SECURITY OF THE ROADS
These roads, thus followed in every direction by the king and the
lords moving from one manor to another, by the merchants and peasants
going to the fair, the market, or the staple, by sheriffs, monks and
itinerant justices, by ladies in carriages and villains driving their
carts, were they safe? The theorist studying the legal ordinances of
the period, and the manner in which the county police and the town
watch and ward were organized, might come to the conclusion that
precautions were well taken for the prevention of misdeeds, and that
travelling did not present more danger than it does at present. If
we add, as Mr. Thorold Rogers has shown, that common carriers plied
their trade between Oxford and London, Winchester, Newcastle, etc.,
and that the price of transport was not dear, we might be persuaded
that the roads were quite safe, and we should be wrong; wrong too, if
on the faith of romantic tales, we pictured to ourselves brigands in
every thicket, a hanged man on {150} every branch, and robber barons
at every cross-road. But _accident_, or the unexpected, must be taken
into account.
Accident played a great part in the social life of the fourteenth
century. It was the moment when modern life began, the outward
brilliancy of a novel civilization had recently modified society from
top to bottom, the need to be constantly on the watch had become less
apparent; the moated castle with its drawbridge, battlements and
loop-holes, had begun to change into a villa or a mansion, while the
hut was growing into a house. Confidence was greater, but not always
justified: accidents are unexpected mishaps.
More means were taken than formerly to hinder ill-doing; but numerous
occurrences happened to destroy this incipient security. Society was
in reality neither calm nor quite settled, and many of its members
were still half savage. The term “half” may be taken literally. If a
list were made of the characteristics of such or such an individual
of the time, it would be found that some belonged to a refined,
and some to a barbarous world. Hence these contrasts: on one side
order, which it would perhaps be unjust not to consider as the normal
condition; and on the other, the frequent ebullitions of the untamed
nature. Let us select an example of such accidents which could take
at times remarkable proportions. Here are a knight and his men at the
corner of a road, waiting for a troop of merchants. The text itself
of the victims’ petition gives all the details of the encounter.[175]
The facts happened in 1342. Some Lichfield merchants state to their
lord, the Earl of Arundel, that on a certain Friday they sent two
servants and two horses laden with “spicery and mercery,” worth
forty pounds, to Stafford for the next market day. When their men
“came beneath Cannock Wood” they met Sir Robert de Rideware, Knight,
waiting for them, together with {151} two of his men, who seized
on the servants, horses, and goods, and took them to the priory of
Lappeley. Unfortunately for the knight, during the journey, one of
the servants escaped.
At the priory the band found “Sir John de Oddyngesles, Esmon de
Oddyngesles, and several others, knights as well as others.” It was
evidently a pre-arranged affair, carefully devised; all was done
according to rule; they shared “among them the aforesaid mercery and
spicery, each one a portion according to his degree.” That done, the
company left Lappeley and rode to the priory of Blythebury, a nuns’
priory. Sir Robert declared that they were the king’s men, quite
exhausted, and begged for hospitality. But the company had obviously
a suspicious appearance, and the abbess refused. Indignant at this
unfriendly reception, the knights burst open the doors of the barns
and lofts, gave hay and oats to their horses, and so passed the night.
But they were not the only people to have made a good use of their
time. The escaped servant had followed them at a distance; when he
saw they had taken up their quarters at the priory he returned with
all speed to Lichfield and warned the bailiff who hastened to collect
his men for the pursuit of the robbers. The latter, men of the sword,
as soon as they were met, stood their ground, and a real battle took
place, in which they had at first the upper hand, and wounded several
of their pursuers. At length, however, they were worsted and fled;
all the spices were recovered, and four of their company taken, who,
without further ado, were beheaded on the spot.
Robert de Rideware was not one of the latter, and did not lose heart.
He met his relative Walter de Rideware, lord of Hamstall Rideware,
with some of his followers, while the bailiff was on his way back to
Lichfield; all together veered around in pursuit of the bailiff. A
fresh fight. This time the king’s officer was routed and fled, {152}
while the highway gentlemen once more captured the spices.
What resource remained for the unhappy William and Richard, authors
of the petition? Resort to justice? This they wanted to do. But as
they were going for this purpose to Stafford, chief town of the
county, they found at the gates some retainers of their persecutors,
who barred their passage and even attacked them so hotly that they
had difficulty in escaping without grievous hurt. They returned
to Lichfield, watched by their enemies, and led there a pitiable
existence. “And, sir, the aforesaid William and Richard, and several
people of the town of Lichfield, are menaced by the said robbers and
their maintainers, so that they dare not go anywhere out of the said
town.”[176]
This legal document, the original of which has been preserved, is, in
many ways, characteristic, and shows us local tyrants not unlike the
latter day ones in the _Promessi Sposi_ and their terrible _bravi_.
One may, especially, notice the coolness and determination of the
knights, not disconcerted by the death of four of their number; the
attack under cover of a wood; the selection of the victims, “garsuns”
belonging to rich merchants; the request for hospitality in a priory
under pretext of journeying in the king’s service; the expeditious
justice of the bailiff, and the persistent surveillance to which the
victims were subjected by their lordly robbers.
These, though remarkable, are not quite exceptional facts, and Robert
of Rideware was not the only man on the look out in the copses along
the roads. Other noblemen were, like him, supported by devoted
retainers, ready for any enterprise. Capes and liveries of their
masters’ colours were given to them, and they went about as the {153}
uniformed soldiers of their chief; a lord well surrounded with his
partizans considered himself as above the common law, and it was no
easy matter for justice to make herself respected by him. The custom
of having a number of resolute followers wearing one’s colours became
universal at the end of Edward III’s reign and under Richard II; it
survived in spite of statutes[177] during the whole of the fifteenth
century, and contributed to render even more embittered and bloody
the War of the Roses.
But even outside the periods of civil war, the misdeeds of certain
barons and their retainers, or of retainers acting on their own
account under cover of their lord’s colours—“notoirs meffesours et
meintenours of meffesours,” the statute said of both,[178]—were at
times so frequent and serious that parts of the country seemed to
be in a state of war. Throughout the fourteenth century, the abuse
called _maintenance_, which word meant in old French _protection_,
was on the increase, in spite of all the efforts of king and
Parliament. The great of the land, and some lesser people too, had
their own men, sworn to their service and ready to do anything they
were commanded, which consisted sometimes in the most monstrous
deeds, such as securing property or other goods to which neither
their masters, nor any claimant paying their master in order to be
thus “protected,”[179] had any title. They terrorized the rightful
{154} owners, the judges and the juries, ransoming, beating and
maiming any opponent.[180]
Statutes were, as usual, numerous, well-meant, peremptory, and
inefficient. The evil was so general that Edward III had to forbid
the people nearest him, the chief officers of his court, his “dearest
consort, the queen,” his son the prince of Wales, the prelates of
Holy Church,[181] to thus interfere with the regular course of the
law. The will of the king is that “the poor should enjoy their right
just as the rich.”[182] But they do not; great ladies practice
maintenance, one among others even dearer to the king than his dear
consort, namely his mistress, Alice Perers.[183]
A new reign begins; maintenance flourishes better than ever before.
The preamble of a statute of the second year of Richard II[184]
gives a perhaps somewhat exaggerated picture of these disorders so
as to better justify rigorous measures, but the description must
have been at least partly true. We there see—and the king, it is
stated, has learnt it both from the petitions addressed to parliament
and by public rumour—that certain people in several parts of the
kingdom claimed “to have right to divers lands, tenements and other
possessions, and some espying women and damsels unmarried, and some
desiring to make maintenance in their marches, do gather together
to a great number of men of arms and archers, _to the manner of
war_, and confederate themselves by oath and other confederacy.”
These people, having no “consideration to God, nor to the laws
of Holy Church, nor of the land, {155} nor to right, nor justice,
but refusing and setting apart all process of the law, do ride in
great routs in divers parts of England, and take possession and
set them in divers manors, lands, and other possessions of their
own authority, and hold the same long with such force, _doing many
manner apparelments of war_; and in some places do ravish women and
damsels, and bring them into strange countries, where please them;
and in some places lying in await with such routs do beat and maim,
murder and slay the people, for to have their wives and their goods,
and the same women and goods retain to their own use; and sometimes
take the king’s liege people in their houses, and bring and hold
them as prisoners, and at the last put them to fine and ransom _as
it were in a land of war_; and sometimes come before the justices in
their sessions in such guise with great force, whereby the justices
be afraid and not hardy to do the law; and do many other riots and
horrible offences, whereby the realm in divers parts is put in great
trouble, to the great mischief and grievance of the people.”[185]
Which shows how vainly the Good Parliament had worked, for, in 1376,
the Commons had already made exactly similar complaints: “Now great
riot begins anew by {156} many people in different parts of England
who ride with a great number of armed men,” etc.[186]
Besides these organized and quasi-seignorial bands, there were
ordinary robbers, numerous enough for chantries to have been founded
“for the safety of travellers who were in danger from thieves.”[187]
Against those people who impeded travelling much more grievously
than ever the floods and broken bridges, Edward I had taken, in
1285, special measures in the Statute of Winchester. These men were
described there as accustomed to crouch down in the ditches, coppice,
or brushwoods near the roads, especially those linking two market
towns. This was, of course, the passage-way of many easy victims,
richly laden. The king orders therefore that, for a space of two
hundred feet, the ground on each side of the road should be cleared
in such a manner that there remain neither coppice nor brushwood,
nor hollow nor ditch which serve as shelter for malefactors: “où
leur peut tapir pur mal fere.” Only large trees such as oaks might
be left. The owner of the soil had to do the work; if he neglected
it, he would be responsible for robberies and murders, and have to
pay a fine to the king. If the road went through a park, the same
obligation lay on the lord, unless he consented to close it by a wall
or a hedge so thick, or by a ditch so wide and deep, that robbers
could not cross them: “qe meffesurs ne pussent passer ne returner pur
mal fere.” The king sets the example and orders such clearings to be
made at once on the lands belonging to the crown.[188]
After which, things continued pretty much as before: “Meanwhile,”
writes a chronicler for the years 1303–05, {157} “certain
malefactors, bound together, four, six, ten or twenty went in
company to fairs and markets, rifled the houses of honest people
and were not ashamed to capture through their misdoings the goods
of the faithful and rich people.”[189] Worse than that: we find as
we progress in the fourteenth century, that these common thieves
had improved their methods and increased their profits. They allied
themselves, sometimes secretly, sometimes openly, to the seignorial
bands, and were not henceforward unticketed men for whom no one was
responsible. The Commons were aware of the fact, and complained
accordingly: “Whereas it is notoriously known _throughout all the
shires of England_ that robbers, thieves, and other malefactors on
foot and on horseback, go and ride on the highway through all the
land in divers places, committing larcenies and robberies: may it
please our lord the king to charge the nobility of the land that none
such be maintained by them, privately nor openly; but that they help
to arrest and take such bad ones.”[190] In the preceding parliament
the same complaints had been made, and the king had already promised
that he would order “such remedy as should be pleasing to God and
man.”[191] But neither God nor man had had apparently cause to be
pleased.
In addition to the support of the great, these evildoers enjoyed
various privileges. Some of them could be met along the roads, cross
in hand; both king and church forbade seizing them, they were men
who had forsworn the realm. When a robber, a murderer, or any felon
found himself too hard pressed, he fled into a church and found
safety. In almost all societies having reached a certain stage of
civilization the same privilege has existed or still exists. It
was known to the Romans, {158} was legislated about by Theodosius
the Great, Justinian and the early councils,[192] and is still in
constant use in many parts of the East. A church in the Middle Ages
was an inviolable place: whoever crossed its threshold was under
the protection of God, and many wonderful miracles, the history of
which was familiar to everybody, attested with what particular favour
the right of sanctuary was regarded especially by the Holy Virgin.
At Walsingham, one of the most famous British pilgrimages, people
never failed to go and see the “Gate of the Knight,” a gate which
had stretched itself so as to give miraculous shelter to a man on
horseback, hard pursued by his enemies, and who found himself thus
opportunely placed beyond the reach of men as well as beyond the
reach of law.
[Illustration 32. THE KNOCKER OF THE DURHAM SANCTUARY (NORMAN).]
Several interesting relics of old English sanctuaries are still in
existence, such as stone sign-posts which helped the fugitive to
avoid either vengeance or justice: “Even to-day, in various parts
of England, curious stone crosses, {159} inscribed with the word
SANCTUARIUM, are to be met with. Such crosses probably marked the
way to a sanctuary and served to guide fugitives.”[193] At Durham is
to be seen a beautiful bronze knocker, cast and chiselled in Norman
times, still affixed to the cathedral door through which malefactors
were admitted to the sanctuary.[194] As soon as they had knocked,
the door was opened, the bell in the Galilee tower was rung, and
after having confessed before witnesses their crime, which was at
once put into writing, the culprits were allowed to enjoy the peace
of St. Cuthbert. Several churches had a chair or stool called the
_fridstool_, or peace chair (originally, in some cases, a presbyteral
or episcopal seat) the reaching of which by the fugitive secured for
him the maximum protection. Beverley has one of the oldest, in stone,
perfectly plain, formerly accompanied with a Latin inscription,
saying: “This stone seat is called _freedstoll_, that is, chair
of peace, on reaching which a fugitive criminal enjoys complete
safety.”[195] The Beverley sanctuary was the most celebrated and
safest in England.[196] In this case, and in some others, at Hexham
for example, the privilege extended not only to the church, but to
one mile or more round it, the space being divided into several
circles, usually marked by stone crosses, and it was more and more
sinful to remove fugitives violently from the sanctuary the nearer
{160} they were to the inner circle. If they were dragged from the
altar or the fridstool, no money atonement was accepted from the
abductor, who thus apparently forfeited his life. Describing the
several circles around the Hexham sanctuary, Prior Richard, who wrote
between 1154 and 1167, says of the inner one: “If any one, moved by
a spirit of madness, ventured with diabolical boldness to seize one
in the stone chair near the altar which the English call _fridstol_,
that is a chair of quiet or peace, or at the shrine of the holy
relics, back of the altar, no compensation will be determined for
such a glaring sacrilege, no amount of money will serve as an
atonement, for it is what the English call _botolos_ (bootless), that
is a thing for which there can be no compensation.”[197]
[Illustration 33. THE FRIDSTOOL AT HEXHAM ABBEY, NORTHUMBERLAND
(NORMAN).]
