In our last chapter we went back to the latter edge of the thirteenth
century and to the City of Oxford, that we might find in that time and
place a Franciscan Friar--known as Roger Bacon, who had an independence
of spirit which brought him into difficulties, and a searchingness of
mind which made people count him a magician. I spoke of Langlande and
Wyclif: and of how the reforming spirit of the first expressed itself in
the alliterative rhythm of the Piers Plowman allegory; and how the latter
declared against Papal tyranny and the accepted dogmas of the Church:
he too, set on foot those companies of “pore priests,” who in long
russet gowns reaching to their heels, and with staff in hand, traversed
the highways and byways of England, preaching humility and charity; he
gave to us moreover that Scriptural quaintness of language, which from
Wyclif’s time, down to ours, has left its trail in every English pulpit,
and colored every English prayer.
Then we came to that great poet Chaucer, who wrote so much and so well,
as--first and most of all contemporary or preceding writers--to make
one proud of the new English tongue. He died in 1400, and was buried at
Westminster--not a stone’s throw away from the site of his last London
home. His tomb, under its Gothic screen, may be found in the Poet’s
Corner of the Abbey, a little to the right, on entering from the Old
Palace Yard; and over it, in a window that looks toward the Houses of
Parliament, has been set--in these latter years, in unfading array--the
gay company of Chaucer’s Canterbury Pilgrims.
In the same year in which the poet died, died also that handsome and
unfortunate Richard the Second[53] (son of the Black Prince) who promised
bravely; who seemed almost an heroic figure when in his young days,
he confronted Wat Tyler so coolly; but he made promises he could not
or would not keep--slipped into the enthralment of royalties against
which Lollard and democratic malcontents bayed in vain: there were court
cabals that overset him; Shakespeare has told his story, and in that
tragedy--lighted with brilliant passages--John of Gaunt, brother to the
Black Prince, appears, old, and gray and near his grave; and his son--the
crafty but resolute Henry Bolingbroke--comes on the stage as Henry IV. to
take the “brittle glory” of the crown.
_Of Gower and Froissart._
But I must not leave Chaucer’s immediate times, without speaking of
other men who belonged there: the first is John Gower--a poet whom I
name from a sense of duty rather than from any special liking for what
he wrote. He was a man of learning for those days--having a good estate
too, and living in an orderly Kentish home, to which he went back and
forth in an eight-oared barge upon the Thames. He wrote a long Latin poem
_Vox Clamantis_, in which like Langlande he declaimed against the vices
and pretensions of the clergy; and he also treated in the high-toned
conservative way of a well-to-do country gentleman, the social troubles
of the time, which had broken out into Wat Tyler and Jack Straw
rebellions;--people should be wise and discreet and religious; then, such
troubles would not come.
A better known poem of Gower--because written in English--was the
_Confessio Amantis_: Old Classic, and Romance tales come into it, and
are fearfully stretched out; and there are pedagogic Latin rubrics at
the margin, and wearisome repetitions, with now and then faint scent of
prettinesses stolen from French _fabliaux_: but unless your patience
is heroic, you will grow tired of him; and the monotonous, measured,
metallic jingle of his best verse is provokingly like the “Caw-caw” of
the prim, black raven. He had art, he had learning, he had good-will;
but he could not weave words into the thrush-like melodies of Chaucer.
Even the clear and beautiful type of the Bell & Daldy edition[54] does
not make him entertaining. You will tire before you are half through the
Prologue, which is as long, and stiff as many a sermon. And if you skip
to the stories, they will not win you to liveliness: Pauline’s grace, and
mishaps are dull; and the sharp, tragic twang about Gurmunde’s skull, and
the vengeance of Rosemunde (from the old legend which Paul the Deacon
tells) does not wake one’s blood.
In his later years he was religiously inclined; was a patron and, for a
time, resident of the Priory which was attached to the church, now known
as St. Saviour’s, and standing opposite to the London Bridge Station in
Southwark. In that church may now be found the tomb of Gower and his
effigy in stone, with his head resting on “the likeness of three books
which he compiled.”
Perhaps I have no right to speak of Froissart, because he was a Fleming,
and did not write in English; but Lord Berners’ spirited translation
of his Chronicle (1523) has made it an English classic:[55] moreover,
Froissart was very much in London; he was a great pet of the Queen of
Edward III.; he had free range of the palace; he described great fêtes
that were given at Windsor, and tournaments on what is now Cheapside;
a reporter of our day could not have described these things better: he
went into Scotland too--the Queen Philippa giving him his outfit--and
stayed with the brave Douglas “much time,” and tells us of Stirling and
of Melrose Abbey. Indeed, he was a great traveller. He was at Milan when
Prince Clarence of England married one of the great Visconti (Chaucer
possibly there also, and Petrarch of a certainty); he was at Rome, at
Florence, at Bordeaux with the Black Prince, when his son Richard II.
was born; was long in the household of Gaston de Foix: we are inclined
to forget, as we read him, that he was a priest, and had his parochial
charge somewhere along the low banks of the Scheldt: in fact, we suspect
that he forgot it himself.
