ENGLISH WAYFARING LIFE in the MIDDLE AGES (XIV^th Cen­tury)
by J. J. JUSSERAND

1. ENGLISH KNIGHTS TRAVELLING, AUGUST, 1399.

(From the MS. Harleian, 1319, painted circa A.D. 1400.)

ENGLISH
WAYFARING LIFE
IN THE MIDDLE AGES
(XIV^th CENTURY)

BY
J. J. JUSSERAND

TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY
LUCY TOULMIN SMITH

A new Edition revised and enlarged by the Author

T. FISHER UNWIN LTD

LONDON: ADELPHI TERRACE

First Edition 1889

Second Impression 1889

Third Impression 1889

Fourth Impression 1891

Fifth Impression 1896

Sixth Impression 1899

Seventh Impression 1901

Eighth Impression 1902

Ninth Impression 1909

Second Edition (Tenth Impression) 1920

Eleventh Impression 1921

We know Egypt, thanks to her tombs, and we know Rome, thanks to Pompeii, in these modern days, better than we know the Middle Ages of Europe and the life of an ordinary man during that period. We cannot hope to find in any corner of France or England a Pompeii, catacombs, or pyramids. In our countries the human torrent has never ceased flowing; rapid and tumultuous in its course, it has at no time ensured the preservation of the past by deposits of quiet ooze.

Yet, this common life of our ancestors, is it indiscernible, impossible to reconstruct? is that of kings and princes alone accessible to our view through the remoteness of ages, like those huge monuments which men see from afar when they cannot distinguish the houses in a distant city? Surely not. But to reach the heart of the nation, to get into touch with the greater number, a patient and extended inquiry is necessary. To make this usefully, one must break more or less completely with the old habit of taking the ideas of every-day life in the Middle Ages only from the descriptions, the satires, or the eulogies of poets. Literature is no doubt of valuable help in these restorations, but it is not the only, nor even the principal source of information. Poets embellish, imagine, colour, or transform; we must not accept their statements without checking them.

To check them is what we can do. We may have no such {8} burial grounds to explore as in Egypt, nor a whole town to bring to light as at Pompeii, but we have what is worth almost as much: the incomparable depositories of the Records of old England. Immense strides have been made, especially within the last hundred years, to render their contents public. Thousands

of documents have been printed or analysed, and the work is still continuing; indeed, looking at the progress made of late, a feeling of wonder cannot be repressed at the premature alarm of historians like Robertson, who wrote in 1769: “The universal progress of science during the two last centuries, the art of printing, and other obvious causes, have filled Europe with such a multiplicity of histories, and with such a vast collection of historical materials, that the term of human life is too short for the study or even the perusal of them.” The field of research has never ceased to widen, while the boundaries of human life scarcely recede at all; but students comprehend that the best means of rendering service is to impose limits on themselves and to study by preference separate points or periods of the immense problem to the best of their power. The work of unearthing is so far advanced that it is possible usefully to sift the riches drawn from these new catacombs.

At first sight all these petitions, these year-books full of reports of lawsuits, these long rows of statutes and ordinances seem the coldest things in the world, the most devoid of life. They are not even mummies or skeletons, they look as if they were but the dust of old bones. Yet to judge of them thus were to judge in a superficial manner; no doubt it might seem pleasanter to keep to the descriptions of tale-tellers; but how many chances of error do they not present! With the year-books, and the petitions followed by inquiries, we are on distinctly more solid ground; we soon grow accustomed to their language, and, under the apparently cold dust, sparks of life appear, we can then with little effort restore scenes, understand existences, perceive the distant echo of imprecations or shouts of triumph.

It was with this thought that the present work was {9} undertaken a good many years ago. In it there is a little less mention of Chaucer and a little more of the “Rolls of Parliament” than is sometimes found in the works devoted to the same period; this does not arise from want of admiration for the great man, far from it, but from the need of a test and of means of control, which may perhaps be deemed legitimate, and only increase, in the end, our sentiment for him. The present writer has desired to confine himself in this work within strict limits; one only of the many sides of the common life in the fourteenth century is here studied, a side little enough known and sometimes difficult to observe, namely, the character and the quality of the chief kinds of nomadic existence then carried on in England. And even in that reduced compass he is very far from making claim to completeness; so that this work is presented to the public more as a sketch than a treatise.