[Illustration 34. THE FRIDSTOOL AT SPROTBOROUGH, YORKSHIRE.
_Fourteenth Century._]
That same fridstool has been preserved, being not improbably the
original episcopal seat of the famous St. Wilfrid, born about 634,
the builder of the old church {163} at Hexham, a crypt of which,
with some Roman stones used for the walls, is still in existence.
Near the fridstool was to be seen a queer, short, stone statue now
moved to another place in the church, of a man, with brutal features,
“wearing a long coat, buttoned in front from the neck to the waist,
having three coils or clumsy ligatures . . . round his ankles; and
he holds erect with both hands a staff or club as tall as himself.”
A. B. Wright, author of an “Essay towards the history of Hexham,”
expresses the opinion that, “it was intended to represent an officer
of justice, with his staff and plume, his feet bared and manacled, to
show that within the bounds of sanctuary he dared not move towards
his design and that there his authority availed him not.”[198]
A confirmation of this opinion may be found in the figures carved
on the little known but very curious fridstool at Sprotborough,
Yorkshire, apparently of the fourteenth century: the fugitive
who could not be properly represented seated in the chair, since
this would have made it impossible of use, is shown protected and
covered by it, while a clumsy and much deteriorated image of some
law official, carrying his staff, stands at one of the sides of
the chair, but unable to move, being bound to it by a collar or
_carcannum_.[199]
Among the most curious remembrances of the English sanctuaries figure
the registers still preserved in some few places, in which were
entered the confessions of the criminals at the moment they asked
for admittance. The Beverley and the Durham ones have been printed;
both date from the fifteenth century; that of Durham covers the years
1464 to 1524; it includes, besides other crimes, 195 murders and
homicides, in which 283 persons {164} are concerned, and which are
divided as follows, according to the trades and avocations of the
perpetrators:
“Husbandmen 8
Labourers 4
Yeomen 4
Gentlemen 4
Ecclesiastics 3
Merchants 2
Tailor 1
Plumber 1
Carpenter 1
Tanner 1
Baxster 1
Glover 1
Sailor 1
Apprentice 1
Under-Bailiff 1
Servant 1
Knight (an accessory) 1
“The occupations of the remainder are not mentioned.”[200]
The entries in the two registers are much alike; the formalities are
of the same kind; the Galilee bell is tolled, the culprit confesses;
witnesses are called to hear him, and the names of all concerned
are given in full. Here is an example translated from the Latin
original: “To be remembered that on the 6th day of October, 1477,
William Rome and William Nicholson, of the parish of Forsate, fled
to the cathedral church of St. Cuthbert in Durham, where on account,
among other things, of a felony committed and publicly confessed by
them, consisting of the murder by them of William Aliand, they asked
from the venerable and religious men, Sir Thomas Haughton, sacristan
of the said church, and William Cuthbert, master of the Galilee
there, both brothers and monks of the same church, to be admitted to
the benefit of the immunity of the church, according to the liberties
and privileges conceded in old time to the most glorious confessor
Cuthbert. And by the ringing of one bell according to custom, they
obtained this benefit. There were present there, seeing and hearing,
the discreet men William Heyhyngton, Thomas Hudson, John Wrangham,
{165} and Thomas Strynger, witnesses called in especially for the
occasion.”[201]
At Beverley there were no witnesses: the culprit swore, his hand on
the Book. Besides stating the cause of his flying to sanctuary he
took his oath to remain peaceful, to help in case of fire or strife,
to be present at mass on the commemoration day of King Athelstan,
benefactor of the church, etc.:
“Also ye shall bere no poynted wepen, dagger, knyfe, ne none other
wapen, ayenst the kynges pece.
“Also ye shalbe redy at all your power, if ther be any debate or
stryf, or oder sodan case of fyre within the towne, to help to
surcess it.
“Also ye shalbe redy at the obite of Kyng Adelstan, at the dirige,
and the messe, at such tyme as it is done, at the warnyng of the
belman of the towne, and doe your dewte in ryngyng, and for to offer
at the messe on the morne,”[202] etc.
To drag men out of the sanctuary was a sacrilege punished with
whipping, heavy fines, excommunication, or even death. Nicholas le
Porter had helped to snatch from the church of the Carmelites of
Newcastle some laymen who had taken refuge there “for the safety
of their lives,” and who, once delivered to the civil authority,
had been executed. Only the Pope’s nuncio could secure for him his
pardon, and he had to submit to a public penance very little in
accord with our present customs:
“We order,” wrote Bishop Richard to the parson of St. Nicholas of
Durham, “that on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of the Whitsun-week
just coming, he shall receive the whip from your hands publicly,
before the chief door of your church, in his shirt, bare-headed,
{166} and barefoot.[203] He shall there proclaim in English the
reason for his penance and shall admit his fault; and when he has
thus been whipped the said Nicholas will go to the cathedral church
of Durham, bareheaded, barefoot, and dressed as above, he will walk
in front, you will follow him; and you will whip him in the same
manner before the door of the cathedral these three days, and he will
repeat there the confession of his sin.”[204]
Excommunication was the punishment meted out to Ralph de Ferrers, one
of the retainers of the then all-powerful John of Gaunt, for having
dragged from the Westminster sanctuary, at mass time, two prisoners
escaped from the Tower where his master had sent them, and for having
killed one in the process, 1378. The Duke of Lancaster, in alliance
then with Wyclif, caused the reformer to write one of his most
virulent treatises against the right of sanctuary, asking for its
abolition.
The right was, however, maintained; the king himself did not dare to
infringe upon it, and, though unwilling, had to let traitors escape,
by such means, his revenge or justice. In a case of this kind, one of
the Henries wrote to the Prior of Durham, and careful as he was to
state that he bound himself only “for the present occasion,” there
is no doubt that his acknowledgment of the full immunities enjoyed
by St. Cuthbert’s church had nothing {167} exceptional: “Trusty and
welbeloved in God,” says the king,[205] “we grete you well. And
wheras we undirstand that Robert Marshall late comitted to prison for
treason is now escapid and broken from the same into youre church of
Duresme, we havyng tender zele and devocion to ye honour of God and
St. Cuthbert, and for the tendir favour and affection that the right
reverend father in God our right trusty and welbeloved the Bisshop of
Duresme our chauncellor of England we have for his merits wol that
for that occasion nothyng be attempted that shud be contrarie to
the liberties and immunities of [your] church. We therefor wol and
charge you that he be surely kept there as ye wol answere unto us
for him.” As there could be very little need for the king to declare
such an obvious feeling as his respect for St. Cuthbert, the earnest
recommendation by which he ends his epistle is most likely to have
been the real cause of his writing to his wellbeloved the Prior of
Durham. Another characteristic instance is the rebellion of Jack Cade
in 1450, when one of his accomplices fled to St. Martin-le-Grand, the
most famous of the London sanctuaries. The king in this case wrote to
the Dean of St. Martin’s ordering him to produce the traitor. This
the Dean refused to do, and he exhibited his charters, which being
found correct and explicit, the fugitive was allowed to remain in
safety where he was.[206]
The right of sanctuary was most valuable, not only for political
offenders, but also, and more frequently, for robbers. They escaped
from prison, fled to the church, and saved their lives. “In this
year,” 1324, say the “Croniques de London,”[207] “ten persons
escaped out of Newgate, of whom five were retaken, and four escaped
{168} to the church of St. Sepulchre, and one to the church of
St. Bride, and afterwards all for-swore England.” But when the
refugees were watched in the church by their personal enemies, their
situation, as evidenced by the statute of 1315–1316, became perilous.
The authors of a petition[208] to the king set forth in that year
that armed men established themselves in the cemetery, and even in
the sanctuary, to watch the fugitive, and guarded him so strictly
that he could not even go out to satisfy his natural wants. They
hindered food from reaching him; if the felon decided to swear that
he would quit the kingdom his enemies followed him on the road,
and in spite of the law’s protection dragged him away and beheaded
him without judgment. The king reforms all these abuses,[209] and
re-enacts the old regulations as to abjuration, which were as
follows: “When a robber, murderer, or other evil-doer shall fly unto
any church upon his confession of felony, the coroner shall cause the
abjuration to be made thus: Let the felon be brought to the church
door, and there be assigned unto him a port, near or far off, and
a time appointed for him to go out of the realm, so that in going
towards that port he carry a cross in his hand, and that he go not
out of the king’s highway, neither on the right hand, nor on the
left, but that he keep it always until he shall be gone out of the
land; and that he shall not return without special grace of our lord
the king.”
The felon took oath in the following terms: “This hear thou, sir
coroner, that I, N., am a robber of sheep, or of any other beast, or
a murderer of one or of more, and a felon to our lord the King of
England, and because I have done many such evils or robberies in this
land, I {169} do abjure the land of our lord Edward King of England,
and I shall haste me towards the port of such a place which thou
hast given me, and I shall not go out of the highway, and if I do I
will that I be taken as a robber and felon to our lord the king; and
at such a place I will diligently seek for passage, and that I will
tarry there but one flood and ebb, if I can have passage; and unless
I can have it in such a place I will go every day into the sea up to
my knees assaying to pass over; and unless I can do this within forty
days, I will put myself again into the church as a robber and a felon
to our lord the king. So God me help and his holy judgment.”[210]
Dover was the port oftenest assigned to abjurors. The time limit
varied, being on occasions so brief, that it must have been almost
impossible for people on foot to fulfil the condition: which was most
probably what the coroner had in view, for he would assign sometimes
different delays to different refugees for the same distance. “The
distance from York to Dover over London Bridge was nearly 270 miles,
and there are several entries of eight days being the allotted time,
thus maintaining a rate of over 33 miles a day.”[211] {170}
In the church robbers found themselves side by side with insolvent
debtors. These before seeking refuge were usually careful to make
a general donation of all their property, and the creditors who
cited them to justice remained empty handed. In 1379,[212] Richard
II enacted remedial legislation. During five weeks, once a week,
the debtor is to be summoned, by proclamation made at the door of
the sanctuary, to appear in person or by attorney before the king’s
judges. If he does not choose to appear justice shall take its
course; sentence will be passed, and the property that he had given
away will be shared among the creditors.
This, however, served, as usual, only for a time. In the first years
of the following reign the Commons are found lamenting the same
abuses. Apprentices who have plundered their masters, tradesmen in
debt, robbers, flee to St. Martin-le-Grand and live there in quiet
on the money they have stolen. They employ the leisure which this
peaceful existence leaves them in patiently forging “obligations,
indentures, acquitances,” imitating the signatures and seals of
honest city merchants and of other people. Felons, murderers and
thieves avail themselves of this restful seclusion for preparing new
crimes; they go out at night to commit them, and safely return in the
morning to their inviolate retreat. The king, apparently puzzled as
to what to do, when the abuse is so great and the privilege {171} so
sacred, vaguely promises that “reasonable remedy shall be had.”[213]
Some years later (A.D. 1447) the Goldsmiths’ Company of London was
startled on finding that a quantity of sham gold and silver plate
and jewellery had been issued from the privileged precincts of St.
Martin-le-Grand’s sanctuary, to the great detriment of their own
worshipful company. They brought the facts to the notice of the
king, who wrote to the Dean recommending him to check this abuse if
possible: “Trustie and welbeloved, we grete you wel, and let you
to wote that we be informed that there be divers persons dwellinge
within our seinctuarie of St. Martin’s that forge and sell laton
and coper, some gilt and some sylverd for gold and silver, unto
the great deceipt of our lege people. . . . ”[214] The tone of the
king’s letter is very moderate; he seems to write only to please the
Goldsmiths’ Company, while realizing that he is powerless in the
matter, and that his recommendations will come to nothing.