He not only wrote Chronicles, but poems; and he tells us, that on his
last visit to England, he presented a copy of these latter--beautifully
illuminated, engrossed by his own hand, bound in crimson velvet, and
embellished with silver clasps, bosses, and golden roses--to King
Richard II.; and the King asked him what it was all about; and he
said--“About Love;” whereat, he says, the King seemed much pleased, and
dipped into it, here and there--for “he could read French as well as
speak it.”
Altogether, this rambling, and popular Froissart was, in many points,
what we should call an exquisite fellow; knowing, and liking to know,
only knights and nobles, and flattering them to the full; receiving
kindly invitations wherever he went; overcome with the pressure of his
engagements; going about in the latest fashion of doublet; somewhiles
leading a fine greyhound in leash, and presenting five or six of the same
to his friend the Comte de Foix (who had a great love for dogs); never
going near enough to the front in battle to get any very hard raps; ready
with a song or a story always; pulling a long bow with infinite grace.
Well--the pretty poems he thought so much of, nobody knows--nobody cares
for: they have never, I think, been published in their entirety:[56] But,
his Journal--his notes of what he saw and heard, clapped down night by
night, in hostelries or in tent--perhaps on horseback--are cherished
of all men, and must be reckoned the liveliest, if not the best of all
chronicles of his time. He died in the first decade of that fifteenth
century on which we open our British march to-day; and, at the outset,
I call attention to a little nest of dates, which from their lying so
close together, can be easily kept in mind. Richard II. son of the Black
Prince, died--a disgraced prisoner--in 1400. John of Gaunt, his uncle,
friend of Chaucer, died the previous year: while Chaucer, Froissart and
John Gower all died in less than ten years thereafter; thus, the century
opens with a group of great deaths.
_Two Henrys and Two Poets._
That Henry IV. who appears now upon the throne, and who was not a very
noticeable man, save for his kingship, you will remember as the little
son of John of Gaunt, who played about Chaucer’s knee; you will remember
him further as giving title to a pair of Shakespeare’s plays, in which
appears for the first time that semi-historic character--that enormous
wallet of flesh, that egregious villain, that man of a prodigious humor,
all in one--Jack Falstaff. And this famous, fat Knight of Literature
shall introduce us to Prince Hal who, according to traditions (much
doubted nowadays), was a wild boy in his youth, and boon companion of
such as Falstaff; but, afterward, became the brave and cruel, but steady
and magnificent Henry V. Yet we shall never forget those early days of
his, when at Gad’s Hill, he plots with Falstaff and his fellows, to
waylay travellers bound to London, with plump purses. Before the plot
is carried out, the Prince agrees privately with Poins (one of the
rogues) to put a trick upon Falstaff: Poins and the Prince will slip
away in the dusk--let Falstaff and his companions do the robbing; then,
suddenly--disguised in buckram suits--pounce on them and seize the booty.
This, the Prince and Poins do: and at the first onset of these latter,
the fat Knight runs off, as fast as his great hulk will let him, and goes
spluttering and puffing to a near tavern, where--after consuming “an
intolerable deal of sack”--he is confronted by the Prince, who demands
his share of the spoils. But the big Knight blurts out--“A plague on
all cowards!” He has been beset, while the Prince had sneaked away; the
spoils are gone:
“I am a rogue, if I was not at half a sword with a dozen of
them two hours together; I have scaped by a miracle; I am eight
times thrust thro’ the doublet--four thro’ the hose. My sword
is hacked like a hand-saw. If I fought not with fifty of them,
then am I a bunch of radish. If there were not two or three and
fifty on poor old Jack, then am I no two-legged creature.”
“Pray God, [says the Prince, keeping down his laughter] you
have not murdered some of them!”
_Falstaff._ Nay, that’s past praying for; for I peppered two
of them--two rogues in buckram. Here I lay, and thus I bore my
sword. Four rogues in buckram let drive at me.
_Prince._ What, four?; thou said’st two.
_Falstaff._ Four, Hal; I told thee four.
And Poins comes to his aid, with--“Ay, he said four.” Whereat the fat
Knight takes courage; the men in buckram growing, in whimsical stretch
to seven, and nine; he, paltering and swearing, and never losing his
delicious insolent swagger, till at last the Prince declares the truth,
and makes show of the booty. You think this coward Falstaff may lose
heart at this; not a whit of it; his eye, rolling in fat, does not blink
even, while the Prince unravels the story; but at the end the stout
Knight hitches up his waistband, smacks his lips:--
“D’ye think I did not know ye, my masters? Should I turn upon
the true Prince? Why thou knowest I am as valiant as Hercules;
but beware instinct: I was a coward on instinct.”
