(Récit d'une Aventure à Calais)
Je fu l'autrier trop mal venuz
Quant j'alay pour veir Calays;
J'entray dedenz comme cornuz,
Sanz congié; lors vint deux Anglois,
Granson devant et moy après,
Qui me prindrent parmi la bride:
L'un me dist: "dogue", l'autre: "ride";
Lors me devint la coulour bleue:
"Goday", fait l'un, l'autre: "commidre".
Lors dis: "Oil, je voy vo queue."
Pour mal content s'en est tenuz
L'un d'eulx, qui estoit le plus lays,
Et dist: "Vous seres retenuz
Prinsonnier, vous estes forfais."
Mais Granson s'en aloit adès
Qui en riant faisait la vuide:
A eulx m'avoit trahi, ce cuide,
En anglois dist: "Pas ne l'adveue."
Passer me font de Dieu l'espite;
Lors dis: "Oil, je voy vo queue."
Puis ay mes talons estenduz
De mon roucin, le serray près,
Lors sault, si furent espanduz;
Delez Granson fut mes retrais
Là ne me vault treves ne pais,
De paour la face me ride,
De tel amour ma mort me cuide;
Au derrain leur dist: "Je l'adveue."
"Chien, faisoit l'un, vez vous vo guide?"
Lors dis: "Oil, je voy vo queue!"[321]
Another writer of the same period, Olivier Basselin, refers to the
Englishmen's tails in a satirical poem, in which he alleges this
physical deformity as his reason for not wishing to live in their
country:--
"Do you think it's a joke that I never would dwell
'Mongst the English, as oft I declare?
Nay, believe me, my friend, 'tis the truth that I tell,
For I hate the long tails that they wear."[322]
In one of his minor poems, Jean Molinet, part-author of the _Roman de
la Rose_, who also belongs to the fifteenth century, humorously goes one
step further than his fellow satirists, and gives even animals of
English race a share in the distinctive peculiarity which birth in
England entailed on the human Islanders. Of a certain tom-cat he says:--
"This Cat for his mother had Cathau the Blue,
To Calais he does not belong;
There's something about him of English breed, too,
And that's why his tail is so long."[323]
About the beginning of the sixteenth century, Crétin, a Norman poet,
combines encouragement of the French with the usual abuse of the
English:--
"Praise shall reward the doughty deeds you do,
And store of crowns, and golden angels, too;
And, in the ransom of the 'long-tailed' crew,
Their flesh and bone shall be as gold to you."[324]
As late as the seventeenth century, an echo of the gibe may still be
heard. Larivey, in one of his comedies, _Les Tromperies_, makes a
swaggering captain boast of the reputation which he has acquired by
valiantly charging the English "tailards" when they attempted to land
at Dieppe.[325] Still nearer our own day, Saint-Amant, who, indeed, is
so modern that he was one of the original members of the French Academy
and figures in Boileau's satires, has a reference to the English
longtails in his _Rome Ridicule_. He incidentally claims for the French
the strange merit of having rid their country of the goitre and of the
king's evil by making carrion of the English invaders:--
"The goitre now we never see,
And cruels, too, have ceased to be,
E'er since we slew our 'tailard' foes
And made them food to gorge the crows".[326]
By this time, however, the tradition had ceased to be popular; for in a
note on this passage, Saint-Amant's contemporary, Conrart, thought it
necessary to give an explanation of the epithet "quouez". According to
him, it was justified by the fact that, in the case of the majority of
Englishmen, the end of the os sacrum, called _coccyx_, actually
protrudes and forms a tail![327]
But, even yet, the old cry has not wholly died out. In the Island of
Guernsey, that genuine bit of Normandy, where it was once so frequently
heard, it is perpetuated by the country children. They have a custom of
slyly throwing at passers-by a hairy, clinging weed, which grows
abundantly by the wayside. If any of it catches on to the victims of
their childish trick, these are made aware of it by hearing themselves
jeered at with cries of "la Coue!" The words are the very same as those
recorded by Monstrelet; and this identity seems to justify the belief
that they are a survival of the medieval scoff.
* * * * *
The Scots, sharing as they did the feeling of animosity entertained by
the French against their English foes, were no less ready than they to
give it expression; and the insulting taunt which they had learnt from
their continental allies was adopted as an effective means to that end.
