after
-being commonplaces of ancient time, fell into undeserved contempt, their
-very existence denied by a sceptical generation, and have only been
-rescued and rehabilitated in recent years by men of science, who, ashamed
-to admit that they have found the fabulous monsters of faery, have
-disguised them in polysyllabic nomenclature of 'saurus.' The 'travellers'
-tales' of old Herodotus, scoffed at by the superior minds of the
-unimaginative Victorian era, are daily gaining acceptance; King
-Chedorlaomer and other worthies, who, after centuries of blameless
-biblical existence, were conclusively demolished by the High German
-Critics, have reappeared on contemporary tablets of imperishable clay
-unkindly disinterred by archæological explorers; and, in more mundane
-matters, the very latest developments of sanitary science prove to have
-been anticipated by a trifle of sixty centuries in the palaces of Crete.
-
-So with Alchemy. The transmutation of the base into the noble, above all
-of the baser metals into gold, was accepted as feasible from the earliest
-historic times until the seventeenth century. Then the spread of printing
-enabled so many votaries of the science to publish their ideas and
-theories that all belief in Alchemy was swept away by the flood of
-mystical nonsense, but now science is back on the threshold of the
-knowledge of transmutation. The old alchemists seem to have based their
-theories on the belief that all metals, and indeed all matter, contained
-one common element, of which the purest and most perfect form on this
-earth was gold. This theory was knocked on the head when scientists
-discovered the Atomic Theory. Proof positive was adduced that certain
-substances, such as gold and silver, were elements, and that elements
-consisted simply and solely of agglomerations of indivisible atoms, each
-of which possessed the characteristics of its particular element. In other
-words, Gold was Gold and Silver was Silver, and there was an end to it.
-But now the indivisible atoms are beginning to fly in pieces before the
-skilful and remorseless attack of modern scientists, and it will be no
-surprising thing if we live to see the 'elements' of our schooldays
-reduced to combinations of two or three Primary Elements, even if the
-Primordial Element, the great First Cause, is not weighed, measured, and
-photographed. If, then, gold and silver can be split into the same
-constituents it might well be possible to recombine those constituents in
-such manner that the silver should become gold and the gold silver. To the
-scientific mind the two transmutations would be of equal value, but to the
-philosopher aiming ever at perfection, and to the sordid speculator,
-aiming ever at profit, the production of gold from the baser metal has
-always been the goal.
-
-We naturally hear little of mediæval alchemists in the legal records.
-Their proceedings were inoffensive and little calculated to bring them
-within the jurisdiction of any court, except possibly that of bankruptcy.
-One of the scarce exceptions of this rule of silence occurred in 1463,
-when Edward IV. granted to Sir Henry Grey of Codnor in Derbyshire,
-authority to labour by the cunning of philosophy for the transmutation of
-metals, with all things requisite to the same, at his own cost, provided
-he answer to the King if any profit grow therefrom. The terms of the grant
-can scarcely be called liberal. Two years later the King decided that Sir
-Henry had had sufficient time for his experiments and called upon him to
-render an account of his gains. The philosopher, who had probably very
-little to account for, did not appear and his case was postponed from term
-to term for five years. At last a date was fixed for him to appear in
-court in the middle of October 1470, 'but before that date the Lord King,
-certain necessary and urgent causes moving him, made a journey from his
-realm of England to foreign parts, leaving no regent or guardian in the
-same realm, wherefore the Barons of the Exchequer did not come to hear
-pleas.' Reading the courtly sentence it is hard to realise that on the
-3rd of October King Edward had, in the words of Speed, 'fled from his host
-besides Nottingham, passing the Washes towards Lynne, with greater
-difficulties than was befitting a Prince to adventure, and thus without
-any order taken for his Realme, in two Hulkes of Holland and one English
-ship, destitute of all necessary provisions, set sail towards Burgundy,
-and in the way was encountered by the Easterlings, England's great
-enemies, having much adoe to clear himself of their surprize.' The politer
-version of the legal roll has been written over an entry which, although
-completely erased, we may be sure set out how Henry VI. had recovered the
-realm from Edward, 'king in fact but not in right.' The alchemy of the
-pen, by which the roseate Lancastrian version faded to the colourless
-statement of the Yorkists, was more successful, we may well believe, than
-was ever the alchemy of Sir Henry Grey.
-
-But in spite of the ill-success of Sir Henry Grey the King in 1476
-licensed David Beaupee and John Merchaunt to practise for four years 'the
-natural science of the generation of gold and silver from mercury.'
-Alchemy, indeed, was clearly flourishing in the fifteenth century. In 1468
-Richard Carter received authority to practise the art, while under Henry
-VI. several such licences were granted. Thus in 1444 Edward Cobbe was
-authorised 'to transmute the imperfect metals from their own kind by the
-art of Philosophy and to transubstantiate them into gold or silver'; two
-years later Sir Edmund Trafford and Sir Thomas Ashton were empowered to
-transmute metals, and in 1446 John Fauceby, John Kirkeby, and John Rayny
-received the royal permission to search for the philosopher's stone or the
-elixir of life and to transmute metals. Presumably the need for royal
-licence in all these cases was based on the royal claim to all mines, and
-therefore to all other sources, of precious metals. Covetous eyes had been
-cast upon Alchemy as a possible source of revenue at least as early as
-1330, when Thomas Cary was ordered to bring before King Edward III. John
-le Rous and Master William de Dalby, who were said to be able to make
-silver by alchemy, with the instruments and other things needful to their
-craft. But of all these scientists and philosophers no more is heard, and,
-although I have not searched the accounts of bullion purchased for the
-Mint, it may safely be asserted that the revenue profited little by all
-their science and philosophy.
-
-Alchemy, like so many other branches of knowledge, found a home in the
-monasteries, and there is a story of an abbot in one of the Western
-Counties who, at the time of the Dissolution, hid his books and
-manuscripts of the hermetic art in a wall, and returning thither to fetch
-them found them not, and for grief at his loss lost also his wits. Thomas
-Ellis, again, prior of Leighs in Essex, took more loss than gain from
-dabbling in the art. Rumours of his skill in manipulating metals caused
-him to be suspected of coining, and he had to give an account of himself.
-His interest in the theory of Alchemy, which he had derived from reading
-books, had been stimulated by 'commynyng with Crawthorne, a goldsmyth in
-Lumbardstrete, that sayd ther was a prest callyd Sir George that made
-himselfe cunning in suche matters.' This priest in turn introduced the
-prior to one Thomas Peter, a clothworker of London, 'that sayd he had the
-syens of alkemy as well as eny man in Yngland.' The prior took him at his
-own valuation and promised to pay him £20 for lessons in the art, and gave
-him 20 nobles in advance. Master Peter then gave his pupil some silver and
-quicksilver with instructions how to treat them. These metals Prior Ellis
-sealed hermetically in a glass vessel, which he then placed in an earthen
-pot full of water, and this he kept hot for some ten weeks or more,
-employing a young novice of the priory, Edmund Freke, a boy of twelve, to
-keep up a continual fire. Master Peter came from time to time to see how
-matters were progressing, and no doubt reported favourably, but after a
-while the prior 'perceyved yt was but a falce crafte,' broke the glass
-vessel, sold the silver for what it would fetch and refused to pay his
-instructor the remaining 20 marks. Peter, however, who was better skilled
-in making money out of men than gold out of silver, threatened an action
-for debt, and as it chanced that an offer of 20 marks was made at this
-time to the prior for the lease of a rectory he handed the money over to
-Master Peter. 'And thus I never medelyd with hym syne, nor with the crafte
-nor never wyll, God wyllyng.'
-
-[Illustration: '_A young novice of the priory._']
-
-
-WHITE MAGIC
-
-Before the days of Sherlock Holmes and the scientific pursuit of clues the
-ways of tracing lost or stolen property were devious and varied. In recent
-times the aid of St. Anthony of Padua has often been invoked. Why that
-good Saint should have taken up this branch of detective work I know not;
-possibly he was confused with his namesake the hermit, whose pig might
-well have been trained to search for lost articles as less holy pigs to
-hunt for truffles, or possibly, as was said of the man who married five
-wives, 'it was his hobby.' However this may be, I have known excellent
-results obtained by the promise of a candle or the repetition of a
-_paternoster_ in honour of St. Anthony; the prayer is the more popular
-offering, being cheaper for the petitioner and more certain for the
-saint--the candle is apt to be withheld when the property has been
-recovered, and candles have even been known to go astray and blaze before
-the altar of the other St. Anthony, who was probably too busy in
-pre-Reformation days looking after the cattle of his devotees to trouble
-about lost property. The man, therefore, who would have supernatural
-assistance in the recovery of his strayed goods had perforce to seek the
-aid of sorcerers and their familiar but often incompetent spirits.
-Unfortunately for the modern inquirer no unsolicited testimonials bearing
-witness to the efficacy of these magicians appear to have survived, and it
-is only their failures that brought them into unpleasant and enduring
-prominence.
-
-London was naturally a great centre of these occult detectives, and they
-seem to have been well patronised. In 1390 when two silver dishes were
-stolen from the Duke of York's house, application was made to one John
-Berkyng, a renegade Jew, who performed certain incantations, and as a
-result accused one of the Duke's servants, William Shadewater. In the
-same way, when Lady Despenser's fur-lined scarlet mantle was stolen, about
-the same time, Berkyng had no hesitation in denouncing Robert Trysdene and
-John Geyte. His repute was no doubt considerable, but these two cases
-proved disastrous; the parties accused had him arrested, and he was found
-guilty of deceit and defamation, stood in the pillory for an hour, and was
-then banished from the city.
-
-In this case nothing is said as to the means of divination employed, but
-in two cases that occurred in London in 1382 particulars are given. When
-Simon Gardiner lost his mazer bowl he employed a German, Henry Pot by
-name, to trace it. He made thirty-two balls of white clay, and after
-appropriate incantations named Nicholas Freman and Cristine, his wife, as
-the thieves. Here again the mistake brought the magician to the pillory,
-and the same fate befell Robert Berewold. In this case also it was a
-mazer that had been stolen; Maud of Eye was its owner, but a friend of
-hers, one Alan, a water carrier, who had evidently a high opinion of
-Robert's power, called him in. Robert then took a loaf and fixed in the
-top of it a round peg of wood and four knives at the four sides of the
-same, in the shape of a cross; his further proceedings are vaguely
-described as 'art magic,' and resulted first in the accusation of Joan
-Wolsey and eventually in the appearance of Robert Berewold in the pillory
-with the loaf hanging round his neck.
-
-The connection between mazers and magic is not obvious, but in 1501 when
-John Richardson, a parish clerk, lost a mazer worth 26_s._ he at once
-sought the assistance of Nicholas Hanwode, 'bringing with him divers young
-children for to behold in a looking-glass.' The record is damaged, but is
-sufficiently legible to show that the victim was arrested and imprisoned
-by the mayor and could only invoke the intervention of the Court of
-Chancery against his accusers. In this last case we have clearly an
-instance of divination by the glass, crystal, or similar medium--a pool of
-ink was used, if I remember right, by the Indians in _The Moonstone_. The
-loaf and knives seem vaguely familiar to me as instruments of divination,
-though I should be puzzled to give the correct ceremonial, but the
-thirty-two clay balls are more difficult to place, unless possibly they
-were used for the construction of some kind of geomantic figure.
-
-[Illustration: _Robert Berewold in the pillory._]
-
-So far we have been dealing with genuine, if inaccurate, magicians, but a
-case that occurred in London in 1382 shows that there were impostors even
-in that learned profession. Mistress Alice Trig having lost her Paris
-kerchief suspected Alice Byntham of having stolen it, and apparently not
-without good reason. The two women seem to have been fairly intimate, and
-Alice Byntham went to a cobbler, William Northamptone, and gave him
-information of certain very private matters concerning the other Alice.
-William then went round to Mistress Trig and posed as a wise man, which he
-may have been, skilled in magic, which he was not, and revealed to her his
-knowledge of her private affairs. She, being duly impressed, asked him who
-had stolen her kerchief, to which he replied, whoever it was it certainly
-was not Alice Byntham, and launching out rashly into prophecy told his
-questioner that she would be drowned within a month. The dismal prospect
-almost terrified her into an early grave, but in the end she survived to
-see William standing in the pillory.
-
-A case that is recorded in Lincolnshire in the sixteenth century is
-interesting as showing the more than local reputation enjoyed by some of
-these cunning men. The church of Holbeach having been robbed, the
-parishioners consulted their fellow-townsman John Lamkyn, a man known to
-have 'resonable knowledg in the sciens of gramer,' which he taught to the
-children of the neighbourhood, and said to have a knowledge not so
-reasonable of such arts as enchantment, witchcraft, and sorcery. He, at
-the request of the churchwardens, went off to consult Edmund Nash, a
-wheeler, famed as 'an expert man in the knowleg of thynges stolen,' who
-lived at 'Cicestre,' which may have been either Chichester or
-Cirencester, as it is called in one place 'Chechestre' and in another
-'Circetter,' but was in any case a very long way off. Lamkyn took with him
-a pair of leather gloves found in the vestry after the robbery, and Nash
-made certain deductions therefrom, which caused suspicion to fall upon
-John Partridge, who complained that he had lost friends and reputation and
-been 'brought into infamy and slander and owte of credenz.' Lamkyn's
-version of the story made out Nash to be merely a private detective
-following up clues without recourse to magic, and also hinted that
-Partridge's reputation was no great loss. There is as little reason to
-believe one as the other.
-
-Probably the most popular method of ascertaining the whereabouts of lost
-property and the identity of the thief was by the use of astrology. Some
-years ago, when I was in one of those bookshops in which at that time I
-spent much of my spare time and all of my spare money, I was offered a
-manuscript volume, formerly the property of William Lilly, in which that
-famous but shifty astrologer had recorded some scores of investigations
-made by him for clients and mostly concerned with the recovery of stolen
-goods. The figures were neatly drawn up, and the interpretation written
-below, but, if my memory serves me, there was nothing to show in how many
-cases the investigations led to any practical result. There are, I
-believe, two similar volumes in the Bodleian, but what became of this
-particular copy I do not know; whether it was due to the unfair incidence
-of taxation under the budget of that year or to more permanent causes, my
-funds did not permit of its acquisition, and I left it sorrowfully in
-company with a much-desired Augsburg Missal and Pine's edition of
-Horace--the rare edition of the '_post est_' blunder. I did, however,
-secure Fludd's _Macrocosm_, by aid of which I might myself, if time and my
-mastery of the movements of the whirling spheres permitted, open a branch
-of the heavenly Scotland Yard.
-
-[Illustration: '_... sware "gret othes" and took himself by the hair._']
-
-The early astrologers, thanks to the cautious vagueness of their
-statements, seem to have avoided the clutches of the law, into which other
-magicians fell. The stars reveal no names, recording only, by an
-anticipation of the Bertillon procedure, the measurements and physical
-peculiarities of the thieves. If from these particulars the querent jumps
-to a false conclusion and accuses the wrong man, so much the worse for
-him--the stars and their interpreters are not to blame. No one said hard
-words of the London astrologers whom Robert Cooke consulted. Cooke was a
-carrier from Kendale who came south in 1528 with £30 in money, much of it
-belonging to other men, in a 'bogett,' and put up at John Balenger's house
-in St. Ives. During the course of the day he opened his packs, bought and
-sold and drank with his customers, allowing a number of people in quite a
-casual way to feel the weight of his 'bogett,' but not opening it. It was
-late that night before they got to bed at John Balenger's, for 'it was
-ten of the clok or they went to soper, for as much as every man pakked up
-his wares or they sooped,' and when they went up to their rooms the house
-was apparently pretty full, as Cooke shared a bed with John Foster, a
-draper, and there were others in the same chamber. Next morning, as they
-were putting their packs on their horses, Cooke suddenly noticed that one
-of his packs was fastened with a different kind of knot from that which he
-used. Thereupon he suddenly exclaimed, 'My pak is wrong knyt, by the
-passhion of God, sith yesternight,' and opening it took out the precious
-'bogett' and found it full of stones. So he sware 'gret othes' and took
-himself by the hair and altogether carried on mightily, and finally 'made
-his advow that he would never ete fisshe ne fleissh until he had been at
-Saint Rynyons in Scotland if he might here of his goodes.' Then, with his
-bed-companion of the previous night, he rode over to Cambridge 'to make
-calculacion for the said goodes,' but at that seat of learning 'they coude
-find noo clerk or other person that wold take on hand to calcle for the
-said money.' However, when Robert Cooke got to London he had no difficulty
-in finding astrologers, who expressed the utmost confidence in their
-ability to 'calcle,' and told him that 'he shulde by the crafte of
-astronomye, if he wold, have hys eye or arme or other joynte of hys body
-thatt hadd robbed hym, att hys pleasure.' This ferocious promise, it may
-be pointed out, merely meant that the astronomer could give a description
-of any particular physical traits necessary to indentify the robber. In
-this particular instance the description was that of a fair man with large
-eyes, hair neither curly nor straight, and a large nose, of medium height,
-good looking, with a bright expression, and having one or more black
-teeth. This elaborate account the astronomer, with becoming modesty, had
-submitted to the judgment of others more learned and experienced than
-himself, and they guaranteed its accuracy. It was found to correspond with
-the appearance of John Balenger the younger, son of Cooke's host, except
-that the latter 'hath no blak toth in his hed as yt apperith iff ony lust
-to serch therfor,' and in order to prove this 'the said John Balenger was
-caused to sytte down and in large wyse to gape and open his jowes to be
-duely seen ... and after due serch therin made yt appeared that the said
-John had alle his teth whyte and in good maner proporconed.' Adding to
-this the fact that he was 'callid a good young man and wele ruled, not
-slaundered neither with dicyng, carding ne other misrule,' and the rather
-suspicious circumstance that the biggest stone found in Cooke's 'bogett'
-after the supposed robbery was a piece of ironstone of a kind not found
-within forty miles of St. Ives but very plentiful in Kendale, it is not
-surprising that the magistrates should have dismissed the case against the
-younger John Balenger. After all, a black tooth is like a finger-tip
-print--damning evidence if present but powerful for acquittal if absent,
-and who is a Justice of the Peace that he should contradict Jupiter?
-
-[Illustration: '_... caused to sytte down and in large wyse to gape._']
-
-
-BLACK MAGIC
-
-Considering how large a part magic and the supernatural played in the life
-of the people in the Middle Ages it is curious that there should be so few
-references thereto in the English judicial records prior to the
-Reformation. The ancient chroniclers and historians enlivened many a dull
-page with the most astonishing tales of sin and mystery, vouched for on
-the testimony of their own eyes or of unimpeachable witnesses, but the
-chains of legal evidence are as powerless to bind these legendary
-sorcerers as were the triple chains of iron to bind the famous Witch of
-Berkeley. With the exception of general vague accusations of witchcraft
-levelled against the Lollards and kindred heretics, references to magic
-are casual and rare in the records of our courts.
