Not less worthy of notice than this attempt at a Navigation Act

is the claim made, even then, by the Commons of England to a

traditional supremacy over the seas. In one of their innumerable

petitions concerning the decay of the navy, which seems to have

been a favourite complaint in England from the remotest period down

to our own time, they state that the rash and often {241} useless

pressing of ships for the king’s service had brought about a most

dangerous decrease of the navy; many mariners addicting themselves

to other trades, while only “twenty years ago, _and always before_,

the shipping of the Realm was in all the ports and good towns upon

the sea or rivers, so noble and plenteous that all the countries held

and called our said sovereign: the King of the Sea (_le Roi de la

Mier_).”[323] As these were trading ships, only occasionally used for

war purposes, this gives an idea of the importance to which British

merchant shipping had risen in the fourteenth century and which it

desired to recover.

The rules concerning foreign merchants coming to England were in the

same manner constantly changed; sometimes the hardest restrictions

were put upon them, and sometimes everything was done to allure

them to come. The result was the same; trade was impeded doubtless,

but it went on, and in spite of the unsteadiness of legislation, of

retaliatory measures (as when, for instance, Hanse merchants were

imprisoned in England and their goods seized on account of misdeeds

committed by Prussians, “ceux de la seigneurie de Pruys,” no reason

of complicity being alleged, but only it seems one of geographical

vicinity[324]), in spite of restrictions innumerable, the intercourse

steadily increased, to the great benefit of the community and the

wider diffusion of ideas. In the ninth, the twenty-fifth, the

twenty-seventh, and other years of his reign, King Edward III again

and again stated that he took foreign merchants under his special

protection: “To replenish the said realm and lands,” he said on one

of these occasions, “with money and {242} plate, gold and silver

and merchandises of other lands, and to give courage to merchants

strangers to come with their wares and merchandises into the Realm

and lands aforesaid, we have ordained and established that all

merchants strangers which be not of our enmity, of what land or

nation that they be, may safely and surely, under our protection

and safe conduct, come and dwell in our said realm and lands, where

they will, and from thence [freely] return,” selling their goods to

whom they please, being exempted from purveyance and only paying the

ordinary customs.[325] If war is declared between England and their

country, they will have forty days to quit the realm, during which

time they shall be allowed to continue their sales, and even more

delay will be allowed them in case they are ill, or are detained

by bad weather. This last was, as we have seen, a very necessary

proviso, for a merchant coming with his goods in the depth of winter

to a broken bridge might be stopped a rather long time; as also if,

reaching the sea-coast, he found contrary winds. The statute of the

twenty-fifth year provided that the liberal intentions of the king

towards foreign merchants should be brought by way of proclamation

to the notice of the officers and inhabitants of all the English

counties, trading cities, seaports, etc.[326]

Thus protected and impeded by turns, foreign trade jogged on, and

as common interest was, after all, stronger than popular prejudice

and narrow regulations, it managed to thrive in England. Foreign

gilds were established in London; foreign settlements were created

in several trading towns,[327] foreign fleets visited the English

coasts {243} at regular intervals, none with more important results

than the fleet of the Venetian Republic. It began to call regularly

at the ports of Flanders, England, and the North, in the year 1317;

each ship had on board thirty archers for its defence, commanded

by young Venetian noblemen. There was in the fourteenth century a

Venetian consul at Bruges, and the commander of the galleys did

not fail to put himself in communication with him. The fleet, or

“galleys of Flanders,” as it was called, brought to England cotton

from Egypt, cloth of silk from Venice, cinnamon, pepper, cloves,

saffron, camphor, musk, and other drugs or spices from the East,

sugar from Egypt and Sicily, etc. The trade of Venice in the

eastern Mediterranean was very extensive; it was carried on freely,

except during occasional wars with the Saracens, and the commercial

interest that the Italian Republics had in the continuation of a good

understanding with the infidel was one of the principal causes of the

cessation of crusades. From England the Venetian galleys took back

wools and woollen cloths, leather, tin, lead, sea-coal, cheese,[328]

etc.

The importance of this intercourse with the continent, which

fortunately the variations in the laws of the land were unable to

check, gave prominence in the community to the English merchant. He

is already in the fourteenth century, and has been ever since, one

of the main supports of the State. While the numerous applications

of Edward III to Lombard bankers for ready money are well known,

it is sometimes overlooked how often he had recourse to English

merchants, who supplied him with that without which his archers’

bows would have remained unstrung. The advice and goodwill of the

{244} whole class of merchants could not be safely ignored; therefore

their attendance was constantly requested at Westminster to discuss

money and other State matters. Some families among them rose to

eminence, like the De la Poles of Hull, who became earls of Suffolk

with descendants destined to die at Agincourt, to be checked by Joan

of Arc at Orleans, to be made dukes, and to be impeached for high

treason. It was, too, the time of “thrice Lord Mayor of London”[329]

Dick, afterwards Sir Richard Whittington, who, if we trust the

legend, did not entertain the same feeling as the above-mentioned

pedlars for cats. Another man of the same sort a little later was the

famous William Canynge, of Bristol, who made a large fortune there

in trading with foreign countries. One of his ships was called the

_Mary Redcliffe_, a name as well as his own since associated with the

memory of the Bristol boy-poet, Thomas Chatterton.

The feeling that the king of England should be _le Roi de la Mier_

goes on increasing. The “Libelle of Englyshe Polycye,” a sort of

consular report, written however in verse, about 1436, is quite

positive:

“Kepte (keep) than the see about in specialle,

Whiche of England is the rounde walle;

As thoughe England were lykened to a cité,

And the walle enviroun were the see.

Kepe than the see that is the walle of Englond,

And than is Englonde kepte by Goddes sonde (decision).”[330]

And those traditions having been continued, Montesquieu was able

to write, in his “Esprit des Lois”: “Other nations have made the

interests of commerce yield to political interests. England has

always made her political interests yield to her commercial ones.

{245}

“This is the people in the world that has best known how to avail

itself of these three great things: religion, commerce, and

liberty.”[331]

[Illustration 47. A RICH MERCHANT TRAVELLING (CHAUCER’S MARCHAUNT).

(_From the Ellesmere MS._)]

Below men in such exalted situations as a Whittington (praised to

the skies in the “Libelle”) or a Canynge, the bulk of the merchant

community throve as best they could. One of the necessities of their

avocation was constant travelling. They were to be met along the

roads almost as much as their poorer brothers the pedlars. They also

made great use of the water-courses, and carried their goods by boat

whenever possible. Hence the constant interference of the Commons

with the erection of new mills, weirs, and other hindrances on rivers

by the owners of the adjoining lands. The “Rolls of Parliament” are

full of petitions asking for the complete suppression of all new

works of this sort as being detrimental to the “common passage of

ships and boats on the great rivers of England,” or stating that

“the merchants who {246} frequent the water between London and Oxford

used to have free passage on the Thames from London to Oxford, with

their ships to carry their goods and to serve the commonalty and the

people, but now they are disturbed by weirs, locks, mills, and many

other hindrances.”[332] The reasons why merchants preferred such a

conveyance were that the cost of carriage was less; that, save for

the occasional meeting of unexpected locks and weirs, they were more

certain than on ordinary roads to find before them a clear course;

and that they were better able to protect themselves against robbers.

They could not, however, go everywhere by water, and willingly or

not they had then to betake themselves to the roads, and incur all

the mischances that might turn up on the way or at the inn. In his

“Visions,” Langland describes how one of his mischievous characters

once rifled at the inn the boxes of travelling chapmen:

“‘Thus, ones I was herberwed,’ quod he · ‘with an hep of

chapmen,

I roos whan thei were arest (having their rest) · and yrifled

here males’” (their trunks).

Repentance, who had just been asking if his interlocutor had never

made “restitucioun,” wonders at this strange statement as to how

things went on at the inn:

“That was no restitucioun, quod Repentance · but a robberes

thefte.”

To which the careless creature retorts in a way that reminds one of

Chaucer’s French of Stratford-atte-Bow:

“‘I wende (believed) ryflynge were restitucioun,’ quod he · ‘for

I lerned nevere rede on boke,

And I can no Frenche in feith · but of the ferthest end of

Norfolke.’”[333]

{247}

Between the “male” of these chapmen and the mere pack of the pedlar

the difference is not considerable; it is not very great either

if compared to the “male” of the merchant we have met before, who

travels slowly on account of an encumbrance represented by the poet

as the emblem of “men that ben ryche.” So that these three links kept

pretty close together the chain of the itinerant trading community.

They all had to go about and to experience the gaieties or dangers of

the road, the latter being of course better known to the richer sort

than to the poor Bob Jakin of the day. The reasons for this constant

travelling were numerous; the same remark applies to merchants of

the fourteenth century as to almost all other classes: there was

much less journeying than to-day for mere pleasure’s sake, but very

much more, comparatively, out of necessity. We cannot underrate the

causes of personal journeys suppressed by the post and telegraph (and

telephone, unheard-of when the present work was first published),

with the money and other facilities they have introduced. But besides

the lack thereof, the staple and fairs were, in the fourteenth

century, potent causes impelling merchants to move about.

The staple was the subject of constant regulations, complaints, new

regulations and new complaints. The fundamental law concerning it is

the well-known statute of 1353, the mechanism of which the following

extracts will show:

“We (i.e. the king and Parliament) have ordained . . . first,

that the staple of wools, leather, woolfels, and lead, growing or

coming forth within our said realm and lands, shall be perpetually

holden at the places underwritten, that is to say, for England at

Newcastle-upon-Tyne, York, Lincoln, Norwich, Westminster, Canterbury,

Chichester, Winchester, Exeter, and Bristow; for Wales at Kaermerdyn;

and for Ireland at Dublin, Waterford, {248} Cork, and Drogheda, and

not elsewhere; and that all the said wools, as well old as new,

woolfels, leather, and lead, which shall be carried out of the said

realm and lands shall be first brought to the said staples, and there

the said wool and lead, betwixt merchant and merchant or merchant and

others, shall be lawfully weighed by the standard; and that every

sack and sarpler of the same wools so weighed be sealed under the

seal of the mayor of the staple.”

Any English may bring and sell wool at the staple; but only foreign

merchants are allowed to take it out of the realm. It is prohibited

to stop carriages and goods going to the staple. It is ordained

also “that in every town where the staple shall be holden, shall

be ordained certain [streets] and places where the wools and other

merchandises shall be put; and because that the lords or guardians

of the houses and places, seeing the necessity of merchants do

set percase their houses at too high ferm, we have ordained that

the houses which be to be leased in such manner, shall be set at

a reasonable ferm,” after the estimation of the local authority,

assisted by four discreet men of the place.[334] It need scarcely

be said that the staple was often removed from one town to another,

from England to Calais and from Calais to England, etc., according to

inscrutable whims and fancies, and with very detrimental results for

all traders.

The fairs, the very name of which can scarcely fail to awaken ideas

of merry bustle, gay clamour, and joyous agitation, were subjected

to no less stringent regulations, so that the word reminded many

people not merely of pleasure but also of fines, confiscations, and

prison. {249} When the time came for a fair, no sale was permitted in

the town except at the fair, under pain of the goods exhibited being

seized. All the ordinary shops were to be closed. Such regulations

were meant not only to insure the largest possible attendance at the

fair, but also to secure for the lord of it the entirety of the tolls

he had a right to.

An inquest holden at Winchester, famous for its St. Giles’s fair,

gives an idea of the manner in which these commercial festivities

were solemnized. The fair belonged to the Bishop of Winchester.

On the eve of St. Giles’s Day, at early dawn, the officers of the

bishop went about the town announcing the conditions of the fair,

which were these: no merchant was to sell or exhibit for sale any

goods in the town, or at a distance of seven leagues round it, except

inside the gates of the fair. The same proclaimed the assise of

bread, wine, and ale; tasted the wine, broke the casks where they

detected “insufficient” wine. They proved all weights and measures;

they destroyed false ones and fined the owners. All merchants were

to reach the fair not later than a certain time (the feast of the

Nativity of the Virgin Mary); if they came later they were not

admitted except with a special licence from the bishop. The usual

allowance is made in case they may have been kept back by a storm at

sea, or by some mischance on land, “infortunium in terra,” which in

this time of bad roads, and of such determined robbers as Sir Robert

de Rideware, was not infrequent. A court of “pie powder,” that is,

“of the dusty feet,”[335] was held in the fair itself, and any suit

arising from transactions or trouble there was determined {250}

by this tribunal at once, and without appeal. Similar rules were

in existence at the Westminster fair, and at many others.[336] The

importance of these meetings is shown by the constant recurrence in

the “Rolls of Parliament” of petitions concerning them, beseeching

the king to grant a fair to a certain lord or to a certain town, or

to suppress a neighbouring town’s fair, for fear it may hurt the

petitioners’ own.

People from the counties and from the continent flocked to the fairs.