So runs the Shakespearean scene, of which I give this glimpse only as a
remembrancer of Henry IV., and his possibly wayward son.
If we keep by the strict letter of history, there is little of literary
interest in that short reign of his--only fourteen years. Occleve, a poet
of whom I spoke as having painted a portrait of Chaucer (which I tried to
describe to you) is worth mentioning--were it only for this. Lydgate,[57]
of about the same date, was a more fertile poet; wrote so easily indeed,
that he was tempted to write too much. But he had the art of choosing
taking subjects, and so, was vastly popular. He had excellent training,
both English and Continental; he was a priest, though sometimes a naughty
one; and he opened a school at his monastery of St. Edmunds. A few
fragments of that monastery are still to be seen in the ancient town of
Bury St. Edmunds:--a town you may remember in a profane way, as the scene
of certain nocturnal adventures that befel, in our time, Mr. Pickwick and
Sam Weller.
Notable amongst the minor poems of this old Bury monk, is a jingling
ballad called _London Lickpenny_, in which a poor suitor pushing his way
into London courts, is hustled about, has his hood stolen, wanders hither
and yon, with stout cries of “ripe strawberries” and “hot sheepes feete”
shrilling in his ears; is beset by taverners and thievish thread-sellers,
and is glad to get himself away again into Kent, and there digest the
broad, and ever good moral that a man’s pennies get “licked” out of him
fast in London. Remembering that this was at the very epoch when Nym and
Bardolph frequented the Boar’s Head, Eastcheap, and cracked jokes and
oaths with Dame Quickly and Doll Tearsheet, and we are more grateful for
the old rhyming priest’s realistic bit of London sights, than for all his
classics,[58] or all his stories of the saints.
But at the very time this Lydgate was writing, a tenderer and sweeter
voice was warbling music out of a prison window at Windsor; and the music
has come down to us:[59]
“Beauty enough to make a world to doat,
And when she walkèd had a little thraw
Under the sweet grene bowis bent,
Her fair freshe face, as white as any snaw
She turnèd has, and forth her way is went;
But then begun my achès and torment
To see her part, and follow I na might;
Methought the day was turnèd into night.”
There is a royal touch in that, and it comes from a royal hand--that of
Prince James of Scotland, who, taken prisoner by Henry IV., was held fast
for sixteen years in the keep of Windsor Castle. Mr. Irving has made
him the subject of a very pleasant paper in the Sketch-book. Though a
prince, he was a poet by nature, and from the window of his prison did
see the fair lady whose graces were garnered in the verse I have cited;
and oddly enough, he did come to marry the subject of this very poem (who
was related to the royal house of England, being grand-daughter of John
of Gaunt) and thereafter did come to be King of Scotland and--what was a
commoner fate--to be assassinated. That queen of his, of whom the wooing
had been so romantic and left its record in the _King’s Quair_--made
a tender and devoted wife--threw herself at last between him and the
assassins--receiving grievous wounds thereby, but all vainly--and the
poor poet-king was murdered in her presence at Perth, in the year 1437.
These three poets I have named all plumed their wings to make that great
flight by which Chaucer had swept into the Empyrean of Song: but not one
of them was equal to it: nor, thenceforward all down through the century,
did any man sing as Chaucer had sung. There were poetasters; there were
rhyming chroniclers; and toward the end of the century there appeared a
poet of more pretension, but with few of the graces we find in the author
of the Canterbury Tales.
John Skelton[60] was his name: he too a priest living in Norfolk. His
rhymes, as he tells us himself, were “ragged and jagged:” but worse
than this, they were often ribald and rabid--attacking with fierceness
Cardinal Wolsey--attacking his fellow-priests too--so that he was
compelled to leave his living: but he somehow won a place afterward
in the royal household as tutor; and even the great Erasmus (who had
come over from the Low Countries, and was one while teaching Greek at
Cambridge) congratulates some prince of the royal family upon the great
advantage they have in the services of such a “special light and ornament
of British literature.” He is capricious, homely, never weak, often
coarse, always quaint. From out his curious trick-track of verse, I pluck
this little musical canzonet:--
“Merry Margaret
As midsummer flower;
Gentle as falcon
Or hawk of the tower:
With solace and gladness
Much mirth and no madness,
All good and no badness,
So joyously,
So maidenly,
So womanly
Her demeaning
In everything
Far, far passing
That I can indite
Or suffice to write
Of merry Margaret
As midsummer flower
Gentle as falcon
Or hawk of the tower:
Stedfast of thought
Well-made well-wrought;
Far may be sought
Ere you can find
So courteous--so kind
As merry Margaret
This midsummer flower.”