-
-With the reign of Elizabeth this ceases to be true, and from the middle of
-the sixteenth century to the end of the seventeenth the Black Arts
-attracted their full share of judicial and magisterial attention. Probably
-twenty instances of legal proceedings taken in connection with these
-'ungodly practices' could be produced after the Reformation for every one
-prior to that date, and while this is in part due to the fact that local
-records of the later periods have survived in far greater number than
-their predecessors, there is a possibility that _post hoc_ is in the case
-also _propter hoc_. It is arguable that the Reformation having abolished,
-for all practical purposes, belief in the miracles of God and His saints,
-the natural craving of the unscientific man for a supernatural explanation
-of the abnormal could only be satisfied by a belief in the miracles of the
-Devil and his sinners. Be that as it may, the fact remains that after the
-Reformation witches and warlocks became as common as holy nuns and
-anchorities had once been--the marvels reported of the one class are about
-as unsatisfactory from a scientific point of view as those of the other.
-It is, however, with a few chance references of earlier date that I am
-concerned.
-
-Suitably enough it is from the land of 'Cunning Murrell' that my earliest
-instance comes. The Sheriff of Essex in 1169 made a note of having
-expended 5_s._ 3_d._ on 'a woman accused of sorcery.' The record is brief
-and unsatisfactory, telling neither the details of the offence, the method
-of trial, nor the result. These two last items we get in another case
-which occurred in Norfolk in 1208, when Agnes, wife of Odo the merchant,
-appealed a certain Galiena for sorcery, and Galiena successfully cleared
-herself by the ordeal of the hot iron. For a century after this any
-magical offenders who may have been brought to trial have eluded my
-search. Then in 1308 began the proceedings against the Knights Templars,
-based very largely on accusations of practising Black Magic. In England,
-however, nothing of the kind was even held to have been proved against the
-knights, although not only 'what the sailor said' was considered to be
-evidence, but also what the clerk thought the priest said the soldier
-heard the sailor say.
-
-[Illustration: '_... thrust a leaden bodkin into the head of that
-image._']
-
-It is rather remarkable that the year 1324, in which the great Irish trial
-of the Lady Alice Kyteler took place, was the date of the fullest and in
-many ways the most interesting of the early English trials for sorcery. In
-that year Robert Marshall of Leicester, under arrest for a variety of
-offences, endeavoured to save his own neck by turning King's evidence and
-accusing his former master, John Notingham, and a number of Coventry
-citizens of conspiring to kill the King, the two Despensers, and the Prior
-and two other officials of Coventry by magical arts. Marshall's tale was
-to the effect that the accused citizens came to John Notingham, as a man
-skilled in 'nigromancy,' and bargained with him for the death of the
-persons named, paying a certain sum down and giving him seven pounds of
-wax. With the wax Notingham and Marshall made six images of the proposed
-victims and a seventh of Richard de Sowe, the _corpus vile_ selected for
-experimental purposes. The work was done in secret in an old deserted
-house not far from Coventry, and when the images were ready the magician
-bade his assistant thrust a leaden bodkin into the head of that image
-which represented Richard de Sowe, and next day sent him to the house of
-the said Richard, whom he found raving mad. Master John then removed the
-bodkin from the head of the image and thrust it into the heart, and within
-three days Richard died. And at that point Robert Marshall's story comes
-to a lame and impotent conclusion. Not a word of explanation does he give
-as to why, when the preliminary experiment had proved so successful, they
-did not go on with their fell design. The unfortunate 'nigromancer' died
-in prison before the case had been thrashed out and reported upon by a
-jury, and the case against the citizens was allowed to fall through. Even
-if the trial had followed its normal course it is not probable that we
-should have had more than a plain and enlightening verdict of 'not
-guilty,' for Robert Marshall was a liar of inventive genius. He accused
-two men of assisting him in the robbery and murder of a merchant from
-Chester 'in Erlestrete, Coventry, near the white cellar,' with a profusion
-of 'corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an
-otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative,' which proved, as he afterwards
-admitted, utterly false. One or two other wild accusations also came to
-nothing, and Robert was duly hanged. But while we cannot say that the
-procedure he described was actually used in this case, we know it was
-quite in accord with the orthodox methods of magicians. That the story was
-believed at the time we may conclude, as the younger Despenser wrote this
-year to the Pope complaining that he was threatened by magical and secret
-dealings. The Pope, with much good sense, recommended him to turn to God
-with his whole heart and to make a good confession and such satisfaction
-as should be enjoined upon him; adding that no other remedies were
-needful.
-
-Passing again over a century we find in 1426 William, Lord Botreaux,
-complaining that Sir Ralph Botreaux, William Langkelly, and others,
-'unmindful of the salvation of their souls and not having God before their
-eyes,' had procured John Alwode of Trottokeshull, Hugh Bower of
-Kilmington, chaplain, and John Newport, who were said to practise
-soothsaying, necromancy, and art magic, 'to weaken, subtly consume, and
-destroy by the said arts,' the complainant's body. Commissioners were
-appointed to inquire into the matter, but any further proceedings that
-there may have been have vanished, or at best are lying hid in some
-unsuspected corner of the Record Office.
-
-Another instance of the use of magical ceremonies with evil intent is
-alluded to fifty years later, when John Knight, chaplain, complained that
-he had been arrested and committed to the Marshalsea for going with the
-servants of 'the Lord Straunge' to search the house of Alice, wife of John
-Huntley, 'which of long tyme hath used and exercised the feetes of
-wychecraft and sorcery,' in Southwark. They went into 'an house called the
-lasour loke in Suthwerk in Kenstrete' (a hospital founded originally for
-lepers, but by this time used more as an almshouse or infirmary) 'and
-there found dyvers mamettes for wychecraft and enchauntements with other
-stuff beryed and deeply hydd under the erthe.' The circumstances are very
-similar to those related in the case of an old woman turned out of the
-almshouses at Rye in 1560 for using magical ceremonies, including the
-burial of pieces of raw beef, to the intent that as the beef decayed away
-so might the bodies of her enemies, though it is possible that in the case
-of Alice Huntley the objects had only been buried for secrecy.
-Five-and-twenty years later, in 1502, a still clearer case of the use of
-'mamettes' or images occurred in Wales. The bishop of St. Davids, having
-vainly remonstrated with Thomas Wyriott and Tanglost William for living
-'in advoutre,' imprisoned the woman Tanglost and afterwards banished her
-from the diocese. She went to Bristol, and hired one Margaret Hackett,
-'which was practized in wychecraft,' to destroy the bishop. Tanglost and
-Margaret then went back to Wyriott's house, and in a room called, most
-unsuitably, Paradise Chamber, made two images of wax, and then, possibly
-thinking that a bishop would take more bewitchment than an ordinary
-mortal, sent for another woman, 'which they thought cowde and hadde more
-cunning and experiens than they,' and she made a third image. The bishop
-was not a penny the worse for this 'inordinat delying,' but ordered the
-arrest of Tanglost for heresy; Wyriott intervened by getting her
-imprisoned through a trumped-up action for debt, in order to keep her out
-of the bishop's clutches, and the bishop had to invoke the assistance of
-the Court of Chancery.
-
-Three cases of magic occurred in 1432. On May 7 of that year an order was
-issued for the arrest of Thomas Northfelde, D.D., a Dominican friar of
-Worcester, and the seizure of all his books treating of sorcery or
-wickedness, and two days later Brother John Ashwell of the Crutched
-Friars, London, John Virley, priest, and Margery Jourdemain, who had been
-imprisoned at Windsor for sorcery, were released. In these cases it is
-very likely that the sorcery consisted in an uncanny and suspicious
-addiction to unusual branches of learning, combined possibly with
-experiments in chemistry or heretical tendencies, both alike dangerous in
-the eyes of the orthodox, but the third case was clearly a matter of
-bewitchment--in the opinion of the victim. The facts are quite simple.
-John Duram of York had a field with a pond in it, and having in some way
-incurred the enmity of Thomas Mell, a farmer, the latter, 'per divers
-artes erroneous et countre la foy catholice cest assavoir sorcery,'
-withdrew the water from John's pond, to the great injury of his cattle,
-besides certain other unnamed injuries wrought by his 'malveys ymaginacion
-et sotell labour.' Mell being under the patronage of men of influence
-because of his magical abilities, Duran did not dare to bring an action
-against him in the ordinary court, and therefore sought the intervention
-of the Court of Chancery, with what success I do not know.
-
-So far my magicians, it must be admitted, have been rather commonplace
-people, proceeding on the usual lines of their craft and displaying little
-originality, but my final instance is, so far as I know, unique. In an
-eighteenth-century manuscript in my possession, formerly in the Phillipps
-collection, amongst a mass of extracts from all kinds of records is an
-entry said to be taken from the court rolls of the manor of Hatfield in
-Yorkshire. According to this, at a court held in 1336 Robert of Rotheram
-brought an action against John de Ithen for breach of contract, alleging
-that on a certain day, at Thorne, John agreed to sell him for
-threepence-halfpenny 'the Devil bound with a certain bond' (_Diabolum
-ligatum in quodam ligamine_), and Robert thereupon gave him 'arles-penny,'
-or earnest-money (_quoddam obolum earles_), 'by which possession of the
-said Devil remained with the said Robert, to receive delivery of the said
-Devil within four days,' but when he came to John the latter refused to
-hand over the Devil, wherefore Robert claimed 60_s._ damages. John
-appeared in court and did not deny the contract, but the steward, holding
-that 'such a plea does not lie between Christians,' 'adjourned the parties
-to Hell for the hearing of the case,' and amerced both parties.
-
-The first question is, is this a genuine extract from the rolls? The
-critic who is inclined to think that he smells a rat may be confuted by
-Camden, according to whom no rats have ever been known in the town of
-Hatfield. The extremely solid nature of all the other extracts in my
-volume is almost a guarantee of good faith so far as the eighteenth
-century copyist is concerned, and the probability that he took it from the
-original is strengthened by his having in one place misread _unde_ as
-_vide_ and subsequently corrected the error. But allowing that it occurred
-on the rolls, was it a genuine transaction or was it a facetious invention
-of the manor clerk? I incline to believe that it was genuine. A man who
-invented such a case to fill up a blank space on the roll would have been
-almost certain to have elaborated it further, while, on the other hand,
-having noted the adjournment of the case to 'another place,' to use
-parliamentary language, he would not have been likely to add that both
-parties were fined. Granting that the action was actually brought, we are
-left in doubt whether Robert was a simple gull with whom John had been
-amusing himself, or whether the defendant really believed that he could
-fulfil his contract. Again, what was that contract? Latin, though
-admirably clear in many respects, suffers from the absence of the definite
-article, and it is difficult to be certain whether it was a question of
-'the Devil' or 'a devil'; judging by the price, the latter seems more
-probable, as threepence-halfpenny for the Prince of Darkness seems
-absurdly little, and I believe that _Diabolus ligatus_ was sometimes
-applied to a divining spirit imprisoned by magic arts in a bottle or
-crystal. However that may be, it is not probable that a law court has ever
-before or since been asked to decide the question of proprietary rights in
-the devil or his imps.
-
-[Illustration: '_Diabolus ligatus._']
-
-
-
-
-II
-
-HIGHWAYS
-
-
-So much is heard of the modern facilities for travelling that one might
-almost think that before the days of Cook (Thomas of the tickets, not the
-Polar Mandeville) no Englishman had ever stirred abroad. Yet it is hardly
-questionable that in mediæval times the proportion of Englishmen who had
-visited foreign lands was far larger than at the present day. Thanks to
-military feudalism it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that during the
-fourteenth and fifteenth centuries most of our country gentlemen had seen
-service in France, taking with them contingents of hired or pressed men
-from every village in the land. For the more peaceful classes there were
-the attractions of the pilgrimage, the spiritual advantages outweighing
-the dangers and hardships of a journey to Rome, and the celebrated
-shrine of St. James of Compostella drawing thousands every year to Spain.
-Still earlier the Crusades drew the pious and the martial alike yet
-farther afield, but of those who journeyed to the East many did not
-return. At all time a pretty sharp limit was set to the travels of the
-ordinary man by the seaboard of Palestine, and those who penetrated still
-deeper into the mysterious East were few. It is therefore interesting to
-follow Geoffrey of Langley on his embassy to the Tartar Court in 1292 and
-back to England, piecing together the story of his travels from the
-prosaic accounts of his paymaster.
-
-Towards the end of the twelfth century the Tartars, a nomadic tribe who
-inhabited the district between the Caucasus and the Euphrates and
-professed the Christianity of the Nestorians, came into some prominence in
-Europe through the fame of their Khan, the celebrated 'Prester John.' He,
-however, was killed in 1203 by the terrible Genghiz Khan the Mogul, from
-Turkestan, whose successors adopted the name and, after one or two
-generations, the religion of the conquered Tartars. Argon, King or Emperor
-of the Tartars, accepted Christianity in 1289, and in alliance with the
-kings of Armenia and Georgia inflicted a severe defeat upon the forces of
-the Soldan. Later in the same year his ambassadors reached Europe, charged
-to preach a new crusade for the ejection of the Saracens from Palestine.
-Strengthened with commendatory letters from the Pope, they visited the
-English Court. King Edward made them welcome, and wrote to Argon
-expressing his delight at his proposed attack upon the Sultan of Babylon,
-and promising to come in person as soon as the Pope would sanction his
-going to the Holy Land. To cement the alliance he promised to send the
-king some gerfalcons, for which he had asked. This letter was written in
-September 1290, and next year the falcons were duly dispatched by the
-hands of Sir Geoffrey of Langley.
-
-The embassy reached Trebizond about the middle of June 1292, and obtained
-quarters for themselves and the precious gerfalcons while waiting for a
-safe-conduct to the Tartar Court. The king's whereabouts were uncertain,
-and Nicholas de Chartres, Geoffrey's squire, and Conrad, nephew of the
-ambassador's chief-of-staff, Buskerell, were sent by sea to Samsoun, and
-thence first to Kaisarieh and then to Sivas, where they waited for the
-king. At last all was ready; a tent had been made from cotton cloth and
-scarlet and grey material, bought in Trebizond, a parasol had been
-purchased for the ambassador, and a horse for him to ride, and also a
-mule, which cost more than three times as much as the horse. For the first
-stage of the journey to Tabriz, where they were to see the king, thirty
-horses were hired, but at Baiburt, which they reached on July 25, the
-number was reduced, and from Baiburt to Zaratkana only fourteen horses
-were employed. Beyond the giving of presents to Tartars and others,
-including a gift of cloth to 'the lady' of Erz Roum, little is recorded
-of the journey to Tabriz--the city of baths and iced drinks, as the
-Spanish ambassadors to Timour Bey found it a century later.
-
-The embassy left Tabriz, carrying with them a leopard as a present from
-the Tartar king, and on Friday, September 26, reached the busy trading
-town of Khoi, where Gonzalez de Clavijo on his way to Samarcand in 1406
-saw a giraffe, which he deemed, 'to a man who had never seen such an
-animal before, a wonderful sight.' Sunday night they spent at 'Nosseya,'
-presumably Nuskar, and Monday at a village 'of the Armenians,' evidently
-near the Lake of Van, as fish appear for the first time amongst the
-provisions bought, in addition to the usual bread, cheese, and fruit. At
-Argish on the Lake of Van boots were bought for three members of the
-suite, the horses were shod and stores laid in, including wine, meat,
-ducks, eggs, and salt. After stopping one night at 'Jaccaon,' Melasgird
-was reached, where they dismissed their mounted escort from Argish and
-proceeded under fresh escort through three nameless Saracen villages to
-Erz Roum, which they reached on Monday, October 6. A two days' halt was
-made here while they laid in stores and had their clothes washed. The wear
-and tear of travelling began to be felt; boots had to be bought for the
-chaplain, John the clerk, Robert, Gerard, another Robert, and William and
-Martin the grooms, and a hat and shoes for Willecok. On the Wednesday
-night, when they stayed at another Saracen village, they were entertained
-by native minstrels, and the following day they reached Baiburt, where
-John the scullion's boots gave out. Here they had to lay in stores, as the
-next two halts were to be 'in the fields,' away from habitations.
-
-[Illustration: '_A wonderful sight._']
-
-At last, on Monday, October 13, they found themselves back at Trebizond,
-where they rested for a week and invested largely in new shoes, as well as
-in such heavy and bulky conveniences as pots and pans, plates, dishes, and
-stools, with which they had had to dispense on their journey. The Saracen
-porters who had carried the baggage from Tabriz were paid off, a Tartar
-who had rendered some small service was rewarded with a carpet, and the
-ambassador's suite received their wages and allowances of linen. At the
-head of the suite was Andrew Balaban, who received a scarlet robe in
-addition to his wages, and Martin the latimer, or interpreter; then there
-were Willecok the chamberer, John the clerk, Walter the cook, Martin
-Lombard the larderer, and Michael and Jonot 'of the kitchen'; Chyzerin,
-Copin, and Tassin the falconers, Jacques and Oliver the grooms, Michael de
-Suria, Theodoric, Manfred, Gerardin, Robert, and Robekin, and one or two
-others of whom we learn nothing but their names. Altogether there must
-have been about twenty or thirty persons who sailed from Trebizond and
-after a slow voyage reached Constantinople on Sunday, November 9.
-
-At Constantinople, which the accountant by an ingenious error of
-derivation calls 'Constantinus Nobilis,' the galley lay for a week,
-possibly delayed by adverse winds. There were compensations for the delay;
-oysters, hares, mallards, chestnuts, pears, and apples must have been
-welcome luxuries after the hardships and monotony of the past weeks, and
-it is possibly more than a coincidence that the doctor had to be called in
-to attend Richard. Even the leopard fared daintily, three chickens making
-a pleasant change from his usual mutton. At last everything was ready,
-the clothes had been washed, John the clerk's hose had been mended, some
-Persian cloth had been bought for Richard's tabard, and the parasol had
-been re-covered, which seems hardly necessary, unless it was to be used as
-an umbrella; the weather being cold, eighteen sets of wraps (_muffeles_)
-were bought for the suite, while Sir Geoffrey procured fur-lined robes of
-vair, gules, and white fox with a hood of 'Alcornyne,' and on Monday,
-November 17, the galley set sail for Italy.