In the remodelling of his text, which had appeared as a French book in 1884 and as articles in English some years earlier, the author has been assisted, he need hardly say, by his learned translator, to whom he owes much for having assumed the task of turning into English a work which she herself would have been so well qualified to write. He has been helped too by friends, all of whom he does not mean to name here. But though feeling that in this also his incompleteness will be very apparent, he cannot deprive himself of the pleasure of inscribing on this page with gratitude and affection the names of Gaston Paris, of the Institute of France; of E. Maunde Thompson, Principal Librarian of the British Museum; of F. J. Furnivall, Director of the Chaucer and many other Societies; lastly, he ought, perhaps, to have said firstly, of the poet and critic, Edmund Gosse, to whose kind initiative and suggestion he owes it that his book is published under its present form.

J.

ALBERT GATE,
July 7th, 1889.

At the time of “les longs espoirs et les vastes pensées,” so far back that I have but a hazy recollection of him, the young author of these pages had formed so bold a plan that he kept it to himself, which was to write, if a long life were granted him, a complete description of the English people, during it is true a single century, the fourteenth, that period, of unique interest, when, after long years of probation, it became certain that England would be English and nothing else, when the language was formed, the first masterpieces were written, the chief traits of the national character became permanent, the principal institutions were founded, and even a first attempt at Reformation was launched.

Old Barthélemy Saint Hilaire, the indefatigable translator of Aristotle, used to say to me when he was our Foreign Minister: one must select, early in life, a vast intellectual task, that will be like a literary companion, a long-lived one, which you can never lose, because it is sure to outlive you. The author of this study thought the ampler work would be his literary companion.

But his official duties thereupon became more exacting, and as they had a first claim, he had to part with his companion, whom, as will happen in life’s pilgrimage, others replaced at later stages of the journey. He desired, however, that some trace be left of an early comradeship: hence the present essay, illustrated in part from his pen-and-ink sketches, also a token of comradeship.

The need of this new issue has supplied the occasion for a revision of the text, with numerous corrections and additions, written in a land unsuspected by the best-travelled of the ever-moving heroes of these pages, written too at a time when the Hundred years war of Chaucerian days has been replaced by a Hundred years peace, and when great deeds performed in common are, if we and our successors prove in any way worthy of our dead, the harbingers of a friendship not to be broken between France, England and America.

J.

WASHINGTON, 1920.

• CONTENTS
  • PREFACE • [7]
  • TABLE OF CONTENTS • [11]
  • LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS • [13]
  • INTRODUCTION • [23]
  • PART I —— ENGLISH ROADS
    • I. ROADS AND BRIDGES • [29]
    • II. THE ORDINARY TRAVELLER AND THE CASUAL PASSER-BY • [90]
    • III. SECURITY OF THE ROADS • [149]
  • PART II —— LAY WAYFARERS
    • INTRODUCTORY NOTE • [181]
    • I. HERBALISTS, CHARLATANS, MINSTRELS, JUGGLERS, AND TUMBLERS • [183]
    • II. MESSENGERS, ITINERANT MERCHANTS AND PEDLARS • [223]
    • III. OUTLAWS, WANDERING WORKMEN, AND PEASANTS OUT OF BOND • [254]
  • PART III —— RELIGIOUS WAYFARERS
    • I. WANDERING PREACHERS AND FRIARS • [283]
    • II. THE PARDONERS • [312]
    • III. PILGRIMS AND PILGRIMAGES
      • 1. Pilgrimages, their motives: to fulfil a vow, to spite the king, to regain health • [338]
      • 2. Principal English pilgrimages; the one of European celebrity, St. Thomas of Canterbury • [346]
      • 3. Piety, merriment, abuses. Real and false relics. Signs and brooches. Pilgrim stories. Honest and false pilgrims • [357]
      • 4. Pilgrimages beyond sea, Calais, Boulogne, Chartres, Rocamadour, St. James of Compostela, Cologne, Rome. Offerings left and indulgences gained. Helping gilds. Faith, superstition, and scepticism. Pilgrimages by proxy • [370]
      • 5. The holy journey to Jerusalem. Pilgrims in the days of St. Jerome. Pilgrims in arms, the crusades. Itineraries and Journals. “Mandeville,” William Wey, the lord of Anglure • [395]
  • CONCLUSION • [419]
  • APPENDIX • [423]
    • I. Patent of King John entrusting a French cleric with the completion of London Bridge, 1201 • [425]
    • II. Petition concerning an old bridge, with arches too low and too narrow to allow boats to pass, 1442 • [426]
    • III. London Bridge and its maintenance • [427]
    • IV. Inquests as to the maintenance of bridges, temp. Ed. I and Ed. II • [429]
    • V. The King’s journeys. Petitions and statutes concerning the Royal Purveyors • [430]
    • VI. The recurrence of leet-days and visits of Justices • [431]
    • VII. The dress of the worldly monk • [432]
    • VIII. Noblemen’s exactions when travelling • [433]
    • IX. Passage of the Humber in a ferry • [433]
    • X. The right of sanctuary • [434]
    • XI. A monopoly of minstrelsy for the King’s own minstrels • [435]
    • XII. Popular English songs of the Middle Ages • [437]
    • XIII. Indulgences and the theory of the “Treasury” according to Pope Clement VI • [438]
    • XIV. Sermon accompanying the display of a pretended papal bull (on the occasion of the coming of Henry of Lancaster) • [439]
    • XV. Ecclesiastical documents concerning chiefly English pardoners • [440]
    • XVI. The first recorded crucifix in England sculptured from life • [445]
    • XVII. The pilgrimage of Reynard • [446]
  • INDEX • [449]