The largest and the more widely known were those of Winchester,[337]

Abingdon for cattle, Bartholomew fair[338] in Smithfield (London),

Stourbridge fair, the most important of all, Weyhill, mentioned in

Langland’s “Visions,”[339] etc. In the time of Elizabeth, {251}

Harrison, describing England, could not help expressing his pride

in the importance and renown of English fairs, about which he writes

thus: “As there are no great towns without one weekelie market at

the least, so there are verie few of them that have not one or two

faires or more within the compasse of the yeare, assigned unto them

by the prince. And albeit that some of them are not much better than

Lowse faire or the common Kirkemesses beyond the sea, yet there are

diverse not inferiour to the greatest marts in Europe, as Sturbridge

faire neere to Cambridge, Bristow faire, Bartholomew faire at

London, Lin mart (Linne), Cold faire at Newport pond for cattell,

and diverse other.” In all of which people were kept merry with ales

and beers of various flavour and strength known by as significant

names as those of present day dances, fox-trot, mother’s rest, and

others, which to-morrow will, they too, need interpretation: “Such

headie ale and beere in most of them, as for the mightinesse thereof

. . . is commonlie called huffe cap, the mad dog, father whoresonne,

angels food, dragon’s milke, go by the wall, stride wide, and lift

leg. . . . Neither did Romulus and Remus sucke their shee wolfe (or

sheepheards wife) Lupa, with such eger and sharpe devotion, as these

men hale at huf cap, till they be red as cockes and little wiser than

their combs.”[340]

Stourbridge fair belonged to the city and corporation of Cambridge,

and was held in September, lasting three weeks. Tents and wooden

booths were erected at that time on the open fields, so as to form

streets; each trade had its own street as in real cities, and

as may still be seen now in the bazaars of the East. Among the

principal articles sold at this fair were: “ironmongery, cloth,

{252} wool, leather, books.” The last article became in several

fairs an important one when the art of printing spread; there was

in the North Hundred of Oxford, in the sixteenth century, a fair at

which an extensive sale of books took place, and this, as Professor

Thorold Rogers has observed, is the only way to account for the

rapid diffusion of books and pamphlets at a time when newspapers and

advertisements were practically unknown. “I have more than once,”

adds the same authority, “found entries of purchases for college

libraries, with a statement that the book was bought at St. Giles’

fair.”[341] No reader of Boswell needs to be reminded how the

father of Dr. Johnson had a booth for book selling on market days

at Uttoxeter, in doing which he was merely keeping up, as we see, a

mediæval tradition of long standing. How young Samuel refused once to

accompany his father to the market, and, in after-time, repaired on

a rainy day to the spot, and there did penance, has been alluded to

before.

Even at the present day books continue to be an article of sale at

the fairs in many French villages, and sheets of printed matter are

taken from thence to cottages, where, under the smoky light burning

in winter by the fireside, people, not very dissimilar to their

forefathers of five hundred years ago, look at the image of mediæval

heroes and of the worthies of the world, by the side of whom now

begins to appear that of the heroes of the Great War.

To the fairs, along with mummers, jugglers, tumblers, beggars, and

the whole of the catchpenny tribe, the pedlar was sure to resort,

in the approved Autolycus fashion. “He haunts,” says the clown in

“Winter’s Tale,” “wakes, fairs, and bear-baiting.” There he might

exhibit “ribands of all the colours i’ the rainbow; points, more

{253} than all the lawyers in Bohemia can learnedly handle, though

they come to him by the gross; inkles, caddisses, cambricks, lawns.

Why, he sings them over, as they were gods or goddesses; you would

think a smock were a she-angel, he so chants to the sleeve hand, and

the work about the square on’t.”[342] So that everybody might remark,

as does the honest clown to fair Perdita, “You have of these pedlars

that have more in them than you’d think, sister.” A favourable view,

adopted, magnified, sublimated by another great poet whose Wanderer

is a pedlar, but what a pedlar and what a part does he not play in

the community!

“By these Itinerants, as experienced men,

Counsel is given; contention they appease

With gentle language; in remotest wilds,

Tears wipe away, and pleasant tidings bring;

Could the proud quest of chivalry do more?”[343]

Less aspiring most of them, not unsatisfied with their lot, careless

of robbers, having few wants, pedlars of the past plodded the miry

roads of Plantagenet England, as they did in the time of Shakespeare,

merrily singing some “Winter Tale” ditty:

“Jog on, jog on, the foot-path way,

And merrily hent the stile-a:

A merry heart goes all the day,

Your sad tires in a mile-a.”

{254}

[Illustration 48. FOREST LIFE. WOOD-CUTTERS.

(_From the MS. 10 E. IV._)]

CHAPTER III

OUTLAWS, WANDERING WORKMEN, AND PEASANTS OUT OF BOND

The mountebanks, the musicians, and their fellows have stayed us at

the street corners, in the castle halls and courtyards; the pedlars

have led us to the peasants’ cots, the fairs and markets. With the

outlaws we must leave the highroad for the pathless woods, fens and

solitudes.

England at that time was not the immense meadow, furrowed by

railways, of the present day; there still remained much of those

forests spoken of by Cæsar in his Commentaries, and where the

Plantagenet kings and their predecessors had so jealously maintained

their rights of the chase. The woods were not so well policed as they

are now; they offered to bandits and men fleeing from justice a more

extensive asylum than any six-circled sanctuary. In the popular mind

the idea of the great rustling forest, and the idea of the free life

{255} that the outlaws led there, were often mingled in one and the

same sentiment of sympathy. Besides, therefore, the praise of the

Arthurian heroes, is found in the poetry of the time that of the

trees and bushes, that of the valiant men who, dwelling in the copse,

were supposed to have struggled for the public liberties, Hereward,

Fulk Fitz-Warin, Robin Hood. Were a man pursued, if the sanctuary was

too far or not to his taste, he took to the forest; it was easier to

get there, he remained nearer to his kin, and was about as safe as if

he had crossed over to the continent.

Robbers, bandits, poachers, knights in trouble might thus meet as

comrades in the depths of the wood. The forest is the first thought

of the proscribed squire in the “Nut Brown Maid,” the masterpiece of

English poetry in the fifteenth century, a musical duet of love, full

of the wild charm of the great forest, with a well-accented cadence,

frequent rhymes and assonances charming the ear as the oft repeated

rustling of the forest leaves. On the verge of capture, the poor

squire is fain to choose between a shameful death and retreat into

“the grene wode.” His betrothed, who is nothing less than a baron’s

daughter, wishes to follow him; and then, in every couplet, her

lover, in order to try her, pictures to her the terrors and dangers

of the fugitive’s life; she may perhaps see him taken and die a

robber’s death:

“For an outlawe this is the lawe, that men hym take and binde

Wythout pytee, hanged to bee, and waver with the wynde.”

With this, a thrilling description of the life in the woods, of the

brambles, snow, hail, rain; no soft bed; for roof the leaves alone:

“Yet take good hede, for ever I drede, that ye coude not sustein

The thorney wayes, the depe valeis, the snowe, the frost, the reyn,

The cold, the hete; for drye or wete we must lodge on the playn;

And, us above, noon other roue (roof), but a brake, bussh or twayne.”

{256}

No delicate food, but only such as the wood affords:

“For ye must there in your hande bere a bowe redy to drawe,

And as a theef thus must ye lyve, ever in drede and awe.”

Worse even, and the trial becomes harder; the young girl must cut

off her lovely hair; life in the forest does not allow of that

ornament. Lastly, to crown all: I have already in the forest another

sweetheart, whom I love better, and who is more beautiful. But, as

resigned as Griselda, the betrothed replies: I shall go none the less

into the forest; I will be kind to your sweetheart, I will obey her,

“for in my mynde, of all mankynde, I love but you alone.” Then the

lover’s joy breaks out: “I wyl not too the grene wod goo, I am noo

banysshyd man,” I am not an obscure squire, but the son of the Earl

of Westmoreland, and the hour of our wedding is now come.[344]

All the fugitives whom the forest received into its depths were not

romantic knights, followed by baronesses patient as Griselda and

brave as Bradamante. To pass from poetry to real facts, they were

for the greater part formidable rovers, the same against whom Edward

I and Edward III had enacted the rigorous law for suspects[345]

mentioned above. This caste was composed, first of the organized

bands of brigands whom the statute calls Wastours, Roberdesmen, and

Drawlatches, then of thieves, sharpers, and malefactors of all kinds,

of outlaws of various sorts, suffering that civil death alluded to by

the lover in the “Nut Brown Maid.”

The sentence of outlawry was usually the starting-point for a

wandering life, which by necessity became a life of brigandage. To

be declared an outlaw, a crime {257} or a misdemeanor must have

been committed; a private suit of a purely civil character was not

enough;[346] but to come within sight of the gallows, no great guilt

was necessary; hence the large number of outlaws. In a criminal

lawsuit of the time of Edward I[347] the judge explains from his

bench that the law is this: if the thief has taken anything worth

more than twelve pence, or if he has been condemned several times

for little thefts, and the total may be worth twelve pence or more,

he ought to be hanged: “The law wills that he shall be hanged by the

neck.” Still, as the judge observes in the case of a woman who had

stolen a carpet lying on a hedge, worth eightpence, the law is milder

than in the days of Henry III, for then a theft of the value of

fourpence would hang a man.[348]

[Illustration 49. FOREST LIFE—A SHOOTING CASUALTY.

(_From the MS. 10 E. IV._)]

The man became an outlaw, and the woman a _weyve_, that is, abandoned

to the mercy of every one and unable to claim the protection of

justice. The author of “Fleta” expresses with terrible force the

condition of persons so punished; they have wolves heads which may

be cut off with impunity: “For she is a weyve whom no one will own,

and it is equivalent to outlawry so far as penal consequences go. An

outlaw and a weyve bear wolves {258} heads, which may be cut off by

any one with impunity, for deservedly ought they to perish without

law who would refuse to live according to law.”[349] The outlaw lost

all his property and rights; all the contracts to which he was a

party fell void; he was no longer bound to any one nor anybody bound

to him. His goods were forfeit: “the chattels of an outlaw shall

belong to our lord the king”; if he had lands the king kept the

usufruct for a year and a day, at the end of which he restored them

to the chief lord (_capitalis dominus_).[350] There were also hard

legal rules on this subject; a man accused of murder and acquitted

suffered confiscation nevertheless, if he had fled, fearing justice.

Listen to the magistrate: “If a man be acquitted of manslaughter and

of assent and help, the justices shall thereupon ask the jury if the

prisoner took to flight; if they say No, let him go quits, if Yes,

the king shall have his chattels.”[351] It may be {259} readily

believed that the draconian severity of such regulations was not

calculated to lessen the audacity of those whom they concerned, and

that the excessive rigour of these penalties would often transform

the fugitive of a day, who had doubted the clear-sightedness of the

judge, into a professional brigand and highway robber.

Besides people of this kind there were the rovers, who, without

being threatened with outlawry, had fled the village or the farm to

which they belonged. The villein who, without special licence, left

his master’s domain, could resume his previous life and intercourse

with his kin, only by placing himself at his lord’s mercy, or, which

was less risky, after having passed a year and a day in a free town

without leaving it and without the lord, often unaware of the place,

having interrupted the prescription. In this latter case he became a

free man, and the ties which bound him to the soil were broken. But

if he confined himself to wandering from place to place he might be

re-taken any day that he reappeared at his own door.

An example of this may be seen in a characteristic lawsuit of the

time of Edward I, a report of which has come down to us:—_A_ presents

a writ of imprisonment against _B_. Heiham, counsel for _B_, says:

It is not for us to defend ourselves, _A_ is our villein, his writ

cannot take effect against us. This is verified, it is found that

_A_ is the son of a villein of _B_, that he ran away, and several

years afterwards returned home, “to his nest,” where he was taken

as a villein. The judge declares that this seizure was legal; that

a villein might wander about during six, seven years or more, but

if at the end he were found “in his own nest and at his hearth,”

he might be seized as continuing to be his lord’s lawful property;

the fact of his return put him into the condition he was {260} in

before his departure. On hearing this decision the delighted counsel

appropriately cites the scripture, “He fell into the pit which he

hath digged.”[352]

At that period a villein could still be sold as chattel, given away

as a present, donated to a convent for the benefit of one’s soul: “I

Hugo de Ringesdon . . . gave and conceded . . . to God and Blessed

Mary and the Abbot and convent of Sulby, for the salvation of my soul

and that of my ancestors and successors, in perpetual frank almoigne,

Robert son of Juliana de Walton, with all his sequel and all his

chattels, nothing remaining of any bond with me or my successors for

ever.”[353]

Or again: “Be it known to all, now and hereafter, that I John, son of

Thomas [of Wurtham], have sold . . . to Hugo abbot of Saint Edmunds

. . . Serval, son of William of Wurtham with all his sequel . . . and

all the tenement which he held from me . . . for sixteen shillings of

silver which the said abbot gave me.”[354]

If the actual sale of a man, sold as such, was infrequent, the

transfer of a tenement, tenant included, {261} was of constant

occurrence; the man and his kin changed hands as the plot of land to

which he was bound. The monastery of Meaux, near Beverley, having

claimed, against the abbot of St. Mary of York, the right to fish

in the Wathsand and Hornsey meres, and no satisfactory proof being

available on either side, recourse was had by the two religious

disputants to judicial duel. The combat was severe: “It took place

at York and lasted from morning to evening, our champion,” says

the Meaux chronicler, “slowly succumbing.” Before complete defeat,

however, “the duel was interrupted by the cleverness of a certain

judge, Roger de Thurkelby, a friend of ours”; Meaux yielded the

fishing rights to York, but York “granted us one toft, with a man

holding that toft in villeinage, and his sequel.”[355]

The change in customs made the separate sale of the man himself

practically impossible in the fourteenth century,[356] but the

_adscriptio glebæ_ remained imperative, and every means was taken to

prevent the villeins from uprooting themselves and ceasing to be,

like their own trees, fixtures liable to change masters with the

trees.