-
-Otranto was reached on Saturday, November 29, and here the ambassador and
-part of his suite landed, Richard and Robert going on at once to Brindisi
-by boat. The galley waited long enough to revictual and to allow of
-cleaning the leopard's cage, and then went on with the rest of the suite
-and the heavier luggage to Genoa. On Sunday, the Bishop of Otranto having
-kindly lent them horses, the ambassador's party started on their journey
-overland to Genoa, reaching Lecce in time for dinner and an impromptu
-entertainment by three minstrels. The first four days of December were
-spent at Brindisi, whence they went on up the east coast by Villanuova and
-Mola to Barletta, then turning inland to 'Tres Sanctos,' which may have
-been Trinitapoli, but was chiefly noteworthy for a dinner of chicken,
-pigeons, and sausages. Next morning, Wednesday, December 10, they lunched
-at San Lorenzo on their way to Troja, and so, past 'Crevaco' to 'Bonum
-Albergum,' which, if it was not Benevento, was not far from that town.
-Two days more brought them, by Monte Sarchio and Acerra, to Naples, where
-they remained until Thursday, the 18th. Here they were once more in a land
-of plenty and could feast on pheasants, partridges, mallards, hares, and
-pigeons, skilfully seasoned with sage and parsley, garlic, and saffron.
-Two mules and a dappled grey horse were bought, as well as some glasses
-and earthenware pots and mugs, and the party set out for Capua, sending
-their silver plate on ahead by the hands of Manfred Oldebrand. At Capua,
-on Friday, December 19, Tassin the falconer died, much regretted by his
-brother falconer, Hanekin, to whom he owed 11_s._ 4_d._, and offerings
-were made for the good of his soul.
-
-[Illustration: '_An impromptu entertainment by three minstrels._']
-
-Five days' march, through Mignano, Ceprano, Anagni, and a place called
-'Mulera,' which I cannot identify, brought them to Rome. At Rome they
-spent Christmas. A doctor was called in to attend one of the grooms, and
-medicine was obtained for a horse, possibly without avail, as two horses
-were bought for thirty florins, from 'the merchants of the Ricardi.' On
-Sunday, the 28th, the journey was resumed, Isola and Sutri forming the
-first day's march, Viterbo and Monte Fiascone the second. Acquapendente
-was reached on Tuesday, and here they spent 18_d._ on 'a small box
-(_cofinello_) in which to carry eel pies.' Passing San Quirico, Siena was
-reached on the 1st of January, their road after that leading through San
-Cossiano, Pistoia, and Buggione, to Lucca. From Lucca they struck across
-to the coast, through Avenza and Sarzana to Sestri, and so up by Rapallo
-and Recco to Genoa, which they reached on Sunday, January 11. At Genoa
-they found their companions, who had come round by sea. A house was hired
-from Pucino Roncini, the galley was unloaded and paid off, its cost from
-Trebizond to Genoa being £200, a sum more formidable in appearance than in
-reality, as the Genoese pound was only about 3_s._ 6_d._ of English money.
-Tamorace the Tartar was dismissed with the present of a silver cup, and
-there remained only the leopard to link them with the East.
-
-At Genoa the series of accounts terminates, but the dispatch of a
-messenger to the Marquess of Saluzzo suggests that our travellers were
-going through his territory, by the same road that Henry of Bolingbroke,
-Earl of Derby and afterwards King of England, followed just a century
-later on his return from Venice and the East, taking with him, by a
-coincidence, a leopard. In that case they would have gone inland, past
-Novi, Asti, and Turin to Chambéry in Savoy, then northwards to Châlons,
-and by Beaune, Châtillon, and Nogent-sur-Saône to Paris. Thence they would
-probably have made for Wissant, and so across to Dover, reaching England
-about the beginning of September, 1293, or rather earlier, after two years
-of almost continual travelling. Of the wonderful things that they saw, and
-the yet more wonderful things that they heard--tales of monstrous men,
-uncanny beasts, and evil spirits--of their adventures, perils of
-shipwreck, and perils of robbers, no record has survived; but something
-of their slow journeying, the trying desert marches, the vexatious delays
-of contrary winds, pleasantly varied by the relaxation of a halt in some
-great city, we have managed to piece together.
-
-Such exceptional voyages as those of Geoffrey of Langley to Tabriz or of
-Gonzalez de Clavijo to Samarcand are interesting for their rarity; but a
-value of another kind attaches to the embassy of Hugh de Vere to the Papal
-Court in 1298. It was a placid and uneventful journey, and would seem to
-have been not merely without adventures, but without incidents. Beyond the
-trifling worries attendant on pack saddles and harness that required
-constant repairs, the trifling interest derived from varying changes of
-diet, and the complication of accounts caused by the existence of an
-entirely fresh monetary standard in each state through which the
-travellers passed, there was little to record but the list of stages on
-the journey. As, however, the route followed was the main road to Rome,
-along which passed a constant stream of pilgrims, prompted by piety or a
-wish to see the world--priests seeking benefices for themselves or curses
-for their neighbours; penitents desiring absolution; appellants with their
-wallets stuffed with deeds, decrees, and legal precedents, and their
-appellees carrying the weightier argument of English gold--it is worth
-while following the embassy and noting the stopping-places. Most of these
-are identical with those used by Henry of Bolingbroke on his return from
-Venice almost a century later, and were, therefore, evidently the usual
-stages on this road.
-
-[Illustration: _Pilgrims._]
-
-Hugh de Vere and his suite, consisting of two knights, two chaplains, a
-clerk, ten esquires, and some thirty grooms and other attendants,
-assembled at Paris on Good Friday, April 4, 1298, and next day rode as far
-as Rozoy, contenting themselves on the journey, as it was a fast day, with
-fish and fruit. The next day being Easter Sunday they did not start until
-after dinner, but reached Provins, fifty miles south-east of Paris, in the
-evening. From Provins of the Roses the cavalcade passed by Pavillon down
-the valley of the Seine to Bar-sur-Seine, where, Lent being over, they
-feasted on meat and pies and flauns, a kind of mediæval pancake
-particularly popular at Easter-time, according to Haliwell. They soon
-entered Burgundy, and turning south through Montbard followed for some
-distance the route now taken by the Canal de Bourgogne with its
-innumerable locks, and after halting a night at 'Flori'--which occurs in
-Bolingbroke's account as 'Floreyn,' but would seem to have dwindled out
-of the maps if not out of existence--reached Beaune; and still doing an
-average of thirty miles a day came to Lyons, stopping at Tournus and
-Bellville on the way, on Monday, April 14. After following the valley of
-the Rhone a few miles farther south, they turned off eastwards near Vienne
-through St. Georges to Voiron and thence northwards, passing close to the
-Grande Chartreuse, across the borders of Savoy to Chambéry. So far the
-currency in use had been 'neir Turneis,' or black money of Tours, 14_d._
-of 'petit tournois' being equivalent to one 'gros tournois,' the standard
-to which all other denominations are reduced in these accounts, a coin
-worth approximately 3_d._ sterling; but now and all the way through Savoy
-and Piedmont payments are entered in 'Vieneys,' of which seventeen went to
-the 'gros tournois.'
-
-Through the mountainous district of Savoy progress was markedly slower,
-the sixty miles from Chambéry to Susa taking six days. The road by which
-they travelled followed the valley of the Arc, as does the modern railway,
-past Montmélian, la Chambre, and St. Michel; but as the Mont Cenis tunnel
-had not then been completed the ambassador and his suite had to go farther
-east to Lansle Bourg, toiling up Mont Cenis to the hospice founded on that
-storm-swept road by the pious King Louis, first of his name, and then
-dropping down to Piedmont and the ancient town of Susa, where after the
-hardships of the day's journey they regaled themselves with 'tartes et
-flaunes.' Whether it was the climbing or the flauns I do not know, but
-next day Sir Hugh's palfreman was ill, and another servant had to be put
-in his place at Avigliano. On Friday, April 25, Turin was reached, and a
-stay was made here until the following Tuesday, a rest that must have been
-welcome after three weeks' continuous travelling. Portmanteaux and bags
-were repaired, clothes washed, and bodies reinvigorated by a more varied
-choice of food than was possible while travelling; shoulders of mutton,
-pigeons, chickens, figs, grapes, and other fruit were bought, and the cook
-prepared 'charlet,' evidently an ancestress of the aristocratic Charlotte
-Russe rather than of her plebeian namesake Apple Charlotte, as the
-constituents were milk and eggs. The journey was resumed on Wednesday,
-April 30, the route lying eastwards through Chivasso and Moncalvo to an
-unidentifiable place, 'Basseignanh,' evidently just across the Po in
-Lombardy, as here the coinage becomes 'emperials,' of which it required
-twenty to make a 'gros tournois.' Lomello, Pavia, Piacenza, Borgo San
-Donnino (where for the first time we note a purchase of cheese, for which
-the district is still famous), Parma, Reggio, and Modena follow in
-uneventful succession, but instead of continuing along the same line to
-Bologna, as does the modern traveller, the embassy now turned sharply to
-the south-west to Sassuolo. In this more countrified district the rate of
-exchange fell, and the 'gros tournois' was only worth eighteen instead of
-twenty 'emperials,' but as a compensation the accountant notes under
-Frassinoro, the next station on the road through the picturesque valley of
-the Secchia, that the expenses of four days were small, thanks to the
-presents of 'la Marcoys.' I am not clear as to the identity of this
-Marquess; all this part of Italy was a mass of little lordships and
-semi-independent principalities, but for the most part their lords were
-Dukes. The Marquess of Carrara seems a reasonable suggestion--if I am
-right in thinking that there was such a person, and am not confusing him
-with the Marquess of Carabas, who, from his occurrence in the history of
-_Puss in Boots_, was presumably a noble of Catalonia. Lucca was reached on
-the eve of Ascension Day, and the feast itself was spent at Pistoia, where
-the coinage in use was 'Pisans,' the 'gros tournois' being worth 4_s._
-2_d._ of Pisan money. The same currency continued in use in Florence and
-Siena, after which 'curteneys' are introduced, the 'gros tournois' being
-worth 5_s._ of this money, which, however, was only in use for two days,
-during which halts were made at Acquapendente and Santa Cristina, a town
-on the shore of the Lake of Bolsena, which name commemorates that saint's
-escape from martyrdom by drowning, thanks to the miraculous buoyancy of
-her millstone, on which she floated to shore as St. Piran floated on his
-stone to the delectable duchy of Cornwall. After this the accounts are
-kept at Viterbo in 'paperins,' 3_s._ 4_d._ of papal money being equivalent
-to the 'gros tournois,' changing next day, for the last time on the way
-out, to 'provis,' at 2_s._ 10_d._ Passing Sutri and Isola, Rome was
-reached on Whit Monday. Here they found Master Thomas of Southwark, who
-had been sent on ahead to hire lodgings and furniture, and here they spent
-six weeks.
-
-[Illustration: '_St. Piran._']
-
-Pope Boniface having agreed to act as arbiter between the Kings of France
-and England, Sir Hugh de Vere's mission was accomplished and the embassy
-left Rome on the afternoon of Thursday, July 9, the Count of Savoy
-accompanying them as far as Isola, their first halting-place. The route
-followed as far as Pistoia was the same as that taken on the way out, but
-by rather shorter stages, as several of the party appear to have been
-knocked up by the heat. At San Quirico, between Acquapendente and Siena,
-hackneys were hired for the invalids and special dishes were prepared for
-them--eggs, honey, and apples being bought 'to make appilmus,' as well as
-'verjus, peresill et autre sause.' Ten miles out of Pistoia, at Buggiano,
-a halt had to be made and rooms hired for the sick members of the party,
-who were left here while the others went on to Lucca. Here a fortnight's
-stay was made, and when the journey was resumed, on August 5, progress was
-very slow. Possibly in order to get the benefit of the sea air a different
-route was followed from this point. The halt at Lucca had not restored the
-strength of the invalids, and the party crept on at about five miles a
-day, stopping at insignificant villages, such as 'Pont Sent Pere' and
-'Valprumaye' between Lucca and Camajore, 'Fregedo' on the coast between
-Pietrasanta and Sarzana, 'Pamarne' and 'La Matillane' between Sarzana,
-where a three days' halt was made, and Borghetto. It would seem that there
-was a particularly bad piece of road after Sestri, as Sir Hugh and the
-other sick persons were taken by boat from Sestri to Chiavari, where a
-whole week was spent. During this halt Wilkoc the clerk was sent into
-Genoa to fetch a doctor for Sir Hugh, and at the same time, money having
-run short, fresh supplies were obtained from some Pistoian merchants
-resident in the town. Fortunately Genoa was well furnished with both cash
-and curatives, for not only was it one of the richest ports in Europe, but
-it shared with its rival, Venice, the fame of producing a 'treacle' which
-possessed as many healing virtues as any of the quack compounds that now
-make England hideous to the railway traveller.
-
-After halts at Rapallo, Recco, and Nervi, Genoa was reached on September
-4. Here they rested for two weeks, and as the treacle had apparently
-proved ineffectual, even when supplemented with 'surupes, leitwaires,
-especeries, emplastres et totes manieres de medicines,' seven members of
-the party who were still ill were sent by sea to Savona. Their comrades
-who came by land having joined them, they left the coast and turned north
-through Cortemiglia, 'Castillol,' which I suppose is Castagnole,
-Villanova, and Rivoli, ten miles west of Turin, to Susa. Here two days
-were spent and 'Monsieur Johan Carbonel and Jak le Gigneur' dined with
-them, but who these guests were I do not know. From Susa to Chambéry the
-route followed was that by which the embassy had travelled on their way
-out, but from Chambéry they took a more easterly road through Belley, St.
-Rambert, and Bourg, rejoining the former route at Tournus. From 'Petit
-Paris,' somewhere between Nogent-sur-Seine and Tournan, four men were sent
-on ahead to secure accommodation. Only one night was spent in Paris, and
-our travellers pressed on northwards through Hodancourt, Etrépagny,
-Oisemont, and Neufchâtel by Boulogne to Wissant, which they reached on the
-last day of October, and whence they crossed to England a week later,
-regaling themselves in the meanwhile with whelks and mustard--not
-necessarily eaten together.
-
-[Illustration: '_... crossed to England._']
-
-Sir Hugh and his company had thus been out of England eight months, the
-journey to Rome occupying some seven weeks, but the return trip covering
-four months. If we have no hint of any adventures and few details of
-anything but food, it only shows that the roads were safe and the
-travellers good Englishmen.
-
-
-
-
-III
-
-CORONATIONS
-
-
-At the present time[1] the coronation is the Rome towards which all roads
-lead; and if a walk down Oxford Street lands us among 'coronation' cuffs
-and collars and soaps and souvenirs it is only to be expected that a
-Mediæval Byway should bring us into the subject of coronations. For of all
-the survivals with which we are surrounded in this conservative country
-the coronation ceremonies, though shorn of much of their grandeur and
-significance during the last hundred years, are still the most unchanged
-in spirit and in detail. For one thing, they restore to London for a brief
-period the predominant feature of mediæval life--colour. For a few days,
-in 1911 as in 1236, the city is 'adorned with silkes, banners, crownes,
-pals, tapers, lampes, and with certaine wonders of wit and strange
-showes'; and, though the colour-scheme is baulked of fulness by the sad
-clothes of the spectators, there is a blaze of gaiety which is pleasing in
-its appeal to primitive instincts and its disregard of business and
-utilitarianism.
-
-[Illustration: '_Henry's badge._']
-
-The proceedings in connection with the coronation of our mediæval kings
-began at the Tower. Very significant was it that before taking formal
-possession of his throne the king took practical possession of the
-fortress. But if his claim to the crown rested partly on force and the
-strong hand, it rested also upon the elective will of the people, and
-accordingly, on the day before the coronation the king rode from the Tower
-to Westminster Palace to show himself to his subjects that they might see
-what sort of man it was whom they were choosing for king. Naturally the
-processional ride was made as magnificent and impressive as possible. With
-the king went a crowd of nobles, all on horseback, conspicuous amongst
-them being the recipients of 'coronation honours,' the new-made Knights of
-the Bath, usually thirty or forty in number, upon whom the honour of
-knighthood had been bestowed, with the accompaniment of scarlet-furred
-robes and other gifts of apparel, the previous day. Richard III., whose
-cavalcade eclipsed the splendour of his predecessors, was accompanied by
-three dukes, nine earls, and a hundred knights and lords, all gorgeously
-attired, 'whereof the Duke of Buckingham so farre exceeded, that the
-caparison of his horse was so charged with embroydered worke of gold, as
-it was borne up from the ground by certaine his footmen thereto
-appointed.' Nor did Henry VII., though careful and even parsimonious in
-most matters, spare expense over his procession. He himself was arrayed in
-rich cloth of gold of a purple ground, of which ten yards were bought from
-Jerome Friscobaldi at the prodigious price of £8 the yard; the 'trappour,'
-or caparison, of his charger was made of crimson damask cloth of gold,
-costing £80, and either this or another trappour was adorned with 102
-silver-gilt 'portculiez' (Henry's badge, so often repeated upon the walls
-of his chapel at the Abbey) made by 'Hanche Doucheman.' Over the king's
-head was a canopy of cloth of gold, the gilded staves of which were
-carried by relays of knights, changed at frequent intervals that many
-might partake of the honourable but arduous duty, and in attendance on him
-were the 'henxmen,' dressed in crimson satin (costing 16_s._ the yard) and
-white cloth of gold embroidered with the royal arms from designs by
-Christian Poynter, who also executed twelve 'cotes of armes for herauldes,
-beten and wrought in oyle colours with fyne gold,' and twelve similar
-trumpet banners. The henchmen led the spare charger which for some reason
-always formed part of the royal procession. It was, possibly, for this
-state charger that the 'trappours of St. George' were made, of white cloth
-of gold, but the 'trappour of blue velvet with 102 red roses worked with
-Venice gold and dragons of red velvet,' and the other 'trappour' with the
-arms of Cadwallader, clearly belonged to the queen's portion of the
-procession. She was clad in white damask cloth of gold, reclining on
-cushions of the same material in a litter drawn by two horses with white
-harness and trappings, under a canopy of white damask with silver staves.
-Five henchmen in crimson and blue led her palfrey of estate; then came
-three 'cheires,' or carriages, each containing four ladies and draped in
-crimson, and then seven ladies in blue velvet 'purfelled' with crimson
-satin, riding on palfreys all of one colour with harness of crimson cloth
-of gold, her suite displaying a splendour of colour which formed an
-excellent foil to her own silvery radiance.