There is a pretty poetic perfume in this--a merry musical jingle; but it
gives no echo even of the tendernesses which wrapped all round and round
the story of the Sad Griselda.
_Henry V. and War Times._
This fifteenth century--in no chink of which, as would seem, could any
brave or sweet English poem find root-hold, was not a bald one in British
annals. There were great men of war in it: Henry V. and Bedford[61] and
Warwick and Talbot and Richard III. all wrote bloody legends with their
swords across French plains, or across English meadows.
Normandy, which had slipped out of British hands--as you remember--under
King John, was won again by the masterly blows Henry V. struck at
Agincourt and otherwheres. Shakespeare has given an historic picture of
this campaign, which will be apt to outlive any contemporary chronicle.
Falstaff disappears from sight, and his old crony the dissolute Prince
Hal comes upon the scene as the conquering and steady-going King.
Through all the drama--from the “proud hoofs” of the war-horses,
prancing in the prologue, to the last chorus, the lurid blaze of battle
is threatening or shining. Never were the pomp and circumstance of war
so contained within the pages of a play. For ever so little space--in
gaps of the reading--between the vulgar wit of Nym, and the Welsh jargon
of Fluellen, you hear the crack of artillery, and see shivered spears
and tossing plumes. In the mid scenes, vast ranks of men sweep under
your vision, and crash against opposing ranks, and break, and dissolve
away in the hot swirl of battle. And by way of artistic contrast to
all this, comes at last, in the closing pages, that piquant, homely,
strange coquettish love-scene, which--historically true in its main
details--joined the fortunes of England and of France in the persons
of King Henry and Katharine of Valois. You will not be sorry to have a
glimpse of this Shakespearean and historic love-making: The decisive
battle has been fought: the French King is prisoner: Henry has the
game in his own hands. It is a condition of peace that he and the fair
Katharine--daughter of France--shall join hands in marriage; and Henry in
his blunt war way sets about his wooing:--
“O fair Katharine, if you will love me soundly with your French
heart, I will be glad to hear you confess it brokenly with your
English tongue. Do you like me, Kate?”
_Kate._ _Pardonnez moi_; I cannot tell vat is--_like me_.
_King._ [Explosively and deliciously.] An angel is like you,
Kate; and you are like an angel: faith, I’m glad thou can’st
speak no better English: for if thou could’st thou would’st
find me such a plain King, that thou would’st think I had
sold my farm to buy my crown. If you would put me to verses,
or to dance for your sake, Kate, why you undid me. I speak
plain soldier. If thou can’st love me for this--take me: if
not--to say to thee that I shall die, is true: but--for thy
love--by the Lord, no. Yet I love thee too. And whil’st thou
livest, Kate, take a fellow of a plain uncoined constancy: a
straight-back will stoop; but a good heart, Kate, is the sun
and the moon; or rather the sun and not the moon, for it shines
bright and never changes. If thou would’st have such a one,
take me!
_Kate._ Is it possible dat I should love de enemy of France?
_King._ No, it’s not possible, Kate: but in loving me you would
love the friend of France, for I love France so well, that I
will not part with a village of it: I will have it all mine:
and, Kate, when France is mine, and I am yours, then yours is
France and you are mine. But, Kate, dost thou understand thus
much English--Can’st thou love me?
_Kate._ I cannot tell.
_King._ Can any of your neighbors tell, Kate?
_Kate._ I do not know dat.
_King._ By mine honor, in true English, I love thee, Kate: by
which honor, I dare not swear thou lovest me: yet my blood
begins to flatter me, that thou dost. Wilt thou have me Kate?
_Kate._ That is as it shall please _le roy mon Père_.
_King._ Nay it will please him well, Kate. It _shall_ please
him, Kate, and upon that, I kiss your hand and call you “my
Queen.”
_Kate._ Dat is not de fashion _pour les ladies_ of France--to
kiss before marriage.
_King._ O Kate, [loftily] _nice customs courtesy to great
Kings_:--here comes your father.
And these two _did_ marry; the Queen being--as Shakespeare represents--in
a large sense, the spoil of war. Out of this union sprung the next King,
Henry VI., crowned when an infant. But this does not close the story
of Katharine: three years after the King’s death, she married a Welsh
knight--named Sir Owen Tudor. (He, poor man, lost his head, some years
after, for his temerity in marrying a King’s widow.) But from the second
marriage of Katharine, was born a son who became the father of that
Henry VII., who sixty years later conquered Richard III. on Bosworth
field--brought to an end the wars of York and Lancaster, and gave his own
surname of Tudor to his son Henry VIII., to the great Elizabeth and to
bloody Mary.
