notorious that there was bitter enmity between elephants and dragons. And
the subject of dragons is a wide one. So far as I know the last, in
Western Europe at least, was killed in the Roman Campagna in 1660, its
slayer himself dying from the poison in its breath, but it was less than
half a century before that, in 1614 to be precise, that a young
half-fledged dragon--it was nine feet long and its wings were only just
sprouting--was seen in Sussex, at Faygate in St. Leonards Forest. Of
course in earlier times they were much more numerous; Switzerland swarmed
with them, in fact Lucerne seems to have been almost as much the happy
hunting-ground of the dragon and the cockatrice as it is now of the Cook's
tourist. The northern counties, especially Durham and Northumberland, were
also much pestered by 'laidly worms'; two estates were held of the Bishop
of Durham from early time by exhibiting to him annually the swords with
which redoubtable ancestors of the tenants had slain the Worm of Sockburn
and the fearsome Brawn of Brancepeth, a boar to which all ordinary boars
were but as ordinary cattle to the Dun Cow, slain by Guy of Warwick with a
sword still shown at Warwick Castle. Perhaps the most satisfactory dragon
on record was that slain at Rhodes in 1345 by Deodatus de Gonzago. That
wily and prudent knight constructed a pantomine dragon on the pattern of
the real article and made two of his servants get inside and work it
realistically; in this manner he accustomed his horse and his dogs to
dragon-baiting, and his trouble was rewarded by the death of the monster
and his own election to the mastership of the Knights of St. John.
Another famous dragon was the Tarask. It seems that when St. Mary
Magdalene landed at Marseilles she installed herself in a dragon's cave;
the dragon was unceremoniously ejected and went off higher up the Rhone;
but he had no luck; the first person he met on landing was St. Martha, who
gave him a good dressing down and handed him over to the peasants, who
slew him but immortalised his name in Tarascon. There were a great many
varieties of dragons, but I think the most curious that I have met was one
of silver gilt belonging to Henry IV. which was described as 'au guyse
d'un boterflie'; anything less like a dragon than a butterfly it would be
difficult to imagine. At the same time some of these terrible beasts seem
to have been quite insignificant. The amphisbæna, though it developed in
the Bestiaries into a fearsome dragon with a head at each end, started as
quite a small worm, so small indeed that a whole one could be carried on
the person without inconvenience. So carried it prevented the wearer from
ever feeling chilly; in which respect it would seem to have been the
opposite of the salamander, whose flesh was so cold that it quenched fire.
Henry V. bought a parrot, two monkeys, and three salamanders from a
fishmonger. I wonder what the salamanders were; if they were the squabby
and unattractive lizard, black, with yellow spots, which now goes by that
name I fear the king must have been disappointed. If he experimented upon
their alleged ability to live in fire, or at least to extinguish it, I
fear the disappointment would have been shared by the salamanders.
[Illustration: '_... constructed a pantomime dragon on the pattern of the
real article._']
Besides the monsters of the land and air there were, of course, mediæval
varieties of the sea-serpent. Matthew Paris records that in 1255 a monster
bigger than the biggest whale was thrown up on the coast of Norfolk. As
this was the year in which the first elephant came over I almost wondered
if two had started and one had fallen overboard and been drowned, but
quite by accident I came upon a legal case connected with this very sea
monster, arising out of foreshore rights and rights of wreck, which showed
that the creature, whatever it was, was very much alive when first seen,
as no less than six boats were sunk in effecting its capture.
Unfortunately no description of the monster is given, but probably it was
a great sperm whale. Fifteen years earlier, in 1240, according to the
same chronicler, there was a great battle of whales off the mouth of the
Thames, and one of the wounded came up the river, just managed to squeeze
through the arches of London Bridge and got as far as Mortlake before it
was killed. A fresh-water monster, or at least one which started life in a
river and developed in a well but afterwards took to the land, was the
terrible Lambton worm, which seems after all to have been more of a
nuisance than a danger, as, so long as it got its trough full of milk
regularly, it was content to lie about, coiled round Lambton Hill.
Terrible beasts were the basilisk--for which I have always felt an
affection since I saw his portrait by Carpaccio in the church of St.