-
-[Illustration: _A 'herauld.'_]
-
-Our sovereigns no longer start from a fortress to ascend the throne, and
-they show themselves to their loyal subjects after they have been crowned
-instead of before the ceremony, not from any fear that they may prove
-unacceptable to the people, but because none would dream of challenging
-their right. But if Buckingham Palace is a less satisfactory
-starting-point than the Tower (and there are artists who consider the
-latter the more picturesque), there are some things in which we have
-improved upon our ancestors. Chief amongst these are the police
-arrangements. It is no longer necessary to proclaim, as was done when
-Edward II. was crowned, 'That no one shall dare to carry sword, or pointed
-knife, or dagger, mace, or club, or other arms on pain of imprisonment for
-a year and a day'--the only weapon of offence thus sternly prohibited
-now-a-days being the aeroplane. Nor is the threat of a similar penalty
-needed to ensure the polite treatment of foreigners attending the
-coronation. A certain amount of severity was no doubt required to
-counteract the effects of nine conduits in the Cheap running red and white
-wine, with auxiliary fountains at Westminster, however weak the wine may
-have been. Modern coronations are not 'hanseld and auspicated,' as was
-that of Richard I., with the blood of many Jews, because some of their
-number had dared sacrilegiously to gaze upon the king--a privilege
-notoriously accorded to cats, but evidently forbidden to a dog of a Jew.
-On the other hand, we are spared such disastrous overcrowding as occurred
-at the coronation of Edward II., when the king had to go out of his palace
-by the back door to avoid the crush, and by the pressure of the crowd
-within the Abbey a stout earthen wall was broken down, a prominent citizen
-'threstyd to deth,' and the area reserved for the ceremony invaded.
-
-It would seem from the instance just quoted that the temporary erections
-made by our ancestors on these occasions would not have passed the L.C.C.
-tests, and we may also flatter ourselves that they would never have been
-capable of hiding their churches and other public buildings under a sea of
-ingeniously constructed deal seats, but still the carpenters and
-upholsterers were kept pretty busy at the Abbey for some little time
-before the ceremony, though the tradesmen who most benefited were the
-leading mercers, who had to supply great quantities of cloth of gold,
-velvet, Turkish and Italian silks, samite, and fine linen of Tripoli.
-Within the Abbey, at the crossing of the transepts, a high stage had to be
-erected for the chair of state, where the king sat in full view of the
-people during the first part of the service. This stage was covered with
-rugs and hung round with silken cloth of gold, the chair of state being
-also provided with a golden canopy and silken cushions. Several varieties
-of cloth of gold were used, the bill for this material at the coronation
-of Edward III., in 1327, amounting to £450, much of it being bought from
-one John de Perers, who might very well have been the father of Alice
-Perers, that 'busy court-flie' who infatuated the king in his declining
-years. The most expensive variety was 'silken cloth of gold of Nak,' but
-what place is meant by Nak I cannot say with any certainty: just
-conceivably it might be Nasik close to Bombay, for much of this material
-came from at least as far east as Turkey; but whatever its place of
-origin, it was used for the king's hose and shoes, and for the little tent
-or shrine before the high altar within which the ceremony of anointing,
-with its attendant disrobing, took place. The next most valuable kind is
-described as _raffata_--presumably 'reeded,' though the word is not to be
-found in Ducange (when will some one do for mediæval Latin what Oxford and
-Sir James Murray are doing for modern English?)--was used for covering the
-archbishop's chair, while of a third variety, diapered or damask, one
-whole cloth was offered at the high altar, and two cloths sewed together
-were used to cover the tomb of the king's grandfather, Edward I. Others of
-these diaper cloths, with purple velvet and cloth of Tartar, or Armenian,
-silk, were used in the chancel and round the high altar, while canvas
-cloth of gold was mixed with the more precious kinds or employed in less
-important positions.
-
-[Illustration: '_The young Edward III._']
-
-The king, after his ride to Westminster Palace, partook of a light supper
-and retired to his chamber. If he had not already been knighted he
-prepared for that ceremony, a usual though not invariable preliminary to
-coronation, by keeping vigil. The room in which the young Edward III.
-rested was provided with red rugs with the royal arms worked in the
-corners, three 'bankers' or bench covers of a like design, and other
-'bankers' of red, green, murrey and blue, and his bath was covered with
-silken cloth of gold, though for the bath of Henry VII. Flemish linen was
-considered good enough. On the morning of the coronation day the king,
-after the ceremonial bath, put on spotless raiment, to signify that 'as
-his body glistens with the washing and the beauty of his vestments so may
-his soul shine,' and went into Westminster Hall, where he was lifted by
-his lords into his throne. Presently the royal procession, the king
-walking barefoot and the various nobles carrying the regalia, started
-down the covered way, carpeted with the coarse burrell cloth of
-Candlewykstrete (now Cannon Street), so much of this carpet as lay outside
-the church being the perquisite of the lord of the manor of Bedford as
-almoner for the day, and were met by the monks and clergy, and by them
-conducted into the Abbey. With the details of the ceremony that then
-ensued, 'whereof the circumstaunce to shewe in ordre wolde aske a longe
-leysoure,' all who are interested must by this time be well acquainted, so
-often and so fully has it been described.
-
-[Illustration: _Crowns ancient and modern._]
-
-The ceremonial investiture was performed with the regalia of St. Edward,
-preserved in the Abbey treasury and regarded as too sacred for lay hands
-to touch, so that in the procession they were carried set out upon a
-covered board; but before the close of the service the king laid aside the
-crown of St. Edward and assumed his royal crown. This did not resemble the
-glittering monstrosity with which we now render our sovereigns' heads
-uncomfortable and slightly absurd, but was a dignified and artistic
-circlet of the type known to heraldic writers as a ducal coronet. Edward
-III. had three crowns, all of gold, the chief--described in 1356 as
-'lately pawned in Flanders'--with eight fleurs-de-lys of rubies and
-emeralds with four great orient pearls and eight sprays of balas rubies
-and orient sapphires; the second, given to Queen Philippa, had ten
-fleurs-de-lys of rubies and emeralds with groups of emeralds and six
-pearls; the third was not, strictly speaking, a crown, but a chaplet,
-being an unflowered circlet with nine groups of great oriental pearls and
-in the midst a beautiful ruby. Wearing his crown and attended by his
-nobles bearing the other insignia of royalty, the newly anointed king
-returned to Westminster Palace for the great business of the coronation
-banquet. For this event Westminster Hall was prepared, a 'siege royal,' or
-throne, being set for the king at the upper end, covered with 'Turkish
-cloth of gold,' or other handsome material, with a canopy. The benches of
-the lower tables were covered with 'bankers' of red or blue cloth and
-'dorsers' of the same material hung behind the guests--the 'dorser' being
-the mediæval equivalent of the 'thing they call a dodo, running round the
-wall.' The 'dorsers' behind the royal seat were of cloth of gold and were
-protected from the dampness of the walls by a lining of canvas. When the
-guests were seated in their order of precedence, and the Earl Marshal and
-his attendants had ridden up and down the hall to make room for the
-attendants, the banquet began, and during its course a number of nobles
-and lords of manors had the duty or privilege of discharging various
-services to the king, receiving as a rule valuable perquisites. Thus the
-table had been laid by the lord of Kibworth-Beauchamp manor, in return for
-which service he kept the salt cellar, knives, and spoons; the cloths and
-napkins had been provided by the lord of Ashley in Essex, as Chief Napier,
-and remained his property. The important post of Chief Butler was filled
-by the Earl of Arundel, though at the coronation of Queen Eleanor, in
-1236, his place was taken by the Earl of Surrey, as he had been
-excommunicated by the Archbishop of Canterbury in a quarrel over sporting
-rights, but the lord of Wimondley had the privilege of passing the first
-cup of wine to the king, and then withdrew in favour of the mayor of
-London, who acted as chief cupbearer--not without reward, for at the
-coronation feast of Edward III. the mayor received as his fee a gold cup
-enamelled with the royal arms, and a gold 'water-spout-pot,' or ewer,
-ornamented with enamel and two Scottish pearls. At the same feast the
-Earl of Lancaster as steward secured four silver chargers stamped with the
-arms of Harclay, and four others bearing the badge of the Countess of
-Hereford, ten silver skewers, and eight sauce-boats, each marked with the
-royal leopard, and the chamberlain carried off two basins parcel gilt and
-enamelled with the arms of England and Scotland. The lord of Addington
-supplied a dish of gruel and the lord of Liston in Essex wafers; other
-persons brought water and held basins and towels, and the head of the
-family of Dymoke of Scrivelsby rode into the hall in full armour, with his
-punning crest of a moke's ears on his helm, and offered to fight any one
-who would deny the king's sovereignty.
-
-[Illustration: '_Dymoke of Scrivelsby._']
-
-But after all the main thing at a feast is the food. And that was
-plentiful--even at the banquet of Edward II., where the waiting was
-disgraceful. For his coronation feast Edward I. sent out orders to the
-sheriffs of the different counties to provide 27,800 chickens, 540 oxen,
-about a thousand pigs and 250 sheep, besides instructing the prelates to
-send up as many swans, peacocks, cranes, rabbits, and kids as possible,
-and also giving large orders for salmon, pike, eels, and lampreys. It is
-not surprising that his cook, Hugh of Malvern, required six oaks and six
-beeches to be made into tables for the kitchen. This suggests a certain
-grossness of feeding which a study of the actual menu might dissipate;
-certainly the banquets of later sovereigns were sufficiently elaborate and
-varied. When Henry VI. was crowned in 1429, at the early age of nine, he
-was served with three 'courses.' The first of these included not only
-boiled beef and mutton, capons, herons, and cygnets, but 'Frument with
-venyson; viand royall plantyd losynges of golde; Bore hedes in castellys
-of golde and enarmed; a rede leche with lyons coruyn therin'--in other
-words, a pink jelly or mould ornamented with lions--and, as a crowning
-glory, 'Custarde royall with a lyoparde of golde syttynge therein and
-holdynge a floure de lyce.' The second course, besides chickens,
-partridges, cranes, peacock 'enhakyll' (with its feathers), and rabbits,
-contained 'pygge endoryd'--gilded sucking-pig--'a frytour garnysshed with
-a leopardes hede and two estryche feders; Gely party wryten and notyd with
-Te Deum Laudamus,' and, as a masterpiece, 'A whyte leche (or blancmange)
-plantyd with a rede antelop, a crowne aboute his necke with a chayne of
-golde; flampayne powderyd with leopardes and flower delyce of golde.'
-After this the third course, with no creation more wonderful than 'A bake
-mete lyke a shylde, quarteryd red and whyte, sette with losenges gylte and
-floures of borage,' falls rather flat. With each course was presented a
-'sotyltie,' or elaborate device made, presumably, of sugar and pastry,
-representing groups of kings and saints. These 'subtleties,' however, were
-not to be compared to those at the coronation banquet of Katherine of
-France, queen of Henry V. Her banquet also was of three courses, 'and ye
-shall understand that this feest was all of fysshe,' and a most
-astonishing variety of fish there was. Besides all the common
-fish--salmon, soles, turbot, etc.--there were lampreys, in comparison
-with which Henry III. once declared that all other fish were insipid,
-'sturgeon with welkes,' a combination of the royal and the plebeian, fried
-'menues,' or minnows, the mediæval whitebait, conger, now much neglected,
-and 'porpies rostyd,' besides a score of other kinds, including certain
-mysterious 'dedellys in burneux.' The sweets included 'Gely coloured with
-columbyne floures'; 'flampeyn--a kind of raised pie--flourished with a
-scochon royall, therein three crownes of golde plantyd with floure delyce
-and floures of camemyll wrought of confeccyons'; 'A whyte leche
-flourysshed with hawthorne levys and redde hawys;' and 'A march payne
-garnysshed with dyverse fygures of aungellys, amonge the whiche was set an
-ymage of Seynt Katheryne holdynge this rason, _Il est escrit, pur voir et
-dit, per mariage pur cest guerre ne dure_.' Of the 'sotylties' the first
-showed a pelican and its young, and an image of St. Katherine (of
-Alexandria) holding a book in one hand and an inscribed scroll in the
-other; the second showed a panther, the Queen's badge, and St. Katherine
-with her more usual emblem, the wheel. The third and most elaborate was 'a
-tigre lokyng in a mirrour and a man sittyng on horse backe, clene armyd,
-holdyng in his armys a tiger whelpe, with this reason (_i.e._ motto), _Par
-force sanz reson ie ay pryse ceste beste_, and with his one hande makynge
-a countenaunce of throwynge of mirrours at the great tigre, the whiche
-helde this reason, _Gile de mirrour ma fete distour_.' The legend of the
-Tiger and the Mirror has been very fully worked out in connection with the
-arms of the Kentish family of Sybill by Mr. G. C. Druce, a great authority
-on unnatural history, but he does not appear to have known this instance
-of its occurrence. An early bestiary informs us that 'there is a beast
-which is called Tiger; it is a kind of serpent' (this suggests the
-zoological classification of _Punch's_ railway porter--'Cats is dogs and
-rabbits is dogs, but a tortoise is a hinsect'). 'This beast is of a nature
-so courageous and fierce that no living man dares to approach it. When
-the beast has young the hunters ... watch until they see the tiger go off
-and leave its den and its young; they then seize the cubs and place
-mirrors in the path just where they leave. The character of the tiger is
-such that however angry it may be it is unable to look in the mirror
-without its gaze becoming fixed.' (Surely this is more suggestive of Eve
-than of the serpent?) 'It believes then that it is its cub that it sees in
-the mirror; it recognises its figure with great satisfaction and believes
-positively to have found its cub.' (This property of the mirror may
-explain the puzzling question why so many ladies persist in dressing like
-their own daughters.) Thus the hunters escape while the tiger stops where
-it is, and I think that I had better follow the tiger's example.
-
-[Illustration: '_The tiger and the mirror._']
-
-
-
-
-IV
-
-DEATH AND DOCTORS
-
-
-To read a medical dictionary is to marvel that any man should enjoy even
-brief intervals of health, there are so many delicate organs in the body
-and so many diseases lying in wait for them. Read the pronouncements of
-specialists on diet and the dangers which attend the eating of any food or
-the drinking of any liquid, and the marvel grows. Add the extraordinary
-facility with which accidents occur, and the margin between life and death
-becomes surprisingly narrow. The crew of a destroyer are habitually
-separated from the other world by about a quarter of an inch of steel.
-With most of us the partition is less obvious, less constant and uniform,
-but very nearly as thin in places. For any but the most hardened there
-must always be a feeling of pleased surprise upon emerging safely on the
-other side of Piccadilly Circus or the Embankment by Blackfriars. (It is
-true that in the latter case a paternal, not to say grandmotherly, Council
-has provided the unexciting alternative of a subway, but only leisurely
-athletes have the time or energy to descend and reascend those stairs.)
-The average City man is within inches and seconds of death every day, and
-it is only when the inches and seconds become fractional that he realises
-for the moment his insecurity of tenure. Which is just as well. Every age
-has its own dangers: we have the motor car, unwitting apostle of socialism
-in its brutal, individualistic disregard for the rights of others;
-mediæval man, I am inclined to think, ran most risk from the quick temper
-of his fellows.
-
-From time to time, when some undesirable alien is arrested for stabbing an
-enemy or chance acquaintance who has annoyed him, the police-court
-magistrate before whom he is brought will comment, with patriotic pride,
-on the 'un-English' nature of the offence. And it is true that at the
-present time the Englishman as a rule emphasises his disagreement with his
-opponent by means of fist or hob-nailed boot rather than with a knife, but
-this was certainly not so in mediæval times. Call a man 'a boor' nowadays
-and you may get a black eye, but the results were more disastrous in the
-thirteenth century, as John Marsh found when he applied that opprobrious
-term to Richard Fraunkfee as they were walking back from church at
-Doncaster, for Richard promptly knifed him. Every man in those days
-carried a knife, dagger, anelace, or baselard, and produced it without
-hesitation if angered. Needless to say, the knife was much in evidence
-after harvest feasts, wakes, and especially visits to the tavern, for
-drunkenness has been an English vice since Fitz Stephen, in the twelfth
-century, spoke of 'the inordinate drinking of fools' as one of the two
-plagues of London. How far this failing was common to both sexes I do not
-know; casual references to women in taverns occur occasionally, but they
-might have been there as blamelessly as their descendants in a modern
-tea-shop, and, so far as I can remember, I have only come across one woman
-who met her death when drunk--a Yorkshire woman who fell down a well. At
-the same time, seeing that 'the good wyf taugte hir dougter' in the
-fifteenth century that 'if thou be ofte drunke it falle thee to schame,'
-it looks as if occasional excess might have been condoned. With the
-exception of drunkenness, the moving cause of the innumerable murderous
-assaults is rarely given, and it is rather curious that the only two cases
-which I have found of men quarrelling, with fatal results, over a woman
-both occurred at ironworks in Yorkshire in 1266.
-
-[Illustration: '_... got his arms round a branch._']
-
-Knives were not infrequently responsible for deaths without any evil
-intent on the part of their owners. In quite a large number of cases when
-boys were playing together a knife would fall out of its sheath and
-inflict a mortal wound. And then, if the owner were over twelve, he would
-have, theoretically, to go to prison and stay there till he received a
-formal pardon from the king for accidental manslaughter. I say
-'theoretically' because in practice the culprit usually 'fled,' which, I
-suspect, meant that he went round the corner while the village constable
-carefully looked in the wrong place for him. An unusual incident connected
-with a knife occurred in Dorset in 1280, when a girl, clearing the table
-after dinner, picked up the tablecloth with a knife inside, and as she
-went out of the room tripped and fell so that the knife stuck into her. It
-was about the same date that a Suffolk peasant, William le Keu, flung a
-knife against the wall of his house and it bounded off and killed his
-infant daughter, lying on her mother's lap in front of the fire. Why he
-should have thrown his knife at the wall does not appear, but people were
-always throwing things about and hitting inoffensive passers-by. For
-instance, a man would fling a rake or a flail at some chicken and hit his
-own child. Children, in fact, had an unhappy knack of coming round the
-corner with disastrous results to themselves, especially when their
-elders were playing quoits or pennystone down the village street. One of
-the most curious cases of what we may call an indirect accident was when
-two small boys went into an orchard to get apples; one of them threw a
-stone up into a tree, but instead of bringing down an apple it hit a stone
-that some one had thrown up long before, and this fell on his cousin's
-head and killed him. Another case of the unforeseen happened in
-Nottinghamshire in the thirteenth century, when Richard Palmer was
-climbing a tree in a churchyard to take a crow's nest. He was standing on
-a bough when suddenly it broke; but the result was not what might have
-been expected, for Richard got his arms round a branch and after hanging
-for a long time came down safely, but the broken bough fell on the head of
-a man standing down below, and 'the dog it was that died.'