A priest who took refuge in a church was not obliged to quit England;
he swore that he was a priest, and “enjoyed ecclesiastic privilege,
according to the praiseworthy custom of the kingdom.”[215] But the
church, who accorded to all comers the benefit of sanctuary, reserved
to herself the power of removal from it. “In this year (1320), a
woman who was named Isabel of Bury, killed the priest of the church
of All Saints, near London Wall, and she remained in the same church
five days, so that the Bishop of London issued his letter that the
church would not save her, wherefore she was brought out of the
church to Newgate and was hanged on the third day afterwards.”[216]
{172}
In those days, when riots and rebellions were not uncommon,
the right of sanctuary might be valuable for any one; reformers
like Wyclif vainly protested against this exorbitant but useful
custom.[217] A bishop even, however sacred his person, might have
to spur his horse and fly towards a church to save his head. The
Bishop of Exeter tried and failed when Isabella and her son came
to overthrow Edward II:[218] “The same day came one Sir Walter de
Stapleton, who was Bishop of Exeter, and the king’s treasurer the
previous year, riding to his house in Elde Deanes lane to his dinner,
and there he was proclaimed traitor; and he seeing that fled on his
horse towards the church of St. Paul’s, and was there met and quickly
unhorsed, and brought to Cheap, and there he was stripped and his
head cut off.”
Under Richard III might be seen a queen and a king’s son refuse
to quit the sacred enclosure of Westminster, in which their lives
were safe, thanks to the sanctity of the place. Sir Thomas More has
left in his history of the usurper, the first real history in the
national language, a moving picture of the plucky defence of Edward
IV’s widow and of the persistent efforts of Richard to snatch the
second child of the late king from the abbey. To reiterated demands
the queen replied: “In what place coulde I recken him sure, if he
be not sure in this the sentuarye whereof was there never tiraunt
yet so develish, that durst presume to breake. . . . For soth he
hath founden a goodly glose, by whiche that place that may defend a
thefe, may not save an innocent.”[219] The “goodly glose” of Richard
III consisted simply in having the right of sanctuary abolished.
In a speech in favour of {173} the measure, which was aimed
especially at the places of refuge of St. Paul’s and Westminster,
the Duke of Buckingham is represented by More drawing a very lively
as well as an exact picture of the disorders there: “What a rabble
of theves, murtherers, and malicious heyghnous traitours, and that
in twoo places specyallye. . . . Mens wyves runne thither with
theyr housebandes plate, and saye, thei dare not abyde with theyr
housebandes for beatinge. Theves bryng thyther theyr stolen goodes,
and there lyve thereon. There devise thei newe roberies; nightlye
they steale out, they robbe and reve, and kyll, and come in again as
though those places gave them not only a safe garde for the harme
they have done, but a license also to doo more.”[220]
This privilege endured, however, and even survived the Reformation;
but from that hour it was less respected. Lord Chancellor Bacon
speaks of the sanctuary of Colnham, near Abingdon, as being
considered “insufficient” for traitors, under Henry VII; several
political criminals who had taken refuge there, were seized,
therefore, and one of them was executed.[221] Sanctuaries were
suppressed, legally at least, in the twenty-first year of the
reign of James I: “And be it alsoe enacted by the authoritie of
this present parliament that no sanctuarie or priviledge {174} of
sanctuary shal be hereafter admitted or allowed in any case.”[222]
But they lingered on in England as well as on the continent. Cromwell
complains, in one of his most famous speeches, of the difficulties
his Government sometimes experience on that account when they have
to ask from foreign potentates that justice be done. He alludes to
the recent assassination of an English messenger, and says: “It is
the pleasure of the Pope at any time to tell you that though the man
is murdered, yet his murderer has got into the sanctuary.” Another
proof that, after the statute of James I, the right of sanctuary
did not fall entirely into disuse in England is that it had to be
re-abolished in 1697; sanctuaries are to be found even so late as
the reign of George I, when the one at St. Peter’s, Westminster, was
demolished.
With all their penal severity, law and custom still gave other
encouragements to malefactors. They often received charters of
pardon which the royal chancery willingly granted because they must
be paid for, while the Commons unweariedly renewed their complaints
against this abuse. The priest, John Crochille, states to the king
in parliament that while he was at the Court of Rome he has been
outlawed, and was imprisoned on his return. The chancellor has
granted him a charter of pardon, but he is “so impoverished that he
has not wherewith to pay for the said charter.”[223]
Charters were thus given to the innocent for money, and to “common
felons and murderers” also, which had two results: the number of
brigands increased by reason of their impunity, and men dared not
bring the most formidable criminals to justice for fear of seeing
them return pardoned and ready to wreak a terrible revenge.
Most unluckily, the interest that the great had in {175} the
continuance of this abuse tended also to its maintenance. In league
with their retainers, they wanted to defend them from justice as
they themselves were defended by them in the street or on the road;
and the best means of saving these _bravi_ from the consequences of
some assassination was to obtain or buy for them a charter of pardon.
The Commons knew it, and reminded the king that often the protectors
of such criminals secured charters for them on the representation
that these men were abroad, occupied in fighting for the prince. The
charter once obtained, the malefactors returned and renewed their
ill-deeds, without fear of being troubled by any one.[224]
For all these reasons the traveller would not have been prudent if
he had not foreseen on starting the chance of some untoward meeting,
and if he had not armed himself in consequence. This was such a
recognized necessity that the Chancellor of the University of Oxford
allowed the students, on the occasion of a journey, to carry arms,
otherwise strictly forbidden.[225]
There was, then, at best, but moderate safety against robbers, and
there was not always much against the sheriff’s officers themselves.
At a time when prowlers were so numerous, it was enough to be a
stranger in the district, especially if it were night, to be sent to
gaol on suspicion, {176} as shown by a statute of Edward III.[226]
Nothing more general than the terms of this law; the power to arrest
is almost unlimited: “Whereas, in the statute made at Winchester
in the time of King Edward, grandfather to the king that now is,
it is contained, That if any stranger pass by the country in the
night, of whom any have suspicion, he shall presently be arrested
and delivered to the sheriff, and remain in ward till he be duly
delivered; and because there have been divers manslaughters,
felonies, and robberies[227] done in times past, by people that
be called roberdesmen, wastors, and draw-latches . . . ” whoever
suspects any to be one such, “be it by day or by night,” shall cause
him immediately to be arrested by the constables of the towns; the
man shall be kept in prison till the justices of gaol delivery come
down, and meanwhile inquiry shall be made.
Think now of a stranger passing through the town by night; some
constable feels suspicious and wants to arrest him; imagining himself
already in prison “till the justices come down,” the man runs away
instead of allowing himself to be taken. The statute has provided
for his case.[228] “If they will not obey the arrest, hue and cry
shall be levied upon them, and such as keep the watch shall follow
with hue and cry with all the town, and the towns near, and so hue
and cry shall be made from town to town until that they be taken and
delivered {177} to the sheriff.”[229] A singular picture: night wraps
in its shadows the crooked lanes of the unlit city; the stranger is
perhaps a robber, perhaps an honest man, who has lost his way, not
knowing the place; his fault is not to be within doors by curfew; he
gropes his way as best he can; the watch perceives and challenges
him; fearing the result he takes to his heels, and behold! the hue
and cry begins, the watch runs, the town wakes up, lights appear, and
one after the other the more zealous join in the chase. If the town
is fortified, the postern gates have long been closed, and he will be
surely taken. Scarcely can he hope to cast himself into some unshut
doorway at a turning of the street, behind which he will cower,
listening with trembling hand and beating heart to the watch who pass
heavily along at a charging pace, followed by a crowd of furious
shouters. The number of steps lessen, and the shouts become fainter,
then die away, lost in the depths of the city.
If the place is not important enough to be enclosed by walls, the
first thought of the fugitive will be to gain the open, and then
he must not fear marshes, ditches, hedges; he must know how, at a
bend of the ground, to leave the high-road and profit by any place
where the Statute of Winchester has been negligently applied. But
for that he is lost, the constables follow, the town follows, the
“cry” continues, and at the next village the scene of the start will
begin over again. The inhabitants, warned by the clamour, light their
lanterns, and see, they are already in the chase. Before he reaches
the end of the high-street some peasant will be found on the alert,
ready to bar the passage of the road to him. All have an interest
in it, all have been robbed, or their friends, or relatives; {178}
someone of their kin may have been wounded or murdered on the road
as he returned from market. Every one has heard of such misfortunes,
and feels himself personally menaced. Hence this zeal in joining the
chase with the hue and cry, and the conviction that, running so hard
and making so many folk run, the fugitive must be a famous brigand
ready for the gibbet.[230]
{179}
PART II
_LAY WAYFARERS_
{181}
[Illustration 35. AN ADVENTURE SEEKER.
(_From the MS. 2 B._ vii; _English; early Fourteenth Century_.)]
INTRODUCTORY NOTE
“_Qui ne s’adventure n’a cheval ni mule, ce dist Salomon.—Qui trop
s’adventure perd cheval et mule, respondit Malcon._”
VIE DE GARGANTUA.
We have seen the aspect and usual condition of English roads; we must
now take separately the principal types of the wandering class and
see what sort of a life the wayfarer led, and what was his importance
in society or in the State.
Wayfarers belonging to civil life were, in the first place, quacks
and drug-sellers, glee-men, tumblers, minstrels, and singers; then
messengers, pedlars, and itinerant chapmen; lastly, outlaws, thieves
of all kinds, peasants out of bond or perambulating workmen, and
beggars. To ecclesiastic life belonged preachers, mendicant friars,
and those strange dealers in indulgences called pardoners. Lastly
there were palmers and pilgrims, whose journeyings {182} had a
religious object, but in whose ranks, as in Chaucer’s book, clerk and
lay were mingled.
Many of these individuals, the friars for instance, had, it is true,
a resting-place, but their existence was spent, for the greater part,
on the roads; when they left their abode their purpose was not to
reach this or that place, they had no fixed itinerary, but spent
their time in ceaseless rambles about the country, begging as they
went. They had, in the long run, caught the manners and the language
of true nomadic wayfarers, and in common opinion were generally
confounded with them; they belonged to that caste or family of beings.
As for the strange race which we still see at the present day
wandering from country to country, and which, later than any, will
represent among us the caste of wanderers, it had not yet made its
appearance in the British world, and are outside the limits of the
present work. The Bohemians or Gipsies remained entirely unknown in
England till the fifteenth century.
[Illustration 36. BLIND BEGGAR AND HIS DOG.
(_From the MS. 10 E. IV._)]
{183}
[Illustration 37. “THER WAS ALSO A DOCTOUR OF PHISIK” (CHAUCER’S
DOCTOR).
(_From the Ellesmere MS._)]
CHAPTER I
HERBALISTS, CHARLATANS, MINSTRELS, JUGGLERS, AND TUMBLERS
The most popular of all the wanderers were naturally the most
cheerful, or those held to be the most beneficent. These latter were
the folks with a universal panacea, very numerous in the Middle
Ages; they went about the world selling health. They established
themselves in the village green, or the market place, on holidays,
spreading a carpet or a piece of cloth on the ground; they displayed
their drugs, and began to harangue the people. Their numbers go
diminishing nowadays, for the laws are more and more unkind to them,
but they have not yet entirely disappeared, so natural to man {184}
are credulity and the longing for health. One may still hear at the
present day discourses not very different from those they spoke in
the fourteenth century in England, France, or Italy; their profession
is one that has changed less than any. In the thirteenth century
the herbalist of Rutebeuf spoke like Ben Jonson’s mountebank of the
seventeenth, like the charlatan who yesterday a few steps from our
door attracted the crowd to his trestle, limiting however his sales,
on account of the churlishness of the legislator, to tonics, tooth
pastes and the like. Big words, marvellous tales, praise of their
noble and distant origin, enumeration of the extraordinary cures
they have made, ostentatious display of an unbounded devotion to the
public good, and of entire pecuniary disinterestedness: all this is
found, and always will be found, in the talk of these insinuating
itinerants, as it is also found to-day in the advertisements, on
walls or in newspapers, of wondrous cures discovered by a priest,
by a convent, by a gentleman of worth and disinterestedness; which
advertisements have, to some extent, replaced the itinerant healer of
olden times.
“Good people,” said Rutebeuf’s medicinal herb-seller six hundred
years ago, “I am not one of those poor preachers, nor one of those
poor herbalists who stand in front of churches with their miserable
ill-sown cloak, who carry boxes and sachets and spread out a carpet.
Know that I am not one of these; but I belong to a lady whose name is
Madame Trote de Salerno, who makes a kerchief of her ears, and whose
eyebrows hang down as silver chains behind her shoulders: know that
she is the wisest lady that is in all the four parts of the world.
My lady sends us into different lands and countries, into Apulia,
Calabria, Burgundy, into the forest of Ardennes to kill wild beasts
in order to extract good ointments from them, and give medicine to
those who are ill in body. . . . And because she made me swear by the
saints when I {185} parted from her, I will teach you the proper
cure for worms, if you will listen. Will you listen?
“. . . Take off your caps, give ear, look at my herbs which my lady
sends into this land and country; and because she wishes the poor as
well as the rich to have access thereto, she told me that I should
make pennyworths of them, for a man may have a penny in his purse who
has not five pounds; and she told and commanded that I might take
pence of the current coin in the land and country wherever I should
come. . . .
“These herbs, you will not eat them; for there is no ox in this
country, no charger, be he never so strong, who if he had a bit the
size of a pea upon his tongue would not die a hard death, they are
so strong and bitter. . . . You will put them three days to sleep in
good white wine; if you have no white take red, if you have no red
take fine clear water, for one may have a well before his door who
has not a cask of wine in his cellar. If you breakfast from it for
thirteen mornings you will be cured of your various maladies. For if
my father and mother were in danger of death and they were to ask of
me the best herb I could give them, I should give them this. This is
how I sell my herbs and my ointments; if you want any, come and take
them; if you don’t, let them alone.”[231]
This herbalist was of those early maligned in France and England
by royal ordinances for the illegal practice of medicine. Philip
the Fair in 1311, John the Good in 1352, had issued severe decrees
against them. They were berated with being “ignorant of men’s
temperament, of the time and mode of administering, of the virtues
of medicines, above all, of laxative ones in which lies danger of
death.” These people “often come from abroad,” go through town and
suburbs, and venture to administer to the confiding sick, “clisteria
multum laxativa et alia {186} eis illicita,”[232] at which the royal
authority was justly indignant.