George of the Sclavs (after much furious argument with a gondolier who
knew no St. George but S. Giorgio Maggiore) at Venice--the cockatrice, and
that strange hybrid of the two, the basilcok, known chiefly for its mean
and unrelenting enmity to the centichore or yale, the strange pig-antelope
who now sits once more as he sat of yore on the bridge at Hampton Court.
Terrible beasts all; but none so morally destructive as that noble friend
of man, the horse. Everybody knows the famous derivation of hypocrite,
'from two Greek words--hippos, a horse, and krites, a judge: a
horse-dealer, therefore, a deceiver.' The Archbishop of York would seem to
have been of the same opinion when he inhibited the cellarer of Newburg
from dealing in horses, on the ground that it was not fitting for a man of
religion, because in the negotiations between buyer and seller it is
almost impossible to avoid sin. It would have been well if John Hill,
vicar of Coliton in Devon in 1426, had considered this before he sold a
horse to Walter Trouns, 'knowing the horse to have contracted divers
diseases and to be incapable of working.' From the description the horse
would seem to have been of the same breed as the 'hakeney' hired by
William Driffeld from Thomas Plevener, a London innkeeper, who 'promysed
and warantized the said hakeney to be of helth and of habilitie and well
and trewlay' to carry Master William to Walsingham, whither he was going,
no doubt, on pilgrimage. In spite of the warranty, the hackney, before he
had covered twenty miles, 'wold nor myght go no ferther' and had to be
left at Ware, where he died 'of dyverse infyrmytes.' Richard Chapman had a
similar experience when he hired a horse from Christopher Thomas to carry
him to York; at the end of the first day it 'failed hym and was
morefounded.' Probably the hirers out of the horses threw the blame on
their clients, as did Robert Grene, 'corsour' (_i.e._ horse-dealer, not
to be confused with corsair, a pirate), who, having sold a horse to John
Bonauntre, complained that 'the said John rode upon the said hors' with
the result that it was 'perished and utterly destroyed,' though whether
that was due to the delicacy of the horse, which was only intended for
ornament, or to the 'unresonable and outrajus rydyng' of the purchaser is
not clear. Mules, as we might expect, occasionally gave as much trouble as
horses. There was a Welsh clergyman in the fifteenth century, John Yevan
by name, upon whom a brother clerk, John Grigge, managed to plant a mule
'the whiche he wold not have had, but through the gret labour and desyre
of the said Sir John Grigge he toke the same mule upon his warantie that
he shuld bere hym from Rome to London, orells not to paye therefore.'
Exactly what happened on that journey is not revealed, but the mule would
seem to have proved several degree more aggravating than Modestine in the
Cevennes, for John Yevan 'was fayne and glad to make a cambicion
(exchange) by the waye, to his gret hurte and hynderance,' and felt much
injured at being called upon to account for the missing mule on his
return. The good man's knowledge of legal jargon seems to have been oral
rather than literary, as he invoked the magic of the law by demanding a
'wryte of sorserare,' in which it is not easy to recognise a writ of
_certiorari_.