The villein’s highest desire was of course manumission and complete

independence: a dream so ambitious that most of them scarcely dared

to form it, up to the time of the peasants’ revolt, when it became

general, {262} and was realized—for a day. Second to that he wanted

the commutation for a cash payment of the harassing personal labour

due by him to his lord, a change which went on increasingly in the

course of the fourteenth century.[357] When neither was possible

and the burden became unbearable, he would, happen what may, try to

escape and live elsewhere unknown and masterless.[358]

The villein, when in this mood, had two great temptations, the

cities with their franchise, which even his master did not dare

infringe,[359] and the forest, where he was out of reach. Noblemen

sometimes allowed their villeins to become merchants and go from city

to city. They were very near freedom, but not quite free; they had to

pay “chevage” to their master as a sign of subjection, and if these

serfs ceased to pay, the mere fact made them runaways, “just like

domestic _cerfs_ (red deer),” says Bracton, indulging in an, even

then, antiquated pun. They can be run after and captured like any

domestic animal.[360] {263}

Scarcely less tempting was the forest. Escaped peasants provided the

wandering class with its most numerous recruits. In England several

causes, the chief of which was the great plague of 1349,[361] had in

the fourteenth century upset the relations of the working classes

with the rich, and the proportions between the rate of wages and the

cost of necessaries. Confronted with a longing for emancipation which

arose on all sides, parliament—the House of Commons as willingly as

the king—passed stern laws for the maintenance of the _statu quo ante

pestem_. Thence came among the various sorts of peasants, both the

villeins bound to their plot of land (“theirs” with the understanding

they should perform the customary services due to the lord), and the

landless labourers free to hire themselves out for wages, an immense

desire to move about and see other parts. In their own hamlet, they

found, nothing was to be got but the same obligations and the same

wages as before the plague; but in such another county, they heard

or supposed, there were better pay and less exacting masters[362];

besides, why not mingle with the class of free labourers? It was

numerous and increased {264} unceasingly, in spite of the law.

All did not succeed in concealing their past; and when the danger

of being “put into stocks” and sent back to their masters became

great, they fled again, changed county and became roamers. Others,

discontented with or without cause, only quitted their place to

become straightway homeless vagabonds of the most dangerous kind.

Thus in the precincts of Westminster, the chapter house of the Abbey

where the Commons sat, resounded with ever new complaints against the

increasing lawlessness of peasants and labourers of all sorts. The

Commons, who, generally speaking, represented the landowners of the

country, and a trading bourgeoisie[363] with somewhat aristocratic

tendencies, rose with force against the wishes for freedom of a

class of workers whom they in no way represented. They were for the

re-establishment of all the old laws and customs, and the strict

rejection of new demands. But the current was too strong, and it

swept by the laws, ever renewed and ever inefficient.

The plague was still raging, Parliament could not meet; the thinning

of the ranks of the workers by death, and the excessive wage demands,

or refusals to work at all, of the survivors, who preferred to live

on alms, created such a dangerous state of confusion that the king

issued, on his own authority and that of his council in June 1349, an

ordinance which formed the basis of the famous Statute of Labourers

of 1351[364] and of all the subsequent ones. {265} The most striking

of its dispositions aimed at an outright conscription of labour,

something like what we have seen of late, under the pressure of

necessity, on the occasion of what has been for the world an even

greater calamity:

“Any man or woman, in our realm of England, of whatever condition,

either free or servile, sound in body and under the age of sixty

years, living not by merchandise nor practising a definite craft,

nor having personally wherewith to live, nor possessing land which

he would cultivate, nor being somebody else’s servant, if he is

requested to serve in a service congruent to his status, shall be

bound to serve the one that shall thus request him.” He is moreover

forbidden to receive any wages or compensations different from those

of the twentieth year of the King’s reign, that is those which were

barely sufficient before the plague and were entirely inadequate

now. Later in the year, a new ordinance forbade any one to leave the

desolated realm, “unless he were a merchant, a notary or an undoubted

messenger.”[365]

The Commons could not imagine that, for mere villeins, there might

be such a thing as necessity, and they uniformly attributed the

new requests to the “malice of servants,” who exacted both higher

wages and other terms of engagement than before. They would not work

“without taking hire that was too outrageous.”[366] {266} Formerly

they hired themselves for a year; now they wanted to remain their own

masters and to hire themselves by the day: the statute forbids them

to do so.

Three years later the complaints are renewed;[367] the value of corn

is very low and labourers refuse to receive it as payment; they

persist also in desiring day hire; all these doings are condemned

once more. The quarrel continues and grows embittered. In the

thirty-fourth year of his reign Edward III threatens to have the

guilty branded on the forehead with an F, as a sign of “fauxine”

(falsehood).[368] In 1372, Parliament declares that “labourers and

servants flee from one county to another, some go to the great

towns and become artificers, some into strange districts to work,

on account of the excessive wages, none remaining for certain in

any place, whereby the statute cannot be put in execution against

them.”[369]

[Illustration 50. REAPING TIME.

(_From the MS. 2 B._ vii. _Fourteenth Century._)

“We haue the payne and traveyle, rayne and wynd in the feldes.” (John

Ball’s speech in Berner’s Froissart.)]

The Commons of the Good Parliament of 1376 secured the confirmation

of all the previous statutes. Prohibitions were renewed against any

going out of their “own district” (_pays propre_), whether they were

villeins proper, or “labourers and artificers and other servants.”

The economic changes that had taken place had rendered possible,

however, what was not so formerly; labourers were wanted, and it

was not rare to find landowners who employed them in spite of the

laws, even by the day, and at other wages than those of the tariff.

The parliamentary petitions declare that “they are so willingly

{269} received in strange places suddenly into service, that this

reception gives example and comfort to all servants, as soon as they

are displeased with anything, to run from master to master into

strange places, as is aforesaid.” And this would not go on, observe

the Commons, if when they offered their services in this fashion they

were “taken and put in the stocks.” True, indeed, but the landowners

who needed help, and whose crops were waiting on the ground, were too

happy to meet with “servantz corores” (runaway), whoever they might

be; and instead of taking them “to the nearest gaol,” to pay and use

them. The labourers knew it, and their traditional masters had to

show less severity. For on some unreasonable demand or over-strong

reprimand, instead of submitting as formerly, or venturing a protest,

the workman said nothing but, “par grande malice,” went away: “As

soon as their masters challenge them with bad service or offer to pay

them for their service according to the form of the said statutes,

they flee and run away suddenly out of their service and out of their

own district, from county to county, from hundred to hundred, from

town to town, in strange places unknown to their said masters.”[370]

Worse still, and inevitable, many among them, unable or unwilling to

work, took up begging or robbing as a profession. These “wandering

labourers become mere beggars in order to lead an idle life, and

betake themselves out of their district commonly to the cities,

boroughs, and other good towns to beg, and they are able-bodied and

might wel ease the community if they would serve.” {270}

So much for the beggars;[371] now for the robbers: “And the

greater part of the said wandering servants commonly become strong

robbers, and their robberies and felonies increase from one day

to another on all sides,” acting in small bands of “two, three

or four together,” and plundering “simple villages.” Energetic

measures must be taken; let it be prohibited to give alms to this

sort of people, and “let their bodies be put in the stocks or taken

to the next gaol,” to be sent afterwards to where they belong.

Edward III had already condemned to prison, by his ordinance of

1349, those who, under colour of charity “sub colore pietatis vel

elemosine,” came to the aid of sturdy beggars, those vagabonds who

went through the country “giving themselves to idleness and vice,

and sometimes to theft and other abominations.” The same complaints

recur in the time of Richard II. Hardly is he on the throne than

they are repeated from year to year: 1377, 1378, 1379, revealing

to us the existence of early unions and federations of villeins

and labourers who, advised by men better informed than themselves,

“lours counseillours, meyntenours et abettours,” defend their assumed

freedom sometimes by force—“menassent les ministres de lours seignurs

de vie et de membre”—sometimes by law, invoking written texts and

“exemplifications” whose value they have learnt, and swear to remain

“confederated” and to help each other at all cost against their

masters.[372] {271}

Statutes multiplied to no purpose; the king had to recognize in

his ordinance of 1383 that the “feitors (idlers) and vagrants”

overran the country “more abundantly than they were formerly

accustomed.”[373] In 1388 he renewed all the orders of his

predecessors, re-enacting for rustics rules similar to those of the

_Inscription maritime_ still applied to-day in France, for what

concerns seafaring, to the seaside population: any one who reached

the age of twelve without having done anything else than “working at

the plough and cart or other labor or service of husbandry,” will

have to continue in this state his life long, “without being allowed

to learn a trade or handicraft,” and if one is found to be a party to

a contract of apprenticeship, the contract shall be void.

The king reminds, at the same time, the mayors, bailiffs, stewards,

and constables of their duties, and asks them in particular to repair

their stocks and keep them always ready for wanderers to cease in

them their wanderings.[374]

No vain threats nor light penalties. The prisons of those days little

resembled the well-washed buildings now to be seen in most English

towns, at York for instance, where the guilty ones are apt to find

more cleanliness and comfort than they ever knew before. They were

mostly fetid dungeons, where the damp of the walls and the stationary

position compelled by the irons corrupted the blood and engendered

hideous maladies.

Many a wandering workman, accustomed to an active life and the open

air, came thus, thanks to the incessant {272} ordinances of king and

Parliament, to repent in the dark for his boldness, and during days

and nights all alike, to regret his liberty, his family, and his

“nest.” The effect of such a treatment on the physical constitution

of the victims may be guessed or imagined, but without any imagining

the reports of justice show it only too clearly. A roll of the time

of Henry III reads, for instance, as follows:

“Assizes held at Ludinglond. The jury present that William le

Sauvage took two men, aliens, and one woman, and imprisoned them at

Thorlestan, and detained them in prison until one of them died in

prison, and the other lost one foot, and the woman lost either foot

by putrefaction. Afterwards he took them to the Court of the lord the

king at Ludinglond to try them by the same Court. And when the Court

saw them, it was loth to try them, because they were not attached for

any robbery or misdeed for which they could suffer judgment. And so

they were permitted to depart.”[375]

[Illustration 51. IN THE STOCKS.

(_From the MS. 10 E. IV._)]

How in such a condition the poor creatures could “depart,” and what

became of them, the Assize Rolls do not say. Certain it is that no

sort of indemnity was given {273} to help them out of trouble in

their horrible condition. The justice of our fathers did not stop at

trifles.

The stocks, which according to the laws of Richard II were always

to be kept in good condition ready for use, consisted of two beams

placed one on the other. At proper intervals round holes were cut;

the upper beam was raised, and the legs of the prisoners were passed

through the holes; sometimes there was a third beam, in the openings

of which the wrists of the wretches were also caught; the body

sometimes rested on a stool, sometimes on the ground. In certain

places the stocks were pretty high; the sufferer’s legs were placed

in them and he remained thus, his body stretched on the ground in the

damp, his head lower than his feet; but this refinement of cruelty

was not habitual.[376]

Stocks are still to be seen in many places in England; for instance,

in the picturesque village of Abinger, where they stand on the green,

near the churchyard. Others in a very good state of preservation are

in existence at Shalford, near Guildford. They have not long ceased

to be used in England; vagabonds and drunkards were seen in them

within the memory of men who were not old when the present book was

written. According to their remembrance people when released felt so

benumbed that they were scarcely able to stand, and experienced great

difficulty in getting away.

[Illustration 52. THE STOCKS AT SHALFORD, GUILDFORD.

(_Present state._)]

But the threat of prisons so unhealthy and of stocks so unpleasant

did not hold back the labourers more and more weary of being tied to

the soil. Every pretext for leaving their place was welcome; they

even dared to use that of a devotional journey. They set out, staff

in hand, “under colour of going far on a pilgrimage,” and {274}

never returned. But a new restraint was to be applied to tame this

turbulent spirit, the obligation for every one to furnish himself

with a kind of letter of travel or passport, in order to move from

one county to another. None might leave his village if he did not

carry a “letter patent stating the cause of his going and the date

of his return, if he were to return.” In other words, even with the

right to go and settle definitively elsewhere, a permit for moving

had to be procured. These letters would be sealed by a “good man”

(_prod homme_), assigned in each hundred, city, or borough, by the

justices of the peace, and special seals were to be expressly made,

said the statute, bearing the king’s arms in the centre, the name of

the county around, and that of the hundred, city, or borough across.

Even the case of fabricating false letters was foreseen, which shows

how well was realized the ardent desire of many men of this class

to {275} leave the place where they were tied. Every individual

surprised without regular papers would be sent to jail.

[Illustration 53. A CRIPPLE AND OTHER BEGGARS.

(_From the MS. 10 E. IV._)]

Beggars were treated as “servants” who had no “testimonial

letters.”[377] What was wanted was to impose immobility upon as many

people as possible, and thus hinder the disquieting peregrinations

of so many rovers. As for beggars incapable of work, they must

nevertheless cease frequenting the highroads, and must end their

days in the cities where they chance to be at the time of the

proclamation, or at most in some town near the spot where they were

born; they shall be taken there within forty days, to stay “for the

rest of their lives.”