ILLUSTRATIONS

[1]. Knights travelling, followed by their escort of archers. From the MS. Harleian 1319, in the British Museum, fol. 25, painted circa 1400 (below No. 15). The two travellers are the Duke of Exeter and the Duke of Surrey; they go to meet Henry of Lancaster at Chester, to whom they are sent by King Richard II, August 1399. • Frontispiece 4

[2]. A minstrel dancing and singing. From the MS. 2 B. vii., in the British Museum, fol. 197a. English, early fourteenth century • 7

[3]. The three-branched bridge at Crowland, fourteenth century, present state • 21

[4]. Old London Bridge. From an illumination in the MS. 16 F. ii. fol. 73, in the British Museum, containing the poems of Charles d’Orléans (fifteenth century). This is the oldest representation extant of the famous bridge built by Isembert and his peers. The painting, of which the upper part only is here given, represents the Tower of London with Charles d’Orléans sitting in it as a prisoner. In our reproduction may be seen the chapel of St. Thomas Becket and the houses on the bridge, the wharves along the City side of the water, and the tops of the white turrets of the Tower of London. The view was obviously painted from nature. A complete reproduction serves as a frontispiece for Vol. I of my “Literary History.” • 29

[5]. The old bridge on the Rhône at Avignon, built by the friars pontiff in the twelfth century, as it now stands, the four arches and the chapel • 33

[6]. The old bridge at Cahors, thirteenth century, present state, photographed by Prof. Enlart, director of the Trocadero Museum • 37

[7]. The bridge at Stratford-at-Bow, as it stood before its reconstruction in 1839. From an engraving dated 1814 • 41

[8]. A part of London Bridge; None-such House, the drawbridge, and the houses on the bridge, as they appeared in 1600. From a drawing in Pepys Library, Magd. Coll., Cambridge, reproduced by Dr. Furnivall in his edition of Harrison’s “Description of England,” 1877 • 45

[9]. The taking down of the houses on old London Bridge, from a water-colour by C. Pyne (1800–1884), preserved in the Victoria and Albert Museum • 51

[10]. Hugh of Clopton’s bridge at Stratford-on-Avon, fifteenth century • 55

[11]. The chapel on the bridge at Wakefield, century. From a copyright photograph by G. and J. Hall, of Wakefield • 67

[12]. The bridge with a defensive tower at Warkworth, Northumberland, fourteenth century. From a photograph by G. W. Wilson, of Aberdeen • 71

[13]. The defensive tower on the Monnow Bridge at Monmouth, from a photograph obligingly supplied by Mr. Oliver Baker • 75

[14]. The one-arched bridge on the Esk, near Danby Castle, Yorkshire, built during the fourteenth century by Neville, Lord Latimer, the arms of whom are still to be seen at the top of the bridge. From a photograph obtained through the kindness of the Rev. J. C. Atkinson, of Danby Parsonage, York • 77

[15]. The parliament sitting in Westminster. From the MS. Harl. 1319, in the British Museum, fol. 57, painted circa 1400. This MS. contains a chronicle of the last years of Richard II, written in his native tongue by a French gentleman called Créton, who accompanied the king in his last journey to Ireland. It is invaluable both for its text and its pictures; in both the author seems to have been very careful to adhere to facts. He begins writing in verse, but afterwards takes to prose, stating that he is coming now to events of such importance that he prefers using prose, to make sure that he shall not allow himself to be led by fancy.