It is not, however, amidst the excitement of international strife that
the cry is first heard. The earliest instance of its use in the North
Country is given by Bower. Under the date of 1217, he has an account of
the mission to Scotland, undertaken by the Prior of Durham and the
Archdeacon of York, in connection with the interdict under which the
kingdom had been laid. These two prelates made themselves very unpopular
by the mercenary spirit which they displayed; and a monkish satirist
voiced the irritation which they aroused, in a strongly worded Latin
poem, containing amongst other terms of reproach and invective, a
denunciation of them as "tailards":--
"Those clerics, both in treach'rous England born,
Are of the breed by whom long tails are worn".[328]
As regards the other instances supplied by the chroniclers, it is
noteworthy that the insult was, in each case, avenged by the defeat of
those who flung it at their enemies. The first occasion on which this is
reported to have occurred was the battle of Dunbar, in 1296. The Castle,
at that time one of the most important in Scotland, had been delivered
over to the Scottish leaders by the Countess of Dunbar. Edward I at once
sent John Plantagenet, Earl of Warrenne and Surrey, to recapture it. The
garrison, conscious of its inability to hold out against the ten
thousand foot and the thousand heavy-armed horse which the English
leader commanded, agreed to surrender to him if it were not relieved
within three days. In the meantime, John Baliol, anxious to retain so
important a stronghold, sent his whole army of forty thousand foot and
fifteen hundred horse to its succour. When the besieged saw this
formidable force encamped on the heights above Spot, they felt confident
of success; and in their premature exultation, they jeered at the
English, calling them "tailed dogs", and threatening not only to kill
them, but also to cut off their tails. Their boasts were not justified
by the result. In the engagement that followed, the rashness of the
Scots in abandoning their favourable position proved disastrous. Ten
thousand of them fell on the field or during the pursuit; and next day
the Castle surrendered at discretion to Edward, who came up from Berwick
with the remainder of his army.[329]
In the following year, Lord Robert Clifford made an incursion into
Annandale, at the head of twenty thousand infantry, preceded by a body
of only one hundred cavalry. On passing the Solway, it was proclaimed by
sound of trumpet that every soldier might plunder for himself and keep
his own booty. On hearing this welcome announcement, the infantry
dispersed over the country, and the horse alone remained together and
marched on Annan, where the Scots, thinking they had to do with a mere
handful, received them with jeers and insults, as a pack of "tailed"
dogs. But when it came to actual fighting, the heavy-armed cavalry
proved too much for the dalesmen. They were driven into marshy ground,
where they were easily overpowered by the infantry that had hurried up
to reinforce the vanguard. Over three hundred of the Scots were slain,
many prisoners were taken; and before the Englishmen returned to
Carlisle with their booty, the destruction of ten villages had given the
scoffers good reason to think less contemptuously of the
"tailards".[330]
At least once again the ill-omened cry was heard. It was on the eve of
the battle of Dupplin, which was fought on the 12th of August, 1332,
between Edward Baliol, with his English supporters, and the army of
David II, under the Earl of Mar. Trusting to their superior numbers and
to their advantageous position, the Scots were confident of success.
They spent a part of the night in drinking and in singing songs that
contained insulting reference to
"The English 'tailards', jeered at for their tails",
and they bragged that they would turn those same tails to practical use,
by binding their wearers, and dragging them to the gallows with
them.[331] But the boastful Scots were beaten, and one of the
chroniclers who record their defeat, reminds them of Seneca's saying,
that never did proud joy stand on a sure footing. "Now," he adds, by way
of moral, "you who, but the day before, declared you would make ropes of
the Englishmen's tails to bind them with, are yourselves bound in real
fetters."[332]
In Wright's collection of medieval political songs, there are some
doggerel verses, which are ascribed to this same half of the fourteenth
century, and which probably refer to the driving out of the English from
some of the strongholds which they had occupied. In his crabbed Latin,
the writer, doubtless some monkish patriot, bids Scotland rejoice at the
happy deliverance:
"The 'tails' appeared, a while they held their sway,
But now, at last, they've all been lopped away;
The 'tails' have gone, and fearlessly we may
Proclaim 'O Scotland, hail the happy day!'"[333]
Those lines, such as they are, may serve as a connecting link between
the historical instances of the use of the derogatory appellation and
those which refer to no special incident, but are merely adaptations of
the old scoff for the purpose of literary invective. The latter are not
numerous; but one of them is interesting from the fact that it
introduces the familiar "tails" under a new name. It occurs in The
_Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy_, that remarkable production which,
though probably nothing more than a _jeu d'esprit_, a kind of friendly
sparring-match between two adversaries "who give each other plaguy
knocks with all the love and fondness of a brother", is assuredly one of
the most astonishing instances of verbal scurrility to be found in
literature. In this wordy tournament the two poets allude in
uncomplimentary language to each other's family history, and Kennedy
reproaches Dunbar, who was a native of Lothian, with being descended
from a traitor, from Corspatrick, who,
"Throu his tressoun brocht Inglis 'rumpillis' in".[334]
John Skelton, a satirist of the late fifteenth and the early sixteenth
century, has preserved three Latin hexameters in which a Scottish
scholar, George Dundas, at one time a professor at the University of
Aberdeen, scoffs at the English in the familiar way, by alluding to
their tails. The Englishman himself, after the battle of Flodden, had
written against the Scots, with the scurrility which characterized him
and which made him obnoxious even to his own countrymen; and it seems
probable that Dundas's lines occurred in a poem written as a retort. The
only connection between them, however, consists in the repetition of the
same idea in a slightly different form; and it is hardly possible to
assume that they stood together, and are to be taken as an epigram. It
may also be noted that the first of them is almost identical with one
that is known to have been current at a much earlier date:
"An Englishman's a dog, because we find
That, like a dog he bears a tail behind".
"Thou English 'tailard', hold thy tail with care,
For fear it drop from thee, at unaware."
"By reason of their tails, the English race
Must bear about a burden of disgrace."[335]
In whatever connection the lines may have appeared, they provoked "the
noble poet Skelton", as he styles himself, to a reply which has for its
heading the statement that, "The most vile Scot, Dundas, alleges that
Englishmen have tails". Apostrophizing him as a "shameless, noxious,
foul-mouthed, lying Scot", he asks him how he dares utter such a
slander. Then, dropping into macaronic verses, he adorns them with such
flowers of vituperation as these:
This Dundas,
This Scottishe as,
He rymes and railes
That Englishmen have tailes.
Skelton Laureat
After this rate
Defendeth with his pen
All Englishmen
Agayn Dundas
The Scottishe as.
Shake thy tayle, Scot, like a cur,
For thou beggest at every mannes dur.
Tut, Scot, I sey,
Go, shake the, dog, hey!
Dundas of Galaway
With thy versyfyeng rayles
How they have tayles.[336]
Though recalled, some half a century later, by the insulting piece of
by-play which it suggested to Mary Stuart's French courtiers, and at
which, as we have already recorded, Hatton and his countrymen waxed so
wroth, the "tailard" taunt is not again heard in the story of the old
feud between England and Scotland. From the sixteenth century to its
final disappearance from use and even from memory, it seems to have
remained as exclusively French as it doubtless was in its origin.