Seeing thus how the name of Tudor came into the royal family, through
that Katharine of Valois, whose courtship is written in the play of Henry
V., I will try on the same page to fasten in mind the cause of the great
civil wars of York and Lancaster, or of the white and red roses, which
desolated England in the heart of the fifteenth century.[62]
You will recall my having spoken of Chaucer as a favorite in the
household of John of Gaunt, and as an inmate also in the household of
John’s older brother, Lionel. You will remember, too, that Henry IV.,
son of John of Gaunt, succeeded the hapless and handsome Richard II.
on the throne; but his right was disputed, and with a great deal of
reason, by the heirs of the older brother, Lionel (who had title of
Duke of Clarence). There was not however power and courage enough to
contest the claim, until the kingship of young Henry VI.--crowned when
an infant--offered opportunity. Thereafter and thereby came the broils,
the apprehensions, the doubts, the conspiracies, the battles, which made
England one of the worst of places to live in: all this bitterness
between York and Lancaster growing out of the rival claims of the heirs
of our old acquaintances Lionel and John of Gaunt, whom we met in the
days of Chaucer.
_Joan of Arc and Richard III._
If we look for any literary illumination of this period, we shall scarce
find it, except we go again to the historic plays of Shakespeare: The
career of Henry VI. supplies to him the groundwork for three dramas: the
first, dealing with the English armies in France, which, after Henry V.’s
death are beaten back and forth by French forces, waked to new bravery
under the strange enthusiasm and heroic leadership of Joan of Arc. Of
course she comes in for her picture in Shakespeare’s story: but he gives
us an ignoble one (though not so bad as Voltaire’s in the ribald poem of
_La Pucelle_).
No Englishman of that day, or of Shakespeare’s day, could do justice to
the fiery, Gallic courage, the self-devotion, the religious ennoblement
of that earnest, gallant soul who was called the Maid of Orleans. A far
better notion of her presence and power than Shakespeare gave is brought
to mind by that recent French painting of Bastien-Lepage--so well known
by engraving--which aims to set forth the vision and the voices that
came to her amid the forest silence and shadows. Amid those shadows she
stands--startled: a strong, sweet figure of a peasant maiden; stoutly
clad and simply; capable of harvest-work with the strongest of her
sisterhood; yet not coarse; redeemed through every fibre of body and
soul by a light that shines in her eye, looking dreamily upward; seeing
things others see not; hoping things others hope not, and with clenched
hand putting emphasis to the purpose--which the hope and the vision
kindle; pitying her poor France, and nerved to help her--as she did--all
the weary and the troublesome days through, till the shameful sacrifice
at English hands, on the market-place of Rouen, closed her life and her
story.
The two closing portions of the Henry VI. dramas relate to home concerns.
There is much blood in them and tedium too (if one dare say this), and
flashes of wit--a crazy tangle of white and red roses in that English
garden--cleared up at last in Shakespeare’s own way, when Richard
III.[63] comes, in drama of his own, and crookedness, and Satanry of his
own, and laughs his mocking laugh over the corpses he makes of kings
and queens and princes; and at last in Bosworth field, upon the borders
of Warwickshire and near to the old Roman Watling Street, the wicked
hunchback, fighting like a demon, goes down under the sword-thrust of
that Henry (VII.) of Richmond, who, as I have said, was grandson to
Katharine of Valois, of the coquettish courtship.
No chronicler of them all, commonplace or painstaking as he might be,
has so planted the image of the crooked Richard III. in men’s minds as
Shakespeare: though it is to be feared that he used somewhat too much
blood in the coloring; and doubtful if the hump-backed king was quite the
monster which Garrick, Booth, and Macready have made of him.
_Caxton and First English Printing._
In the midst of those draggling, dreary, dismal war-times, when no poet
lifted his voice in song, when no chronicler who has a worthy name wrote
any story of the years, there came into vogue in Europe and in England,
a trade--which in its issues had more to do with the life and spread of
good literature, than any poet, or any ten poets could accomplish. You
will guess at once what the trade was; it was the trade of Printing.
Bosworth field dates in 1485: in the middle of the century (or 1444)
John Gutenberg began the printing of a Bible; and a little after, Faust
began to dispose of wonderful copies of books, which the royal buyers
thought to be manuscripts: and Faust did not perhaps undeceive them: yet
copies were so wonderfully alike--one to the other--that book lovers were
puzzled, and pushed inquiry, and so the truth of the method came out.