He must have himself superintended the painting with the greatest care. There can be no doubt that the figures are actual portraits; of this there are two proofs: first, when the same person appears in several paintings he is always given the same features, and can be easily recognized; second, the exact resemblance of one of the persons can be put beyond a doubt, which makes it likely that the others also resemble their originals. Richard II, the image of whom constantly recurs in the pictures, is easily recognizable as having the same features as in the bronze statue over his tomb at Westminster. And we know for certain that this tomb and statue were ordered by Richard himself during his lifetime; the indenture with the seals attached, dated 18 Rich. II (1395), and binding two apparently English artists, viz., “Nicholas Broker et Godfrey Prest, citeins et copersmythes de Loundres,” is still in existence at the Record Office.

The sitting of the parliament here represented is the famous one when Richard was deposed, and Henry of Lancaster came forth to “chalenge yis Rewme of Yngland” (“Rolls of Parliament,” iii. p. 422), Oct. 1399, and the throne was then, as seen in the painting, left unoccupied, “sede regali cum pannis auri solempniter preparata, tunc vacua,” “Rolls,” ibid. On the right of the throne are seated the spiritual lords; on the left the temporal lords, knights, &c. The nearest to the throne left is Henry of Lancaster (wearing a tall fur cap). Says Créton:

“Entour le dit siége asez près

Estoient les prélas assis . . .

D’autre costé tous les seigneurs,

Grans moyens petiz et meneurs (lesser ones) . . .

Premiers seoit le duc Henry

Et puis tout au plus près de ly

Le duc Diorc (York) son beau cousin,” &c. • 87

[16]. A common cart. From the MS. 10 E. IV., in the British Museum, fol. 110 b, early fourteenth century, English • 90

[17]. A reaper’s cart going up-hill. From the Louterell psalter; fac-simile of the engraving in the “Vetusta Monumenta,” Society of Antiquaries, vol. vi.; see in that vol., “Remarks on the Louterell psalter,” by J. G. Rokewood—“Dominus Galfridus Louterell me fieri fecit.” English, first half of the fourteenth century • 93

[18]. Ladies travelling in their carriage with their dogs and pet animals, one of which is a squirrel. One of the followers travelling on horseback, to be more at his ease and to be able to defy the wind, has covered his head with his hood, and carries his tall hat hanging to his girdle. From the Louterell psalter. See preceeding No. • 97

[19]. A young squire travelling:

“And he hadde ben somtyme in chivachie,

In Flaundres, in Artoys, and in Picardie,

And born him wel, as of so litel space,

In hope to stonden in his lady grace.

Embrowdid was he, as it were a mede

Al ful of fressh floures, white and reede,

Syngynge he was, or flowtynge al the day;

He was as fressh as is the moneth of May.”

From the Ellesmere MS. of the “Canterbury Tales.” The Ellesmere cuts are used by the kind permission of Dr. Furnivall • 100

[20]. Travelling in a horse-litter; a lady and a wounded knight are carried in the litter; squires escort them. From the MS. 118 Français, fol. 285, in the Bibliothèque Nationale at Paris; “Romance of Lancelot,” late fourteenth century, French. A good example of a State horse-litter is to be found in the MS. 18 E. II, in the British Museum, fol. 7; “Chronicles of Froissart,” French, fifteenth century • 101

[21–22]. Ladies on horseback. Two drawings illustrative of both ways of riding; sitting sideways: Chaucer’s prioresse, and riding astride: Chaucer’s Wife of Bath. From the Ellesmere MS. • 105

[23]. A family dinner. From the MS. Addit. 28162, in the British Museum, fol. 10 b, early fourteenth century; French. Note the carver, the cup-bearer, the musicians, the marshal of the hall, whose mission it is to expel objectionable intruders, whether men or dogs. In the present case, while this officer is expelling a very objectionable lazar, come under pretence of sprinkling the diners with holy water, a little further a dog seizes his opportunity, and gets hold of a fish on the table. The carver grasps the meat with his left hand; forks then were unknown, but good breeding was, nevertheless, not neglected, and it consisted in the server’s touching the meat only with the left hand. Writing later than the time we speak of, John Russell, marshal of the hall to Duke Humphrey of Gloucester (fifteenth century), adds one refinement more, that is to use only three fingers of the left hand. This was, in his mind, the acme of fine breeding:

“Sett never on fysche nor flesche, nor fowle trewly,

Moore than ij fyngurs and a thombe, for that is curtesie.

Touche never with youre right hande no maner mete surely.”

“Boke of Nurture” (Furnivall, 1868, p. 137).

It may be seen from our picture that part of these niceties was unknown yet to carvers in the first half of the fourteenth century. The whole of the left hand is used to grasp the meat • 109

[24].

“A cooke thei hadde . . .

To boyle chiknes and the mary bones.”