In England the itinerant drug-sellers had no better reputation; the
popular songs, satires and farces always show them associating in
taverns with the meanest rabble, and using—true to nature—the most
ridiculous rant. Master Brundyche’s man, in a play of the fifteenth
century, thus prepares the minds of the hearers for the advent of the
“leech,” his master, deriding both:
What dysease or syknesse y^t ever ye have,
He wyl never leve yow tylle ye be in your grave.[233]
To have an idea of what their recipes might be, one must recall what
the medicine was that the statutes of the kingdom protected. John
of Gaddesden, court doctor under Edward II, got rid of the marks of
the small-pox by wrapping the sick man in red cloths, and he thus
cured the heir to the throne himself.[234] He had for a long time
been troubled how to cure stone: “At last,” says he, in his “Rosa
Anglica,” “I bethought myself of collecting {187} a good number of
those beetles which in summer are found in the dung of oxen, also of
the crickets which sing in the fields. I cut off the heads and the
wings of the crickets and put them with the beetles and common oil
into a pot; I covered it and left it afterwards for a day and night
in a bread oven. I drew out the pot and heated it at a moderate fire,
I pounded the whole and rubbed the sick parts; in three days the pain
had disappeared”; under the influence of the beetles and the crickets
the stone had broken into bits.[235] It was almost always thus, by a
sudden illumination, bethinking himself of beetles or of something
else, that the learned man discovered his most efficacious remedies:
Madame Trote de Salerno never confided to her agents in the various
parts of the world the secret of more marvellous and unexpected
recipes.
The law, however, made a clear distinction between a court physician
and a quack of the cross-ways. Kings and princes had their own
healers, attached to their persons, whom they trusted more than they
did their ministers. Securing by indentures of 1372 and 1373 the
services of “frere William de Appleton, phisicien et surgien,” and
of “Maistre Johan Bray,” granting them forty marks yearly pension
with the “bouche en court,” or right to be fed at his tables, and
other advantages, John of Gaunt, “roy de Castille,” was careful
to bind those men of learning to attend on him “in peace and in
war, _so long as they lived_,” a pledge which his brother, King
Edward, never exacted from his chancellors. A Gaddesden had the
support of an established reputation to apply any medicament to his
patients, and he offered the warranty of his high position. He had
studied at Oxford, and he was an authority; a grave physician like
Chaucer’s “doctour,” who had grown rich during the plague, his wealth
increasing his repute— {188}
“For gold in physik is a cordial,”
had not neglected to pore over the works of “Gatesden.”
With lesser book-knowledge but an equal ingenuity, the wandering
herbalist was not so advantageously known: _he_ could not, like
the royal physician, rely on his good reputation and his “bouche
en court” to make his patients swallow glow-worms, rub them with
beetles and crickets, or give them “seven heads of fat bats”[236] as
remedies. The legislator kept his eye on him. In the country, like
most of the other wayfarers, the man nearly always found means to
escape the rigour of the laws; but in towns the risk was greater.
The unhappy Roger Clerk was sued in 1381 for the illegal practice of
medicine in London, because he tried to cure a woman by making her
wear a certain parchment on her bosom. Though such a nostrum could
not possibly be more hurtful than the use of fat bats, he was carried
to the pillory “through the middle of the city, with trumpets and
pipes,” on a horse without a saddle, his parchment and a whetstone
round his neck, unseemly pottery hanging round his neck and down his
back, in token that he had lied.[237]
Uneasy at the increase of these abuses, Henry V issued in 1421
an _Ordinance against the meddlers with physic and surgery_, “to
get rid of the mischiefs and dangers which have long continued
within the kingdom among the people by means of those who have
used the art and practice of physic and surgery, pretending to be
well and sufficiently taught in the same arts, when of truth they
are not so.” Henceforth there would be severe punishments for all
practitioners who have not been approved in their speciality, “that
is to say, those of physic by the universities, and the surgeons by
the masters of that art.”[238] The mischief {189} continued just
as before; which seeing, in order to give more authority to the
medicine approved by the State, Edward IV, in the first year of his
reign, erected the Company of Barbers of London using the faculty of
surgery, into a corporation.[239]
The Renaissance came and found barbers, quacks, empirics, and
sorcerers continuing to prosper on British soil, and still the
subject of song, satire and play. John Heywood’s Pothecary is a
lineal descendant of Rutebeuf’s herbalist; he sells a wonderful
_Syrapus de Byzansis_, and advertises it in such a way that, anything
that happens, he is right:
“These be the thynges that breke all stryfe
Betweene mannes sycknes and his lyfe;
From all payne these shall you delever
And set you even at reste for ever.”[240]
Henry VIII deplored the hold those men kept on the common people, and
on some of their betters too; he considered it his duty to enact new
rules. “The science and connyng of physyke and surgerie,” said the
king in his statute, “to the perfecte knowlege wherof bee requisite
bothe grete lernyng and ripe experience, ys daily within this Royalme
exercised by a grete multitude of ignoraunt persones, of whom the
grete partie have no maner of insight in the same nor in any other
kynde of lernyng; some also can no lettres on the boke, soofarfurth
that common artificers, as smythes, wevers, and women boldely
and custumably take upon theim grete curis and thyngys of great
difficultie, in the which they partely use sorcery and which-crafte,
partely applie such medicine unto the disease as be verey noyous and
nothyng metely therfore, to the high displeasoure {190} of God . . .
and destruccion of many of the kynge’s liege people, most specially
of them that cannot descerne the uncunnyng from the cunnyng.”[241]
The examples above have shown how difficult it must often have been
to “descerne” between them.
Consequently, the king continues, every one who may wish to practise
in London or seven miles round, must previously submit to an
examination before the bishop of that city, or before the Dean of
St. Paul’s, assisted by four “doctors of phisyk.” In the country the
examination will take place before the bishop of the diocese or his
vicar-general. In 1540, the same prince united the corporation of the
barbers and the college of surgeons, and granted each year to the new
association the bodies of four condemned criminals “for anathomies.”
Hardly were all these privileges conceded than doubts filled the
mind of the legislator himself, and who, it may be wondered, did he
regret? precisely those old unregistered quacks, those possessors
of infallible secrets, those village empirics so harshly treated
in the statute of 1511. A new law was enacted, which is but one
long enumeration of the guilty practices of qualified doctors; they
poison their clients as thoroughly as the quacks of old, the chief
difference is that they take more for it, refusing even to interfere
if the patient is poor:
“Mynding oonelie theyre owne lucres, and nothing the profite or ease
of the diseased or patient, [they] have sued, troubled and vexed
divers honest persones aswell men as woomen, whome God hathe endued
with the knowledge of the nature, kinde, and operacion of certeyne
herbes, rotes, and waters, . . . and yet the saide persones have not
takin any thing for theyre peynes and cooning, but have mynistred the
same to the poore people oonelie for neighbourhode and Goddes sake,
and of pite and {191} charytie; and it is nowe well knowen that the
surgeons admytted wooll doo no cure to any persone, but where they
shall knowe to be rewarded with a greater soome or rewarde than the
cure extendeth unto, for in cace they wolde mynistre theyre coonning
to sore people unrewarded, there shoulde not so manye rotte and
perishe to deathe for lacke of helpe of surgerye as dailie doo.”
Besides, in spite of the examinations by the Bishop of London, “the
most parte of the persones of the said crafte of surgeons have
small coonning.” For which cause all the king’s subjects who have,
“by speculacion or practyse,” knowledge of the virtues of plants,
roots, and waters, may as before, notwithstanding enactments to the
contrary, cure any malady apparent on the surface of the body, by
means of plasters, poultices, and ointments “within any parte of the
realme of Englande, or within any other the kinges dominions.”[242]
A radical change, as we see; the secrets and “speculacions” of
country people were no longer those of sorcerers, but precious
recipes which they had received from God by intuition; the poor,
subject to die without a doctor, rejoiced, the quacks breathed once
more—but were led again onto the boards of the comic stage just as
before. Ben Jonson, that bold pedestrian who walked all the way from
London to Scotland, and who, in his long rambles through villages
or cities, had become familiar with the variegated characters
haunting their market places, painted, in his turn, the portrait of
the “mountebank doctor,” one of the best, not better however than
Rutebeuf’s, and very similar to it, for, as we said, the type passed
on from century to century, unchanged.
Old Ben, as usual, paints from life, having seen and heard more
than once at Bartholomew and other fairs the drug-seller pacing his
scaffold and exclaiming, “O, health, health! the blessing of the
rich! the riches of the {192} poor! who can buy thee at too dear a
rate, since there is no enjoying this world without thee.” Upon which
the man makes game of the despicable “asses” his rivals, boasts of
his incomparable panacea, into which enters a little human fat, which
is worth a thousand crowns, but which he will part with for eight
crowns, no, for six, finally for sixpence. A thousand crowns is what
the cardinals Montalto and Farnese and his friend the Grand Duke of
Tuscany have paid him, but he despises money and he makes sacrifices
for the people. Likewise he has a little of the powder which gave
beauty to Venus and to Helen; one of his friends, a great traveller,
found it in the ruins of Troy and sent it him. This friend also sent
a little of it to the French Court, but that portion had become
“sophisticated,” and the ladies who use it do not obtain from it such
good results.[243]
Three years later, an English traveller, finding himself at Venice,
was filled with wonder at the talk of the Italian mountebanks, and
describing them, he too, from life, gave another copy of the same
immutable original. “Truely,” wrote Coryat, “I often wondered at
many of these natural orators. For they would tell their tales with
such admirable volubility and plausible grace, even _extempore_,
and seasoned with that singular variety of elegant jests and witty
conceits, that they did often strike great admiration into strangers
that never heard them before.” They sell “oyles, soueraigne waters,
amorous songs printed, apothecary drugs, and a common-weale of other
trifles. . . . I saw one of them holde a viper in his hand, and play
with his sting a quarter of an houre together, and yet receive no
hurt. . . . He made us all beleeve that the same viper was lineally
descended from the generation of that viper that lept out of the
fire upon St. Paul’s hand, in the island of Melita, now called
Malta.”[244] {193}
No doubt the loquacity, the volubility, the momentary conviction,
the grace, the insinuating tone, the light, winged gaiety of the
southern charlatan were not found so fully or so charmingly at the
festivals of old England. These festivals were, however, merry and
boisterous, attended by large crowds, among which moved many an
artful character so full of jest and guile that Shakespeare thought
them worthy of immortality; he gave it them indeed in creating,
as a model of those men whose “revenue is the silly cheat,” his
incomparable “Autolycus, a rogue.”
Country labourers went in numbers to these meetings, to stand jests
which, aimed at them, were an amusement even to themselves, and to
buy some drug which would do them good: they are to be seen there
still. At the present day they continue to collect before the vendors
of cures for the toothache and other troubles. Certificates abound
round the booth; it seems as though all the illustrious people in
the world must have been benefited by the discovery; the man now
addresses himself to the rest of humanity. He talks, gesticulates,
gets excited, leans over with a grave tone and a deep voice. The
peasants press around, gaping with inquisitive eye, uncertain if
they ought to laugh or to be afraid, and in the end get confident.
The large hand fumbles in the new coat, the purse is drawn forth
with an awkward air, the piece of money is held out and the medicine
received, while the shining eye and undecided physiognomy say plainly
that the cunning and the habitual practical sense are here at fault;
that these good souls, clever and invincible in their own domain
when it is a question of a sheep or a cow, are the victims of every
one in an unknown land, the land of medical lore. The vendor bestirs
himself, and now, as formerly, triumphs over indecision by means of
direct appeals.
In England the incomparable Goose Fair at {194} Nottingham should
be chosen as the place to see these spectacles, which shine there in
all their infinite variety, with quacks as racy as those of pristine
days, scenes reminding one of Rubens’ great “Kermesse” at the Louvre,
and at every turn and before every shop living confutations of St.
Evremond and others’ ideas of the temper of the English, ever lost in
their thoughts, as if merry England were no more.[245]
Greater still was, in the Middle Ages, the popularity of those
wayfarers, numerous too at the Goose Fair, who came not to cure, but
to amuse, and who, if they did not offer remedies for diseases, at
least brought forgetfulness of troubles; the minstrels, tumblers,
jugglers, and singers. Minstrels and _jongleurs_, under different
names, exercised the same profession, that is, they chanted songs
and romances to the accompaniment of their instruments, as is still
done in the East, in Persia for instance, where poems are not told
but chanted, in various keys according to the subject. At a time
when books were rare, and the theatre, properly so called, did not
exist, poetry and music travelled with the minstrels and gleemen
along the roads; such guests were always welcome. They were to be
found at every feast, wherever there were rejoicings; it was expected
from them, as from wine or beer, that care would be lulled to sleep,
and merriment would replace it. They had many ways to fulfil the
expectation, some dignified, some not. Of the first sort was the
singing and reciting, either in French or English, of the loves and
deeds of ancient heroes.