What is stranger, and lacking other proofs, would show to what

class students then belonged, is that they are included in the same

category; they were accustomed, on returning to their homes, or on

making pilgrimages, or going to the university, to hold out a hand

for the charity of passers-by and to knock at the door of possible

givers. They were ranked with the beggars, and put in irons if they

lacked the regulation letter; this document was to be given them by

the Chancellor, and that {276} was the only difference: “And that

the scholars of the universities that go so begging have letters

testimonial of their Chancellor upon the same pain.”[378]

Again, in the following year (1389), a new statute reproves the

custom of “artificers, labourers, servants,” etc., who keep for

their own use harriers and other dogs, and on “feast days, when

good Christians are at church hearing Divine service,” get into the

parks and warrens of the nobility and destroy the game. Much more,

they avail themselves of these occasions when they meet together

armed, without fear of being disturbed, to “hold their assemblies,

conversations, and conspiracies, to rise against and disobey their

allegience.” The thickets of the seignorial forests must have

sheltered many a meeting of this kind during church services on the

eve of the great revolt of 1381;[379] in such retreats no doubt

were brought forth some of the living and stirring ideas which,

transported from place to place by the wanderers, made the people

of different counties understand that they were the same people,

suffering from a variety of abuses, longing for relief.

In a revolt like this, the part played by the wandering class is

considerable, and the historian should not neglect it. If we do not

take this element into account, it is hard to explain the extent

and importance of a movement which came near having consequences

comparable to those of the French Revolution. “I had lost my heritage

and the kingdom of England,” said Richard II {277} on the evening

of the day when his presence of mind had saved him, and he was

right. Why was the French Jacquerie a commonplace, powerless rising

compared to the English revolt? The reasons are manifold, but one

of the chief was the absence of a class of wayfarers as strong,

active, and numerous as that of England. This class served to unite

all the people: by its means those of the South learnt the ideas of

those of the North, what each suffered and desired; the sufferings

and wishes were not always identical, but it was enough to know

that all had reforms to demand. Thus, when the news came that the

revolt had begun, the people rose on all sides, and while it was

apparent that the desires of each were not absolutely similar, yet

the basis of the contention being the same, and all wishing for

more independence, they went forth together without being otherwise

acquainted than by the intermediary of the wayfarers. The kings of

England, indeed, had perceived the danger, and on different occasions

had promulgated statutes bearing especially on the talk indulged in

by these wanderers about the nobles, prelates, judges, and all the

depositaries of public power. Edward I had said in one of his laws:

“Forasmuch as there have been oftentimes found in the country

devisors of tales, whereby discord, or occasion of discord, hath

many times arisen between the king and his people, or great men of

this realm; for the damage that hath and may thereof ensue, it is

commanded, that from henceforth none be so hardy to tell or publish

any false news or tales, whereby discord, or occasion of discord, or

slander may grow between the king and his people, or the great men of

the realm; and he that doth so, shall be taken and kept in prison,

until he hath brought him into the court who was the first author of

the tale.”[380]

The danger of such speeches, which touched the acts {278} and even

the thoughts of the great men of the kingdom, became menacing anew

under Richard II, and in the first years of his reign the following

statute was enacted, reinforcing that of 1275:

“Item, Of devisors of false news and reporters of horrible and false

lyes, concerning prelates, dukes, earls, barons, and other nobles

and great men of the realm, and also concerning the chancellor,

treasurer, clerk of the privy seal, steward of the king’s house,

justices of the one bench or of the other, and of other great

officers of the realm about things which by the said prelates, lords,

nobles, and officers aforesaid were never spoken, done, nor thought

. . . whereby debates and discords might arise betwixt the said lords

or between the Lords and the Commons, which God forbid, and whereof

great peril and mischief might come to all the realm, and quick

subversion and destruction of the said realm, if due remedy be not

provided: it is straitly defended upon grievous pain, for to eschew

the said damages and perils, that from henceforth none be so hardy to

devise, speak, or to tell any false news, lyes, or other such false

things, of prelates, lords, and of other aforesaid, whereof discord

or any slander might rise within the same realm; and he that doth the

same shall incur and have the pain another time ordained thereof by

the statute of Westminster the first.”[381] In vain: two years later

broke out the revolt of the peasants, and the depositions of the

rebels when brought before the judge leave no doubt as to the part

played by wayfarers in the carrying of political news from one county

to another.

The mason John Cole, of Lose, in the parish of Maidstone, Kent, turns

informer, betrays twenty-seven of his companions, giving their names

(some proved innocent), and saving his own head. Their plan was to

make the otherwise unpopular John of Gaunt, king of England, {279}

on the mere report that he had freed his “natives.” The rebels had

decided to send to him in order to ascertain, and if the news proved

true, to depose his nephew young Richard II. The report had been

brought to the city of Canterbury by pilgrims, _peregrini_, arriving

from the North, obviously to worship at the shrine of St. Thomas.[382]

In mediæval France during the endless wars, and the brief intervals

between them, the roads were held by plundering brigands: labourers

or knights by birth. Soldiers, the dregs of the lowest or highest

classes, considered the rest of society as their devoted prey, the

highway resounded with the noise of arms, the peasant fled. Troops

originally equipped for the defence of the land attacked without

scruple all whom they thought less strong than themselves and worth

robbing. Such people “turned French,” as Froissart puts it, and

“turned English” according to the interest of the moment.

The vagrants threatened with the stocks by the English law were

of another kind, and whatever the number of brigands among them

these were not the majority; the peasants mostly sympathized with,

instead of fearing, them. Thus the English revolt was not a desperate

enterprise; it was conducted with extraordinary coolness and

practical sense. The insurgents showed a calm {280} consciousness of

their strength which strikes us, and struck much more the anxious

knights in London; they went with their eyes open, and, if they

destroyed much, they wished also to reform. It was possible to treat

and come to an understanding with them; truth to say, the word and

pledge given them will be broken, and the prison, the rope and the

block will quickly put an end to the revolt; but whatever the Lords

and Commons sitting at Westminster may say,[383] the new bonds will

not have the tenacity of the old ones, and a great step towards

freedom, one with which the continent has nothing comparable, will

have been made.

In France, the beast of burden, ill-nourished, ill-treated, fretted

by the harness, trudged wearily along with shaking head, wan eye and

a halting gait; his sudden bolts only caused new loads to be added to

his fardel, and that was all; centuries were to pass before the day

of accounting came and, in blood too, the account would be settled.

{281}

PART III

_RELIGIOUS WAYFARERS_

{283}

[Illustration 54. A FRIAR ON A JOURNEY (CHAUCER’S “FRERE”).

(_From the Ellesmere MS._)]

CHAPTER I

WANDERING PREACHERS AND FRIARS

While the inward consciousness of common wants and longings for

better days spread everywhere, by means of that crowd of work-people

whom we find in England ceaselessly on the move in spite of statutes,

the guiding ideas were sown broadcast by another kind of roamer,

the preachers. Sprung also from the people, they had studied; as we

have seen it was not necessary to be rich in order to go through the

course at Oxford; the villeins even sent their children there, and

the Commons, of scant liberalism as we know, protested against this

emancipation of another kind, this advancement by means of learning,

“avancement par clergie.” Preventive measures, they thought, were

indispensable to save “the honour” of the freemen of the realm, by

which they meant privilege; ideas of honour have changed. But, even

then, it was going too far, and the king, who had after all learnt a

lesson in 1381, rebuked the Commons with a “le roi s’avisera” which

{284} was then, and is to-day, the form of royal refusal.[384] These

clerks knew what was the condition of the people; they knew the

miseries of the poor, which were those of their father and mother and

of themselves; the intellectual culture they had received enabled

them to transform into precise conceptions the general aspirations of

the tillers of the soil. The former are not less necessary than the

latter to every important social movement; if both are indispensable

to the making of the tool, handle and blade, it is these definite

views which form the blade.

The roaming preachers knew how to sharpen it, and they were numerous.

Those whom Wyclif sent to popularize his doctrines,[385] his

“simple priests,” or “poor priests,” did just what others had done

before them; they imitated their forerunners, and no more confined

themselves to expounding the difficult and not always democratic

theories of their master than the mendicant friars, or monks, or

secular priests, friends of the revolution, strictly kept to the

precepts of the gospel. Their sympathies were with the people,

and they showed it in their discourses. Wyclif contributed to the

increase of these wanderers; his people came from the same stock as

the others; if it was easy for him to find clerks ready to act as his

missionaries, the reason was that many in the kingdom were already

prepared for such a task, and only awaited their opportunity.[386]

The revolutionary {285} leader John Ball was a secular priest, and

so was the well-known Lollard, William Thorpe.

All, in fact, did the same kind of work. For different motives and

with different aims, they led to the same results: the belief that

the State, the Church, the Government, the Court, the rule of the

masters, whether spiritual or temporal, were not what they should be,

and that a change _must_ come. Doubts and discontents always help

each other; whoever strikes at the tree shakes the tree. Wyclif’s

theory, “both before and after the rising, was that temporal lords

had a right to their property, but that churchmen had no right to

theirs.”[387] His teachings helped, however, to spread doubts as to

the legitimacy of both. Though it had nothing to do with Lollard

tenets, the diffusion thereof was facilitated by the papal schism of

1378: another great tree that was shaken.

Men able to address a crowd scoured the country, drawing together the

poor and attracting them by harangues filled with what people who

suffer always like to hear. The statute passed just after the revolt

clearly shows how much the influence of the wandering preachers

was feared. Their dress even and manner of speech are described;

these malcontents have an austere aspect, they go “from county to

county, and from town to town in certain habits under dissimulation

of great holiness.” They dispense of course with the ecclesiastical

papers which regular preachers ought to carry; they are “without

the licence of our Holy Father the Pope, or of the Ordinaries of the

{286} places, or other sufficient authority.” They make themselves

heard, and their successors to this day have never ceased to follow

suit, “not only in churches and churchyards, but also in markets,

fairs, and other open places where a great congregation of people

is.” Their real subject is not dogma, but the social question;

on their lips the religious sermon becomes a political harangue.

“Which persons,” the statute says, “do also preach divers matters of

slander, to engender discord and dissension betwixt divers estates

of the said realm as well spiritual as temporal, in exciting of

the people, to the great peril of all the realm.” They are cited

to appear before the ecclesiastic authority, the ordinaries, but

refuse to “obey to their summons and commandments.” Let the sheriffs

and others of the king’s officers henceforth watch with care these

wandering orators and send to prison those unable to show proper

certificates.[388]

We may gain an idea of their speeches by recalling the celebrated

harangue of the priest John Ball,[389] the most stirring of these

travelling orators. Certainly, in the Latin phrase of the “Chronicle

of England,” his thoughts are given too solemn and too correct a

form, but all that we know of the circumstances matches so well his

undoubted purports, that his actual speech cannot have differed, in

its trend at least, from what the chronicler has transmitted to us.

The popular saying quoted before serves as his text, and he developes

it in this manner:

“At the beginning we were all created equal; it is the tyranny of

perverse men which has caused servitude to arise, in spite of God’s

law; if God had willed that there should be serfs He would have said

at the beginning {289} of the world who should be serf and who should

be lord.”[390]

[Illustration 55. “WHEN ADAM DELVED AND EVE SPAN.”

(_The motto of John Ball’s speech illustrated from the MS. 2 B._ vii.

_Fourteenth Century_).]

What made Ball powerful was that he found his best weapons in the

Bible; quoting it he appealed to the good sentiments of the lowly, to

their virtue, their reason; he showed that the Divine Word accorded

with their interest; they would be “like the good father of a family

who cultivates his field and plucks up the weeds.” The same ideas

are attributed to him by almost all the chroniclers. Froissart uses

to describe his doings almost the same words as the statute already

quoted. He represents him when he found a congregation of people,

especially on Sundays, after mass, preaching in the open air sermons

similar to that in the “Chronicon Angliæ”: “This preest,” says

Froissart, “used often tymes on the sondayes after masse, whanne

the people were goynge out of the mynster, to go into the cloyster

and preche, and made the people to assemble about hym, and wolde

say thus: A ye good people, the maters gothe nat well to passe in

Englande, nor shall nat do tyll every thyng be common, and that there

be no villayns nor gentylmen. . . . What have we deserved or why

shulde we be kept thus in servage? we be all come fro one father and

one mother, Adam and Eve: whereby can they say or shewe that they

be gretter lordes than we be, savynge by that they cause us to wyn

and labour for that they dispende . . . They dwell in fayre houses,

and we have the payne and traveyle, rayne and wynde in the feldes;

and by that that cometh of our labours they kepe and maynteyne their

estates. . . . Lette us go to the kyng, he is yonge, and shewn hym

what servage we be in. . . . Thus Johan sayd on sondayes whan the

people issued out of the churches in the vyllages . . . and so they

wolde murmure one with another in the feldes and in the wayes as

{290} they went togyder, affermyng howe Johan Ball sayd trouthe.”[391]

So the enthusiastic multitude promised to make him archbishop and

chancellor of that kingdom in which he dreamed there should be “equal

liberty, equal rank, equal power” for all; but he was taken, drawn,

hanged, beheaded, and quartered,[392] and his dream remained a dream.