From the illumination in the Ellesmere MS. of the “Canterbury Tales.” The pot-hooks with three prongs, which he carries, were the distinctive attribute of cooks and cookmaids, and appear on all representations of such people: several are to be found in the Louterell psalter; see “Vetusta Monumenta,” vol. vi., the Roy. MS. 10 E. IV., passim, &c. They used it to turn the meat and take it out of the deep round-bellied pots, standing on three legs over the fire, which were then in common use • 116

[25]. The new habits of luxury; a gentleman, helped by two attendants, dressing before the fire in his bedroom. From the MS. 2 B. vii., in the British Museum, fol. 72 b, English, early fourteenth century • 127

Of this luxury, of the spread of the use of chimneys, &c., Langland, as a satirist, complains; and this, as a marshal of the hall, John Russell a little later recommends as the proper method of dressing for a gentleman. He then thus addresses the attendant:

“Than knele down on youre kne, and thus to youre soverayn ye say:

‘Syr, what robe or govn pleseth it yow to were today?’” &c.

“Boke of Nurture” (Furnivall, 1868, p. 178).

[26]. An English inn of the fourteenth century. From the Louterell psalter • 129

[27]. The New Inn, Gloucester, originally built for pilgrims, middle of the fifteenth century, still in use • 131

[28]. On the roadside; the alehouse. From the MS. 10 E. IV., in the British Museum, fol. 114 b; English, fourteenth century • 133

[29]. The hermitage chapel of St. Robert, hewn out of the limestone, at Knaresborough, Yorkshire, thirteenth century; the figure of the knight, of a much later date. Similar rock habitations are innumerable in France in the valley of the Loire and of certain of its affluents, especially in Vendomois (at Troo for example); some are still occupied; several were, in the middle ages, the place of abode of hermits and still bear signs thereof • 139

[30]. A Hermit in his solitude, tempted by the devil; MS. 10 E. IV., fol. 113 b. The miniature reproduced is one out of several which illustrate a well-known mediæval tale. Here it may be remarked that though this MS., invaluable as it is for the study of English customs, dresses, &c., during the fourteenth century has been often made use of, it has perhaps never been so thoroughly studied as it deserves. It contains Decretals, with marginal coloured drawings of the highest value on account of their variety and the subjects they illustrate. Not only a number of games and trades are there represented, with many miracles of the Virgin, &c., but there are also complete tales told by the draughtsman, without words, and only with the help of his colours. He does not invent his stories, but simply illustrates the fabliaux which he remembered and particularly relished. The drawing here belongs to the story of the “hermit who got drunk.” As he was once sitting before his cell he was tempted by the devil, who reproached him with his continual virtue, and entreated him to sin at least once, recommending him to choose either to get drunk or to commit adultery or to commit murder. The hermit chose the first as being the least (see below, p. [133], the picture where he is seen at his drink). But when he has once got drunk he finds on his way the wife of his friend the miller; he commits adultery with her, and then meeting the husband, kills him. The text of the tale is in Méon, “Nouveau recueil de fabliaux,” 1829, vol. ii. p. 173, “De l’ermite qui s’enyvra” • 144

[31]. Escaped prisoner flying to sanctuary. From the MS. 10 E. IV., fol. 206 b, in the British Museum, fourteenth century • 149

[32]. The Durham knocker (Norman), affixed to one of the doors of the cathedral. Fugitives used it to be admitted to sanctuary. Cf. a capital in the church at Saint Nectaire, Puy de Dôme, XIth century, representing, in accordance with Professor Enlart’s interpretation, a man who flies to sanctuary and embraces a column thereof, while an angel with drawn sword stands by to protect him • 158

[33]. The stone frith or frid stool in Hexham Abbey, Northumberland, dating from Saxon times, possibly the episcopal chair of St. Wilfrid, a great church builder, bishop of Hexham in the early years of the VIIIth century • 160

[34]. The stone fridstool at Sprotborough, Yorkshire, fourteenth century, a view kindly procured by my British colleague at Washington, Lord Grey of Fallodon • 161

[35]. An adventure seeker. From the MS. 2 B. vii., fol. 149, English, early fourteenth century • 181

[36]. A blind beggar led by his dog. From the MS. 10 E. IV., fol. 110 • 182

[37]. A Physician (Chaucer’s Doctour of Phisik):

“He knew the cause of every malady.”