-
-[Illustration: '_The broken bough fell on the head of a man standing down
-below._']
-
-Fire, the second of Fitz Stephen's 'plagues,' played its part in
-preventing over-population, as might be expected when the framework of the
-huts was of wood, the roof of thatch and the floor covered with straw or
-rushes. If a woman went to bed leaving a lighted candle stuck on the wall
-it was hardly surprising if she paid for her carelessness with her life,
-but as a rule the victims were children or very old people, and as often
-as not the immediate cause was some chicken, or pig, or calf getting on to
-the open hearth and scattering the fire on to the straw-covered floor. For
-the mediæval peasant shared his hut with his live stock, though it would
-not be often that a man would be called upon to separate two horses
-fighting in his kitchen; this did actually happen to a man in Winchester,
-and as usual the peacemaker got the worst of it. Fire, again, acting
-indirectly through the medium of water, was another frequent cause of
-disaster, a most astonishing number of cases occurring of persons, usually
-children, scalded to death. I can only suppose that the cauldrons were
-large and insecurely balanced; that they were large may be concluded from
-the frequency with which people fell into them. But cold water was perhaps
-as deadly an agent as any. In Yorkshire in particular the coroners' rolls
-suggest that the number of people that fell off bridges and out of boats
-into streams and down wells must have seriously interfered with the purity
-of the water supply; but, fortunately, water was very rarely drunk in
-those days. The most frequent cause of drowning seems to have been falling
-off a horse, and the mediæval version of the well-known proverb ought to
-have been 'One man can ride a horse to the water, but nine out of ten
-can't stay on when he drinks.' Taking the number of cases in which men
-watering their horses did get drowned, and allowing that a reasonable
-percentage of those thrown into the water scrambled out again, the
-standard of mediæval riding must have been about equal to that of the
-White Knight, who, when his horse stopped fell over its head, and when it
-went on again fell over its tail.
-
-Occasionally the propelling agent, so to speak, was human, as in the case
-of a clothworker of Tadcaster, who, 'being annoyed with his wife,' flung
-her into the Wharfe and drowned her. The measure seems extreme, and he
-could not plead peril of shipwreck, the excuse of the Syracusan, who,
-'when all ponderous things were to be exonerated out of the ship,' flung
-his wife into the sea 'because she was the greatest burden.'
-
-In spite of a verdict of 'misadventure,' I cannot help feeling a little
-sceptical about an incident which took place at Bedford in 1220, when
-William the miller was driving certain Jews in his cart, and at the bridge
-the cart fell into the water and three Jews were drowned. As I read the
-story there came into my mind Sam Weller's conversation with Mr. Pickwick
-about his father's remarkable accident with the voters: '"Here and there
-it is a wery bad road," says my father. "'Specially near the canal, I
-think," says the gentleman.... You wouldn't believe it, sir, but on the
-wery day as he came down with them woters his coach was upset on that 'ere
-wery spot and every man on 'em was turned into the canal.'
-
-Occasionally, also, the victim was a voluntary one, as in the case of John
-Milner, who, with the contempt for consequences which we might expect from
-one of his name, jumped into the Ouse. The consequence for him was that he
-became what Mr. Mantalini called 'a demmed, moist, unpleasant corpse,' and
-the jury decided that he had acted 'by temptation of the Devil.' While
-they displayed a certain boldness in thus arraigning the Devil for
-procuring, aiding, and abetting a felony, they showed more discretion in
-another quarter, for when a man and his wife were found struck by
-lightning, where a modern jury would have declared it an 'act of God' the
-mediæval jury preferred the less dogmatic and more reasonable verdict that
-'no one is suspected.' It is pleasant to note that in another instance,
-where the body of a man struck by lightning was first found by his wife,
-the jury expressly exonerated her, saying 'she is not suspected' (of
-having done it).
-
-I am not quite certain of the force of a verdict of 'by temptation of the
-Devil' in a case of suicide, but it seems to have been the half-way house
-between _felo-de-se_ and madness, to have been, in fact, the mediæval
-equivalent of that 'temporary insanity' which is the invariable verdict in
-modern times. The idea that a man must be mad to take his own life, and
-that therefore all suicides were insane, had not occurred to the mediæval
-mind, but they evidently felt that there were cases in which the suicide
-was not himself, although he was not sufficiently outside or beside
-himself to be considered an absolute lunatic. There are strange and grim
-little stories of madmen in some of these old records. One of these, not
-wanting in pathos in its evidence of good intentions diabolically twisted,
-tells how Robert de Bramwyk, a lunatic who had some lucid intervals (and
-was, therefore, probably not so closely guarded), in a fit of frenzy took
-his sister Denise, who had been deformed and hunchbacked from her birth,
-and, wishing to make her straight, cast her into a cauldron of hot water,
-and taking her out of this bath trampled upon her with his feet to
-straighten her limbs.
-
-[Illustration: '_... cast her into a cauldron._']
-
-With the exception of this madman's empiric bone-setting I only remember
-to have come across one instance of an operation being mentioned in this
-particular class of coroner's records. This was in 1330, when Richard de
-Berneston, a surgeon of Nottingham, cut a 'wenne' on the arm of William de
-Brunnesley and William afterwards died of heart failure. It is rather
-remarkable that doctors seem hardly ever to have been held responsible
-for the death of their patients, though in 1350 we do find Thomas Rasyn,
-leech, and Pernel, his wife, pardoned for the death of John Panyers,
-miller, of Sidmouth, whom they were said to have killed through ignorance
-of their art; the inclusion of the wife seems to point to a mediæval
-nursing home. As a rule, probably, when a patient died under a doctor's
-care, his relations took the matter philosophically and assumed that the
-treatment had been correct and that he would have died in any case. It was
-the patients who survived that made all the fuss. For instance, there was
-Thomas Medewe, the vicar of a Hertfordshire parish in the fifteenth
-century, who 'by goddys visitacion had an infirmyte in his throte.' The
-local practitioner, or his equivalent, who would probably have been a
-'wise woman,' being unable to deal with it, the vicar came up to London
-and consulted John Dayvyle, surgeon, who gave him a plaster for his throat
-which did him much good and only cost 4_d._ Unfortunately for both
-parties, the surgeon finding that his patient was 'nygh hole' as a result
-of his first experiment insisted upon his having another plaster, for
-which he charged 20_d._ to make him 'thurgh hole.' The result was
-disastrous, as the patient 'felle in suche infirmitye that he might not
-speke and was like therby to have dyed' if he had not called in another
-doctor. It was, in the circumstances, perhaps natural that the vicar
-expressed his feelings strongly when Dayvyle sent in a bill for 20_s._ for
-attendance. There was the case also of Edmund Broke, of Southampton, who
-came up to London to undergo an operation, and put himself in the hands of
-Nicholas Sax, who stipulated for a fee of 33_s._ 4_d._, of which 13_s._
-4_d._ was paid in advance. The patient, according to his own account, was
-in jeopardy of his life through the 'defaute and unkunnyng' of Dr. Sax,
-and had to call in John Surgeon, 'dwelling at Powlez cheyn,' who cured him
-and to whom he paid the 20_s._ which his incompetent attendant claimed was
-due to him.
-
-Of course there was another side to the question, patients then as now
-being more ready with promises when ill than with fees when well. There
-was William Robinson, for instance, a haberdasher of Lombard Street, who
-fell ill with pestilence and sent for William Paronus, promising that if
-he would only save him 'he would reward him as well as ever he was
-rewarded for any cure'; but when, after a month's attendance, he was well
-again, he declined even to pay the doctor's out-of-pocket expenses
-incurred for drugs. And sometimes there were cases in which it was
-difficult to decide who was in the right. One such case came into court in
-1292. Mauger le Vavassour, a member of a leading Yorkshire family, fell
-ill; his wife, Agnes, and other friends, including his uncle, Henry le
-Chapeleyn, sent for Master Otto of Germany, evidently a doctor of repute,
-promising him one mark to come and see the invalid, and further six marks
-if he would undertake his treatment. So Master Otto paid his visit and
-then went off to York to the apothecary's and compounded various medicines
-and healing drinks, which he gave to Mauger, with excellent effect. When
-the patient was convalescent Master Otto put him on a very strict diet,
-so strict that Mauger grew restive, and his wife, who sympathised with his
-feelings, gave him various forbidden foods. The doctor, finding his orders
-disobeyed, declined to accept responsibility, washed his hands of the case
-and withdrew. The question then arose whether he was entitled to his fees
-or whether he had shown neglect by leaving his patient before he was fully
-cured. The jury decided that Master Otto ordered the strict diet for
-Mauger's good, and not, as had been suggested, with the object of keeping
-him weak, and so increasing the bill for attendance, but they also found
-that as a matter of fact the extra food did the patient good and not harm.
-The verdict being thus for both parties the judges were puzzled and
-reserved their decision.
-
-Another rather curious point cropped up about the middle of the fifteenth
-century. Eryk de Vedica, one of the brethren of the Grey Friars of London,
-was a physician of skill and reputation, and was sent for by Alice, wife
-of William Stede, a vintner. She seems to have been in a very bad way, and
-when Brother Eryk saw her and understood her 'grete age and jubertous
-sikeness' he was with difficulty persuaded to attempt her cure. However,
-after five weeks' attention he 'had soo doon hys parte vnto her that she
-thought herself wele amended in her body, she cowde hym grete thancke and
-gave hym 20_s._ for his labour.' And then her curmudgeon of a husband, who
-was possibly not particularly pleased at her recovery, sued Brother Eryk
-for taking the money, and technically the unfortunate friar had no
-defence, as 'the common law supposeth every receiving of the husband's
-goods or money by the hands of his wife without his licence or command to
-be a wrongful taking away of the same from him.' We will hope that the
-Court of Chancery, whose assistance was invoked, over-ruled the Common Law
-and did the friar justice.
-
-It was not unusual for friars to have a knowledge of science and medicine,
-but a statement that I read the other day in a book recently published,
-that most (I believe my author said 'all') mediæval doctors 'were, of
-course, monks' is singularly wide of the truth. On the contrary, in even
-the largest monasteries it was customary to call in a doctor from outside
-in any case of serious illness, and the greater houses frequently retained
-the services of a secular physician. The cathedral monastery of
-Winchester, for instance, in the fourteenth century, made an agreement
-with Master Thomas of Shaftesbury that he should attend the convent in
-return for his board and lodging, the board, it may be noticed, including
-a daily allowance of one and a half gallons of the best ale and a gallon
-of a smaller brew. It is probable also that Master Adam of St. Albans,
-surgeon, who came from the priory of Ely to attend King Edward I. in his
-last illness at Lanercost, was the cathedral doctor. There were, of
-course, medical attendants attached to the court; their salaries were not
-large, the surgeons of the first two Edwards being paid only from one to
-two pounds a year, but there were perquisites in the shape of furred
-robes, gifts of money, or silver goblets from grateful patients, and
-substantial pickings in the shape of ecclesiastical benefices--the
-favourite way of pensioning a court physician being to give him one or
-more prebends or rectories. Occasionally the pension took the form of
-landed estate, as when Edward III. gave land in Kildare to his surgeon,
-John Leche, a grant which proved rather a white elephant, for early in the
-next reign Parliament, seeing the evils of absenteeism, ordered that all
-owners of estates in Ireland should reside on them in person or else pay
-for an able-bodied man to assist in policing the country, two alternatives
-equally trying to the old surgeon's feelings. With such slender and
-precarious remuneration it was excusable that the royal doctors should
-sometimes have an eye to the main chance, and Fabyan tells a story against
-one Master Dominic, physician (very much) in waiting to Elizabeth, Queen
-of Edward IV. Before the birth of her first child (the Princess
-Elizabeth) Master Dominic had been very positive that it would be a boy,
-and so, when the time came, he stood outside the queen's room 'that he
-myght be the firste that shulde brynge tydynges to the kynge of the byrth
-of the prynce to the entent to have greate thanke and rewarde of the
-kynge; and lastly when he harde the childe crye, he knockyd or called
-secretly at the chamber dore, and frayned what the quene had. To whom it
-was answeryd by one of the ladyes, "what so ever the quenes grace hath
-here wythin, suer it is that a fole standithe there withoute." And so
-confused with thys answere, he deperted wythoute seynge of the kynge for
-that tyme.'
-
-[Illustration: '_... called secretly at the chamber dore._']
-
-The position of the medical man who was not attached to the court or to
-some nobleman's suite is rather obscure. In London during the fourteenth
-and fifteenth centuries the surgeons of the city were under the control of
-two or more master surgeons who acted as universal consultants; any
-surgeon undertaking a case involving risk to life or limb being obliged to
-call in one of the masters to see that his treatment was correct. In the
-same way the veterinary surgeons were at liberty to call in the advice of
-a master farrier, and if through conceit or negligence they did not do so
-and the horse they were treating died, then they would be responsible to
-the owner for its value. As to the country practitioner, it is not quite
-clear who licensed him to take the title of 'leech' or whether he merely
-assumed it. There were, no doubt, a certain number of men of learning in
-the provinces, and in 1478 Sir John Savage was able to find a 'connyng
-fisission' for Robert Pilkington in Macclesfield. He certainly required
-such a one, for, as a result of eating a mess of 'grene potage' containing
-poison he was 'swolne so grete that he was gyrd abowte his bodye in iij
-places with towells and gyrdylls' to prevent him bursting. When a man is
-in such a state it is 'a thousand to one if he lives the age of a little
-fish,' as Nicholas Culpeper would say, but the physician 'dyd grete cures
-to hym' and he recovered. As a rule, however, it is probable that the
-country leech had little more knowledge of the healing art than many of
-his patients. It must be remembered that a knowledge of simple herbal
-remedies was pretty widely diffused, and an acquaintance with more
-elaborate preparations formed part of the education of the upper classes.
-Did not the lady of the manor almost to our own days dispense home-made
-medicines with moral stimulants to her tenants, whose simple minds and
-_dura ilia_ received therefrom much benefit? Yea, 'kynges and kynges sones
-and other noble men hath ben eximious phisicions,' and there is in the
-British Museum a book full of recipes for plasters and ointments, composed
-by Henry VIII. Half a century before that bluff but gouty monarch 'the
-gude Erl of Herforth was holden a gud surgen,' though he seems to have had
-a tendency towards extravagant multiplication of ingredients in his
-prescriptions. In humbler ranks of life every monastery had an Infirmarian
-who, though dependent on outside assistance in serious cases, was expected
-to treat the ordinary illnesses of his brethren, and at least to see that
-there was always ginger, cinnamon, and peony (this last most effectual for
-the incubus or nightmare) in his cupboard. It is noteworthy that in all
-the hundreds of hospitals founded prior to the Reformation, from St.
-Leonard's at York with its two hundred beds downwards, there appears to
-have been no provision for medical attendance. The wardens were rarely
-medical men; Master Thomas Goldington, one of the surgeons of Edward III.
-was made warden of two hospitals, at Derby and Carlisle, but the only
-result was that he attended to his private practice and neglected the
-hospitals. Clearly the rudiments of nursing were assumed to be known to
-the resident chaplain or some of the inmates--more particularly the women.
-Wise women have doctored the country-side time out of mind, and in the
-reign of Elizabeth we even find one, Isabel Warick, practising surgery in
-York and requiring protection from her male rivals. A century earlier
-Alice Shevington, servant to William Gregory of London, 'pretendyng
-hirself to have had connyng in helyng of sore ighen,' spent much of her
-time attending to her neighbours' eyes instead of her master's house,
-wherefore he docked her of part of her munificent wages of 16_s._ a year.
-
-[Illustration: '_... gyrd abowte his bodye in iij places with towells and
-gyrdylls._']
-
-But, of course, this lay knowledge of herbs and so forth was not enough,
-for, as Andrew Borde, that man of wit and sound learning, said, quoting
-Galen, '"If Phisicions had nothing to do with Astronomy, Geomatry, Logycke
-and other sciences, coblers, curryars of lether, carpenters and smythes
-and al such manner of people wolde leave theyr craftes and be Phisicions,"
-as it apereth nowe a dayes that many coblers be; fye on such ones!'
-Without a knowledge of astronomy how could Culpeper have discovered that a
-certain French quack was 'as like Mars in Capricorne as a Pomewater is an
-Apple,' and that therefore he was a fool? It was important also to
-comprehend the mystical properties of gems, many of which exercised as
-healing an influence as any herb. So well was this recognised that in
-1217, when Alice Lunsford, a member of an old East Sussex family (whose
-later descendants endeavoured to extend its antiquity by forging Saxon
-ancestors with the delightfully improbable Christian names of David and
-Joseph), fell ill, she sent to Philip Daubigny and borrowed three rings
-from him, and when he asked for them back begged him, for the love of
-God, not to take them away, as without them she could not recover.
-Unfortunately the troops of Louis the Dauphin plundered her house shortly
-afterwards, and although she did recover Philip lost his rings, one of
-them being a sapphire for which he would not have taken 50 marks.
-
-Gems were not only held to exercise a beneficent influence when worn in
-rings or held in the mouth, but were also administered internally. Amongst
-the long list of medicines made for Edward I. during his last illness, in
-1307, is 'a comforting electuary made with ambergis, musk, pearls, and
-jacinths, and pure gold and silver.' Lower down in the list occurs 'a
-precious electuary called Dyacameron,' and a fifteenth-century book of
-prescriptions shows that this was composed of ginger, cinnamon, clove, and
-other spices, black, white, and long pepper, musk, ambergris, 'the bone of
-a stag's heart,' coral, pure gold, and shavings of ivory, amongst other
-things. This same book shows a still more elaborate preparation, called
-'The Duke's Electuary,' containing fifty ingredients, but mostly herbal,
-and not so precious or indigestible as these others. These electuaries,
-which were a kind of medicated sweetmeat, seem to have been taken in large
-quantities, as Richard de Montpelier, King Edward's apothecary, prepared
-over 280 pounds of electuaries made with sugar. These cost a shilling the
-pound, while Dyacameron ran up to 13_s._ 4_d._ the pound, and four ounces
-of rose comfits (_sucurosset_) flavoured with pearls and coral cost £3,
-13_s._ 4_d._ Oriental ambergris to put in the king's food and in his
-claret was another expensive item. But all these drugs and all the care of
-Master Nicholas de Tyngewyk, his physician, of whose skill the king held a
-high opinion, proved unavailing.
-
-A list of drugs provided for the Scottish expedition in 1323 is chiefly of
-interest as showing that the virtue of a fine-sounding name for a medicine
-was recognised some six centuries before Mr. Ponderevo hit on the sonorous
-Tono-Bungay. Here are some of the items; Oxerocrosium, Diaterascos,
-Apostolicon, Dyaculon, Ceroneum, Popilion, Agrippa, Gracia Dei--all of
-them compounds of the patent medicine types; Galbanum, Armoniak, Apoponak,
-Bedellum, Collofonium, Mastik, and Dragon's blood--simpler vegetable
-preparations; Seruse, Calamine, Litharge, and Tutie--which are mineral
-substances: Tutie being 'bred of the sparkles of brasen furnaces,
-whereinto store of the mineral Calamine beaten to dust, hath been cast.'