Meanwhile, politics apart, there might yet be found in the fourteenth

century some of God’s elect who, alarmed by the crimes of the

world and the state of sin in which men lived, left their cells or

the paternal roof to go about among villages and towns and preach

conversion. There remained some, but they were rare. Contrary to

others, these did not speak of public affairs, but of eternal

interests; they had not always received sacred orders; they acted

as volunteers to the celestial army. Of this sort was the before

mentioned Richard Rolle, of Hampole, whose life was partly that of

a hermit, partly of a wandering preacher. He was neither monk, nor

doctor, nor priest; when young, he had abandoned his father’s house

to go and lead a contemplative life in solitude. There he meditated,

prayed, and mortified himself; crowds came to his cell to listen to

his exhortations; he had ecstatic trances; his friends took off his

ragged cloak, mended it, and put it back on his shoulders without

his perceiving it. He later left his retreat, and for a long time

travelled over the north of England, becoming a wanderer, “changing

place continually,” preaching to lead men to salvation. He finally

settled at Hampole, where he ended his life in seclusion, writing

incessantly, and edifying the neighbourhood by his devotion; he

died the year of the great plague, 1349. Scarcely was he dead than

his tomb attracted pilgrims, pious people brought offerings there,

miracles were performed. In the {291} nuns’ convent at Hampole,

which drew from the vicinity of his tomb great honour and profit, an

“Office of St. Richard, the hermit,” was composed, as we have seen,

to be sung when he should be canonized. But the office of the old

hermit and itinerant preacher has never had occasion to be sung down

to the present day.[393]

The wandering preachers met with in the villages were not always

Lollards sent by Wyclif, nor inspired men who, like Rolle of Hampole,

held their mission from their conscience and from God; they were

often members of an immense and powerful caste sub-divided into

several orders, that of the mendicant friars. The two principal

branches were the Dominicans, Preachers, or Black friars, and the

Franciscans, Friars minor or Grey friars, both established in England

in the thirteenth century,[394] the “men of this [world] that most

wide walken,” said Langland.[395]

The immortal satires of Chaucer should not blind us to the initial

merit of these orders, nor cause us to see in the members thereof, at

all times, nothing but impudent and idle vagabonds, at once impious,

superstitious, and greedy—

“A Frere ther was, a wantoun and a merye;

* * * * *

Ful wel biloved, and famulier was he {292}

With frankeleyns overal in his cuntre,

And eek with worthi wommen of the toun;

* * * * *

Ful sweetly herde he confessioun,

And plesaunt was his absolucioun.

He was an esy man to yeve penance,

Ther as he wiste to han a good pitance;

For unto a povre ordre for to geve

Is signe that a man is wel i-shreve.

* * * * *

He knew wel the tavernes in every toun,

And every ostiller or gay tapstere.”[396]

[Illustration 56. A WORLDLY ECCLESIASTIC.

(_From the MS. 10 E. IV._)]

In Chaucer’s days, such friars were many, but some better ones could

also be met; not only those, rare indeed in the fourteenth century,

who continued the traditions of their founder, living among the poor,

poor as they, and withal wise, devout, and compassionate: Chaucer’s

friar was of a different sort; he avoided acquaintance with “a lazer

or a beggere,” unwilling to deal “with such poraile.” But even

among those who lived careless of the rule, some were at work whose

thoughts, dangerous {293} as they might be, were not so base, those

friars namely who, when the moment came, could be confounded with

the simple priests of their enemy Wyclif, and who were certainly

comprised along with them in the statute of 1382. Certain it is

that many friars, in their roaming career, preached in the market

place, just like John Ball, the new doctrines of emancipation. Hence

they alone among the clergy, at the hour of the great revolt, still

preserved a certain popularity among the lowly; and the monastic

chroniclers, their natural enemies, complacently paraded in their

narratives this new grievance against these detested orders.[397]

Langland, who cursed the revolt, cursed also the friars for having a

share of responsibility in it. Envy has whispered into their ears and

said: study logic, law, and the hollow dreams of philosophers, and

go from village to village proving that all property ought to be in

common—the very teaching of John Ball:

“and proven hit by Seneca

That alle thyng under hevene · ouhte to beo in comune.”[398]

Always armed with good sense, Langland plainly declares that the

author of these subversive theories lies; the Bible says, “Thou shalt

not covet thy neighbour’s goods.” Formerly the life of the friars

was exemplary, Charity dwelt among them; this was in the days of the

great saint of Assisi, the friend of men, the friend of birds, the

friend of all that had been created and could suffer.[399] {294}

And, indeed, what a holy mission their founder had given them!

Coarsely dressed, barefoot, getting only such food as was freely

offered them, they were to go into the towns and visit the poorest,

most densely populated and unhealthiest suburbs, to seek out the lost.

“And all the brothers,” said Francis, in his rule, “are to be clad in

mean habits, and may blessedly mend them with sacks and other pieces;

whom I admonish and exhort, that they do not despise or censure

such men as they see clad in curious and gay garments and using

delicate meats and drinks, but rather let every one judge and despise

himself.” They must never quarrel, but be “meek, peacable, modest,

mild and humble. . . . And they are not to ride unless some manifest

necessity or infirmity oblige them. Whatsoever house they go into,

they shall first say, ‘Peace be unto this house,’ and, according to

the Gospel, it shall be lawful for them to eat of all meats that

are set before them.” They must beg in order to get the necessaries

of life, but they must receive them in kind, never in money. “The

brothers shall not make anything their own, neither house nor place,

nor any other thing; and they shall go confidently to beg alms like

pilgrims and strangers in this world, serving our Lord in poverty and

humility.”[400]

All the miseries, all the hideous blemishes of humanity, every

kind of outcasts, the physical or moral lepers, were to have their

sympathy; and the lower classes in return would love and venerate

them, and grow morally better, owing to their word and example.

Eccleston relates that a friar minor once put on his sandals without

permission to go to matins. He dreamt afterwards that he was arrested

by robbers, who cried out, “Kill him! Kill him!”

“But I am a friar minor,” said he, sure of being respected. {295}

“Thou liest, for thou art not barefoot.”[401]

The first of their duties was to remain poor, in order to be able,

having nothing to lose, fearlessly to use firm language to the rich

and powerful of the world. When on his death-bed, in 1253, wise and

courageous Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln, a great friend of

theirs, and because a friend of theirs, reminded them of their rule,

appropriately quoting a line of Juvenal’s:

“Cantabit vacuus coram latrone viator.”

The friars were to be like the traveller without money, whose peace

of mind is never disturbed by meeting robbers.[402]

St. Francis had not wished his friars to be men of learning and

study; he was afraid especially of those subtle theological and

metaphysical researches which uselessly absorbed the life of so many

great clerics. Others enough, he thought, would devote themselves to

such speculations; he wanted to fill a gap and in this line there

was no gap. His rule was so strict that the famous Roger Bacon, who

belonged to his order, had to apply to the pope to be permitted

to use ink and parchment.[403] What the saint desired was to send

throughout the world an army of missionaries who would devote

themselves materially and morally to the welfare, body and soul, of

all the weary, the derelict, the dregs of humanity. Thus practised,

with no room left for the pride of knowledge, disinterestedness was

the more absolute, servitude the {296} more voluntary, and the

effect on the masses the greater. The subtlety of teachers was not

necessary for the fulfilling of this task; and the striking example

of the poverty of the consoler, heedless of his own troubles, was

the best of consolations. Above all, the vanity of the apostle must

be killed, the greatness of his merit must be apparent to God only.

With a heart so purified he would necessarily have a sufficient

comprehension of the problems of life and of the high moral aims

accessible even to the lowest to be naturally eloquent; the study of

the “Summæ,” in repute, was useless.

But too many dangers surrounded the sublime foundation, and the first

was knowledge itself. “The Emperor Charles, Roland and Oliver,”

once said the Saint, “and all the paladins and all strong men, have

pursued the infidel in battle till death, and with great pains and

labour have won their memorable victories. The holy martyrs died

struggling for the faith of Christ. But in our days there are people

who seek glory and honour among men simply by the narration of the

deeds of heroes. In like manner there are some among you who take

more pleasure in writing and preaching on the merits of the saints

than in imitating their works.” This reply St. Francis made to a

novice who wished to have a psalter. He humorously added, “When you

have a psalter you will wish to have a breviary, and when you have a

breviary you will sit in a chair like a great prelate, and will say

to your brother, ‘Brother, fetch me my breviary.’”[404]

The popularity of the friars had soon become immense,[405] {297} and

it was found that they had monopolized in England everything that

concerned religion.[406] By a quite human contradiction—let Brutus

be Cæsar—their poverty had invited riches, and their self-denial

power; the hovels where they lodged at first had become sumptuous

monasteries with chapels as large as cathedrals; the rich wanted to

be buried there, in tombs chiselled with the latest refinements of

the florid Gothic. Their apologists of the fifteenth century relate

with admiration that in their fine library at London, for in spite of

the rule they had a fine library, there was a tomb adorned with four

cherubims;[407] that their church, begun in 1306, was three hundred

feet long, ninety-five wide, and sixty-four feet high, with the

columns all of marble as well as the pavement. Kings and princes had

enriched the building; some had given the altars, others the stalls;

Edward III, “for the repose of the soul of the most illustrious Queen

Isabella, buried in the choir” (who had ended her immoral life in the

habit of the Santa Clara nuns), repaired the great middle window,

blown down by the wind. In the same church was preserved the heart

of Queen Eleanor, mother of Edward I. Relating that it was there,

Rishanger, a monk of Saint Albans and a contemporary, made thereupon

a remark, which Walsingham, also a monk of St. Albans, gleefully

reproduced in his “Historia Anglicana”: “Her body was buried in

the monastery of Ambresbury, but her heart in London, in the church

of the Minorites, who, like all friars of every order, claim for

themselves something of the bodies of any powerful persons dying;

after the manner of the dogs assembling {298} round corpses, where

each one greedily awaits his portion to devour.”[408] Gilbert de

Clare, Earl of Gloucester, had given for the same building twenty

trees from his forest of Tunbridge. Rich merchants, the mayor, the

aldermen, followed suit. The names of the donors were inscribed on

the windows, and Langland was indignant, and recalled the precept,

“Let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth.” We learn thus

that the third window on the west had been given by Walter Mordon,

“stoke-fyschmonger,” and Mayor of London. The second window on the

south was due to John of Charlton, knight, and his wife, whose arms

figured in it; the fourth to Walter de Gorst, fellmonger of London;

the fifth to the Earl of Lancaster; the fourth on the west to

“various collections, and thus it does not bear a name.” One of the

donors is styled the special father and friend of the friars minor.

It could be but a delight for the Wyclifites to reproach the friars

with all these mundane splendours; Wyclif revels in it:

“Freris bylden mony grete chirchis and costily waste housis, and

cloystris as hit were castels, and that withoute nede. . . . Grete

housis make not men holy, and onely by holynesse is God wel served.”

Those convents are “Caymes Castelis.”[409]

[Illustration 57. PSALM SINGING. THE INTERIOR OF A FRIAR’S CHURCH.

(_From the MS. Domit. A._ xvii. _in the British Museum_.)]

Interminable lists, too, of cardinals, bishops, and kings who have

belonged to the order are drawn up, not forgetting even “certain

persons of importance in the world,”—the very antithesis of their

founder’s intent. Finally, they enumerate the dead who at the last

moment assumed the habit of the friars: “Brother Sir Roger {301}

Bourne, knight, buried at Norwich in the friars’ habit, 1334.”[410]

The pride and riches of the Dominicans are just as great. The author

of “Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede,” towards the end of the fourteenth

century, accurately describes one of their monasteries, the splendid

columns to be seen there, the sculptures, paintings, and gildings

that adorn the chapter house, so beautiful that it obviously reminds

the author of the one at Westminster, or of the painted chamber, “la

chambre peinte,” where at times Parliament sat:

“As a Parlement-hous · y-peynted aboute,”

the magnificent stained glass windows ornamented with the arms of

the nobles or the mark of the merchants who have given them (“merkes

of marchauntes”), and “lovely ladies,” their bronze figures lying on

the slabs, “in many gay garmentes,” the imposing tombs of knights

heightened with gold.[411]

The proportions are reversed; as great as the modesty required by

the holy founder was now the pride. The faults Chaucer reproaches

them with creep in among them; they become interested, greedy, coarse

men of the world. The necessity for them to live among the laity had

been one of their chief dangers; they were to save the laity, but

were instead corrupted by it; they caught the plague that they were

to cure. Before even the middle of the {302} thirteenth century, one

of them had had a revelation that “Demons celebrated every year a

council against the order, and had found three means (to pervert it),

that is, intercourse with women, the receiving of useless persons,

and the handling of money.”[412]

Mendicity is now their trade, which some practice well, others

better; miracles of self-denial were demanded of them, and behold, on

the contrary, prodigies of selfishness. It is no longer religion, it

is their order which must be promoted; they preach not on behalf of

Christ, but on behalf of their convent; the reversal is complete. All

borrow largely from the treasure of good works amassed by their first

apostles and spend it madly. The respect of the multitude lessens,

their renown for holiness declines; they cast into the other scale of

the balance so many faults and disorders that it overweighs. And what

remains henceforth? Superstition replaces devotion; some, in spite of

the rule, have studied metaphysics and sciences, the _trivium_, the

_quadrivium_[413]; for a larger number, however, it is not learning

but a gross materialism that veils the superhuman ideal of Francis

of Assisi. Contact with their habit is equivalent to a good deed; if

the dress is assumed on the death-bed the demons will take flight.

Numberless visions have revealed to them these articles of a new

faith: “Thei techen lordis and namely ladies,” says Wyclif, “that if

they dyen in Fraunceys habite, thei schul nevere cum in helle for

vertu thereof.”[414] {303}

And so it came to pass that, not only poets like Chaucer

and Langland, not only reformers like Wyclif, but also the

universities[415] and the monks of the old-established orders,

waged open war against the friars. To which the monks were moved

partly, it is true, by jealousy, when they saw these newly created

brotherhoods rising in importance, in numbers and in wealth, but

partly, also, by the sight of undeniable abuses and worldliness.