From the Ellesmere MS. • 183

[38]. Playing upon the vielle (viol). From the MS. 10 E. IV., fol. 4 • 207

[39]. The “Minstrels’ gallery” in the Exeter cathedral, fourteenth century. From a photograph by Messrs. Frith and Co. • 209

[40]. A fourteenth-century juggler. From the MS. 10 E. IV., fol. 5 • 216

[41]. Favourite dances of the fourteenth century; a woman dancing head downwards, to the sound of a tabor and a double flute. From the MS. 10 E. IV., fol. 58. Representations of such dances of women, head downwards, are innumerable in MSS., painted glass, old portals, &c. There is one in the album of Villard de Honnecourt, thirteenth century, ed. Lassus and Darcel; the interest taken in such performances is attested by countless examples • 219

[42]. Favourite dances in Persia. From a pencil-case in the possession of the author. See also the life-size Persian paintings exhibited in the Victoria and Albert Museum, where similar dances are represented • 220

[43]. A performing bear. From the MS. 10 E. IV., fol. 154, in the British Museum, English, fourteenth century • 222

[44]. A sham messenger carrying a letter. From the MS. 10 E. IV., fol. 53 b • 223

[45]. A professional messenger. From the MS. 10 E. IV., fol. 302 b, in the British Museum, English, fourteenth century • 228

[46]. A travelling pedlar; his bag robbed by monkeys. From the MS. 10 E. IV., in the British Museum, fol. 149 b • 238

[47]. A rich merchant travelling (Chaucer’s Marchaunt):

“A marchaunt was ther with a forked berd,

In motteleye, and high on horse he sat,

Uppon his heed a Flaundrisch bever hat . . .

Ther wiste no man that he was in dette

So estately was he of governaunce.”

From the Ellesmere MS. • 245

[48]. Forest life; wood-cutters. From the MS. 10 E. IV., fol. 100 b • 254

[49]. Forest life; a shooting casualty. From the MS. 10 E. IV., fol. 203 a • 258

[50]. Reaping time. Labourers reaping corn under the supervision of the hayward. From the MS. 2 B. vii., fol. 78 b. English, early fourteenth century. “They dwell in fayre houses, and we haue the payne and traueyle, rayne and wynd in the feldes” (speech of John Ball, in Lord Berners’ Froissart, chap. ccclxxxi). The overseer shown in the drawing may possibly be a bailiff: “Supervidere debet ballivus falcatores, messores, cariatores,” &c. (“Fleta,” cap. 73), or a provost, who had about the same duties, but was practically chosen by the peasants themselves. But it seems more likely to be a hayward; the dress and attitude better suit a man in that station. The care of seeing that “repemen . . . repe besili and clenli,” was sometimes entrusted to such officers; see Skeat, “Notes to Piers the Plowman,” Early English Text Society, 1877, p. 273. A horn, such as our man bears, was always carried by haywards, who used to blow it to warn off people from straying in the crops. The rough and commanding attitude seen in the drawing would not be so readily expected from a bailiff with his juridical knowledge and com­par­a­tive­ly high function, or from a provost appointed by the peasants themselves, as from a hayward or garde champêtre • 267

[51]. In the stocks. A woman and a monk are put into them; a gentleman abuses them. From the MS. 10 E. IV., fol. 187, where it forms part of a series of drawings illustrating a fabliau of the same sort as the one alluded to above (illustration No. 28). It is called, Du soucretain et de la fame au chevalier; the author is Rutebeuf, and it may be found in the works of this the most famous of the French thirteenth-century poets (ed. Jubinal, or ed. Kressner) • 272

[52]. Stocks at Shalford, near Guildford; present state, a drawing by Aug. de Blignières • 274

[53]. Beggars. A cripple and other beggars helped by a generous king to his own garments. From the MS. 10 E. IV., fol. 261 b • 275

[54]. A friar (Chaucer’s friar). From the Ellesmere MS. “And it shall be lawful for such as shall be compelled by necessity to be shod, . . . and they are not to ride unless some manifest necessity or infirmity oblige them.” “The rule of the Friars Minors,” Dugdale’s “Monasticon,” 1817, vol. vi. part iii. p. 1504 • 283

[55]. “When Adam delved and Eve span”—the text of John Ball’s harangue (same idea in Wace’s “Roman de Rou,” l. 6027), illustrated from the early fourteenth-century MS., 2 B. vii., 4 b, in the British Museum. (English) • 287

[56]. A worldly ecclesiastic—

“Ful wel biloved and familiar was he

. . . with worthie wommen.”