This was a grand part to play, one held in much reverence; the
harpers and minstrels who arrived at the castle gates, their heads
full of war stories, or sweet tales, or lively songs to excite
laughter, “ad ridendum,” were received with the highest favour. On
their coming they announced themselves without by some “murie {195}
singing” overheard in the house; soon came the order to bring them
in; they were ranged at one end of the hall, and every one gave ear
to them.[246] They preluded on their instruments, and then began to
sing. On what subject?
“Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow
For old unhappy far off things
And battles long ago:
Or is it some more humble lay
Familiar matter of to-day?
Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain
That has been and may be again?”[247]
Like Taillefer at Hastings, they told of the prowess of Charlemagne
and of Roland, or they spoke of Arthur, or of the heroes of the wars
of Troy, undoubted ancestors of the Britons of England:
“Men lykyn jestis for to here,
And romans rede in diuers manere
Of Alexandre the conqueroure,
Of Julius Cesar the emperoure,
Of Grece and Troy the strong stryf,
There many a man lost his lyf, {196}
Of Brute that baron bold of hond
The first conqueroure of Englond,
Of kyng Artour that was so riche,
Was non in his tyme him liche,
* * * * *
How kyng Charlis and Rowlond fawght
With Sarzyns nold they be cawght,
Of Tristrem and of Ysoude the swete
How they with love first gan mete,
Of kyng John and of Isombras,
Of Ydoyne and of Amadas,
Stories of diuerce thynggis
Of pryncis, prelatis, and of kynggis,
Many songgis of diuers ryme,
As english, frensh, and latyne.”[248]
In the fourteenth century most of these old romances, heroic,
forceful, or touching, had been re-cast and put into new language;
florid descriptions, complicated adventures, marvels and prodigies
had been added to them; many had been turned into prose, and instead
of being sung they were read.[249] The lord listened with pleasure,
and his taste, palled by surfeit, caused him to take delight in
the strange entanglements with which every event was henceforth
enveloped. He now lived a more complex life than formerly; being more
refined he had more wants, and grand, simple pictures in poems like
the Song of Roland no longer satisfied his imagination: he preferred
variety to grandeur. The heroes of romance {197} found harder and
harder tasks imposed on them, and were obliged to triumph over more
and more marvellous enchantments. As the hand became more alert the
modelling improved; the softer-hearted heroes of amorous adventures
were endowed by the poet with that charm, at once mystic and sensual,
so characteristic of the sculptured figures of the fourteenth
century. The author of “Sir Gawayne” takes a scarcely concealed
pleasure in describing the visits which his knight receives, in
painting his lady, so gentle, so pretty, with easy motions and gay
smile; he puts into his picture all his art, all his soul; he finds
words which seem caresses, and verses which shine as with a golden
gleam.[250]
These pictures, not rare in the thirteenth century, greatly
multiplied in the fourteenth, but toward the end thereof passed from
the romance into the tale, or into poems, half tale, half romance,
such as the “Troilus” of Chaucer. After many transformations the
metrical romance was gradually giving way to new forms and styles
which better suited the tastes of the hour. A hundred years earlier
such a man as Chaucer would have taken up the Arthur legends in his
turn, and would have written some splendid long-winded poetical
romance for the minstrels; but he left us tales and lyric poems
because his own taste and that of the age were different, and he
felt that people were still curious but not enthusiastic about old
heroic stories, that few any longer followed them with passion to
the end, and that they were rather made the ornament of libraries
than the subject of daily thought.[251] Thenceforward men liked to
find separately in {198} ballads and in tales the lyric breath and
the spirit of observation formerly contained with all the rest in
the great metrical romances, the poetical _summæ_ of earlier days;
and these, abandoned to the less expert of the itinerant rhymers,
became such wretched copies of the old originals that they were the
laughing-stock of people of sense and taste.
Many of the grand French epics were thus abridged and put into
skipping, barren English verse, the epics being out of fashion, their
substitutes valueless. So, when Chaucer, surrounded by his fellow
pilgrims, favoured them with a story of Sir Thopas, popular good
sense, personated by the host, rebelled, and the performance was
rudely interrupted. Yet from Sir Thopas to many of the romances which
ran the streets or the roads the distance is small, and the laughable
parody was hardly more than a close imitation. Robert Thornton, in
the first half of the fifteenth century, copied from older texts a
good number of these remodelled romances. In turning their pages one
is struck by the excellence of Chaucer’s jesting, his caricature
being almost a portrait.
These poems are all cut after one and the same pattern, tripping
and sprightly, with little thought and less sentiment; the cadenced
stanzas march on, clear, easy, and empty; no constraint, no effort;
one may open and close the book without a sigh, without regret, with
no positive weariness nor really-felt pleasure. Were it not for the
proper names, the reader might pass chancewise from one romance to
another without noticing the change. Take no matter which, “Sir
Isumbras” for example: {199} after a prayer for form’s sake, the
rhymer vaunts the valour of the hero, then praises a quality of
especial value, with which he was happily endowed, his fondness for
minstrels and his generosity towards them:
“He luffede glewmene well in haulle
He gafe thame robis riche of palle (fine cloth)
Bothe of golde and also fee;
Of curtasye was he kynge,
Of mete and drynke no nythynge,
On lyfe was none so fre.”
Isumbras, his wife, and his son, are without peers; he is the most
valiant of knights, his wife the most lovely of women:
“I wille yow telle of a knyghte
That bothe was stalworthe and wyghte,
And worthily undir wede;
His name was hattene syr Ysambrace.”
So is also Sir Eglamour:
“Y shalle telle yow of a knyght
That was bothe hardy and wyght,
And stronge in eche a stowre.”
So is also Sir Degrevant:
“And y schalle karppe off a knyght
That was both hardy and wyght,
Sire Degrevaunt that hend hyght,
That dowghty was of dede.”[252] {200}
So is also Chaucer’s Sir Thopas:
“. . . I wol telle verrayment
Of myrthe and of solas,
Al of a knyght was fair and gent
In batail and in tornament,
His name was Sir Thopas.”
And though Sir Thopas almost comes within the scope of the present
work, being an adventure seeker, “a knight auntrous,” ever on his
way, never sleeping in a house—
“And for he was a knight auntrous,
He nolde slepen in non hous,
But liggen in his hode;
His bright helm was his wonger (pillow),”
yet must we abide by the ruling of mine host and leave him alone:
“No more of this for Goddes dignitee.”
But, even at a comparatively late date, the inmate of an out of the
way castle usually proved more lenient. He welcomed the minstrel, his
verse and his viol as he welcomed change; he lent a complacent ear to
his commonplace romances, his ballads on every subject, his praise
of flowers, women, wine, spring, heroes and saints, his _goliardic_
dispraise of women,[253] monks and friars, his tales of love or
laughter, his patriotic songs the rarest of all, for the Hundred
Years War was for the English chiefly a royal and not a national
war, and this alone can explain the scant place occupied in the
songs of the time by Crécy {201} and Poictiers, never mentioned by
Chaucer, never mentioned by Langland (who disapproved of the war),
celebrated only by one solitary songster known by name and otherwise
unknown, the unimitated and ungifted Laurence Minot.[254] The noble
listened; he had few intellectual diversions; he gave little time
if any to reading, which was not for him then an unmixed pleasure,
and needed effort; there was no theatre for him to go to. At long
intervals only, when the great yearly feasts came round, the knight
might go, in company with the crowd, to see Pilate and Jesus on the
boards. There he found sometimes not only the crowd but the king too.
Richard II, for example, witnessed a religious play or mystery in the
fourteenth year of his reign, and had ten pounds distributed among
several clerks of London who had played before him at Skinnerwell
“the play of the Passion and of the creation of the world.”[255] A
few years later he saw the famous York plays, at the feast of Corpus
Christi, performed in the streets of that city.[256] In ordinary
times the knight was only too happy to receive in his home men of
vast memory, who knew more verse and more music than could be heard
in a day.
The king himself liked their coming. He had them sometimes brought
up to him in his very chamber, where he was pleased to sit and hear
their music. Edward II received four minstrels in his chamber at
Westminster and heard their songs, and when they went he ordered
twenty ells of cloth to be given them for their reward.[257] No
one thought in those days of rejoicings without minstrels; there
were four hundred and twenty-six of them {202} at the marriage of
the Princess Margaret, daughter of Edward I.[258] Edward III gave
a hundred pounds to those who were present at the marriage of his
daughter Isabella,[259] some figured also at his tournaments.[260]
When a bishop went on his pastoral rounds he was occasionally greeted
by minstrels, hired on purpose to cheer him; they were of necessity
chosen among local artists, who were apt to fiddle cheap music to
his lordship. Bishop Swinfield, in one of his rounds, gave a penny a
piece to two minstrels who had just played before him; but on another
occasion he distributed twelve pence a piece.[261]
When men of importance were travelling they sometimes had the
pleasure of hearing minstrels at the inn, and in that manner
whiled away the long empty evenings. In the curious manual already
quoted, called “La manière de langage,” composed in French by an
Englishman of the fourteenth century, the traveller of distinction
is represented listening to the musicians at the inn, and mingling
his voice at need with their music: “Then,” says our author, “come
forward into the lord’s presence the trumpeters and horn-blowers
with their frestels (pipes) and clarions, and begin to play and blow
very loud, and then the lord with his squires begin to move, to
sway, to dance, to utter and sing fine carols till midnight without
ceasing.”[262]
In great houses minstrels’ music was the usual seasoning of meals.
At table there are only two amusements, {203} says Langland, in his
“Visions”: to listen to the minstrels, and, when they are silent,
to talk religion and to scoff at its mysteries.[263] The repasts
which Sir Gawain takes at the house of his host the Green Knight
are enlivened with songs and music. On the second day the amusement
extends till after supper; they listen during the meal and after it
to many noble songs, such as Christmas carols and new songs, with all
possible mirth:
“Mony athel songez,
As coundutes of kryst-masse, and carolez newe,
With all the manerly merthe that mon may of telle.”
On the third day,
“With merthe and mynstralsye, with metez at hor wylle,
Thay maden as mery as any men moghten.”[264]
In Chaucer’s “Squire’s Tale,” King Cambynskan gives a
“Feste so solempne and so riche
That in this worlde ne was ther noon it liche.”
And this prince is shown sitting after the third course among his
nobles, listening to the music:
“. . . So bifelle after the thridde cours,
Whil that the kyng sit thus in his nobleye,
Herkyng his mynstrales her thinges pleye
Byforn him atte boord deliciously. . . .”
During all these meals the sound of the viol, the voice of the
singers, the “delicious things” of the minstrels, were interrupted,
it is true, by the crunching of the bones {204} gnawed by the dogs
under the tables, by the quarrels of the same, or by the sharp cry
of some ill-bred falcon; for many noblemen kept during dinner these
favourite birds on a perch behind them. Their masters, enjoying their
presence, were indulgent with the liberties they took.
The minstrels of Cambynskan are represented as attached to his
person; those belonging to the King of England also had permanent
functions. The sovereign was seldom without them, and even when
he went abroad was accompanied by them as well as by his hawks
and hounds, a complete orchestra. Henry V engaged eighteen, who
were to follow him to Guyenne and elsewhere.[265] Their chief is
sometimes called _king_ or _marshal_ of the minstrels.[266] On
May 2, 1387, Richard II gave a passport to John Caumz (? Camuz),
“rex ministrallorum nostrorum,” who was setting out for a journey
beyond the sea.[267] On January 19, 1464, Edward IV grants a pension
of ten marks “to our beloved Walter Haliday, marshall of our
minstrels.”[268] The Roll of Thomas Brantingham, treasurer to Edward
III, bears frequent mention of royal minstrels, to whom a fixed
salary of seven pence-halfpenny a day is paid.[269] King Richard II
had in the same manner minstrels in his pay, and enjoyed their music
{205} when travelling. When he went for the last time to Ireland he
had to wait for ten days at Milford on account of contrary winds.
That French gentleman, Créton, who was with him, and wrote afterwards
a most interesting account of what befell the unfortunate king during
the last year of his reign, states in his chronicle that the time was
merrily passed at Milford while expecting a change in the weather,
and that day and night they had music and songs of minstrels.[270]
The richer nobles imitated, of course, the king, and had their own
companies, whom they allowed to play at times in various parts
of the country (as was the case later with regular actors), and
whom they supplied with testimonial letters vouching for them and
their artistic ability.[271] The accounts of Winchester College
under Edward IV show that this college recompensed the services of
minstrels belonging to the king, the Earl of Arundel, Lord de la
Ware, the Duke of Gloucester, the [Earl] of Northumberland, and the
Bishop of Winchester; these last often recur. In the same accounts,
time of Henry IV, mention is made of the expenses occasioned by the
visit of the Countess of Westmoreland, accompanied by her suite. Her
minstrels formed part of it, and a sum of money was given them.[272]
{206}
When visiting towns and performing before the citizens, itinerant
troups made a collection among the bystanders, having, however,
themselves a fee to pay for the privilege. A curious example of this
is recorded in John of Gaunt’s register,[273] where his seneschal
of Newcastle-under-Lyme is ordered to see to it that 4d. be paid to
William de Brompton a burgess of that city and Margery his wife, “by
every minstrel coming there to make his minstralcy against the feast
of St. Giles the Abbot,” and that a payment be also made to the same
for every bear brought there to be baited, a regular inquest having
shown that such fees had been paid to that couple and to Margery’s
ancestors from time immemorial.