In such an authoritative work as the “English History,” written in

St. Albans Abbey by Chaucer’s contemporary, Thomas Walsingham, the

present state and behaviour of the friars is thus described: “The

friars, unmindful of their profession, have even forgotten to what

end their orders were instituted; for the holy men their law-givers

desired them to be poor and free of all kind of temporal possessions,

that they should not have anything which they might fear to lose on

account of saying the truth. But now they are envious of possessors,

approve the crimes of the great, induce the commonalty into error,

and praise the sins of both; and with the intent of acquiring

possessions, they who had renounced possessions, with the intent of

gathering money, they who had sworn to persevere in poverty, call

good evil and evil good, leading astray princes by adulation, the

people by lies, and drawing both with themselves out of the straight

{304} path.” Walsingham adds that a familiar proverb in his time was,

“He is a friar, therefore a liar.”[416]

[Illustration 58. SPRINKLING DINERS WITH HOLY WATER.

(_From the MS. 10 E. IV._)]

The sanctity of the institution and the unworthiness of many of its

members caused it to be at once venerated and detested; however

contemptible be the man, what if, after all, the keys of heaven were

in his hand? Respect mingled with fear in the feeling for him. Thus

poets laughed at the friars, popular story-tellers scouted them;

distrust, doubt, contempt spread, extending from the lowly friar

to the reverend bishop himself; churchmen were caricatured on the

very stalls upon which they sat; Master Reynard was represented

delivering a sermon while wearing episcopal insignia, and neither

the miniaturist, charged with illuminating an imposing volume of

Decretals, nor those who had entrusted him with the work, found

anything improper in his satirising on the margin the whole

ecclesiastical hierarchy, from bishops to monks or clerks. One of the

latter is shown forgetting in the kitchen his sprinkler and bucket of

holy water; {305} then remembering what he has come for and going

to sprinkle the masters at table, then returning to the kitchen

maid.[417] In the same ironical spirit the author of a popular song

of the fourteenth century wrote:

“Preste ne monke ne yit chanoun,

Ne no man of religioun,

Gyfen hem so to devocioun

As done thes holy frers.

For summe gyven ham to chyvalry,

Somme to riote and ribaudery;

Bot ffrers gyven ham to grete study,

And to grete prayers.”

Several stanzas follow which cannot be quoted.[418]

The people, therefore, fitfully saw in the friars their protectors

and allies in case of revolt, while at other times they pursued them

in the streets with stones, struck them and lacerated their garments:

angels or else devils? they were not sure. “At the same time the

preaching friars took to flight because they feared to be maltreated

and ruined, because the commonalty bore with them very reluctantly,

on account of their proud behaviour, for they did not behave as

friars ought.”[419]

“Know ye,” says the king, “that we have understood, that some persons

of our kingdom of England, by the instigation of the evil spirit,

. . . do and daily strive to do harm and scandal to our beloved in

Christ, the religious men, friars of the order of minors, . . .

openly and secretly stirring up our people against them to destroy

the houses of the said friars, tearing their habits from them,

striking some, and ill-treating them, against our peace.”[420]

From another point of view, that of public safety, the {306} Commons

were indignant at the number of foreigners among the friars, whom

they considered a permanent danger to the State. They requested

“that all the alien friars, of whatever habit they might be, should

void the realm before the Feast of St. Michael, and if they remained

beyond the said feast they should be held as out of the common law,”

that is, outlawed.[421]

The friars kept their assurance, they were blessed in the days of

their good deeds; now they speak loud and make themselves feared; to

the Pope alone they are amenable; they carry their heads high, their

power is independent, they have become a church within the Church.

Along with the priest who preaches and confesses in his parish is to

be seen the wandering friar, who preaches and confesses everywhere;

his universal presence and power are sources of conflict; the parish

priest finds himself abandoned; the religious wayfarer brings the

unknown, the extraordinary, and everybody runs to him. He lays down

his staff and wallet and begins to talk; his language is that of the

people, the whole parish is present; he busies himself with their

eternal welfare, and also with their earthly interests, for lay life

is familiar to him, and he can give appropriate advice. But his

teaching is sometimes suspicious. “These false prophets,” says not

Wyclif, but the Council of Saltzburg in 1386, “by their sermons full

of fables often lead astray the souls of their hearers”; they make

game of the authority of the parish priests.[422]

To stop their progress proved impossible. The tide rose and swept

away the embankments; the excellent had become the worst, _corruptio

optimi pessima_, and the old adage was verified to the letter. In

spite of grievances, protests, derisive songs and stories, they

were met everywhere, in the hut and in the castle, begging from the

rich {307} and knocking also at the door of the poor. They sat at

the board of the noble, who treated them with consideration; with

him they played the part of the fashionable man of religion; they

interested, they pleased. Wyclif shows them creeping into familiarity

with the great, liking “to speke bifore lordis and sitte at tho mete

with hom, . . . also to be confessoures of lordis and ladyes.”[423]

Langland, in “Piers Plowman,” is equally severe on “frere Flaterere.”

In a Wyclifite treatise of the same period we read, “Thei geten

hem worldly offis in lordis courtis, and summe to ben conseilours

and reuleris of werris, and also to ben chamberleyns to lordes and

ladies.”[424]

Courting popularity among all people, they were different men and

acted differently in the villages where they made their rounds; to

their wallet they added store of thread, needles, ointments, with

which they traded:

“Thei becomen pedleris, berynge knyves, pursis, pynnys and girdlis

and spices and sylk and precious pellure and forrouris for wymmen,

and therto smale gentil hondis (dogs), to gete love of hem.”[425]

They were more and more the subject of song and cause of mirth, but

they did not mind, being the better advertised thereby:

“Thai wandren here and there,

And dele with dyvers marcerye,

Right as thai pedlers were.

Thai dele with purses, pynnes, and knyves,

With gyrdles, gloves, for whenches and wyves.”[426]

{308}

The anonymous author, a contemporary of Chaucer, adds:

“I was a frere ful many a day,

Therefor the sothe I wate (know).

But when I sawe that thair lyvyng

Acordyd not to thair preching,

Of I cast my frer clothing,

And wyghtly went my gate” (my way).[427]

Between the scepticism of the century and blind credulity,

superstition flourished. The friars pretended they could sell the

merits of their order at retail. They were so numerous and prayed

so devoutly, that they had a surplus of piyers in store. Why not

distribute this superfluous wealth to men of faith and good will?

They did so, for cash of course; it was an exchange of wealth; like

will to like. The friars went about the country discounting these

invisible riches, and selling to pious souls, under the name of

_letters of fraternity_, drafts upon heaven. What is the use of these

parchments? they were asked. They give a share in the merits of the

whole order of St. Francis.—What are they good for? Wyclif was asked.

“Bi siche resouns thinken many men that thes lettris mai do good for

to covere mostard pottis.”[428]

Discredited as they were at the end of the century, the friars had

not, however, lost all hold over the people. Henry IV usurped the

throne, and soon found that he must reckon with the friars. A good

many among them were indignant at his enterprise, and some preached

here and there, during the first years of his reign, that Richard

II was still living and was the true king, and this was one more

case, and a very important one, of political ideas vulgarised by

wayfarers throughout the country. Henry IV sent them to gaol. One

who was brought before him {309} reproached him violently for the

deposition of Richard: “But I have not usurped the crown, I have been

elected,” said the king.—“The election is null if the legitimate king

is living; if he is dead he is dead by thy means; if he was killed by

thee, thou canst have any title to the throne.”—“By my head,” cried

the prince, “I will have thine cut off!”

The accused were advised to throw themselves on the king’s mercy;

they refused, and requested to be regularly tried by a jury. Neither

in the city nor in Holborn could any one be found to sit on that

jury; inhabitants of Highgate and Islington had to be fetched for the

purpose. These men declared the friars guilty; the poor wretches were

drawn to Tyburn, hanged, then beheaded, and their heads were placed

on London Bridge (1402). The convent was permitted to gather their

remains, and bury them in holy ground. The Islington and Highgate

jurors came weeping to the Franciscans to implore their pardon for a

verdict of which they repented.

For several years, in spite of these punishments, friars continued

to preach about the country in favour of Richard II, maintaining

that he still lived, although Henry IV had taken care to have a

public exhibition in London of the corpse of his assassinated

predecessor.[429]

In the fifteenth century the reputation of the friars only grew

worse. The abuses of which they were the living personification were

among those which best served {310} to draw later adherents to

Luther. If there remained in their ranks men who knew how to die,

like that unfortunate friar Forest, who was hung alive by chains

above a wood fire and slowly roasted, while Bishop Latimer, himself

to be burnt later, addressed the dying man “with pious exhortations”

to repentance,[430] the mass of them remained the object of universal

contempt. This was one of the few points on which it sometimes

happened that Catholics and Protestants agreed. Sir Thomas More,

beheaded for the Catholic faith, spoke of the friars in the same

strain as his adversary Tyndal, strangled for the Protestant faith.

In his eyes they were but dangerous vagabonds. He relates, in his

“Utopia,” the dispute between a friar and a fool, on the question of

pauperism. “‘You will never,’ said the friar, ‘get rid of beggars,

unless you also make an edict against us friars.’ ‘Well,’ said the

fool, ‘it is already made, the cardinal passed a very good law

against you when he decreed that all vagabonds should be seized and

made to work, for you are the greatest vagabonds that can be.’ When

this was said, and all eyes being turned on the cardinal, they saw he

did not disown it; every one, not unwillingly, began to smile, except

the friar.”[431]

A class, as historians have observed, which no longer justifies its

privileges by its services, is in imminent danger; if it reforms in

time, it may be saved; if it does not, it is doomed. In England, the

friars were doomed. But nothing is ever entirely lost, and while,

for centuries, Chaucer’s merriment made people merry at the expense

of the begging orders, it is only fair, before parting with them, to

recall such an unprejudiced testimony as that of {311} Bacon, in his

essay “Of Love”: “There is in man’s nature a secret inclination and

motion towards love of others, which, if it be not spent upon some

one or a few, doth naturally spread itself towards many, and maketh

men become humane and charitable; as it is seen sometime in friars.”

{312}

[Illustration 59. A GAME OF FOX AND GEESE.

(_From the MS. 10 E. IV._)]

CHAPTER II

THE PARDONERS

“Indulgence” was at first simply a commutation of penance. The

punishments inflicted for sins were of long duration; fasting and

mortification had to be carried on for months and years. The faithful

were permitted to transform these interminable chastisements into

shorter expiation. Thus a clerk might exchange a year of penance

against three hundred lashes, reciting a psalm at each hundred.[432]

Tables of such exchanges were drawn up by competent prelates.

The learned and autocratic Theodore, born at Tarsus, Cilicia,

an encyclopædic mind and a strong disciplinarian, archbishop of

Canterbury from 669 to 690, who left on the British church a

permanent mark, had published a tariff allowing people to be excused

of a month’s penance on bread and water if they sang instead twelve

hundred psalms with bended knees; for a year’s penance the singing

was increased, and each course of psalter singing was accompanied

with three hundred strokes in the palm of the hand (_palmatæ_). But

it was possible to compensate {313} a year’s penance and escape

at the same time the psalms, fasts and strokes by paying a hundred

shillings in alms.[433] In another such table, drawn up in the ninth

century by Halitgarius, bishop of Cambrai, is found this additional

facility, that if the sinner, sentenced to a month’s penance on bread

and water, chooses rather the singing of psalms he may be allowed not

to kneel while he sings, but then instead of twelve hundred he will

have to sing fifteen hundred and eighty psalms. He may in the same

manner be excused of more than one month, up to twelve, in which last

case, if he chooses not to kneel, he will have to sing no less than

twenty thousand one hundred and sixty psalms.[434]

Laymen, who had their choice, frequently preferred a payment in

money, the rich having to pay more than the poor, and the sums

thus obtained were usually well employed. We have seen them serve

for the support of roads and bridges; they were also applied in

reconstructing churches, in helping the sick of a hospital, and in

covering the expenses of numerous public enterprises. The entirety of

punishments was taken off by a plenary indulgence; thus the French

pope, Urban II, at the Council of Clermont, in 1095, granted one to

all those who, through pure devotion and not to acquire booty or

glory, should go to Jerusalem to fight the infidel; and this was the

first crusade.

Little by little the idea of an actual commutation vanished, and

was replaced by a different system, known as the theory of the

“Treasury.” It had indeed become obvious as the use of indulgences

spread, and they were more and more easily gained, that they could

no longer be justified as offering to the sinner only his choice

between {314} several sorts of even penances. They were something

else. A short, well selected prayer, a small gift in money, would now

exempt devout people from the greatest penalties and from numberless

years of a possible purgatory; the one could scarcely be considered

as the equivalent of the other; how was the equilibrium established

between the two scales? The answer was that the deficiency was made

up by the application to the sinner of merits, not indeed his own,

but of Christ, the Virgin, and the saints, of which there was an

inexhaustible “treasury,” the dispensation of which rested with the

Pope and the clergy.