(Prologue of the “Canterbury Tales”). From the MS. 10 E. IV., fol. 185. Belongs to the same story as No. 48 • 292

[57]. Psalm singing. The interior of a friars’ church. From the MS. Domit. A. xvii., fol. 120 b, in the British Museum, early fifteenth century. The splendour of this church, with its beautiful pavement, its sculptured stalls, altar, roof, and pinnacles, very exactly tallies with the contemporary criticisms against the wealth of the friars, and may be taken as an illustration of the very words of Wyclif and Langland • 299

[58]. Sprinkling people at dinner with holy water. From the MS. 10 E. IV., fol. 108 b • 304

[59]. A game of fox and geese. From the MS. 10 E. IV., fol. 49 b • 312

[60]. Reading in Canterbury cathedral of a fabricated papal bull granting pardons to those who will help Henry of Lancaster against King Richard II. From the MS. Harl. 1319, fol. 12 a, containing the chronicle of Créton; see supra No. 14. The archbishop, Thomas Arundel, the same who led Henry IV to the empty throne, shown in No. 15, is represented saying: “My good people, hearken all of you here. You well know how the King most wrongfully and without reason banished your lord Henry; I have therefore obtained of the Holy Father who is our patron, that those that shall forthwith bring aid this day, shall every one of them have remission of all sins. . . . Behold the sealed bull that the Pope of renowned Rome hath sent me, my good friends, in behalf of you all.” John Webb’s translation of Créton’s chronicle, “Archæologia,” vol. xx. • 319

[61]. A pardoner (Chaucer’s pardoner)—

“A vernicle hadde he sowed on his cappe,

His walet lay byforn him in his lappe

Bret-ful of pardoun come from Rome al hoot.”

From the Ellesmere MS. of the “Canterbury Tales” • 336

[62]. Rocamadour, general view. From a photograph, obtained through the kindness of Canon Laporte, of Rocamadour • 338

[63]. A pilgrim. From the MS. 17 C. xxxviii, fol. 39, in the British Museum; travels of Mandeville, English, fifteenth century • 369

[64]. The fortified entrance to the sanctuaries of Rocamadour, built in the eleventh century, recently restored. From a photograph obtained as above, No. 62 • 373

[65]. Travelling by sea. From the MS. Harl. 1319, fol. 7 b. The subject is the return of Richard II from Ireland to England • 377

[66]. The southern entrance to St. James of Compostela, twelfth century, “Plaza de las Platerias” (silversmiths). The present cathedral, replacing an older one, destroyed by the Moors, was begun in the middle of the eleventh century, and dedicated in 1211 • 381

[67]. A sample of Pilgrims’ signs, as sold to them at Walsingham; from the original in the British Museum • 418

[68]. A blind beggar and his boy. The trick played upon the blind man by his boy is well known as being one of the incidents in the first chapter of the sixteenth-century Spanish novel, “Lazarillo de Tormes.” It has long been suspected that the materials for this chapter were drawn by the Spanish author from an earlier tale. This drawing and several others that follow it, never adverted to with reference to “Lazarillo de Tormes,” put the fact beyond a doubt; they tell in their way the same tale, and they are of the first part of the fourteenth century. MS. 10 E. IV., in the British Museum, fol. 217 b; see above No. 30 • 419

3. THE THREE-BRANCHED BRIDGE AT CROWLAND.

INTRODUCTION

“O, dist Spadassin, voici un bon resveux; mais allons nous cacher au coin de la chem­i­née et là passons avec les dames nostre vie et nostre temps à enfiler des perles ou à filer comme Sardanapalus. Qui ne s’ad­ven­ture n’a cheval ni mule, ce dist Salomon.”

VIE DE GARGANTUA.

At the present day there are but few wayfarers. The small trades plyed along the road, in every chance village, are disappearing before our newer methods of wholesale manufacture; more and more rarely do we see the pedlar unstrap his pack at the farm door, the travelling cobbler mend by the wayside the shoes which on Sunday will replace the wooden clogs, or hear the wandering musician drone at the windows his oft rehearsed tunes. Professional pilgrims exist no longer, even quack doctors are losing their credit. It was far otherwise in the Middle Ages; many people were bound to a wandering existence, and started even from childhood on their life-long journey. Some trotted their strange industries in the broad sunshine, through the dust of the highroads; others skulked in bye-lanes or {24} even in coppices, hiding their heads from the sheriff’s officer—may be a criminal, may be a fugitive, “a wolf’s head that anyone may cut down,” according to the terrible expression of an English jurist of the thirteenth century. Among these, many labourers who had broken the villeins bond, unhappy and oppressed in their hamlets, and who wandered through the country in quest of work, as though flight could enfranchise them: but “service est en le sank” (“service is in the blood”), the magistrate warned them.[1] Among them also, pedlars laden with petty wares; pilgrims who from St. Thomas’ to St. James’ went begging along the roads, living by alms; pardoners, those strange nomads, who sold to the common people the merits of the saints in paradise; mendicant friars and preachers of all sorts who, according to the times, delivered ardently liberal harangues or contemptibly selfish discourses at the church doors. All these had one character in common, namely, that in the wide extent of country where they passed their lives, ever on the move, they served as links between the separated groups of other men who, attached to the soil by law or custom, spent the whole of their days, irremovable, under the same sky, on the same ground, at the same toil.