-Of the high-sounding preparations Popilion was so called from its
-containing poplar leaves; Diaterascos was a plaster compounded of pitch,
-wax, acetic acid, and various aromatics; Ceroneum was a similar plaster
-without the acid, containing rather more aromatics and also saffron,
-aloes, and litharge; and Dyaculon was a third variety of plaster, very
-remotely, if at all, connected with the adhesive Diachylon plasters of
-modern times. 'The oynment that is called Agrippa' was still used in the
-fifteenth century for deafness, and at that date Apostolicon was made as
-follows: Take equal quantities of 'vermod (wormwood), smallache (water
-parsley), centori, waybred (? plantain), and the rote of osmond and als
-muche of egremoyne (agrimony) as of all the others,' seethe in vinegar and
-add an ounce of 'medwax (beeswax) that is multen in woman's milk' (a
-favourite solvent). To this is added alum, galbanum, pitch, and
-turpentine, and the whole worked up into an ointment. If this is not
-sufficiently elaborate for your purpose, 'Her is makyng of Gracia Dei:
-Take betanye, pympernel and vervayn, of ilkon an handfull, bothe crope and
-rote, and wasshe hem clene and stamp hem smalle and do hem in a new erthen
-pote and put therto a galon of white wyne, and if you may get no white
-wyne take red, and sethe them till yt come to a potell:' let it cool,
-strain through canvas, seethe again, and add half-a-pound of 'gud mede
-wax, bot loke the wax be molten first, and woman's milke of knave child
-and a pond of rosyn and a pond of gome litarge and a pond of galbanum and
-a pond of popanelke (? opoponax) and a pond of arestolog rotundum
-(birth-wort) and an unce of mastike wel poudred,' stir well and then 'do
-als mykill baume (balsam) als weies a peny and a ferthyng and lete it
-sethe whil you may say iij _Miserere mei deus_ all the hole salme'; take
-off the fire, add gum turpentine, and stir till melted, strain and skim
-off any dirt with a feather. When cold it should be worked up between the
-hands until it becomes of sticky consistency, it is then to be spread on
-clean linen or leather, and is good for all manner of sores that be
-perilous. There is another method of preparing Gracia Dei which was used
-by 'Hopkyn of the fermory of Killyngworth,' that is to say in the
-infirmary at Kenilworth Priory, and a third, devised by 'the gude erl of
-Herforth' which is much more elaborate, the herbs used being 'betany,
-vervayne, pympernel, comfrey, osmond, dayshy, mousher (mouse-ear)
-weybrede, rib (? rhubarb), milfoile (the yarrow, which in Saxon leechdom
-seems to have been held good for everything from headaches to
-snake-bites), centory, anence, violete, flos campi (? campion), smalache,
-sauge, and egremoyn.'
-
-[Illustration: '_... led through the middle of the city._']
-
-When these simple remedies were not successful recourse could always be
-had to charms--either sheer pagan gibberish or rhyming prayers and
-invocations of saints. It was obviously appropriate for the sufferer from
-toothache to appeal to St. Appolonia, who was tortured by having her teeth
-broken with a mallet, but it was less obvious why a man with the falling
-sickness should cut his little finger and write with his blood the names
-of the three kings, Jasper, Balthazar, and Melchior, on a piece of
-parchment and hang it round his neck; nor do I know why SS. Nichasius and
-Cassian should be invoked against any 'erwig or any worme that is cropyn
-into a mans bed.' It was as well in any case to be sure that the charm was
-genuine, as Roger atte Hache found in 1382. His wife, Joan, being ill, he
-accepted the word of one Roger Clerk of Wandsworth that he was skilled
-in medical lore and paid him 12_d._ to undertake her cure. Clerk took a
-leaf of parchment out of a book and sewed it up in cloth of gold and bade
-Joan put it round her neck. When she got no better her husband grew
-suspicious and summoned Clerk for fraud. Clerk, being asked to explain the
-value of the piece of parchment, said that it was a good charm for fever
-and contained the words 'Anima Christi sanctifica me' and other similar
-pious expressions, but upon examination it was found that there were no
-such words upon it, and as he proved to be ignorant of physic and
-illiterate, it was adjudged that he should be led through the middle of
-the city, with trumpets and pipes, riding on a horse without a saddle,
-with the parchment and a whetstone (the recognised symbol of a liar) hung
-round his neck, and in front of him the unseemly emblem of the medical
-profession.
-
-
-
-
-V
-
-THOSE IN AUTHORITY
-
-
-It is a common delusion, or, not to beg the question before producing
-evidence, a common opinion, that England in olden times, by which I mean
-that vague period when all words were spelled with an 'e' at their end and
-most with a 'y' in the middle, was a 'merrie' place. This idea is held not
-only by the _laudatores temporis acti_, who find it safer to repine for a
-past which can never be recovered than to enthuse over a future which may
-arrive and prove disappointing, but also by those energetic persons who
-set out to make the world enjoy itself and imagine that their schemes for
-compulsory happiness will really only restore a lost gaiety to the nation.
-Life in the Middle Ages was undoubtedly more highly coloured, more varied,
-more picturesque, but that it was merrier is at least a doubtful
-assumption. As the life of a people is reflected in their arts, we may
-compare the life of the Middle Ages to the quaint, irregular lines of some
-unimproved village street, or to the older parts of such towns as
-Winchester and Guildford, and contrast it with the mid-Victorian era, the
-flattest and dullest of all periods, as typified by Brixton, or with the
-frivolity of the present day, portrayed in the outbreak of terra-cotta and
-white wood flimsinesses all over the country. But the picture is not
-complete. In the background, behind the straight sameness of 'Alma
-Terrace,' or the quirked and joggled sameness of 'Mafeking Avenue,' lies
-nothing more terrible than the 'desirable residence' or the 'eligible
-mansion.' Behind your picturesque old-world cottages frowns the shadow of
-the feudal fortress. And, as Huxley remarked to the young man who said
-that he did not see what difference it would have made to him if his
-great-grandfather had or had not been a monkey, 'it must have made a lot
-of difference to your great-grandmother.'
-
-It was not without reason that such names as Batvilayne, Scorchevilayne,
-and Maungevilayne are found amongst the landowning classes. There were men
-who would beat, scorch, or devour their villeins, and some six-and-a-half
-centuries ago an ancestor of the present Lord Ashburnham could oppress his
-tenants until they were reduced to literal beggary, and when they
-complained to the Justices could airily reply that they were his villeins
-and, short of injury to life and limb, he need not answer them. Such was
-the position of the bulk of the peasantry, but in practice they did not
-often suffer by it, for it was obviously to the advantage of the landlord
-to have prosperous tenants. It was at the hands of the officials, the
-swarm of stewards, bailiffs, catchpoles, and so forth, that the peasants,
-yeomen, and smaller gentry suffered. These men, secure in the protection
-of a chain of superiors reaching back to some great noble, lived on their
-neighbours, wringing money from them on every, or no, pretext. A favourite
-weapon was the jury list; the frequency with which juries were summoned
-and the resulting inconvenience to those called away from their work made
-the more wealthy willing to pay well for exemption; then money could be
-obtained by summoning four or five times as many jurors as were required
-and taking bribes from the superfluous to let them go home again. Another
-common object of the country-side was the 'scotale,' which was a kind of
-bean-feast. No doubt this lent an appearance of merriness to life in the
-country, just as the wriggling of the worm on the hook lent it a
-superficial air of gaiety which deceived old Isaak Walton, but it is
-questionable if the feasters really enjoyed themselves, as they knew that
-the ale which formed the main feature of the meal was brewed from malt
-which they had unwillingly contributed, and that they were paying for the
-(compulsory) privilege of consuming their own produce. Nor did the
-townsmen escape entirely; even five hundred years ago the Christmas box
-was an established extortion, and, in 1419, William Sevenok, Mayor of
-London, had to forbid the custom of the servants of the mayor, sheriffs,
-and corporation begging gifts from the tradesmen at Christmas, as it was
-found that they used threats towards those who would not give and accepted
-the gifts of others as bribes to overlook their offences against the
-trading laws. Not only at Christmas did the servants of the city and the
-court fleece the tradesmen; the doubtful privilege of supplying the royal
-court with provisions could be, and frequently was, avoided by a gift to
-the purveyors, and one result was that rogues from time to time went round
-the breweries pretending to be court purveyors and taking money to leave
-the ale alone. A rogue of a similar type, with a turn of humour, was
-William Pykemyle, who in 1379 went to the town house of the Countess of
-Norfolk, and, pretending to be a royal messenger, left word that she was
-to dine with the King at Leeds Castle, near Maidstone, next day; having
-received from her a reward of 3_s._ 4_d._ (royal messengers always
-expecting a substantial tip) he went on to the Countess of Bedford and
-gave a similar message, only making the place of dining Eltham. Whether
-the ladies kept their appointments is not recorded, but the gay deceiver
-was caught and committed to Newgate.
-
-If the men of the Middle Ages had had nothing more to complain of than
-extortion by threats and trickery they might have been merry enough, but
-when the bailiffs exercised their powers of arbitrary arrest and
-imprisonment it was another matter. From the sheriffs downwards those
-'clothed with a little brief authority' used it unscrupulously to fill
-their own pockets, dragging men off to prison on false accusations, or on
-none, and causing convicted felons to accuse the innocent of participation
-in their crimes. Release from prison depended solely upon the payment of a
-fine to the officer concerned, and was almost as easily available for the
-guilty as for the innocent. Upon occasion the powers of the law could be
-used to assist the criminal and punish his victim. During the misrule of
-the last years of Henry III., one, Wilkin of Gloseburne, accused Gilbert
-Wood of killing his son; Gilbert promptly turned the tables by bribing the
-gaoler of York, who arrested Wilkin on a charge of theft, bound him naked
-to a post in the prison, and kept him without food until he paid 40_s._
-About the same time, in Suffolk, a man stole six geese belonging to
-Constance de Barnaucle; possibly he would have argued that they were
-'barnacle geese,' and as this species notoriously grew on trees they were
-_feræ naturæ_, in which there could be no property. If so, he must have
-felt that his case was weak, as he ran away, pursued by the lady's
-servant. The thief was caught by the bailiffs of Thingoe Hundred, but
-either they were friends of his or they saw a chance of getting the geese
-themselves, for they let him go free, and when the pursuer came up they
-showed half-a-dozen other geese, which he naturally failed to identify;
-they then talked big about libel actions and false accusations and
-terrified 4_s._ out of the unlucky man's pockets.
-
-[Illustration: '_... failed to identify the geese._']
-
-Besides accusations of actual misdeeds, charges of opposing a predominant
-or favouring a fallen faction could be used for purposes of extortion.
-Towards the end of the reign of Edward II., when the Despensers were in
-power, Alan of Teesdale, chamberlain to the younger Despenser, with the
-assistance of Geoffrey Eston, the villainous gaoler of York, started a
-report that Sir John de Barton had spoken ill of Hugh le Despenser,
-whereat Hugh was much moved and furiously threatened Sir John, who for
-fear of his power had to give them lands to appease their lord. The same
-two scoundrels burnt down part of one of Alan's own mills and then laid
-the blame first on Sir John de Barton, then on Thomas Vipont, and finally
-on the Abbot of Byland, all of whom, for fear of the Despenser, paid heavy
-compensation. They further extorted lands from Master Thomas de Leuesham
-by threatening to accuse him of having been a partisan of Andrew de
-Harclay, who, after winning the earldom of Carlisle by his loyalty at
-Boroughbridge in 1322, had, the following year, been dramatically
-degraded and executed as a traitor. Nearly a century earlier, Robert
-Passelewe, Justice of the Jews, had extorted £60 from John le Prestre, a
-wealthy Jew, by threatening to commit him to Corfe Castle for having
-financed the Bishop of Carlisle and Hubert de Burgh, then in disgrace.
-From the same Jew Passelewe extorted, amongst other things, a cameo worth
-40 marks; he seems to have had an appreciation for jewels, as he
-appropriated a 'camehew' and an emerald belonging to a Jew who was hanged,
-and made Benedict Crispin give him another cameo, which he afterwards gave
-to the Queen. Crispin was fleeced by several persons in high places and
-had to part with another of his cameos, 'on which was engraved a chariot
-with two angels,' to Peter de Rievaux, the Treasurer.
-
-If the Jews were plundered we may at least put it to the credit of our
-ancestors that they showed a fine impartiality in according similar
-treatment to Christian clergy. The sheriff of Yorkshire, in 1315, wishing
-to persuade Master Henry de Percy, rector of Wharrom, to surrender his
-church, handed him over to Geoffrey Eston,[2] the gaoler of York, of whom
-we have already said something, who bound him to a convicted criminal and
-kept him five days without food or drink; at the end of that time he paid
-£20 to be released, but he kept his church. Encouraged by this, the
-sub-sheriff followed his superior's example and brought the rector of
-Whixley to Geoffrey, who confined him 'in a horrible place in the prison'
-until he produced 20 marks. Most prisons, probably, had a 'horrible
-place,' usually an underground dungeon, such as 'the pit of the gaol' at
-Exeter, or the 'fosse' at Newgate, or the place in the King's Bench
-prison called by the grim humour of the fifteenth century 'Paradise,' from
-which Alexander Lokke, who had been detained there 'alle this holy tyme of
-Cristemasse,' begged to be removed to some other prison. Apart from these
-dungeons the comfort of the prisoners depended largely on their possession
-of money; they were not 'lodged at his majesty's expense,' but were
-dependent upon money supplied by friends or on the alms of the charitable,
-and their position when the gaoler was a tyrant was unenviable. In the
-reign of Henry VIII. the keeper of Norwich gaol, Andrew Asketell, 'of his
-uncharitabill and covetous mind' oppressed the poor prisoners, charging
-them twice as much for ale as it cost outside--and ale, it must be
-remembered, was in those days really 'the people's food in liquid
-form'--and when kind people sent 'a potte ale' to the prisoners he made
-his servants pour the drink in the streets and break the vessels. But he
-did this once too often, when 'a litill boy haveng a veray power woman to
-his moder in prison brought to her to ye prison wyndow a crok with ale.'
-Edward Rede, alderman and J.P., seeing her drink thus snatched from her,
-kindly sent her 'a cruse with drynk.' The arrival of this widow's cruse so
-annoyed the keeper that he came up to the alderman and insulted him,
-calling him 'a Bedlam man,' and as a result he saw prison life from a
-fresh point of view. Some two centuries earlier Newgate was controlled by
-Edmund le Lorimer, who ill-treated his prisoners shockingly, keeping them
-short of food, depriving them of their share in the common alms, and
-preventing them communicating with their friends. He robbed them, taking
-from Roger Martel a gold cross with four garnets and a 'pere crapaudyn' or
-toad-stone, the precious jewel which a toad bears in its head and which is
-an invaluable antidote to poison, and he inflicted such severe 'penaunce'
-to extort money that many died, including a knight, Sir John de Horn, and
-that Roger de Colney, being loaded with irons and deprived of food,
-snatched a knife from a companion and cut his throat.
-
-All those in authority were not brutes; it is even recorded of a Suffolk
-bailiff that finding on his recovery from illness that his deputy had been
-guilty of extortion, he returned the money and dismissed the deputy. But
-the reports from Yorkshire in 1275 were fairly typical; the bailiff of the
-Earl of Lincoln had done 'many acts of oppression, rapine, and injuries
-beyond belief'; 'many other things, beyond number and astonishing,' were
-related of the sub-sheriff, and 'innumerable devilish acts of oppression'
-were accredited to the steward of Earl Warenne. The earl himself was a man
-of violence, who had turned about a fifth part of the county of Sussex
-into a game preserve, and maintained armed keepers to prevent the peasants
-from driving the deer out of their corn. The story is well known how, when
-King Edward's commissioners demanded by what title he held his lands, he
-produced a rusty sword and said 'by this my ancestors won their lands and
-by this I will defend them.' Like most well-known stories this is
-apocryphal, and in any case a distaff would have been more appropriate, as
-his lands had descended through an heiress, but that he would have been
-willing to protect his lands with the sword is likely enough. One of his
-descendants, the Earl of Surrey of the time of Henry VIII. seems to have
-inherited some of his lawlessness, as he was charged with 'a lewde and
-unsemely manner of walking in the night abowght the stretes and breaking
-wyth stonebowes (_i.e._ catapults) of certeyne wyndowes.' It does not
-appear that he wanted 'Votes for Peers' and, in fact, he admitted that he
-'hadde verye evyll done therein,' and was sent to the Fleet prison.
-
-Life must certainly have been more exciting, if not merrier, in now
-peaceful Sussex when Earl John de Warenne was alive. He was carrying on a
-sort of private war with his neighbour, Robert Aguillon, who was also on
-bad terms with his other neighbour, William de Braose, while further west,
-at Midhurst, was John de Bohun, who displayed his contempt for the law by
-attacking Luke de Vienne on the high road and ducking him in a horse-pond
-when he was on his way to hold a court. The son and namesake of this
-William de Braose showed his temper by insulting one of the Justices of
-the King's Court who had given judgment against him. Edward I. was not the
-man to excuse such conduct; he had, indeed, banished the Prince of Wales
-from court for insolence towards a judge, and Braose had to walk in
-penitential garb through Westminster Hall when the court was sitting and
-apologise to the justice. With such examples set by their lords it is not
-surprising that the smaller men adopted an attitude of swagger and
-arrogance, riding with armed followers through markets and fairs for the
-mere pleasure of frightening the people. As an example of apparently
-pointless insolence, the constable of Shrewsbury gave his groom 4_d._ to
-go through the village of Cressage calling out 'Wekare, Wekare,' to
-insult both men and women. The character of the insult is not obvious, but
-it was evidently clear to those concerned, as a woman dared to
-remonstrate; the groom struck at her and wounded a man who came to her
-assistance, but then had to fly and was shot--for which his lord obtained
-full compensation.