[Illustration: '_Hakeney._']
One of the most deadly of vicarious insults was to crop the tails of your
adversary's horses; it would seem to have been as bad as the biblical
custom of cutting off the skirts of his messengers. John Enot, archdeacon
of Buckingham in the fifteenth century, complained tearfully that one
Thomas Coneloye (was he a lawless Irish Connelly?) prevented him from
carrying out his duties in the punishment of sinners and had caused the
tails of his horses to be cut. It was a similar insult to the hot-tempered
Thomas Becket that caused that archbishop's furious denunciation of his
enemies and led to his murder and so to his canonisation, from which it
follows that we owe Chaucer's _Canterbury Tales_ to the curtailment of the
archbishop's horses. From insult to assault is a short journey, and horses
have brought so many to the 'demnition bow-wows,' that I am reminded at
this point of the adventure of the vicar and the dog and the door-key,
which fell out in this wise. William Russell, vicar of Mere in Somerset,
some time during the reign of Henry VI., left his church at five o'clock
one Good Friday evening, having been 'bysyly occupyed all that day before
in hyryng of confessions.' He locked up his church and turned homewards,
but on his way met one of his parishioners, John Totyn, an evil man, 'not
dredyng God ne the censers of the chirche.' Totyn had in his hand a
seven-foot staff with 'a grete pyke of yren' at one end and with him was
'an horryble grete Dogge called a lymer,' and he at once attacked the
vicar and 'provoked and stered his saide dogge to renne upon hym, callyng
hym by his name and saide Hay Dewgarde.' I am not clear whether the dog's
name was Dieugarde, which seems rather unlikely, or Dugald, which is
possible, but I rather incline to the idea that Totyn really said 'good
dog,' with a provincial accent--'Hey! gude darg!' in fact. Anyhow, 'the
saide dogge, knowyng the condicions of his maister, ran upon (the vicar)
and bote hym by the arme in iij places and pullyd hym downe to grounde
twyes and so was likely then to have been murthored by the saide John
Totyn and his dogge,'--the good vicar at the recollection of the exciting
incident becomes oblivious of grammar and changes the subject of his
verbs--'but as God woold he smote the said dogge with the chirche dore key
under his ere, and with that the said dogge departed.' Next day worthy
William Russell trotted off to his patron, the Abbot of Glastonbury, and
showed him his injuries--'his shurte beyng full of blode, his gowne to
torne, his arme sore byten'; but he got cold comfort and scant sympathy.
Totyn was the abbot's servant and the abbot said, 'that that was doon it
was doon in the defence of my man, and it shall coste me xl{_li_} or thou
shalte do my man any wrong, for I lete the wete I wyll defende hym.'
[Illustration: '_... showed him his injuries._']
Dogs of all kinds,--
'Mastiff, greyhound, mongrel grim,
Hound or spaniel, brach or lym,
Or bobtail tike or trundle tail,'
figure often enough in our old records, and often enough got their owners
into trouble for poaching, but they were not so frequently complained of
for assault as might have been expected. I remember coming across one
rather interesting case in which a man complained that a neighbour's dogs
had chased a tame deer belonging to his daughter, and when she interfered
to rescue it had bitten her hands. The keeping of tame deer was common
enough; Edward III. had a tame hind brought from St. Albans to Woodstock
on one occasion, and about a couple of centuries later a Lincolnshire
clergyman, John Barnardiston, rector of Great Coates, for his own
recreation and comfort and the amusement of his friends, 'norysched, kept
and brought up a tame hynde calfe.' Unfortunately he had annoyed Sir
Christopher Askew, who instigated William Morecropp and other 'lyght and
evyll disposed persons' to kill the hind. They discovered where it
frequented day and night and carried it off to Morecropp's house, where
they assembled next day 'with force and aryms; that is to saye wyth
staves, bylles, swordes and bokelers,'--an almost excessive armament for
the purpose,--and slew the unfortunate hind and carried its body to Sir
Christopher, who, when Barnardiston complained, 'lyghtly and wantonly made
a gret game and sport therat' and threatened that worse should befall him
if he did not sit still. While sympathising with the rector for the loss
of his pet, it is difficult to deny that the assembly of half-a-dozen
ruffians fully armed with swords and bucklers to tackle one tame little
fawn suggests the four-and-twenty tailors who set out to kill a snail, and
is not without its ludicrous side.
[Illustration: '_... fully armed with swords and bucklers._']
Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to His Majesty at the Edinburgh
University Press
FOOTNOTES:
[1] June 1911.
[2] The record of one of this man's acts of torture is worth preserving,
though it is, for obvious reasons, best left in the original Latin: 'cepit
unum vermem qui vocatur clok [_i.e._ a sheep tick] et posuit infra virgam
Roberti de Alverton et ligavit virgam cum parva corda et posuit ipsum
Robertum super unam cordam et ligavit cordam de una trabe ad aliam et
fecit ipsum moveri super cordam predictam et membra sua frotari quousque
finem fecit pro x marcis.'
Transcriber's Notes:
Passages in italics are indicated by _italics_.
Superscripted characters are indicated by {superscript}.