This theory was acted upon long before being put forth in express

words; it does not appear to have been more than vaguely alluded to

before the fourteenth century, when Pope Clement VI, the “Doctor

Doctorum,” gave a perfectly clear definition and exposition of the

“treasury” system. In a bull of the year 1350, he explains that

the merits of Christ are infinite, and those of the Virgin and

the saints, superabundant. This excess of unemployed merit has

been constituted into a treasury, “not one that is deposited in a

strong room, or concealed in a field, but which is to be usefully

distributed to the faithful, through the blessed Peter, keeper

of heaven’s gate, and his successors.” However largely employed,

there ought to be “no fear of an absorption or a diminution of this

treasury, first on account of the infinite merits of Christ, as has

been said before, then because the more numerous are the people

reclaimed through the use of its contents, the more it is augmented

by the addition of their merits.”[435] The treasury had therefore no

chance of ever being found empty, since the more was drawn from it

the more it grew. Such is in all its simplicity the theory of the

“treasury,” which has ever since been maintained, with no change in

the theory but much in the practice. {315}

With so much to distribute among the faithful, the Church had

recourse, for insuring its repartition, to certain people who went

about, supplied with official letters, and who offered to good

Christians a particle of the heavenly wealth placed at the disposal

of the successors of Peter. They expected in return some portion of

the earthly riches their hearers might be possessed of, and which

could be applied to more tangible uses than the “treasury.” The men

entrusted with this mission were called sometimes _questors_, on

account of what they asked, and sometimes _pardoners_, on account of

what they gave.[436]

Many a man lives in our remembrance owing to his portrait. If his

image had not been preserved by an artist of genius his memory would

have been abolished. Who would remember, but for her tomb at Lucca,

lovely Ilaria del Carretto? Many among us would not suspect that the

long vanished pardoner ever existed if the master-painter, Chaucer,

had not drawn, from life, his unlovely portrait. “Lordyngs,” says the

one in the “Canterbury Tales”:

“Lordyngs, quod he, in chirches whan I preche,

I peyne me to have an hauteyn speche,

And ryng it out, as lowd as doth a belle,

For I can al by rote which that I telle.

My teeme is alway oon, and ever was;

_Radix omnium malorum est cupiditas_.”

In the pulpit he leans to the right, to the left, he gesticulates,

wanders in his talk; his arms move as much as his tongue; it is a

wonder to see and hear him:

“I stonde lik a clerk in my pulpit,

And whan the lewed people is doun i-set,

I preche so as ye have herd before,

And telle hem an hondred japes more. {316}

Than peyne I me to strecche forth my necke

And est and west upon the people I bekke,

As doth a dowfe (pigeon), syttyng on a berne;

Myn hondes and my tonge goon so yerne,

That it is joye to se my businesse.

* * * * *

I preche no thyng but of coveityse.

Therefor my teem is yit, and ever was,

_Radix omnium malorum est cupiditas_.”

The description may seem to-day improbable and exaggerated, but it is

not. A verifying from authentic sources and a search for documents

only shows once more Chaucer’s marvellous exactness; not a trait

in his picture that may not be justified by letters from papal or

episcopal chanceries.

These _quæstores_, or _quæstiarii_, as they were officially called,

were, says Boniface IX, speaking at the very time that the poet

wrote his tales, sometimes secular clerics and sometimes friars,

most of them extremely impudent. They dispensed with ecclesiastic

licences, and went from place to place delivering speeches, showing

their relics and selling their pardons. It was a lucrative trade and

the competition was great; the success of authorized pardoners had

caused a crowd of self-appointed ones to issue from the school or

the priory, or from mere nothingness, greedy, with glittering eyes,

as in the “Canterbury Tales”: “suche glaryng eyghen hadde he as an

hare”; true vagabonds, infesters of the highroads, who having, as

they thought, nothing to fear, boldly carried on their impostor’s

traffic. They overawed their listeners, spoke loud, and unbound upon

earth without scruple all that might be bound in heaven. Much profit

arose therefrom; Chaucer’s pardoner got a hundred marks a year, which

was easy enough for him, since, having received no authority from any

one, to no one did he render any accounts, but kept all the gains for

{317} himself. In his measured language the Pope tells us as much as

the poet, and it seems as though he would duplicate, line by line,

the portrait drawn by the story-teller, his contemporary.

First, says the pontifical letter, these pardoners swear that they

were sent by the Court of Rome. “Certain religious, who even belong

to one or the other of the mendicant orders, and some secular clerks,

even endowed with privileged benefices, affirm that they are sent by

us or by the legates or the nuncios of the apostolic see, and that

they have received a mission to treat of certain affairs, . . . to

receive money for us and the Roman Church, and they go about the

country under these pretexts.”

From Rome also comes Chaucer’s personage; he moves about the country,

and in exchange for his pardons tirelessly asks for goods and money,

which certainly will not go to Rome:

“a gentil pardoner . . .

That streyt was comen from the court of Rome . . .

His walet lay byforn him in his lappe,

Bret-ful of pardoun come from Rome al hoot.”

* * * * *

“What! trowe ye, whiles that I may preche

And wynne gold and silver for I teche,

That I wil lyve in povert wilfully?

* * * * *

For I wol preche and begge in sondry londes,

I wil not do no labour with myn hondes . . .

I wol noon of thapostles counterfete,

I wol have money, wolle, chese, and whete.”

“Thus,” continues the Pope, “they proclaim to the faithful and simple

people (“the lewed people,” says Chaucer’s man) the real or pretended

authorizations which they have received; and irreverently abusing

those which are real, in pursuit of infamous and hateful {318} gain,

they carry further their impudence by mendaciously attributing to

themselves false and pretended authorizations of this kind.”

What does the poet say? That the charlatan has ever fine things to

show, that he knows how to dazzle the simple, that he has his bag

full of parchments with awe-inspiring seals, maybe genuine, maybe

not;[437] that the people look on and admire, and the parson gets

angry but holds his tongue:

“First I pronounce whennes that I come,

And thanne my bulles schewe I alle and some;

Oure liege lordes seal upon my patent

That schewe I first, my body to warent,

That no man be so hardy, prest ne clerk,

Me to destourbe of Cristes holy werk.

And after that than tel I forth my tales.

Bulles of popes and of cardynales,

Of patriarkes, and of bisshops, I schewe,

And in Latyn speke I wordes fewe

To savore with my predicacioun,

And for to stere men to devocioun.”

As for that “turpem et infamem quæstum” branded by the Pontiff, it is

the ever-recurring burden of the unholy discourse:

“Now good men, God foryeve yow your trespas,

And ware yow fro the synne of avarice.

Myn holy pardoun may you alle warice (redeem),

So that ye offren noblis or starlinges,

Or elles silver spones, broches, or rynges.

Bowith your hedes under this holy bulle.”

{319}

[Illustration 60. READING IN CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL OF A FABRICATED

PAPAL BULL, A.D. 1399.

(_From the MS. Harl. 1319._)]

{321}

The effect of solemn parchments and large seals displayed from the

pulpit rarely failed upon the crowd, and in some circumstances of

more importance than the retail selling of the merits of saints in

heaven, recourse was had to such exhibitions. When Henry of Lancaster

came to turn his cousin Richard II out of the English throne, the

first thing he did, according to Créton, was to have a pretended

papal bull, granting a plenary indulgence, read from the pulpit of

Canterbury cathedral and commented by Archbishop Arundel (whose

brother, the earl, King Richard had caused to be summarily executed).

As Créton was not present when this scene, which he describes only on

hearsay, took place, the speech he gives is the more interesting, for

it may be considered an average speech, such a one as was usual and

likely to have been pronounced on the occasion.

“My good people,” the Archbishop is supposed to have said, “hearken

all of you here: you well know how the king most wrongfully and

without reason has banished your lord Henry; I have therefore

obtained of the holy father who is our patron, that those who shall

forthwith bring aid this day, shall every one of them have remission

of all sins whereby from the hour of their baptism they have been

defiled. Behold the sealed bull that the Pope of renowned Rome hath

sent me, my good friends, in behalf of you all. Agree then to help

him to subdue his enemies, and you shall for this be placed after

death with those who are in Paradise.”

“Then,” continues the narrator, describing the effect of the speech,

“might you have beheld young and old, the feeble and the strong, make

a clamour, and regarding neither right or wrong, stir themselves up

with one accord, thinking that what was told them was true, for such

as they have little sense or knowledge. The archbishop invented this

device . . .”[438]

{322}

The burst of eloquence of Chaucer’s pardoner is a caricature, but

not an unrecognizable one, of the grave discourses of this sort.

The Pope has still more to say: “For some insignificant sum of money,

they extend the veil of a lying absolution not over penitents, but

over men of a hardened conscience who persist in their iniquity,

remitting, to use their own words, horrible crimes without there

having been any contrition nor fulfilment of any of the prescribed

forms.” It almost seems as if the Pope himself had listened in

disguise, on the road to Canterbury, to Chaucer’s man saying:

“I yow assoile by myn heyh power,

If ye woln offre, as clene and eek as cler

As ye were born.

* * * * *

I rede that oure hoste schal bygynne,

For he is most envoliped in synne.

Come forth, sire ost, and offer first anoon,

And thou schalt kisse the reliquis everichoon,

Ye for a grote; unbocle anone thi purse.”[439]

Boccaccio, in one of the tales which he represents himself as telling

under the name of Dioneo, pictures, he too, an ecclesiastic of great

resemblance, moral and physical, to Chaucer’s man. He was called Frà

Cipolla, and was accustomed to visit Certaldo, Boccaccio’s village on

the hill top, still very much now as it was then, with the writer’s

house conspicuous in the main street. “This Frà Cipolla was little of

person, red-haired (Chaucer’s pardoner had “heer as yelwe as wex”)

and merry of countenance, the jolliest rascal in the world, and to

boot, for all he was no scholar, he was so fine a talker and so ready

of wit that those who knew him not would not only have esteemed him a

great rhetorician, but had {323} avouched him to be Tully himself,

or maybe, Quintilian; and he was gossip, or friend, or well-wisher,

to well-nigh every one in the country.” If his hearers gave him

a little money or corn or anything, he would show them the most

wonderful relics; and besides they would enjoy the special protection

of the patron saint of his order, St. Anthony: “Gentlemen and ladies,

it is, as you know, your usance to send every year to the poor of our

lord Baron St. Anthony of your corn and of your oats, this little

and that much, according to his means and his devoutness, to the

intent that the blessed St. Anthony may keep watch over your beeves

and asses and swine and sheep; and, beside this, you use to pay,

especially such of you as are inscribed into our company, that small

due which is payable once a year.”[440]

Such people had few scruples and knew how to profit by those of

others. They released their customers from all possible vows, and

remitted any penance, for money; they were a living encouragement

to sin, making it so easy to atone for. The more prohibitions,

obstacles, or penances were imposed, the more their affairs

prospered; they passed their lives undoing what the real clergy

did, the richer for it, and the clergy the poorer. The Pope again

tells us: “For a small compensation they remit vows of chastity,

of abstinence, of pilgrimage beyond the sea to Sts. Peter and Paul

of Rome, or to St. James of Compostela, and any other vows.” They

allow heretics to re-enter the bosom of the Church, illegitimate

children to receive the sacred orders, they remove excommunications

and interdicts; in short, as their power comes from themselves alone,

they see no reason to restrain it and they use it to the full and

without stint. Lastly, they affirm that “it is in the name of the

apostolic chamber that they take all this money, and yet they are

never known {324} to give an account of it to any one: ‘Horret et

merito indignatur animus talia reminisci.’”[441]

They went yet further; they had formed regular associations for

systematically speculating on public credulity; thus Boniface IX

orders in 1390, that bishops should make an inquiry into everything

that concerns these “religious or secular clerics, their people,

their accomplices, and their associations”; that they should imprison

them without other form of law, “de plano ac sine strepitu et

figura judicii”; should make them render accounts, confiscate their

receipts, and if their papers be not in order hold them under good

keeping, and refer the matter to the sovereign pontiff.

There were indeed authorized pardoners who paid the produce of

their receipts into the treasury of the Roman Court. The learned

Richard d’Angerville, otherwise de Bury, Bishop of Durham, called by

Petrarch, whom he had met at Avignon in 1330, “vir ardentis ingenii,”

speaks, in a circular of December 8, 1340, of apostolic or diocesan

letters, subject to a rigorous visa, with which the regular pardoners

had to be furnished.[442] But many did without them, and the bishop

notices one by one the same abuses as the Pope and as Chaucer.

“Strong complaints have come to our ears that the questors of this

kind, not without great and rash boldness, of their own authority,

and to the great danger of the souls who are confided to us, openly

setting at nought our jurisdiction, distribute indulgences to the

people, dispense with the execution of vows, absolve the perjured,

homicides, usurers, and other sinners who confess to them; and, for

a little money paid, grant remission for ill-atoned crimes, and are

given to a multitude of other abuses.” Henceforward all curates,

vicars and chaplains must refuse to admit these pardoners to preach

or to bestow indulgences, {325} whether in the churches or anywhere

else, “if they be not provided with letters or a special licence”

from the bishop himself. And this was a most proper injunction, for

with these bulls brought from far-off lands, adorned with unknown

seals “of popes and of cardynales, of patriarkes and of bisshops,”

it was easy to make people believe that all was in order. Meanwhile

let all those who are now wandering round the country be stripped of

what they have taken, and let “the money and _any other articles_

collected by them or on their behalf,” be seized: the common people

not being always possessed of actual cash, Chaucer’s pardoner

contented himself with “silver spones, broches, or rynges.” One more

allusion is to be noticed in this text to those associations of

pardoners which must have been so harmful.

They employed, in fact, inferior agents; the general credulity and

the widespread wish to get rid of religious trammels which men had

imposed on themselves, in the shape of vows or otherwise, or which

had been imposed on them on account of their sins, were a mine for

the perverse band, the veins of which they carefully worked. By means

of these subordinate representatives of their fanciful power, they

easily extended the field of their operations, and the complicated

threads of their webs covered the whole kingdom, sometimes too strong

to be broken, sometimes too fine to be perceived.