In 1477 William Caxton set up the first English printing press--in an old
building, close upon Westminster Abbey--a building, which, if tradition
is to be trusted, was standing down to near the middle of the present
century; and on its demolition in 1846 its timbers were converted into
snuff-boxes and the like, as mementos of the first printer. It was in
1477 that William Caxton issued the first book, printed with a date, in
England.[64]
This Caxton was a man worth knowing about on many counts: he was a
typical Englishman, born in Kent; was apprenticed to a well-to-do
mercer in the Old Jewry, London, at a time when, he says, many poor
were a-hungered for bread made of fern roots;--he went over (while yet
apprentice) to the low countries of Flanders, perhaps to represent his
master’s interests; abode there; throve there; came to be Governor of the
Company of English merchant adventurers, in the ancient town of Bruges:
knew the great, rich Flemings[65] who were patrons of letters;--became
friend and protégé of that English Princess Margaret who married Charles
Duke of Burgundy; did work in translating old books for that great lady;
studied the new printing art, which had crept into Bruges, and finally,
after thirty odd years of life in the busy Flemish city sailed away
for London, and set up a press which he had brought with him, under
the shadow of Westminster towers. Fifteen years and more he wrought on
there, at his printer’s craft--counting up a hundred issues of books;
making much of his own copy, both translation and original, and dying
over seventy in 1492. A good tag to tie to this date is--the Discovery of
America; Columbus being over seas on that early voyage of his, while the
first English printer lay dying.
And what were the books, pray, which Master Caxton--who, for a wonder, was
a shrewd business man, as well as inclined to literary ways--thought it
worth his while to set before the world? Among them we find _A Sequell
of the Historie of Troie_--_The Dictes and Sayings of Philosophers_--a
history of Jason, the _Game and Plays of Chesse_, Mallory’s King
Arthur (to which I have previously alluded), a _Book of Courtesie_,
translations from Ovid, Virgil and Cicero--also the Canterbury Tales of
Chaucer (of whom he was great admirer)--coupling with these latter, poems
by Lydgate and Gower; many people in those days seeming to rank these
men on a level with Chaucer--just as we yoke writers together now in
newspaper mention, who will most certainly be unyoked in the days that
are to come.
The editions of the first English books ranged at about two hundred
copies: the type was what we call black letter, of which four varieties
were used on the Caxton press, and the punctuation--if any--was of the
crudest. An occasional sample of his work appears from time to time on
the market even now; but not at prices which are inviting to the most
of us. Thus in 1862, there was sold in England, a little Latin tractate
printed by Caxton--of only ten leaves quarto, with twenty-four lines to
the page, for £200; and I observe upon the catalogue of a recent date of
Mr. Quaritch (the London bibliopole) a copy of _Godefroi de Bouloyne_, of
the Caxton imprint, offered at the modest price of £1,000.
Very shortly after the planting of this first press at Westminster,
others were established at Oxford and also at the great monastery of
St. Albans. Among the early books printed at this latter place--say
within ten years after Caxton’s first--was a booklet written by a certain
Dame Juliana Barnes;[66] it is the first work we have encountered
written by a woman; and what do you think may have been its subject?
Religion--poesy--love--embroidery? Not one of these; but some twenty
odd pages of crude verse “upon the maner of huntyng for all maner of
bestys” (men--not being included); and she writes with the gusto and
particularity of a man proud of his falcons and his dogs. Warton says
blandly: “The barbarism of the times strongly appears in the indelicate
expressions which she often uses; and which are equally incompatible with
her sex and profession.” The allusion to her “profession” has reference
to her supposed position as prioress of a convent; this, however, is
matter of grave doubt.
_Old Private Letters._
But this is not the only utterance of a female voice which we hear
from out those years of barrenness and moil. In 1787 there appeared in
England a book made up of what were called Paston Letters[67]--published
and vouched for by an antiquarian of Norfolk, who had the originals in
his possession--and which were in fact familiar letters that had passed
between the members and friends of a well-to-do Norfolk family in the
very years of the War of the Roses, of Caxton, of King Richard, and of
Wynkyn de Worde.
Among the parties to these old letters, there is a John Paston senior
and a Sir John Paston, and a John Paston the younger and a good Margery
Paston; there is a Sir John Fastolf too--as luck would have it. Was this
the prototype[68] of Shakespeare’s man of humors? Probably not: nor can
we say of a certainty that he was the runaway warrior who was of so bad
repute for a time in the army of the Duke of Bedford: but we do know from
these musty papers that he had a “Jacket of red velvet, bound round the
bottom with red leather,” and “Another jacket of russet velvet lyned with
blanket clothe;” also “Two jackets of deer’s leather, with a collar of
black velvet,” and so on.
We do not however care so much about this Fastolf inventory, as for what
good Margaret Paston may have to say: and as we read her letters we seem
to go back on her quaint language and her good wifely fondness to the
very days when they were written--in the great country-house of Norfolk,
near upon the city of Norwich, with the gentle east wind from the German
Ocean, blowing over the Norfolk fens, and over the forests, and over the
orchards, and over the barns, and into the hall-windows, and lifting the
very sheets of paper on which the good dame Margery is writing. And what
does she say?