-
-[Illustration: '_... ducking him in a horse-pond._']
-
-Whatever the meaning of 'Wekare,' there can be no doubt of the insult
-conveyed by Robert Sutton to Roger of Portland, clerk of the Sheriff of
-London, when he exclaimed in full court, 'Tprhurt, tprhurt!' This
-monosyllable is a very trumpet blast of contempt and its significance
-surely did not require to be emphasised by Robert's 'raising his
-thumb'--whether to his nose or not it is not stated, which is a pity, as
-it would have been interesting to find the 'long nose' flourishing in
-1290. City Officers, and more particularly mayors and aldermen, were very
-touchy, seeing and punishing 'vile and abominable abuse' in the most
-harmless retort, and my sympathy is certainly with Collard, the cobbler,
-who was sent to prison at Norwich because, when the mayor ordered him to
-take off his beard he refused to do so and said, 'Noo, I was ones shaven
-and I made an othe I wolde never have off my berde again, I was so evell
-shaven.' Still there is no doubt that however arbitrary the authorities
-may have been they also had their trials, and, if officials often abused
-their powers, their was another side to the question. Smaller men than
-William de Braose could, upon occasion, tell the judges what they thought
-of them. In 1300 one Henry de Biskele came into the Sussex county court
-and asked leave to say certain matters 'on the king's behalf,' and having
-thus obtained silence and the attention of the whole court, he broke out
-into violent abuse of one of the justices, calling him a liar and using
-other opprobrious terms, for which he was lucky to escape with a fine of
-20_s._ Some fifty years later a more violent act of contempt of court
-occurred at Pevensey. John de Molyns, the Queen's steward, came to hold a
-court there, but being busy appointed a deputy to take his place in the
-morning; this official seems to have irritated the townsmen, and when he
-ordered them to withdraw outside the bar, contrary to their local custom,
-Roger Porter replied by challenging him to come outside and fight. During
-the luncheon interval the deputy reported the state of affairs, and in the
-afternoon the steward himself came to the court, preceded by the portreeve
-carrying his white wand of office, but the townsmen refused to come when
-summoned, Roger and Simon Porter in particular declaring that they were
-not bound to attend. At last the steward rose in wrath and started to
-seize the two Porters, who fled to their house and with drawn swords stood
-in the doorway. A pitched battle ensued between them and the steward's
-men, in which several were injured, but in the end victory rested with the
-law.
-
-[Illustration: '_... with drawn swords stood in the doorway._']
-
-Even the King's Court at Westminster was not safe from disturbance. In
-1332 John Parles, acting as attorney for Adam Basset in a plea of debt
-against Florence de Aldham, was waiting in the great hall at Westminster,
-where the court was in session. He was sitting on a table 'close to the
-sellers of jewels,' from which it would seem that the lower end of the
-hall was used for stalls, or at any rate for peddling jewellery, even
-while cases were proceeding. Presently Florence came up with two men and
-abused John Parles, threatening to kill him if he did not abandon the
-suit; Richard Calware dragged him off the table and struck him a blow
-which drew blood and Thomas Newark whipped out a knife and would have
-killed him if he had not been restrained. John at once made his way to the
-bar and complained to the judges, who ordered the arrest of his
-assailants, but they struggled towards the door and were joined by Thomas
-of Thornhamton with his sword drawn. But the clerks of the court,
-apprentices, and attorneys barred the doors and disarmed them, and they
-were all handed over to the warden of the Tower.
-
-In all these cases the disturbers of the peace met with prompt defeat, but
-sometimes they were more successful, though their success was usually
-temporary and vengeance overtook them sooner or later. No courts seem to
-have been so unpopular as those of the Church; dealing with moral
-offences, they touched the lives of the people in a way which must have
-led to constant irritation, even if the archdeacons and their summoners
-had not been unfair and extortionate. That they were so was the pretty
-general opinion of mediæval Englishmen, from Chaucer to his contemporary
-John Belgrave, who, when the archdeacon of Leicester was going to hold a
-court, set up in his church a clearly written bill setting forth that the
-archdeacon and his officials might well rank with the judges who condemned
-Susannah, giving unrighteous judgment, oppressing the innocent, and
-suffering evildoers. This so terrified the archdeacon and his officials,
-possibly made cowards by their consciences, that they dared not hold their
-courts. Civil courts were also liable to be broken up, especially the
-open-air courts held by sheriffs. On one occasion, in the fourteenth
-century, when the sheriff of Sussex was holding such a court, John
-Ashburnham rode up, with a small boy bearing his tabard, and so threatened
-the sheriff that he incontinently fled. To hasten his going Ashburnham
-whistled on his fingers--a street-boy's accomplishment to which I must
-admit I have never managed to attain in spite of repeated efforts--at
-which whistle his esquire and other men in ambush suddenly rose up. Even
-the assize courts were liable to be interfered with, especially in the
-north, and at the end of the reign of Edward II. there were in Lancashire
-several men of position who rode about with armed bands and turned up at
-the courts with fifty or sixty ruffians to persuade their adversaries not
-to proceed with their suits, or, if such peaceful picketing proved
-unavailing, to terrorise the justices. Chief of these was Sir Walter
-Bradshaw. He had been one of the sworn adherents of Sir Adam Banaster in
-his rebellion, and having assisted in the attack on Liverpool Castle and
-the capture of Halton, had fled the country after the defeat of his
-friends at Preston. Returning later, he carried on a private war with Sir
-Richard de Holand, another ruffian of the same kidney, each of them riding
-about with small armies, oppressing each other's tenants and openly
-defying the courts. These quarrels between county families were
-undoubtedly more exciting when the process of cutting one another was
-conducted with swords instead of with averted eyes and upturned noses, but
-whether they were more conducive to the merriness of their rival retainers
-may be doubted. These retainers, if we may trust Sir Ralph Evers, did not
-always play their parts with the politeness and courtesy which their
-masters displayed, and, in fact, on one occasion he remonstrated with Sir
-Roger Hastings' servant, saying, 'Ye false hurson kaytyffes, I shall lerne
-you curtesy and to knowe a gentilman.' It is possible that he was feeling
-irritated at the time, as he had been lying in wait to ambush Sir Roger,
-and it must have been annoying to find that he had only caught his
-servants. Sir Roger himself seems to have been rather quick-tempered; he
-had a grudge against one Ralph Jenner, and on his way to church on
-Christmas Day discovered that Ralph was in the church; he at once decided
-that the season of peace and goodwill was a suitable occasion to make an
-end of his quarrel (and of his adversary), but the vicar flung himself on
-his knees before him, while Lady Hastings ran up to Ralph Jenner
-exclaiming, 'Woo worthe man this day! The chirche wolbe suspended and thou
-slayn withoute thou flee away and gette thee oute of his sighte.'
-Whereupon Ralph, either out of consideration for the parishioners or
-himself, prudently fled.
-
-[Illustration: '_He incontinently fled._']
-
-It sometimes happened that these imperious gentry reaped the reward of
-their own lawlessness and goaded their oppressed tenants to active
-rebellion. As early as the twelfth century the sheriff of Hants is found
-grimly entering in his accounts money spent on doing justice on the
-peasants who burned their lord. At Faccombe in the same county, in 1426,
-John Punchardon, lord of the manor, was dragged from his bed one Sunday
-night, carried out into the fields, and there done to death. In this case
-there was probably some personal feeling in the matter, as the murderers
-included five members of the family of Cosyn, whose ancestors had formerly
-held the manor, but who had now come down to the position of labourers. A
-case in which the motive of rebellion was more clearly resentment to
-oppression occurred at Preston in Sussex, in 1280, when the villeins of
-Simon de Pierpoint set fire to his manor-house, and with drawn knives and
-flourished axes compelled him to swear upon the Gospels that he would
-demand no services from them without their consent, and would take no
-action against them for their violence. At the same time they destroyed
-their lord's tabard, so beat his charger that it could never be used again
-and slew his 'gentle falcon,' thus wreaking their wrath on the outward
-signs of his nobility. Such revolts were much more common in towns; for
-instance, at Lynne, in 1313, when Robert Muhaut tried to exercise his
-authority in a new direction, a crowd of tradesmen, under the leadership
-of the prior, assaulted his house, dragged him out and made him stand on a
-stall in the market-place and swear on the Host that he would not
-interfere with the town officers. At Bristol, also about the same time,
-the burgesses quarrelled with the castellan, barricaded the streets and
-erected an embattled wall from behind which they shot into the castle, and
-at Oxford the watchmen were on several occasions shot at with arrows:--I
-have known, in more recent times, a casual shot at a proctor with a lump
-of sugar have more disastrous effects--to the shooter.
-
-[Illustration: '_... compellyd them for to devour the same writte._']
-
-But if the lords of manors, town officials, and judges occasionally found
-their authority slighted and their persons endangered by the disrespect of
-those who should have been subservient to them, their trials were not to
-be compared with those of the inferior officers such as bailiffs. In the
-fourteenth century, when Philip of Berwick was elected as bailiff of
-Hailsham, he had to fly for his life to escape from a certain John of
-Buckholt, who terrorised the whole neighbourhood, chasing the vicar into
-his church, killing several persons, and so frightening the coroner that
-he dared not hold any inquests. With such men about as this John of
-Buckholt, who was known as king among his people, the life of a bailiff
-was not a happy one, and in particular, the life of the process-server was
-exciting, but not necessarily merry. It can hardly have been cheering to
-the man who had to serve a writ in Drayton Basset to know that the
-offenders were boasting that 'whoo so ever wold be so bolde to serve any
-warrant there shuld runne upon a pycheforke.' It was also not an uncommon
-experience that Thomas Talbot and Thomas Gaiford had when they served a
-writ on Agnes Motte, who 'reysyd upp her neghburs with wepyns drawen for
-to slee and mordre the said bryngers of the writte and compellyd them for
-to devour the same writte and ther, sitting upon ther knees, in saving of
-ther lyves, eete the writte bothe wex and parchement,' in fact, from the
-number of similar instances recorded it would almost seem that
-writ-servers must have been accustomed to a diet of wax and parchment.
-There seems also to have been a custom of serving writs in church, not
-unattended with risk, as the sacredness of the place does not seem always
-to have subdued the temper of the recipient. When William Nash served a
-writ on John Archer in Ilmingdon churchyard he retorted by threatening to
-make him eat it, and afterwards, as Nash was kneeling in the church, he
-came up to him and said, 'Pray, longenekked horesson, by Goddes armes,
-thou shalt be hanged ere I ete holy bred.' John Cheyney, also, when he was
-served with a writ in church, took the server by the shoulders and thrust
-him out of the church, saying that he would slit his nose, stove his eyes,
-crop his ears, and 'make hym a curtall.'
-
-[Illustration: '_... thrust him out of the church._']
-
-No, taking into consideration the injuries inflicted by the more powerful
-men in authority upon those subject to them and the pains suffered by
-those having the responsibilities of office without its powers, I do not
-think the mediæval populace was always merry and bright, and if any one,
-after reading this article, still thinks that England in the Middle Ages
-was a 'merrie' place, I can only say with Robert Sutton, 'Tprhurt,
-tprhurt!'
-
-
-
-
-VI
-
-IVORY AND APES AND PEACOCKS
-
-
-There is a sentence in the biblical account of the wonders of Solomon's
-reign that has always had a fascination for me. 'Once in three years came
-the navy of Tarshish bringing gold and silver, ivory and apes and
-peacocks.' And the fascination lies not in the crude magnificence of tusks
-and ingots, the burnished brilliance of peacocks, or the uncanny, too
-human, grotesqueness of apes, but in all the varied multitude of unnamed
-articles which must have constituted the cargo of those far-faring ships
-of Tarshish--gaudy tissues interwoven with bettle-wings, strange shells,
-jewel-crusted swords, carvings in sandal-wood and in the wood of the
-mysterious almug tree. Possibly the almug tree is not mysterious to the
-well-informed man, but I admit that I have always carefully avoided
-looking it up; I might say, as was said of the purple cow, 'I never saw an
-almug tree, I never want to see one,' because I am certain that it would
-prove a vast disappointment. The unlading of a ship is an enlarged and, it
-must be admitted, less personal version of the unpacking of a Christmas
-hamper, a joy apportioned to childhood, not, in nine cases out of ten,
-because in our maturer years we lose the appreciation of disinterring the
-unexpected from swathings of paper, string, and straw, but because the
-opportunities are denied us. Of course, it is given to few to unpack a
-ship, and there may be persons of little imagination to whom a bill of
-lading seems dull and uninspiring, but to me every such list is a
-potential hamper. When the bill of lading is of the fifteenth century
-there is added something of the feeling which we have when turning out a
-drawer in an old forgotten bureau of our great-grandmother's. The everyday
-objects of that time are now unfamiliar, and our ingenuity is taxed to
-guess the use of some of them, while on the other hand it is quite a shock
-to find that other things which we still use were known so long ago.
-
-[Illustration: '_latten "Agnus Dei."_']
-
-The hold of a ship, like poverty, makes strange bed-fellows acquaint. A
-hundred distaves, emblems of peaceful home-life, came into London port in
-1390 side by side with ninety-three dozen swords, these latter for Gerard
-van Barle, who must have been either an armourer in business on a very
-large scale, or else an army contractor. Six hundred oranges, at fifteen a
-penny, we find sandwiched between eight barrels of varnish and nine glass
-cups; a jar of preserved dates is thrust in between twelve yards of linen
-cloth and a barrel containing seven and a half dozen beaver hats. A ship
-of Dieppe came into Winchelsea harbour in 1490 with damask and satin and
-pipes of wine, razors and needles and mantles of leopard skins, five gross
-of playing-cards and eight gross of latten 'Agnus Dei.' These last, which
-I regret to say seem to have been considerably less valued than the
-'devil's books' which accompanied them, were plaques stamped with the
-figure of the holy Lamb, and it would seem that they were so common that
-the word became a synonym for a plaque, as in an inventory of the jewels
-of Henry VII. occurs 'an Agnus of the Salutation of Our Lady.' In the same
-way the component parts of the rosary became so intimately associated in
-men's minds with prayers that when we read in a list of cargo of
-'pater-nosters' or 'bedys' of amber, coral, tin, or 'tree' it is
-impossible to be sure whether they were rosaries or beads in the modern
-sense of ornaments. Devotional objects naturally figured largely in the
-imports of mediæval days, images of painted wood or tin occurring with
-frequency in the London customs accounts of 1390, and the alabaster
-carvings for which England, and in particular Nottingham, was famous form
-quite the most interesting of our exports in the fifteenth century. As a
-whole it must be admitted that our exports at that time were very dull
-compared to our imports; cloth, hides, and corn are but uninspiring
-merchandise, and although the frequent mention of ale and beer might cheer
-the heart of Mr. Belloc or the late Mr. Calverley it leaves me cold. One
-item, however, is interesting in the fifteenth-century exports from
-Bristol, and that is the constant occurrence in cargoes for Ireland, and
-for nowhere else, of casks of 'corrupt wine.' This looks like 'another
-injustice to Ireland.' With this untempting liquor went a good quantity of
-honey, possibly to counteract its acidity, and of 'battery-ware,' which
-was really such things as kettles, but may have been endeared to the Irish
-from an imaginary connection with assault.
-
-If the exported cloth was uninspiring in its lack of variety the same
-charge cannot be brought against the imported stuffs. There is some room
-for imagination in the cargo of Matthew Clayson's boat, which brought
-kerchiefs of Cyprus and Syria (so at least I interpret _cirian_), oriental
-kerchiefs and glittering (_relusant_) kerchiefs, with 707 lb. of pins
-wherewith to fasten them. There is also something satisfactory about
-baudrik powdered with Cyprian gold, and even about chamelet and sarcenet.
-I own to a delight in the old drapery terms, and, whatever their merits as
-materials, I feel that our modern trade terms such as viyella and eoline
-(if these be their names) are feeble and finicking besides arras, bayes,
-bewpers, boulters, borratoes, buffins, bustyans, bombacyes, calimancoes,
-carrells, dornicks, frisadoes, fustians, grograines, mockadoes, minnikins,
-makarells, oliotts, pomettes, plumettes, perpetuanas, rashes, russells,
-sayes, stamells, tukes, tamettes, and woadmolles. But if these and similar
-words have a fascination it is partly a fascination of the unknown, and I
-should be grateful to any one who could tell me what it was that Walter
-Hake brought into London port in 1390, for, besides two barrels with
-fourteen nests of mazer cups and other recognisable goods, he carried
-three thousand five hundred 'redwark,' ten hundred 'ruskyn,' as much
-'popl,' and, most puzzling of all, eight thousand 'of good work' (_boni
-operis_). I admit the temptation to endow the work with plurality and to
-set this load of good works in opposition to a contemporary Rabelaisian
-cargo of 'fartes of Portingale.'
-
-[Illustration: '_... playing innumerable pranks._']
-
-So far the cargoes of our ships have not greatly resembled those of the
-ships of Tarshish, but, if the peacocks are to seek, we can easily find
-the ivory, in the shape of combs, and as to the apes the _Clement_ of Rye
-in 1490 brought home four dozen baboons (_baboynes_). It must, however, be
-admitted that these baboons would not have found a home at the Zoo--they
-were in fact little grotesque figures, and in that sense the word occurs
-often in mediæval inventories. Edward III. had not only a number of
-pieces of plate with 'babewyns' upon them, but one cup described as gilt
-and enamelled with 'diverse babwynrie.' At the same time the real monkey
-was a common enough object; he figures in the margin of scores of
-illuminated manuscripts, playing innumerable pranks, not infrequently in
-the dress of a priest, a monk, or a friar. Monkeys were kept by many of
-the nobles, and when Thomas Becket went, as Chancellor of England, on an
-embassy to the court of France an ape sat on every pack horse of his
-gorgeous cavalcade. The merchandise of Venice in 1436 included 'Apes and
-japes and marmusettes tayled,' and so far was the ape a common import that
-at many seaports monkeys figured in the customs lists, the due at Norwich
-being 40_d._ each, no small sum. With the monkey in these lists is also
-found the bear, who at Norwich paid 42_d._ for admission to the country.
-Bears were even commoner sights than monkeys, for not only were there the
-performing bears in charge of itinerant showmen, but many of the poor
-brutes were kept for sport, to be baited by dogs. It was probably for
-purposes of sport that Sir John Bourchier, Earl of Bath, kept half-a-dozen
-bears, which after the Reformation he stabled in the dismantled priory of
-the Black Friars at Fisherton, near Salisbury. There they lived happily
-until, according to Harry Sutton, their keeper, John Davy and Agnes his
-wife with other naughty and evil-disposed persons broke into the close
-where they were kept, and Agnes, 'being thene of most wyckyd and damnable
-disposicion,' scattered poisoned bread on the ground and in the water
-where the bears drank. As a result three of the bears died, as did also a
-poor man's sow that drank of the pond; and a poor woman who washed her
-face in the water 'so swelled that she was like to have died,' which I
-take leave to think was an exaggeration on the part of Harry Sutton. There
-is always another side to every story, and according to John Davy he had a
-lease of part of the friary lands, and his wife was quite peaceably
-walking there when Sutton, to frighten her away, untied 'the grettyste and
-most terryble bere' and set him at her, whereat she being 'sore affrayed
-and abashed' ran away and in running fell over a sow, not the poor man's
-sow that died, but a sow of lead, and received a hurt from which she died.
-The two versions are singularly divergent, and if Sutton could show three
-dead bears and a sow in support of his story, Davy could show a dead wife
-in support of his.