Occasionally, too, the bad example came from very high quarters;

all had not the Bishop of Durham’s virtue. Walsingham relates with

indignation the behaviour of a cardinal who made a stay in England

when the marriage between Richard II and the emperor’s sister, Anne

of Bohemia, was being negotiated. For money this prelate, just like

the common pardoners, removed excommunications, dispensed people of

pilgrimages to St. Peter, St. James, or Jerusalem, and had the sum

that would have been spent on the journey duly computed and given

{326} to him;[443] and it is much to be regretted from every point

of view that the curious tariff of the expenses of a journey thus

estimated has not come down to us.

The list of the misdeeds of pardoners was in truth enormous, and

it is found even larger on exploring the authentic ecclesiastical

documents than in the work of Chaucer himself. Thus in a bull of Pope

Urban V, dated 1369, mention is made of practices apparently untried

by the otherwise experienced “gentil pardoner of Rouncival.” These

doings were customary with those employed by the Hospitallers of St.

John of Jerusalem in England. Helped by the connivance of the “very

priors” of the order, they pretended to be “privileged” and exempted

from the formality of showing apostolic letters before they were

allowed to proceed with their preachings and to offer to the people

their “negotia quæstuaria.” The parish rectors and curates naturally

enough objected to such pretensions, but their complaints were ill

received, and the pardoners, to get rid of them, sued them before

some distant authority for contempt of their cloth and privileges.

While the suit was being determined they remained free to act as they

liked. Sometimes they were so lucky as to secure sentence against the

priest who had tried to do his duty, and even succeeded in having

him excommunicated: which could of course but be a cause of great

merriment among the unholy tribe.

“Very often, also,” adds Pope Urban, “when they mean to hurt a rector

or his curate, they go to his church on some feast-day, especially

at such time as the people are accustomed to come and make their

offerings. They {327} begin then to make their own collections or to

read the name of their brotherhood or fraternity, and continue until

such an hour as it is not possible to celebrate mass conveniently

that day. Thus they manage perversely to deprive these rectors and

vicars of the offerings which accrue to them at such masses.” They

have, on the other hand, Divine service performed “in polluted or

interdicted places, and there also bury the dead; they use, as helps

to their trade, simple and almost illiterate subordinates, who spread

errors and fables among people as ignorant as themselves.”

Such abuses and many others, constantly pointed out by councils,

popes, and bishops, moved the University of Oxford to recommend, in

the year 1414, the entire suppression of pardoners, as being men

of loose life and lying speeches, spending their profits “with the

prodigal son,” remitting to sinners their sins as well as their

penances, encouraging vice by the ease of their absolutions, and

drawing the souls of uneducated people “to Tartarus.” But this

request was not listened to, and pardoners continued to prosper for

the moment.[444]

At the same time that they sold indulgences, the pardoners showed

relics. They had been on pilgrimage and had brought back pieces of

bone and fragments of all kinds, of holy origin, they said. But

although the credulous were not lacking among the multitude, the

disabused among the better sort were numerous and they scoffed

without mercy. The pardoners of Chaucer and Boccaccio, and in the

sixteenth century of Heywood and Lyndsay,[445] exhibited the most

unexpected trophies. The Chaucerian one, who possessed a piece of the

sail of St. {328} Peter’s boat is surpassed by Frate Cipolla, who

had brought back much better from Jerusalem. “I will, as an especial

favour, show you,” said he, “a very holy and goodly relic, which I

myself brought aforetime from the Holy Lands beyond seas, and that

is one of the Angel Gabriel’s feathers, which remained in the Virgin

Mary’s chamber, whenas he came to announce to her in Nazareth!”[446]

The feather, which was from the tail of a parrot, through some joke

played upon him was replaced in the holy man’s box by a few coals;

when he perceived the metamorphosis he showed no embarrassment, but

began the narrative of his long voyages, and explained how, instead

of the feather, the coals on which St. Lawrence was grilled would be

seen in his coffer. He had received them from “My Lord Blamemenot

Anitpleaseyou,” the worthy patriarch of Jerusalem, who also showed

him “a finger of the Holy Ghost as whole and sound as ever it was,

. . . and one of the nails of the cherubim, . . . divers rays of

the star that appeared to the three Wise Men in the East, and a

vial of the sweat of St. Michael whenas he fought with the devil”;

he possessed also “somewhat of the sound of the bells of Solomon’s

Temple in a vial.”

Poets’ jests; but less exaggerated than might be thought. Was there

not shown to the pilgrims at Exeter a bit “of the candle which the

angel of the Lord lit in Christ’s tomb”? This was one of the relics

brought together in the venerable cathedral by Athelstan, “the most

glorious and victorious king,” who had sent emissaries at great

expense on to the Continent to gather these precious spoils. The list

of their treasure-troves, which has been preserved in a missal of the

eleventh century, comprises also a little of “the bush in which the

Lord spoke to Moses,” and a lot of other curiosities.[447] Some {329}

of the Virgin’s milk was, as all know, venerated at Walsingham and

in various other places.

Matthew Paris relates that, in his time, the friar preachers

gave to Henry III a piece of white marble on which there was the

trace of a human foot; nothing less, according to the testimony

of the inhabitants of the Holy Land, than the mark of one of the

Saviour’s feet, left by Him as a souvenir to His apostles after His

Ascension. “Our lord the king had this marble placed in the church of

Westminster, to which he had already lately offered some of the blood

of Christ.”[448]

In the fourteenth century kings continued to set the example to the

common people, and to collect relics of undemonstrable authenticity.

In the accounts of the expenses of Edward III, in the thirty-sixth

year of his reign, a hundred shillings are put down for a messenger

who had brought him a vest of St. Peter’s.[449] In France, at the

same period, King Charles V “le sage” had one day the curiosity

to visit the cupboard at the Sainte Chapelle, where the relics of

the passion were kept. He found there a phial with a Latin and

Greek inscription indicating that it contained some of the blood

of Jesus Christ. “Then,” relates Christine de Pisan, “that wise

king, because some doctors have said that, on the day that our Lord

rose, nothing was left on earth of His worthy body that was not all

returned into Him, would hereupon know and inquire by learned men,

natural philosophers, and theologians, whether it could be true that

upon earth there were some of the real pure blood of Jesus Christ.

Examination was made by the said learned men assembled about this

matter; the said phial was seen and visited with great reverence

and solemnity of lights, in which when it was hung or lowered could

{330} be clearly seen the fluid of the red blood flow as freshly as

though it had been shed but three or four days since: which thing

is no small marvel, considering the passion was so long ago. And

these things I know for certain by the relation of my father who was

present at that examination, as philosophic officer and counsellor of

the said prince.”

After this examination made by great “solemnity of lights,” the

doctors declared themselves for the authenticity of the miracle;[450]

which was not in reality more surprising than that at the cathedral

at Naples, where the blood of the patron saint of the town may still

be seen to liquify several times a year, and for several days each

time.

In every country of Europe the pardoners enjoyed, not to say endured,

the same reputation and acted in the same manner. Be it France,

Germany, Italy, or Spain, they were found living, so long as there

remained any, as Chaucer’s pardoner did. In France, Rabelais has the

cheaters cheated by his beloved Panurge. The clever _vaurien_ used

to place his penny in their plate so skilfully that it seemed to be

a silver piece: for which he made bold to take change, leaving only

a farthing. “‘And I did the same,’ said he, ‘in all the churches

where we have been.’—‘Yea, but,’ said I, ‘you . . . are a thief, and

commit sacrilege.’—‘True,’ said he, ‘as it seems to you; but it does

not seem so to me. For the pardoners give it me as a gift when they

say, in offering me the relics to kiss: _Centuplum accipies_—that

is, that for one penny I take a hundred; for _accipies_ is spoken by

them according to the manner of the Hebrews, who use the future tense

instead of the imperative, as you have in the book, _Diliges Dominum,

id est, dilige_.’”[451] {331}

Pardoners, of course, never appear on the boards of the old French

theatre, but to be derided:

“_Pardoner_: I mean to show you the comb of the cock that crowed

at Pilate’s, and half a plank of Noah’s great ark. . . . Look,

gentlemen, here is a feather of one of the seraphs near God. Don’t

think it is a joke; here it is for you to see.

“_Triacleur_: Gogsblood! ’tis the quill from a goose he has eaten at

his dinner!” and so on.[452]

The same in Spain. Lazarillo de Tormes, the page of many masters,

happens, at one time, to be in the service of a pardoner: the very

same individual Chaucer had described two hundred years before. He,

too, knows how to use Latin when profitable: “Hee woulde alwayes bee

informed before he came, which were learned and which not. When he

came to those which he understood were learned, he woulde be sure

never to speake worde of Latin, for feare of stumbling: but used in

suche places a gentle kind of Castilian Spanish, his tong alwayes

at libertie. And contrariwise whensoever hee was informed of the

reverend _Domines_ (I meane such as are made priestes more for money

than for learning and good behaviour), to hear him speake amongs

suche men you would saye it were St. Thomas: for hee woulde then two

houres together talke Latin, at lest which seemed to bee, though it

was not.”[453] A trick which, as is well known, Sganarelle, many

years after, did not disdain to use when put upon his last shifts as

the “Médecin malgré lui.”

Pardoners lived merrily; certain it is that after a busy day they

must have been cheerful companions at the inn. The thought of the

multitude of sins they had pardoned, of excommunications they had

removed, {332} of penalties they had remitted—themselves mere

vagabonds threatened with the jail or gallows—the knowledge of their

impunity, the strangeness of their existence, the triumphant success

of the mad harangues in which they attributed to themselves the keys

of heaven, must have made their hearts swell with uncontrollable

merriment. Their heads were filled with anecdotes, sacred or profane;

native coarseness and assumed devotion, the real and the artificial

man, jostled each other to the sound of jugs and vessels clattering

on the table. See in the margin of an old psalter the lean figure of

Master Reynard[454]: a crozier between his paws, a mitre on his head,

he is preaching a sermon to the wondering crowd of ducks and geese of

the poultry yard. The gesture is full of unction, but the eye shaded

by the tawny hair has a cruel glitter, which ought to give warning of

the peroration. But no, the poultry yard clucks devoutly and fears

nothing; woe to the ducks when the mitre has fallen: “And Thou, Lord,

shalt laugh at them,” says the psalmist on the same page.

A singular knowledge of the human heart those individuals must have

had, going through such strange experiences day by day. Never were

more unworthy beings supposedly clothed with greater supernatural

powers. The deformed monster squatting on the apse of the cathedral

laughs and grimaces hideously on his airy pedestal. And up to the

clouds rise the fretted spires; the chiselled pinnacles detach

themselves like lace upon the sky; the saints pray their eternal

prayer under the porch; the bells send forth their peals into space,

and souls are seized with a thrill, with that mysterious awe caused

by the sublime. The monster laughs; hearts believe themselves

purified, but he has seen their ugly sores, a sinister hand will

touch them and prevent their cure; the edge {333} of the roof

reaches the clouds; but his look goes through the dormer window, he

detects a cracking beam, worm-eaten boards giving way, and a host

of obscure creatures slowly pursuing under the wooden shafts their

secular labour of destruction: he laughs and grimaces hideously.

On the tavern bench the pardoner is still seated. There come Chaucer,

the knight, the squire, the friar, the host—old acquaintances. We

are by ourselves, no one need be afraid to speak, the foaming ale

renders hearts expansive; and the unseen coils of that tortuous

soul unfold to view, he gives the summary of a whole life, the

theory of his existence, the key to his secrets. What matters his

frankness? he knows that it cannot hurt him; time and again has the

bishop brought his practices to light, but the crowd always troops

around him. And who knows if his companions—who knows if his more

enlightened companions, to whom he shows the concealed springs of

the automaton—will, to-morrow, believe it lifeless? their memory,

their reason will tell them so, yet still their heart will doubt. If

custom is the half of belief, theirs is well-rooted; how much more

that of the multitude! And the pardoner himself, do you suppose that

he always sees clearly what he is, do you think that his scepticism

is absolute? he for whom nothing is holy, whose very existence is a

perpetual mockery of sacred things, he also has his hours of doubt

and terror, he trembles before that formidable power which he said

he held in his hands, and of which he has made a toy; he does not

possess it, but others may, and he stands aghast; the monster looks

upon himself and is afraid.

Very easy it was to lead the popular belief into the channel of

the marvellous. Decrees had been deemed necessary to prevent the

conjuring up of spectres or ghosts in those long watches passed with

the dead; disobedience {334} was attempted, people believed they

succeeded. In presence of the horrible a strange reaction of the

heart would take place, a wind of madness passed predisposing men to

see and believe anything, a nervous and demoniacal merriment seized

upon all, and dances and lascivious games were started. Dancing went

on in the cemeteries during the solemn vigils of religious feasts,

there was dancing also during the watch for the dead. The Council of

London, in 1342, prohibited “the superstitious customs which cause

prayer to be neglected, and unlawful and indecent meetings” held in

such places.[455] The Council of York, in 1367, also forbade “those

guilty games and follies, and all those perverse customs . . . which

transform a house of tears and prayers, into a house of laughing

and excess.” The palmers’ gild of Ludlow allowed its members to go

to night-watches of the dead, provided that they abstained from

raising apparitions and from indecent games.[456] As to professional

sorcerers, the belief in them was so profound that they were sent

to the stake, as happened to Petronilla of Meath, convicted of

having manufactured powders with “spiders and black worms like

scorpions, mingling with them a certain herb called milfoil, and

other detestable herbs and worms.”[457] She had also made such

incantations that “the faces of certain women seemed horned like the

heads of goats”; {335} therefore she had her due punishment and “was

burnt before an immense multitude of people with all the accustomed

ceremonial.” Such facts explain the existence of the pardoner.