“Ryte worshipful husband, I recommend me unto you”--she begins; and
thereafter goes on to speak of a son who has been doing unwise things,
and been punished therefor as would seem:--
“As for his demeaning, syn you departed, in good faith, it
hath been ryt good, I hope he will be well demeaned to please
you hereafterward; and I beseche you hartily that you would
vouchsafe to be hys good fader, for I hope he is chastyzèd, and
will be worthier. As for all oder tyngges at home, I hope that
I, and oder shall do our part therein, as wel as we may; but as
for mony it cometh in slowly, and God hav you in his keeping,
and sen you good speed in all yr matters.”
Again, in another note, she addresses her husband,--
“Myn oune sweethert [a good many years after marriage too!] in
my most humble wyse I recommend me to you; desiring hertly to
her of your welfare, the which I beseche Almighty God preserve
and kepe.”
And a son writes to this same worthy Margaret:--
“Ryght worshipful and my moste kynde and tender moder, I
recommend me to you, thanking you of the great coste, and of
the grete chere that ye dyd me, and myn, at my last being with
you. _Item_: As for the books that weer Sir James [would] it
like you that I may have them? I am not able to buy them; but
somewhat wolde I give, and the remnant with a good devout
hert, by my truthe, I will pray for his soule.
“Also, moder, I herd while in London ther was a goodly young
woman to marry whyche was daughter to one Seff, a mercer, and
she will have 200 pounds in money to her marriage, and 20 £ by
year after the dysesse of a stepmoder of hers, whiche is upon
50 yeeres of age: and fore I departed out o’ Lunnon, I spak
with some of the mayd’s friends, and hav gotten their good
wille to hav her married to my broder Edmond. Master Pykenham
too is another that must be consulted--so he says: Wherefore,
Moder, we must beseeche you to helpe us forward with a lettyr
to Master Pykenham, for to remember him for to handyl this
matter, now, this Lent.”
A younger son writes:--
“I beseeche you humbly of your blessing: also, modyr, I
beseeche you that ther may be purveyed some meane that I myth
have sent me home by the same messenger that shall bring my
Aunt Poynings answer--two paire hose--1 payr blak and another
russet, whyche be redy for me at the hosers with the crooked
back next to the Blk Friars gate, within Ludgate. John Pampyng
knoweth him well eno’. And if the blk hose be paid for, he
will send me the russet ones unpaid for. I beseeche you that
this geer be not forgot, for I have not an whole hose to do
on. I pray you visit the Rood of St. Pauls, and St. Savior at
Barmonsey whyls ye abide in London, and let my sister Margery
go with you to pray to them that she may have a good husband
ere she come home again. Written at Norwich on holyrood day, by
yr
“Son and lowly Servant
“JNO: PASTON THE YOUNGEST.”
This sounds as home-like as if it were written yesterday, and about one
of us--even to the sending of two pair of hose if one was paid for. And
yet this familiar, boy-like letter was written in the year 1465: six
years before Caxton had set up his press in Westminster--twenty-seven
before Columbus had landed on San Salvador, and at a time when Louis XI.
and barber Oliver (whose characters are set forth in Scott’s story of
Quentin Durward) were hanging men who angered them on the branches of the
trees which grew around the dismal palace of Plessis-les-Tours, in France.
_A Burst of Balladry._
I have brought my readers through a waste literary country to-day; but we
cannot reach the oases of bloom without going across the desert spaces.
In looking back upon this moil and turmoil--this fret and wear and
barrenness of the fifteenth century, in which we have welcomed talk about
Caxton’s sorry translations, and the wheezing of his press; and have
given an ear to the hunting discourse of Dame Juliana, for want of better
things; and have dwelt with a certain gleesomeness on the homely Paston
Letters, let us not forget that there has been all the while, and running
through all the years of stagnation, a bright thread of balladry, with
glitter and with gayety of color. This ballad music--whose first burst we
can no more pin to a date than we can the first singing of the birds--had
lightened, in that early century, the walk of the wayfarer on all the
paths of England; it had spun its tales by bivouac fires in France; it
had caught--as in silken meshes--all the young foragers on the ways of
Romance. To this epoch, of which we have talked, belongs most likely that
brave ballad of Chevy Chase, which keeps alive the memory of Otterbourne,
and of that woful hunting which
“Once there did, in Chevy Chase befal.
“To drive the deare with hounde and horne
Erle Percy took his way;
The child may rue, that is unborn
The hunting of that day.”