-
-Henry III. was the proud possessor of a polar bear, which used to be taken
-for a swim in the Thames to disport itself and to catch fish, no doubt to
-the great joy of the young Londoners. This was a present from the King of
-Norway, and gifts of strange beasts were often made to our kings, the
-favourites naturally being lions and leopards, in allusion to the royal
-arms, the Black Prince on one occasion sending his father a lion and a
-leopard. In passing it may be remarked that it is a curious trait of the
-heraldic lion that it cannot look a man in the face; when a lion looks at
-you it becomes a leopard. This, I admit, sounds rather like the
-schoolboy's description of the tortuous river of Palestine, 'The Jordan
-runs straight down the middle of the map, but when you look at it it
-wriggles,'--but it is none the less a fact. In early heraldry the lean and
-fearsome beast that does duty for a lion when seen in profile is called a
-leopard when its full face is shown; it is true that a later generation of
-heraldic writers converted the three golden leopards of England into
-'lions passant guardant,' but leopards they were, and, for those of us who
-prefer the heraldry of the classic period to its debased and jargonised
-descendant, leopards they remain. At the same time, as the live lions
-could hardly be expected to look continuously over their left shoulders,
-the royal menagerie at the tower was usually stocked with real leopards
-as well as lions. For generations, and indeed centuries, the lions of the
-Tower enjoyed much the same privileged position as the eponymous bears of
-Berne, and were so emphatically the sight to which all country cousins, by
-a humane version of 'Christianos ad leones,' had to be taken that their
-name became, and remains, synonymous with all that is double-asterisked by
-Baedeker.
-
-[Illustration: '_When a lion looks at you it becomes a leopard._']
-
-Mediæval Englishmen seem to have a partiality for strange beasts, combined
-with a reluctance to pay exorbitant fees for seeing them. In 1364 Edward
-III. had to order the mayor and sheriffs of London to protect Roger Owery
-and John Want, to whom he had committed the custody of a certain Egyptian
-beast called an 'Oure,' various persons, who apparently wished to see the
-beast without paying, having threatened to assault them and kill the
-'Oure.' What this creature was is not clear; possibly it was the aurochs
-or buffalo--Borde's 'vengeable beast,' the Bovy of Bohemia. Whatever it
-was its keepers, who had no doubt looked forward to making a good thing
-out of exhibiting it, seem to have had a doubtful bargain, and the same
-fate befell Thomas Charles, 'squier,' and William Lynde just about a
-century later when they obtained from the king the keeping of his 'foul
-called an Estrich.' They sent the ostrich round the country in charge of
-Richard Axsmith and John Piers, 'for to disporte with the sight of hym the
-kynges true lieges,'--and incidentally, though they do not think that
-worth mentioning, to put money in their own pockets. 'How be hit that
-oother mysdoers in certain places wher lite reverence is doon or shewed to
-anything of the kinges, as the dede hathe proven, have withoute cause
-wrongfully doon grete trespasses and offenses as wel to the said foul as
-to Richard Axsmyth and John Piers.' At Royston a mob, egged on by the
-prior, assaulted the keepers and caused the ostrich 'to ben seyn of alle
-peuple' and the unfortunate 'fowle' was 'hurten so sore that he may
-never be hool, as hit on hym wel appereth.' When they came to Norwich one
-of the sheriffs cast them into prison as 'false Flemings,' and 'caused the
-foul to be seyn in the common strete of alle peuple that list to come seen
-hym for nought.' Nor did they have any better luck at the next town, Bury
-St. Edmunds, where they were again imprisoned and the bird exhibited for
-nothing, the townsmen 'axing hem who made hem so hardy as to go on with
-the kinges foule about among his peuple without a commission.' This seems
-to have been the end of their tour in the eastern counties.
-
-[Illustration: '_The unfortunate "fowle" was "hurten so sore."_']
-
-The ostrich does not often occur under that name, but its egg was often
-made into a cup, under the name of a griffon's egg or 'grype's ey.' Edward
-III. had more than one 'oef de greffon,' and Henry IV. had half-a-dozen
-'gryppesheys,' but possibly by this time the term was only conventional
-and the true origin of the egg was known, as one of these 'gryppesheys'
-was mounted on 'two white ostriches.' The griffin, half eagle and half
-lion, was a very popular mediæval beast; that no specimen is ever recorded
-to have been taken round on show may have been due to the fact that this
-beast 'so much disdaineth vassalrey and subjection that he will never be
-surprised alive.' The appearance amongst the jewels of Richard II. of an
-almsdish supported by two griffons suggests an analogy with its modern
-relation the Jubjub, of which it is said that 'In charity meetings it
-stands at the door, And collects though it does not subscribe.' If doubt
-is to be thrown on examples of the griffon's eggs, still more dubitable is
-the 'drinking vessel made of the horn of a griffon, mounted in copper
-gilt,' which belonged to Edward III. This may well rank with a relic
-preserved in the Cathedral Priory of Rochester,--'the rod of Moses which
-budded,'--in view of the fact that it was Aaron's rod which budded and
-that a griffon has no horns.
-
-If our forefathers never had a chance of seeing a griffon and failed to
-appreciate an ostrich when they did see one, there is no question that
-they saw and appreciated the first elephant that landed in England. It was
-a present from King Louis of France to Henry III. and landed at Sandwich
-in 1255, whence it proceeded leisurely to London, filling all beholders
-with astonishment. It only lived a couple of years, and when its successor
-came over I do not know, but I suspect that there was a very long interval
-before England was again visited by an elephant. Before its lamented
-decease it sat for its portrait to Matthew Paris and another contemporary
-chronicler, and the resulting sketches are quite recognisable. The
-elephant was not a very favourite subject with mediæval artists, though
-the Earl of Arundel in 1397 had a piece of tapestry (probably oriental)
-'powdered with lions, olyfauntes and imagery,' and if any one wants to
-know what it was like they have only to go to an old house in Market
-Street at Rye, where they can see just such a piece of tapestry,
-'olyfauntes' and all, reproduced as a wall-painting. Talking of elephants,
-a learned man not many years back wrote an article with the fascinating
-title, 'How the Elephant became a Bishop'; as a matter of fact it dealt
-with the evolution of the chess 'bishop,' but what a title for a fairy
-tale!
-
-Elephants, to one mediævally minded, infallibly suggest dragons, for it is
-notorious that there was bitter enmity between elephants and dragons. And
-the subject of dragons is a wide one. So far as I know the last, in
-Western Europe at least, was killed in the Roman Campagna in 1660, its
-slayer himself dying from the poison in its breath, but it was less than
-half a century before that, in 1614 to be precise, that a young
-half-fledged dragon--it was nine feet long and its wings were only just
-sprouting--was seen in Sussex, at Faygate in St. Leonards Forest. Of
-course in earlier times they were much more numerous; Switzerland swarmed
-with them, in fact Lucerne seems to have been almost as much the happy
-hunting-ground of the dragon and the cockatrice as it is now of the Cook's
-tourist. The northern counties, especially Durham and Northumberland, were
-also much pestered by 'laidly worms'; two estates were held of the Bishop
-of Durham from early time by exhibiting to him annually the swords with
-which redoubtable ancestors of the tenants had slain the Worm of Sockburn
-and the fearsome Brawn of Brancepeth, a boar to which all ordinary boars
-were but as ordinary cattle to the Dun Cow, slain by Guy of Warwick with a
-sword still shown at Warwick Castle. Perhaps the most satisfactory dragon
-on record was that slain at Rhodes in 1345 by Deodatus de Gonzago. That
-wily and prudent knight constructed a pantomine dragon on the pattern of
-the real article and made two of his servants get inside and work it
-realistically; in this manner he accustomed his horse and his dogs to
-dragon-baiting, and his trouble was rewarded by the death of the monster
-and his own election to the mastership of the Knights of St. John.
-Another famous dragon was the Tarask. It seems that when St. Mary
-Magdalene landed at Marseilles she installed herself in a dragon's cave;
-the dragon was unceremoniously ejected and went off higher up the Rhone;
-but he had no luck; the first person he met on landing was St. Martha, who
-gave him a good dressing down and handed him over to the peasants, who
-slew him but immortalised his name in Tarascon. There were a great many
-varieties of dragons, but I think the most curious that I have met was one
-of silver gilt belonging to Henry IV. which was described as 'au guyse
-d'un boterflie'; anything less like a dragon than a butterfly it would be
-difficult to imagine. At the same time some of these terrible beasts seem
-to have been quite insignificant. The amphisbæna, though it developed in
-the Bestiaries into a fearsome dragon with a head at each end, started as
-quite a small worm, so small indeed that a whole one could be carried on
-the person without inconvenience. So carried it prevented the wearer from
-ever feeling chilly; in which respect it would seem to have been the
-opposite of the salamander, whose flesh was so cold that it quenched fire.
-Henry V. bought a parrot, two monkeys, and three salamanders from a
-fishmonger. I wonder what the salamanders were; if they were the squabby
-and unattractive lizard, black, with yellow spots, which now goes by that
-name I fear the king must have been disappointed. If he experimented upon
-their alleged ability to live in fire, or at least to extinguish it, I
-fear the disappointment would have been shared by the salamanders.
-
-[Illustration: '_... constructed a pantomime dragon on the pattern of the
-real article._']
-
-Besides the monsters of the land and air there were, of course, mediæval
-varieties of the sea-serpent. Matthew Paris records that in 1255 a monster
-bigger than the biggest whale was thrown up on the coast of Norfolk. As
-this was the year in which the first elephant came over I almost wondered
-if two had started and one had fallen overboard and been drowned, but
-quite by accident I came upon a legal case connected with this very sea
-monster, arising out of foreshore rights and rights of wreck, which showed
-that the creature, whatever it was, was very much alive when first seen,
-as no less than six boats were sunk in effecting its capture.
-Unfortunately no description of the monster is given, but probably it was
-a great sperm whale. Fifteen years earlier, in 1240, according to the
-same chronicler, there was a great battle of whales off the mouth of the
-Thames, and one of the wounded came up the river, just managed to squeeze
-through the arches of London Bridge and got as far as Mortlake before it
-was killed. A fresh-water monster, or at least one which started life in a
-river and developed in a well but afterwards took to the land, was the
-terrible Lambton worm, which seems after all to have been more of a
-nuisance than a danger, as, so long as it got its trough full of milk
-regularly, it was content to lie about, coiled round Lambton Hill.
-
-Terrible beasts were the basilisk--for which I have always felt an
-affection since I saw his portrait by Carpaccio in the church of St.
-George of the Sclavs (after much furious argument with a gondolier who
-knew no St. George but S. Giorgio Maggiore) at Venice--the cockatrice, and
-that strange hybrid of the two, the basilcok, known chiefly for its mean
-and unrelenting enmity to the centichore or yale, the strange pig-antelope
-who now sits once more as he sat of yore on the bridge at Hampton Court.
-Terrible beasts all; but none so morally destructive as that noble friend
-of man, the horse. Everybody knows the famous derivation of hypocrite,
-'from two Greek words--hippos, a horse, and krites, a judge: a
-horse-dealer, therefore, a deceiver.' The Archbishop of York would seem to
-have been of the same opinion when he inhibited the cellarer of Newburg
-from dealing in horses, on the ground that it was not fitting for a man of
-religion, because in the negotiations between buyer and seller it is
-almost impossible to avoid sin. It would have been well if John Hill,
-vicar of Coliton in Devon in 1426, had considered this before he sold a
-horse to Walter Trouns, 'knowing the horse to have contracted divers
-diseases and to be incapable of working.' From the description the horse
-would seem to have been of the same breed as the 'hakeney' hired by
-William Driffeld from Thomas Plevener, a London innkeeper, who 'promysed
-and warantized the said hakeney to be of helth and of habilitie and well
-and trewlay' to carry Master William to Walsingham, whither he was going,
-no doubt, on pilgrimage. In spite of the warranty, the hackney, before he
-had covered twenty miles, 'wold nor myght go no ferther' and had to be
-left at Ware, where he died 'of dyverse infyrmytes.' Richard Chapman had a
-similar experience when he hired a horse from Christopher Thomas to carry
-him to York; at the end of the first day it 'failed hym and was
-morefounded.' Probably the hirers out of the horses threw the blame on
-their clients, as did Robert Grene, 'corsour' (_i.e._ horse-dealer, not
-to be confused with corsair, a pirate), who, having sold a horse to John
-Bonauntre, complained that 'the said John rode upon the said hors' with
-the result that it was 'perished and utterly destroyed,' though whether
-that was due to the delicacy of the horse, which was only intended for
-ornament, or to the 'unresonable and outrajus rydyng' of the purchaser is
-not clear. Mules, as we might expect, occasionally gave as much trouble as
-horses. There was a Welsh clergyman in the fifteenth century, John Yevan
-by name, upon whom a brother clerk, John Grigge, managed to plant a mule
-'the whiche he wold not have had, but through the gret labour and desyre
-of the said Sir John Grigge he toke the same mule upon his warantie that
-he shuld bere hym from Rome to London, orells not to paye therefore.'
-Exactly what happened on that journey is not revealed, but the mule would
-seem to have proved several degree more aggravating than Modestine in the
-Cevennes, for John Yevan 'was fayne and glad to make a cambicion
-(exchange) by the waye, to his gret hurte and hynderance,' and felt much
-injured at being called upon to account for the missing mule on his
-return. The good man's knowledge of legal jargon seems to have been oral
-rather than literary, as he invoked the magic of the law by demanding a
-'wryte of sorserare,' in which it is not easy to recognise a writ of
-_certiorari_.
-
-[Illustration: '_Hakeney._']
-
-One of the most deadly of vicarious insults was to crop the tails of your
-adversary's horses; it would seem to have been as bad as the biblical
-custom of cutting off the skirts of his messengers. John Enot, archdeacon
-of Buckingham in the fifteenth century, complained tearfully that one
-Thomas Coneloye (was he a lawless Irish Connelly?) prevented him from
-carrying out his duties in the punishment of sinners and had caused the
-tails of his horses to be cut. It was a similar insult to the hot-tempered
-Thomas Becket that caused that archbishop's furious denunciation of his
-enemies and led to his murder and so to his canonisation, from which it
-follows that we owe Chaucer's _Canterbury Tales_ to the curtailment of the
-archbishop's horses. From insult to assault is a short journey, and horses
-have brought so many to the 'demnition bow-wows,' that I am reminded at
-this point of the adventure of the vicar and the dog and the door-key,
-which fell out in this wise. William Russell, vicar of Mere in Somerset,
-some time during the reign of Henry VI., left his church at five o'clock
-one Good Friday evening, having been 'bysyly occupyed all that day before
-in hyryng of confessions.' He locked up his church and turned homewards,
-but on his way met one of his parishioners, John Totyn, an evil man, 'not
-dredyng God ne the censers of the chirche.' Totyn had in his hand a
-seven-foot staff with 'a grete pyke of yren' at one end and with him was
-'an horryble grete Dogge called a lymer,' and he at once attacked the
-vicar and 'provoked and stered his saide dogge to renne upon hym, callyng
-hym by his name and saide Hay Dewgarde.' I am not clear whether the dog's
-name was Dieugarde, which seems rather unlikely, or Dugald, which is
-possible, but I rather incline to the idea that Totyn really said 'good
-dog,' with a provincial accent--'Hey! gude darg!' in fact. Anyhow, 'the
-saide dogge, knowyng the condicions of his maister, ran upon (the vicar)
-and bote hym by the arme in iij places and pullyd hym downe to grounde
-twyes and so was likely then to have been murthored by the saide John
-Totyn and his dogge,'--the good vicar at the recollection of the exciting
-incident becomes oblivious of grammar and changes the subject of his
-verbs--'but as God woold he smote the said dogge with the chirche dore key
-under his ere, and with that the said dogge departed.' Next day worthy
-William Russell trotted off to his patron, the Abbot of Glastonbury, and
-showed him his injuries--'his shurte beyng full of blode, his gowne to
-torne, his arme sore byten'; but he got cold comfort and scant sympathy.
-Totyn was the abbot's servant and the abbot said, 'that that was doon it
-was doon in the defence of my man, and it shall coste me xl{_li_} or thou
-shalte do my man any wrong, for I lete the wete I wyll defende hym.'
-
-[Illustration: '_... showed him his injuries._']
-
-Dogs of all kinds,--
-
-  'Mastiff, greyhound, mongrel grim,
-   Hound or spaniel, brach or lym,
-   Or bobtail tike or trundle tail,'
-
-figure often enough in our old records, and often enough got their owners
-into trouble for poaching, but they were not so frequently complained of
-for assault as might have been expected. I remember coming across one
-rather interesting case in which a man complained that a neighbour's dogs
-had chased a tame deer belonging to his daughter, and when she interfered
-to rescue it had bitten her hands. The keeping of tame deer was common
-enough; Edward III. had a tame hind brought from St. Albans to Woodstock
-on one occasion, and about a couple of centuries later a Lincolnshire
-clergyman, John Barnardiston, rector of Great Coates, for his own
-recreation and comfort and the amusement of his friends, 'norysched, kept
-and brought up a tame hynde calfe.' Unfortunately he had annoyed Sir
-Christopher Askew, who instigated William Morecropp and other 'lyght and
-evyll disposed persons' to kill the hind. They discovered where it
-frequented day and night and carried it off to Morecropp's house, where
-they assembled next day 'with force and aryms; that is to saye wyth
-staves, bylles, swordes and bokelers,'--an almost excessive armament for
-the purpose,--and slew the unfortunate hind and carried its body to Sir
-Christopher, who, when Barnardiston complained, 'lyghtly and wantonly made
-a gret game and sport therat' and threatened that worse should befall him
-if he did not sit still. While sympathising with the rector for the loss
-of his pet, it is difficult to deny that the assembly of half-a-dozen
-ruffians fully armed with swords and bucklers to tackle one tame little
-fawn suggests the four-and-twenty tailors who set out to kill a snail, and
-is not without its ludicrous side.
-
-[Illustration: '_... fully armed with swords and bucklers._']
-
-
-Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to His Majesty at the Edinburgh
-University Press
-
-
-
-
-FOOTNOTES:
-
-[1] June 1911.
-
-[2] The record of one of this man's acts of torture is worth preserving,
-though it is, for obvious reasons, best left in the original Latin: 'cepit
-unum vermem qui vocatur clok [_i.e._ a sheep tick] et posuit infra virgam
-Roberti de Alverton et ligavit virgam cum parva corda et posuit ipsum
-Robertum super unam cordam et ligavit cordam de una trabe ad aliam et
-fecit ipsum moveri super cordam predictam et membra sua frotari quousque
-finem fecit pro x marcis.'
-
-
-
-
-Transcriber's Notes:
-
-Passages in italics are indicated by _italics_.
-
-Superscripted characters are indicated by {superscript}.
-
-
-
-
-
-
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