Like lords and princes, from the early fifteenth century at least,
cities themselves had their troups of minstrels: “London, Coventry,
Bristol, Shrewsbury, Norwich, Chester, York, Beverley, Leicester,
Lynn, Canterbury, had them, to name no others. They received fixed
fees or dues, wore the town livery and badge of a silver scutcheon,
played at all local celebrations and festivities and were commonly
known as _waits_.”[274]
Besides money and good meals, those musical wanderers often received
a variety of gifts, such as cloaks, furred robes, and the like.
Langland alludes more than once to these largesses, which proves
that they were considerable, and he regrets that all this was not
distributed to the poor who go, they too, from door to door, and are
the minstrels of God: {207}
“Clerkus and knyghtes · welcometh kynges mynstrales,
And for love of here lordes · lithen hem at festes:
Much more, me thenketh · riche men auhte
Have beggers by-fore hem · whiche beth godes mynstrales.”[275]
But his advice was not heeded, and long after his time the minstrels
continued to be admitted to the castle halls. In erecting the hall
the builder took into account the probable visits of musicians, and
often raised a gallery for them above the entrance door, opposite
to the dais, the place where the master’s table was set.[276] This
custom long survived the Middle Ages. At Hatfield a minstrels’
gallery of the seventeenth century adorns the hall of that beautiful
place, and is still, on great occasions, put to the use it was
originally intended for.
[Illustration 38. PLAYING UPON THE VIELLE.
(_From the MS. 10 E.IV; English; early Fourteenth Century._)]
The classic instrument of the minstrel was the _vielle_, a kind of
violin or fiddle with a bow, something like ours, a drawing of which,
as used in the thirteenth century, is to be found in the album of
Villard de Honnecourt.[277] It was delicate to handle, and required
much skill; in proportion therefore as the profession lowered, the
good performer on the _vielle_ became rarer; the common tambourine
or tabor, which needed but little training, replaced the _vielle_,
and true artists complained of the music and the taste of the {208}
day. It was a tabor that the glee-man of Ely wore at his neck when
he had his famous dialogue with the King of England, which proved
so bewildering for the monarch: “He came thence to London; in a
meadow he met the king and his suite; around his neck hung his tabor,
painted with gold and rich azure.”[278]
The minstrels played yet other instruments, the harp, the lute, the
guitar, the bag-pipe, the rota (a kind of small harp, the ancient
instrument of the Celts), and others.[279]
[Illustration 39. _Cittern._ _Bagpipe._ _Clarion._ _Rebec._
_Psaltery._ _Syrinx._ _Sackbut._ _Regals._ _Gittern._ _Shalm._
_Timbrel._ _Cymbals._
THE MINSTRELS’ GALLERY AT EXETER.
(_Fourteenth Century._)]
The presents, the favour of the great, rendered enviable the lot
of the minstrels; they multiplied accordingly, and the competition
was great, which made the trade less profitable. In the fifteenth
century, the king’s minstrels, clever and able men, protested to
their master against the increasing audacity of the false minstrels,
who deprived them of the greater part of their revenues. “Uncultured
peasants,” said the king, who sided with his own men, “and
workmen of different trades in our kingdom of England have passed
themselves off as minstrels; some have worn our livery, which we
did not {211} grant to them, and have even given themselves out to
be our own minstrels.” By means of these guilty practices, they
extorted much money from the king’s subjects, and although they had
no understanding nor experience of the art, they went from place to
place on festival days and gathered all the profits which should have
enriched the true artists, those who had devoted themselves entirely
to their profession, and did not exercise any low trade.
The king, to protect his men against such unlawful competition,
authorized them to reconstitute and consolidate the pre-existing
gild of minstrels; no one could henceforth exercise this profession,
whatever his talent, if he had not been admitted into the gild. A
power of inquiry was granted to the members of the society, who had
the right to have false minstrels fined, the money to be applied
to candles lit in the chapel of the Holy Virgin at St. Paul’s and
in the “royal free chapel of St. Anthony.” For a pious motive was
associated then with most actions, and minstrels, so badly treated
by the generality of religious writers, were in this case bound,
says the king, to pray in those two chapels for him while alive and
for his soul when dead, for his “dearest consort Elizabeth queen of
England,” and for the soul of his “dearest lord and father”; this
till the end of time. Women were, as well as men, admitted into the
fraternity.[280]
Such was the will of the king; in the same manner, and without any
better success, the price of bread and the wage for a day’s labour
were lowered by statute, all of which had but a limited and temporary
effect. {212}
The authorities had other reasons for watching over singers and
itinerant musicians; while they showed indulgence to the armed
retainers of the great, they feared the rounds made by those glee men
with no other arms than their vielle or tabor, but sowing sometimes
strange disquieting doctrines under colour of songs. These were more
than liberal, and went at times so far as to recommend social or
political revolt. The Commons in parliament denounced by name, at the
beginning of the fifteenth century, the Welsh minstrels as fomentors
of trouble and causes of rebellion. Their political songs encouraged
the insurgents to resistance; and parliament, who bracketed them with
ordinary vagabonds, knew well that in having them arrested on the
roads, it was not simple cut-purses whom it sent to prison. “_Item_:
That no westours and rimers, minstrels or vagabonds, be maintained
in Wales to make kymorthas or quyllages on the common people, who
by their divinations, lies, and exhortations are partly cause of
the insurrection and rebellion now in Wales. _Reply_: Le roy le
veut.”[281]
Popular movements were the occasion for satirical songs against the
great, songs composed by minstrels and soon known by heart among the
crowd. It was a popular song which furnished to John Ball the text
for his famous speech at Blackheath in the revolt of 1381:
“When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman?”
Again, under Henry VI, when the peasants of Kent rose, and their
allies the sailors took and beheaded the Duke of Suffolk at sea,
a satirical song was composed, became popular and has come down
to us. As before killing him they had given a mock trial to the
king’s favourite, so in the song they present the comedy of his
funeral; {213} nobles and prelates are asked to come and sing their
responses, and in this pretended burial service, which is in reality
a hymn of joy and triumph, the minstrel calls down heavenly blessings
on the murderers. At the end the Commons are represented coming in
their turn to sing a sarcastic _Requiescant in pace_ over all English
traitors.[282]
The renown of the popular rebel, Robin Hood the outlaw, who lived
in the twelfth century if he ever lived at all, went on increasing.
His manly virtues were extolled; picturesque companions were, later,
invented for him: Friar Tuck, Maid Marian, Little John and all the
imaginary inhabitants of Sherwood Forest; listeners were told how
this pious man, who, even in the worst danger, waited till mass
was over before thinking of his safety, boldly robbed great lords
and high prelates, but was merciful to the poor;[283] which was an
indirect notice to the brigands of the time that they should be
careful to discern in their rounds between the tares and the wheat.
The sympathy of the minstrels for ideas of emancipation, which had
made such progress in the fourteenth century, was not only evinced in
these songs, but also in the remodelled romances recited by them in
presence of the nobles, and which henceforth were full of high-flown
declarations on the equality of men. The hearer did not take offence;
the greater poets, favourites of all that counted, the king himself
in his public statements proclaimed liberal truths which it was
hardly expected would be acted upon literally. Thus Chaucer {214}
celebrates in his most eloquent verse the only true nobility in his
eyes, that which comes from the heart.[284] Thus also King Edward
I, on summoning the first true English parliament in 1295, declared
that he did so inspired by the old maxim which prescribes that what
concerns all should be approved by all, proclaiming a principle
whence have since issued the most radical reforms of society, and on
which the American insurgents founded, centuries later, their claim
to independence.[285]
Such direct appeals from the king to his people contributed early to
develop among the English the sense of duty, of political rights and
responsibilities. In days of trouble, when parliament scarcely yet
existed, the same king thought he should explain his conduct to the
people and allow them to form an opinion: “The king about this, and
about his estate and as to his kingdom, and how the business of the
kingdom has come to naught, makes known and wishes that all should
know the truth of it; which ensues . . .”[286]
In France the enunciation of liberal principles was frequent
in royal edicts, but the emptiness of these fine words and the
interested motives which caused them to {215} be used were scarcely
veiled at all. Louis X, “le Hutin,” in his ordinance of July 2, 1315,
declares that, “as according to the law of nature every one is born
free,” he has resolved to enfranchise the serfs on his own estates.
He adds, however, that he will do so for money. Three days later,
fearing that his benefit is not sufficiently prized, he supplements
his first statement by a new one in which his exalted ideas and
his present needs are boldly intertwined: “It may be that some,
ill-advised and in default of good counsel, might misunderstand such
great benefit and favour and wish rather to remain in the baseness of
servitude than to come to free estate: wherefore we order and commit
to you that, _for the aid of the present war_, you levy on such
persons according to the amount of their property, and the conditions
of servitude of each one, as much and sufficiently as the condition
and riches of those persons may bear and as the necessity of our war
may require.”[287]
Well then might the minstrels imitate the king himself in repeating
axioms so well known, and which, according to appearance, there was
so little chance of seeing carried out. But ideas, like the seeds of
trees falling on the soil, are not lost, and the noble who had gone
to sleep to the murmur of verses chanted by the glee-man waked up
one day to the tumult of the crowd collected before London, with the
refrain of the priest John Ball for its war-cry. And then he had to
draw his sword and show by a massacre that the time was not yet come
to apply these axioms, and that there was nothing in them save song.
Still were the trees dropping their seeds. Poets and popular singers
had thus an influence over social movements, less through the
maxims scattered throughout their great works than by those little
unpolished pieces, struck off on the moment, which the lesser among
them composed and sang for the people, at the cross-roads in {216}
times of trouble, or by the peasants’ hearth in ordinary times, as a
reward for hospitality.[288]
[Illustration 40. A FOURTEENTH-CENTURY JUGGLER.
(_From MS. 10 E. IV._)]
Minstrels, however, as singers of songs, propagators of thoughts,
tellers of romances, were to disappear. An age was beginning when
books and the art of reading spread among the people, and a more and
more numerous public would read and cease to listen; the theatres
were, moreover, about to offer a spectacle much superior to that
of the little troop of musicians and wandering singers, and would
compete with them more powerfully than the “rude husbandmen and
artificers of various crafts,” against whose impertinence Edward IV
was so indignant. Replaced, unwanted, the minstrels proper ceased to
exist as a class, leaving however behind them a variety of men who
could claim them as ancestors, street musicians, mirth mongers, or
the “blind crouder with no rougher voice then rude stile,” who sang
for Sir Philip Sidney “the olde song of Percy and Douglas.”
In fact, the period of the Taillefers who would go to death in the
fight while singing of Charlemagne was a limited one; the lustre
which the jongleurs or trouvères of the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries, who confined themselves to the recitation of poetry,
had shed on their profession, was effaced in proportion as they
associated {217} more closely with the mannerless bands of tumblers,
jugglers, leaders of performing bears (_ursinarii_, the Latin
documents of the time name them),[289] conjurors, and ribalds of all
kinds.[290]
These bands had always existed, but the chanters of romances,
tellers of knights’ high deeds, and of saints’ edifying examples,
admitted even into the cloister, finding grace before St. Thomas
Aquinas,[291] had, in the heyday of their fame stood above them, or
apart from them. At all times, however, in castles and at fairs,
were to be found buffoons and jugglers, whose coarseness exhilarated
the spectators. The precise details which the contemporaries give
as to their performances show not only that their jokes would not
be tolerated among the rich of to-day, but that there are even few
out of the way villages where {218} peasants on a festival would
accept them without disgust. The great of former days found pleasure,
however, in them, and in the troop of mummers and tumblers who went
about wherever mirth was wanted, there always were some who excited
laughter by the ignoble means described in John of Salisbury’s
“Polycraticus”—“so shameful that even a cynic would blush at seeing
them.”[292] But people of high degree did not blush, they laughed.
Two hundred years later, some sacrilegious clerks, out of hate for
the Archbishop of York, made themselves guilty of the same monstrous
buffooneries in his very cathedral, and the episcopal letter relating
their misdeeds with the precision of a legal report, adds that they
were committed _more ribaldorum_.[293] Langland, at the same epoch,
shows that one of his personages is not a true minstrel, either of
the higher or of the lower sort, since he is neither able to “telle
faire gestes,” nor to practise those welcome turpitudes.[294]
The greater was the feast, the coarser were often the deeds and
songs of the mirth-mongers. In this way, in particular, were they
accustomed to celebrate Christmas. Thomas Gascoigne, in the sort of
theological dictionary compiled by him, beseeches his readers to
abstain from hearing such Christmas songs, for they leave on the mind
images and ideas which it is almost impossible afterwards to wash
out. He adds as a warning the story of a man he personally knew: “I
have known, I, Gascoigne, Doctor in Divinity, who am writing this
book, a man who had heard at Christmas some of those repulsive songs.
{219} It so happened that the shameful things he had heard had made
such a deep impression on his mind that he could never in after time
get rid of those remembrances nor wipe away those images. So he
fell into such a deep melancholy that at length it proved deadly to
him.”[295]
[Illustration 41. FAVOURITE DANCES IN MEDIÆVAL ENGLAND.