Hereabout, too, belongs in all probability the early English shaping of
the jingling history of the brave deeds of Sir Guy of Warwick; and some
of the tales of Robin Hood and his “pretty men all,” which had been sung
in wild and crude carols for a century or more, now seem to have taken
on a more regular ballad garniture, and certainly became fixtures in
type. This is specially averred of “Robin Hood and the Monk,” beginning:--
“In summer when the shawes be sheyne
And levès be large and long,
Hit is full merry, in feyre forést,
To here the foulé’s song;
To see the dere draw to the dale,
And leve the hillés hee,
And shadow them in the levés green,
Under the grenwode tree.”
But was Robin Hood a myth? Was he a real yeoman--was he the Earl of
Huntington? We cannot tell; we know no one who can. We know only that
this hero of the folk-songs made the common people’s ideal of a good
fellow--brave, lusty--a capital bowman, a wondrous wrestler, a lover of
good cheer, a hater of pompous churchmen, a spoiler of the rich, a helper
of the poor, with such advices as these for Little John:--
“Loke ye do no housbande harme
That tylleth with his plough;
No more ye shall no good yeman
That walketh by grenewode shawe,
Ne no knyght, ne no squyèr,
That wolde be a good felawe.”
That very charming ballad of the Nut-Brown Maid must also have been
well known to contemporaries of Caxton: She is daughter of a Baron, and
her love has been won by a wayfarer, who says he is “an outlaw,” and a
banished man, a squire of low degree. He tries her faith and constancy,
as poor Griselda’s was tried in Chaucer’s story--in Boccaccio’s tale, and
as men have tried and teased women from the beginning of time. He sets
before her all the dangers and the taunts that will come to her; she must
forswear her friends; she must go to the forest with him; she must not be
jealous of any other maiden lying _perdue_ there; she must dare all, and
brave all,--
“Or else--I to the greenwood go
Alone, a banished man.”
At last, having tormented her sufficiently, he confesses--that he is not
an outlaw--not a banished man, but one who will give her wealth, and
rank, and name and fame. And I will close out our present talk with a
verselet or two from this rich old ballad.
The wooer says--
“I counsel you, remember howe
It is no maydens law
Nothing to doubt, but to ren out
To wed with an outlaw:
For ye must there, in your hand bere
A bowe ready to draw,
And as a thefe, thus must you live
Ever in drede and awe
Whereby to you grete harme might growe;
Yet had I lever than
That I had to the grenewode go
Alone, a banished man.”
_She_: “I think not nay, but as ye say
It is no maiden’s lore
But love may make me, for your sake
As I have say’d before,
To come on fote, to hunt and shote
To get us mete in store;
For so that I, your company
May have, I ask no more,
From which to part, it maketh my hart
As cold as any stone;
For in my minde, of all mankinde
I love but you alone.”
_He_: “A baron’s child, to be beguiled
It were a cursèd dede!
To be felawe with an outlawe
Almighty God forbid!
Yt better were, the poor Squyère
Alone to forest yede,
Than ye shold say, another day
That by my cursed dede
Ye were betrayed; wherefore good maid
The best rede that I can
Is that I to the grenewode go
Alone, a banished man.”
_She_: “Whatever befal, I never shall
Of this thing you upraid;
But if ye go, and leve me so
Then have ye me betrayed;
Remember you wele, how that ye dele
For if ye, as ye said
Be so unkynde to leave behinde
Your love the Nut Brown Mayd
Trust me truly, that I shall die
Soon after ye be gone;
For in my minde, of all mankinde
I love but you alone.”
_He_: “My own deare love, I see thee prove
That ye be kynde and true:
Of mayd and wife, in all my life
The best that ever I knewe
Be merry and glad; be no more sad
The case is chaunged newe
For it were ruthe, that for your truthe
Ye should have cause to rue;
Be not dismayed, whatever I said
To you when I began;
I will not to the grenewode go
I am no banished man.”
_And she, with delight and fear_--
“These tidings be more glad to me
Than to be made a quene;
If I were sure they shold endure
But it is often seene
When men wyl break promise, they speak
The wordes on the splene:
Ye shape some wyle, me to beguile
And stele from me I wene;
Then were the case, worse than it was
And I more woebegone,
For in my minde, of all mankynde
I love but you alone.”
_Then he--at last_,--
“Ye shall not nede, further to drede
I will not disparàge
You (God defend!) syth ye descend
Of so grate a linèage;
Now understand--to Westmoreland
Which is mine heritàge
I wyl you bring, and with a ryng
By way of marriàge
I wyl you take, and lady make
As shortely as I can:
Thus have you won an Erly’s son
And not a banished man.”
* * * * *
In our next chapter we shall enter upon a different century, and
encounter a different people. We shall find a statelier king, whose name
is more familiar to you: In place of the fat knight and Prince Hal, we
shall meet brilliant churchmen and hard-headed reformers; and in place of
Otterbourne and its balladry, we shall see the smoke of Smithfield fires,
and listen to the psalmody of Sternhold.