(_From MS. 10 E. IV._)]
The representations of the dance of Salome to be found in mediæval
stained glass or manuscripts give an idea of the sort of tricks and
games considered the fittest to amuse people of importance while
sitting in their hall or having their dinner. It is by dancing on her
hands, head downwards, that the young woman gains the suffrages of
Herod. As the idea of such a dance could not be drawn from the Bible,
it obviously arose from the customs of the time. At Clermont-Ferrand,
in the stained glass of the cathedral (thirteenth century), Salome
dances on knives which she holds with each hand, she also having
her head downwards. In a window at the Lincoln cathedral she has no
knives, but her “dance” is of the same sort and her red-stockinged
feet touch the upper line of the glass panel. At Verona, she is
represented on the {220} most ancient of the bronze gates of St.
Zeno (ninth century) bending backwards and touching her feet with her
head. Those standing by are filled with surprise and admiration, one
puts his hand to his mouth, the other to his cheek, in an involuntary
gesture of amazement. She may be seen in the same posture in several
manuscripts in the British Museum; Herod is sitting at his table
with his lords, while the young woman dances head downwards.[296] In
another manuscript, also of the fourteenth century, minstrels are
shown playing on their instruments, while a professional dancing girl
belonging to their troop performs as usual head downwards, but this
time, as at Clermont, her hands rest on two swords. The accounts of
the royal exchequer of England sometimes mention sums paid to passing
dancers, who, no doubt, must also have performed surprising feats,
for the payments are considerable. Thus, in the third year of his
reign, Richard II pays to John Katerine, a dancer of Venice, six
pounds thirteen shillings and fourpence for having played and danced
before him.[297]
[Illustration 42. FAVOURITE DANCES IN PERSIA.
(_From a pencil-case._)]
In the East, where, in our travels, we have sometimes the surprise
of finding ancient customs still living {221} which we can at home
only study in books, the fashion for buffoons and mimics survives,
and even remains the great distraction of princes. The Bey of Tunis,
when I was there years ago, had fools to amuse him in the evening,
who insulted and diverted him by the contrast between their permitted
insolence and his real power. Among the rich Moslem women of the
same city, few of whom could read, the monotony of days spent by
them till death came under the shadow of the same walls, behind the
same gratings, was broken by the tales of the female fool, whose
duty was to enliven the harem by sallies of the strangest liberty.
As for dances, they frequently consist, in the East, in performances
similar to that of Salome, such as shown in our manuscripts. Women
dancing head downwards constantly appear in Persian pictures; several
examples may be seen in the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the same
subject often occurs on the valuable pencil-cases formerly made with
so much taste and art in Persia.
If our ancestors of the fourteenth century could enjoy such
pleasures, no wonder that moralists declared more and more openly
against both minstrels and mimics and ranked them with those rogues
and vagabonds denounced as a public danger by parliament. As years
pass the discredit grows. In the sixteenth century Philip Stubbes
saw in minstrels the personification of all vices, and he justified
in bitter words his contempt for “suche drunken sockets and bawdye
parasits as range the cuntreyes, ryming and singing of uncleane,
corrupt and filthie songes in tavernes, ale-houses, innes, and other
publique assemblies.” Their life is like the shameful songs of which
their heads are full, and they are the origin of all abominations;
the more dangerous because their number is so great:
“Every towne, citie, and countrey is full of these minstrelles to
pype up a dance to the devill: but of dyvines, so few there be as
they maye hardly be seene. {222}
“But some of them will reply, and say, What, sir! we have lycences
from justices of peace to pype and use our minstralsie to our best
commoditie. Cursed be those lycences which lycence any man to get his
lyving with the destruction of many thousands!
“But have you a lycence from the archjustice of peace, Christe
Jesus? If you have not . . . than may you, as rogues, extravagantes,
and straglers from the heavenlye country, be arrested of the high
justice of peace, Christ Jesus, and be punished with eternall death,
notwithstanding your pretensed licences of earthly men.”[298]
Such was the state of degradation the noble profession of the old
singers had reached; the necessity either of obtaining a licence or
of joining a gild, as prescribed by Edward IV, had been powerless
to check the decay. With new manners and inventions their _raison
d’être_ disappeared; the ancient reciters of poems, after having
mingled with the disreputable troops of caterers to public amusement,
saw these troops survive them, and, regular players apart, there
henceforth only remained upon the roads those coarse buffoons,
bearwards, and vulgar music makers whom thoughtful men held as
reprobates.
[Illustration 43. A PERFORMING BEAR.
(_From MS. 10 E. IV._)]
{223}
[Illustration 44. A SHAM MESSENGER.
(_From MS. 10 E. IV._)]
CHAPTER II
MESSENGERS, ITINERANT MERCHANTS AND PEDLARS
All his life long, kind, loving, merry Chaucer, a good observer, a
good listener and good talker, was fond of travels and travellers,
of roamers and tale-tellers, of people who came from afar, bringing
home with them many stories if little money, stories in which much
invention no doubt was mingled with a little truth: but what is
the good of raising a protest against harmless invention? Is not
sometimes their mixture with “sooth” a pleasant one? Thus, he said:
“Thus saugh I fals and sothe compouned
Togeder fle for oo (one) tydynge.”
Interested in all that was human he studied ordinary types and
rare ones; he observed mine Host, and looked also for seekers of
adventure, and was never tired of hearing their tales: {224}
“Aventure,
That is the moder of tydynges,
As the see is of welles and of sprynges.”
No greater pleasure for him than to see:
“Winged wondres faste fleen,
Twenty thousand in a route,
As Eolus hem blew aboute.”
He was in this a real _connoisseur_, fully appreciating the merit of
a well-told fable and knowing how useful and pleasant some such may
be found to beguile slow-winged time. Long before he started from
the Tabard, “faste by the Belle,” for a journey which millions of
Englishmen have since performed at his heels, allured by the music or
merriment of his word, he had this same taste for “unkouthe syghtes
and tydynges,” as well as for “thinges glad.” Finding himself once
in great “distresse” of mind, with a heavy heart, “disesperat of all
blys,” what did he dream of to “solace” himself, but of meeting and
hearing the whole innumerable tribe of tale-tellers, wayfarers, and
adventure seekers, by fancy assembled in an immense house, “made of
twigges, salwe, rede and green eke?” He wanted us to know, and he
wrote of the “House of Fame,” where after having met the bard “that
bare of Thebes up the fame” (Statius), and “gret Omere,” and “Venus’
clerke Ovide,” “Englyssh Gaunfride” (of Monmouth, of Arthurian fame),
and many more, he thought that there was no room for him, and feeling
his distress as keen as ever, dreamed of something else, willing
“Somme newe tydyngis for to lere,
Somme newe thinge, Y not what,
Tydyngs other this or that,
Of love, or suche thinges glad.”[299]
{225}
In this he had full satisfaction; his dream took another turn, and
he was led towards the place he wanted, where things glad were to be
found, a temple not of fame, but of tales and tidings, of noise and
merriment:
“And theroute come so grete a noyse,
That had hyt stonde upon Oyse,
Men myght hyt have herd esely
To Rome, Y trowe sikerly.”
The noise went up to the sky from innumerable apertures, for
“This hous hath of entrees
As feele (many) as of leves ben on trees,
In somer whan they grene ben.”
Never for one instant is the place quiet nor silent; it is always
“Filde ful of tydynges,
Other loude or of whisprynges;
And over alle the houses angles,
Ys ful of rounynges and of jangles,
Of werres, of pes, of mariages,
Of restes, of labour and of viages.”
War and peace, and love and travels, all this he was to make in
after-time the subject of his “Canterbury Tales,” and he represents
himself in this earlier poem as if coming to the well and spring of
all tales, placed somewhere in the land of dreams and fancy, yet
surrounded by people who were neither fanciful nor dreamy creatures,
but bony beings, on the contrary, with strong muscles and alert
tongues, and the dust of the road to Rome or the East on their feet;
surrounded, in fact, by these very roamers we are now trying to call
up one by one from the past, and who receive in the “House of Fame”
such an apotheosis as befits their quaint if rather questionable
character. Good Chaucer {226} lends a willing ear, and the ways of
speech of these people are carefully preserved in his verse for those
who after him may find interest in them. In this manner they spoke:
every person, says the poet,
“Every wight that I saugh there
Rouned (muttered) in eche others ere,
A newe tydynge prevely,
Or elles tolde alle oppenly
Ryght thus, and seyde; ‘Nost not thou
That ys betyd, late or now?’
—‘No,’ quod he, ‘Telle me what.’
And than he tolde hym this and that,
And swore therto that hit was sothe;
‘Thus hath he sayde’ and ‘Thus he dothe,’
And ‘Thus shal hit be’ and ‘Thus herde Y seye.’”
And the delight is that the tale repeated by many is always new, for
it is never exactly the same; the fib fattens as it grows old, so
that it may serve your pleasure many a time and oft:
“Whan oon had herde a thinge ywis,
He come forthright to another wight,
And gan him tellen anon ryght,
The same thynge that him was tolde,
Or hyt a forlonge way was olde,
But gan sommewhat for to eche (increase)
To this tydynge in this speche
More than hit ever was . . .
As fire ys wont to quyk and goo
From a sparke sprongen amys,
Tille alle a citee brent up ys.”
That there may be no mistake about the sort of people to whom the
pleasant art of stretching a lie is so familiar, Chaucer is careful
to name them, and there we find almost every one of our friends
already mentioned or hereafter described, the sea or land wayfarers:
“And lord! this hous in alle tymes
Was ful of shipmen and pilgrimes,
With scrippes (bags) bret-ful of leseyngs (lies)
Entremedled with tydynges, {227}
And eke allone be hemselve,
O many a thousand tymes twelve
Saugh I eke of these pardoners,
Currours, and eke of messangers
With boystes crammed ful of lyes.”
What Chaucer gathered from these shipmen, pardoners, couriers, and
messengers, he assures us it was not his intention to tell the world,
“For hit no nede is redely;
Folke kan hit synge bet than I.”
Whether or not some doubt may have afterwards entered his mind about
the great poetical faculty of “folke,” certain it is that, for the
delight of future ages, he did not stick to his word, as every reader
of the “Canterbury Tales” well knows.
[Illustration 45. A PROFESSIONAL MESSENGER.
(_From the MS. 10 E. IV._)]
These “boystes” which Chaucer represents, carried by messengers and
couriers, were filled in the way he describes only in a metaphorical
sense, and this left room for more solid ware, for letters and
parcels too, since in those old simple days, the messengers were
the only equivalent for mail and for parcels post. They were to be
found in the service of abbots, bishops, nobles, sheriffs, courts
of justice,[300] and of the king. Such a costly forerunner of the
post was not, of course, available for everybody; people did as they
best could. The poor man {228} waited till some friend was going a
journey; the rich only had express messengers, entrusted with their
errands to distant places and with the carrying of their letters,
generally written at dictation by a scribe on a sheet of parchment,
and then sealed in wax with the master’s signet.[301] The king kept
twelve messengers with a fixed salary; they followed him everywhere,
in constant readiness to start; they received threepence a day when
they were on the road, and four shillings and eightpence a year to
buy shoes.[302] They were entrusted with letters {229} for the kings
of France and Scotland; sent to call together the representatives
of the nation for Parliament; to order the publication of the papal
sentence against Guy de Montfort; to call to Windsor the knights of
St. George; to summon the “archbishops, earls, barons, and other
lords and ladies of England and Wales” to London to be present at the
funeral of the late queen (Philippa); to prescribe the proclamation
in the counties of the statutes made in Parliament; to command the
“archbishops, bishops, abbots, priors, deans, and chapters of the
cathedral churches of all the shires to pray for the soul of Anne,
late Queen of England, deceased.”[303]
Edward III sends messengers or heralds to foreign parts, viz.,
France, Germany, Brabant, Flanders, Scotland, to call the nobility
of these countries to a great tournament, a sort of international
match to be held on St. George’s Day. The amount of the expense so
incurred, which is not less than thirty-two pounds, shows that the
messengers must have had long protracted journeys and must have had
to visit every part of the countries allotted to each of them.[304]
Sometimes the king got into trouble with his Commons on account of
expenses for messengers, which he did not always feel inclined to pay
from his own purse. Such a case happened in 1378, and the Commons
took this opportunity to once more assert their views about {230}
the French and other foreign possessions of their sovereign, Ireland
being included among them. They plainly state, as they had before,
that these countries and the expenses concerning them are a matter
for the king, not for them; it is a sort of kingly luxury with which
they will have nothing to do. They remonstrate, therefore, that about
forty-six thousand pounds sterling have been spent and entered as an
item of national expense “for the safeguard of certain countries,
places and fortresses, for which the Commons ought in no way to be
charged. These are partly in the march of Calais and partly at Brest,
Cherbourg, in Gascony, and in Ireland; and also expenses over certain
messengers to Flanders, Lombardy, Navarre, and Scotland.”
The Government peremptorily refuses to accept this kind of reasoning,
and returns a spirited reply: “To which it was answered that Gascony
and the other forts which our lord the king has in the parts beyond,
are and must be as barbicans for the kingdom of England, and if the
barbicans are well kept, with the safeguard formed by the sea, the
kingdom will be secure of peace. Otherwise we shall never find rest
nor peace with our enemies; for then they would push hot war to the
thresholds of our houses, which God forbid. Besides, through these
barbicans our said lord the king has convenient gates and entrances
towards his enemies to grieve them when he is ready and can act.”
Telling reasons are also given for retaining among public expenses
the costs of the journeys of messengers north and south.[305] None
the less did the Commons of England long continue to consider the
French wars, glorious perhaps, but undoubtedly expensive, as a
personal quarrel of their sovereign, and as, in fact, little more
than a rivalry between two French sovereigns speaking the same
language and belonging to the same family. {231}
Besides letters, couriers and messengers had many strange parcels
to carry from one place in the country to another: presents to fair
ladies, commodities of all sorts for their own masters. Thus, in
the year 1396, we find a servant of the Duke de Berri sent as a
messenger to Scotland, and travelling all the way thither from France
across England to fetch certain greyhounds of which his master was
especially fond. He is accompanied by three men on horseback, to help
him in taking care of the hounds, and he carries a safe-conduct from
Richard II, to travel without hindrance through the English dominions
with his followers and their belongings.[306]
Among the missions given by the king to his servants are some which,
at the present day, would seem singularly repugnant. He might, for
instance, charge one of his faithful retainers to carry the quarters
of a criminal’s body executed for treason to the great towns of
England. In this case he did not employ simple messengers; they were
personages of trust, followed by an escort to convey the remains.
Thus Edward III, in the fifty-first year of his reign, paid not less
than twenty pounds to “Sir William de Faryngton, knight, for the
costs and expenses he had incurred for transporting the four quarters
of the body of Sir John of Mistreworth, knight, to different parts of
England.”[307]
Of all travellers, the messenger was the swiftest; first, because
travelling was his business; he was a good horseman, an experienced
person, clever in getting out of trouble on the road and at the inns;
then he had the right of way; woe to whoever thought to stop him;
there were immense fines if the master were powerful, still more if
the man were the king’s messenger. A messenger of the queen, who had
been imprisoned by {232} the constable of Roxburgh Castle, did not
hesitate to claim £10,000 sterling for contempt of his sovereign, and
£2,000 as indemnity for himself.[308]
When, on August 7, 1316, Jacques d’Euse, cardinal-bishop of Porto,
was chosen pope at Lyons, and assumed the name of John XXII, Edward
II being at York learnt the news ten days afterwards through Laurence
of Ireland, messenger of the house of the Bardi. And indeed we
find by the accounts of the king’s household that this prince paid
Laurence twenty shillings on the 17th of August to reward him for his
trouble. It was only on the 27th of September that, being still at
York, the king received by Durand Budet, a messenger of cardinal de
Pelagrua, the official letters announcing the election; he gave five
pounds to the messenger. Finally, the pope’s nuncio having arrived in
person shortly afterwards, bearing the same news no longer so fresh,
the king made him a present, inversely proportionate to his speed, of
a hundred pounds.[309]
Such was the custom, presents were made to the bringers of good
news; royal messengers had thus a chance of casually increasing
their meagre pay of threepence a day. Most fortunate were those who
brought word to the king himself of happy events. Edward III gave
a forty marks pension for life to the queen’s messenger who came
announcing the birth of the Prince of Wales, the future Black Prince;
he gave thirteen pounds, three shillings and fourpence to John Cok
of Cherbourg, who told him of the capture of King John at Poictiers;
he settled a pension of one hundred shillings upon Thomas of
Brynchesley who brought him the good news of the capture of Charles
of Blois.[310] {233}
Sometimes messengers, in spite of their privileges and cleverness,
were liable to find themselves in very difficult plight. In time of
war they had to conceal their real function, and were in constant
danger of being stopped and having their bag searched and their
letters opened. People felt strongly about foreigners living in
England, many of them being friars who might disclose the secrets
of the realm in their private correspondence. The Commons therefore
asked for very strict rules to be passed in order to remedy this
possible evil, and we find them, in the year 1346, when England was
at war with France, recommending the creation of something like the
_cabinets noirs_ of a later date.[311]
Langland in his “Visions” graphically compares the different modes of
travelling of messengers and such other wayfarers as merchants going
with their goods from one place to another. The one is the swiftest
of all, no one would dare to stop him; the other is retarded by his
pack, his debts, his fear of robbers which prevents his travelling
at dark, the impossibility for him to use short cuts across the
fields, while short {234} cuts are freely allowed to messengers: no
hayward would disturb them; no man in his senses, no “wys man” would
“wroth be” on account of his crops being spoiled by a messenger; the
messenger shows his letters and is free to go:
“ . . . Yf a marchaunt and a messager · metten to-gederes,
And scholde wende o way · where both mosten reste . . .
The marchante mote nede be lette (kept) · lengere then the messagere;
The messager doth na more · bote with hus mouthe telleth
Hus erande and hus lettere sheweth · and is a-non delyvered.
And thauh thei wende by the wey · tho two to-gederes,
Thauh the messager make hus wey · a-mydde the whete,
Wole no wys man wroth be · ne hus wed (pledge) take;
Ys no haiwarde yhote (bidden) · hus wed for to take:
_Necesitas non habet legem._
Ac yf the merchaunt make hus way · overe menne corne,
And the haywarde happe · with hym for to mete,
Other hus hatt, other hus hode · othere elles hus gloves
The marchaunt mot for-go · other moneye of hus porse . . .
Yut thauh thei wenden on way · as to Wynchestre fayre,
The marchaunt with hus marchaundise · may nat go so swithe
As the messager may · ne with so mochel ese.
For that on (one) bereth bote a boxe · a brevet (letter) ther-ynne,
Ther the marchaunt ledeth a male (trunk) · with meny kynne thynges,
And dredeth to be ded there-fore · and (if) he in derke mete
With robbours and revers (thieves) · that riche men dispoilen;
Ther the messager is ay murye · hus mouthe ful of songes.”[312]
Wayfarers there were in whom both characteristics were united, the
slowness of pace of the merchant and the lightness of heart of the
messenger. These were the pedlars, a very numerous race in the Middle
Ages, one of the few sorts of wanderers that have not yet entirely
disappeared. A jovial race they seem to have been; they are so now,
most of them, for their way to success is through fair speech and
enticing words; and how could they be enticing if they did not show
good humour and jollity? “Gaiety” mends their broken wares, and
colours the faded ones, and blinds customers to otherwise {235}
obvious defects. They have always been described thus; they were
merry and sharp-tongued; such was Shakespeare’s Autolycus; such is,
in a novel of our time, the jovial owner of the dog Mumps, Bob Jakin
of “The Mill on the Floss.” “‘Get out wi’ you, Mumps,’ said Bob, with
a kick; ‘he is as quiet as a lamb, sir’—an observation which Mumps
corroborated by a low growl, as he retreated behind his master’s
legs.” About the exact scrupulousness prevailing among the tribe the
opinion has perhaps not been quite so consistent, which is the best
that can be said for it.
One good point about them, however, is that in mediæval England,
whatever may have been their reputation, they entirely escaped
legislation. Very possibly they were impliedly included in statutes
against vagrants and rovers; but they may at least argue that as
a matter of fact they are not named in any Act of Parliament, and
pass unobserved or nearly so by the Westminster legislator down to
a comparatively recent date. They are for the first time named in a
statute during the reign of Edward VI, in which, it is true, they are
treated in a contemptuous manner, being described as more “hurtful
than necessary to the common wealth.” This is called “an acte for
tynkers and pedlers,” and is to the following effect: “For as muche
as it is evident that tynkers, pedlers and suche like vagrant persons
are more hurtfull than necessarie to the Common Wealth of this realm,
Be it therefore ordeyned . . . that . . . no person or persons
commonly called pedler, tynker or pety chapman shall wander or go
from one towne to another or from place to place out of the towne,
parishe or village where such person shall dwell, and sell pynnes,
poyntes, laces, gloves, knyves, glasses, tapes or any suche kynde of
wares whatsoever, or gather connye skynnes or suche like things or
use or exercise the trade or occupation of a tynker,” except those
that shall have a licence from two justices {236} of the peace; and
then they will be allowed to travel only in the “circuyte” assigned
to them.[313]
Queen Elizabeth, too, had a word for pedlars, and it was not
more complimentary than what her brother had to say about them,
although “scollers of the Universityes” joined them on her list of
disreputable roamers. They figure in her “Acte for the punishment of
vacabondes”; and a very curious list of wanderers is found in it: “It
ys nowe publyshed,” says the queen, “that . . . all ydle persones
goinge aboute in any countrey of the said Realme, using subtyll
craftye and unlawfull games or playes, and some of them fayninge
themselves to have knowledge in phisnomye, palmestrye, . . . and all
fencers, bearwardes, comon players in interludes and minstrels not
belonging to any baron of this realme . . . all juglers, pedlars,
tynkers, and petye chapmen . . . and all scollers of the Universityes
of Oxford or Cambridge y^t goe about begginge . . . and all shipmen
pretendinge losses by sea . . . shalbee deemed roges vacabounds
and sturdy beggers intended of by this present act.”[314] But the
case of pedlars was not seriously taken in hand before the reign of
William III who put a tax upon them and, ominously enough, bound them
to certify commissioners for transportation how they travelled and
traded.[315]
The late date of this statute of pedlars, if it may be called so,
is the more remarkable that they swarmed along the roads in the
Middle Ages, more numerous than tinkers or any other wandering
representatives of petty trades. There were not then as now large
shops in every village with all the necessaries of life ready
provided for the inhabitants. The shop itself was itinerant, being
nothing else than the pack of travelling chapmen. In the same way
{237} as the literature propagated by the minstrels, as news,
tales, and letters, pardons from Rome and many other commodities,
so household wares were carried about the country by indefatigable
wayfarers. A host of small useful things, or sometimes useless, but
so pleasing! were concealed in their unfathomable boxes. The contents
of them are pretty well shown by a series of illuminations in a
fourteenth-century manuscript, where a pedlar is represented asleep
at the foot of a tree, while monkeys have got hold of his box and
help themselves to the contents. They find in it vests, caps, gloves,
musical instruments, purses, girdles, hats, cutlasses, pewter pots,
and a number of other articles.[316]
As to the means by which pedlars came by their goods, a variety seem
to have been used by them, and purchase was only one among several. A
proverbial saying preserved for us by Langland shows how they secured
furs for their country customers. The author of the “Visions” states
how Repentance came once to Avarice, and examined him as to his
usurious doings:
“‘Hastow pite on pore men · that mote nedes borwe?’
‘I have as moche pite of pore men · as pedlere hath of cattes,
That wolde kille hem, yf he cacche hem myghte · for coveitise of here
skynnes.’”[317]
a practice which cannot fail to be deeply resented by all lovers of
cats.
The regular merchants whom Langland and Chaucer describe, so
splendid to look at that no one knew they were “in dette,” adorned
with Flaundrish hats and “botes clasped faire and fetisly,” were a
very different sort of {238} people; but though no mere wanderers,
they were, too, great wayfarers. Many of them had had to visit the
continent to find markets for their goods, and for their purchases.
Through them too, and it was in fact, perhaps, the safest and most
reliable among many such channels of information, ideas of what was
going on in the outer world and how things were managed in France and
elsewhere, points of similitude and comparison, were introduced into
England and made the subject of thought and discussion.
[Illustration 46. A PEDLAR ROBBED BY MONKEYS.
(_From MS. 10 E. IV._)]
During the fourteenth century the foreign trade of England had
greatly increased; there was a constant intercourse with Flanders,
with Bruges above all other towns, for the sale of home produce:
wools especially, and woolfels, cheese, butter, tin, coal,[318]
etc., with the {239} Rhine country, with Gascony, with Spain, for
the purchase of wines;[319] with the Hanse towns, Lombardy, Venice,
and the East. Unintelligent regulations constantly interfered, it
is true, with this development, but so strong was the impulse that
it went on steadily. One of the most persistent and most noxious of
these regulations was the prohibition to export money or bullion,
which governments were never tired of renewing.[320] English
merchants were forbidden, when purchasing goods in foreign countries,
to pay for them with money; they had to pay in kind, with wools,
cheese and other home produce, which of course might or might not be
found acceptable by the vendor. It was, in other words, forbidden
to use money as a means of facilitating exchange, which is its very
_raison d’être_, and people had to return to the primitive practice
of _troc_, or exchange in kind. It had sometimes worse effects than
that of impeding transactions; foreign merchants might, as once
did the Flemings, show their appreciation of the rules imposed on
their English purchasers by answering their proffer of wools and
cheese with a beating and imprisonment until they would alter their
laws or their minds. For {240} which treatment, English merchants
sent doleful complaints to Parliament. In such cases retaliation
upon Flemings in England might be demanded, but no thought was
entertained, even by the injured party, of repealing laws considered
as an indispensable safeguard for the kingdom.[321]
Not much wiser were the rules applied to merchant shipping, made
worse by constant change, a defect which was noticeable in every
trade regulation of that time. Some are curious as being an attempt
to establish the long lived, but more moderate rules devised by
Cromwell in 1651: “Item, to increase the navy of England which is
now greatly diminished, it is assented and accorded, that none of
the king’s liege people do from henceforth ship any merchandize in
going out or coming within the realm of England in any port, but
only in ships of the king’s liegeance.” But the very next year this
impossible statute was altered so as to practically annul it: “It
is ordained and granted that the said ordinance only have place
as long as ships of the said ligeance in the parts where the said
merchants happen to dwell be found able and sufficient.”[322] The
same unsteadiness of purpose was shown in almost every branch of the
yet unbaptized science of political economy.