Pursuing their singular work, these wanderers, who had seen and experienced so much, served to give some idea of the great unknown world to the humble classes whom they met on their way. Together with many false beliefs and fables they put into the heads of the stay-at-homes certain notions of extent and of active life which these would hardly otherwise have acquired; above all, they brought to the land-bound men news of their brethren in the neighbouring province, of their condition of misery or of happiness, and these were pitied {25} or envied accordingly, and remembered as brothers or friends to call upon in the day of revolt.

At a period when, for the mass of mankind, ideas were transmitted orally and travelled with these wanderers along the roads, the nomads served as a link between the human groups of various districts. It would be therefore of great interest for the historian to know what were these channels of the popular thought, what life was led by those who filled such a function, what were their influence and manners. We shall try to study the chief types of this race, and shall choose them in England in the fourteenth century, in a country and at an epoch when their social importance was considerable. The interest which attaches to them is of course manifold; the personality of these pardoners, professional pilgrims, and minstrels, extinct species, is in itself curious to scrutinize; but not more so than their state of mind and the mode in which they carried on their businesses, both reacting on the social condition of a great people which had just been formed and was acquiring the features and the character still its own at the present day. It was the period when, thanks to the French wars and the incessant embarrassments of royalty, the subjects of Edward III and of Richard II gained a parliament similar to that which we now see; the period when, in religious life, the independence of the English spirit asserted itself through the reforms of Wyclif, the statutes for the clergy, and the protests of the Good Parliament; when, in literature, Chaucer inaugurated the series of England’s great poets, and instead of one more commonplace dream, Langland, like Dante, gave to his compatriots Visions; when, in short, from noble to villein was felt a stir which led without excessive revolution to that true liberty for which we, the French, had long to envy our neighbours. This epoch is decisive in the history of the country. It will be seen that in all the great questions debated in the cloister, in the castle, {26} or on the market-place, the part played by the wayfarers, though scarcely visible at times, was not insignificant.

We must first examine the place of the scene, afterwards the events that happened there; see what were the roads, then what were the beings who frequented them.

PART I ENGLISH ROADS

4. OLD LONDON BRIDGE.

(From MS. Roy. 16 F2 in the British Museum.)

CHAPTER I ROADS AND BRIDGES

The maintenance of roads and bridges in England was in the four­teenth cen­tury one of those charges which weighed, like military service, on the whole of the nation. All landed proprietors were obliged, in theory, to watch over the good condition of the highways; their tenants had to execute the repairs for them. The religious houses themselves, owners of property given in frank almoigne, that is to say, with a purely charitable object, were dispensed from every service and rent towards their benefactor, no other charge being usually left but that of saying prayers or giving alms for the repose of the donor’s soul. It remained, however, for them to satisfy for public weal the trinoda necessitas, or triple obligation, which among other duties consisted in the repairing of bridges.[2] {30}

There existed in England a very considerable network of roads, the principal of which dated as far back as the Roman times. The province of Britain had been one of those where the greatest care had been bestowed upon the military and commercial ways by the Roman emperors. “The network of roads in the island,” says Mommsen, “which was uncommonly developed, and for which in particular Hadrian did much in connection with the building of his wall, was of course primarily subservient to military ends; but alongside of, and in part taking precedence over the legionary camps, Londinium occupies in that respect a place which brings clearly into view its leading position in traffic.”[3] In many places are yet to be found remnants of the Roman highways, the more important of which were called in Anglo-Saxon times, and since, Watling Street, Erming Street, the Fosse, and Ikenild Street. “These Roman ways in Britain have frequently been continued as the publick roads, so that where a Roman military way is wanting, the presumption is in favour of the present highroad, if that be nearly in the same direction.”[4] There are two reasons for that permanence: the first is that the roads were built by the Romans to supply needs which have not ceased to be felt; being cut, for instance, from London to the north through York; towards Cornwall along the sea coast; towards the Welsh mines, &c.; the second reason is the way in which they were built. “A portion of the Fosse Road which remains at Radstock, about ten miles south-west of Bath, and was opened in February, 1881, showed the following construction: {31}

“1. Pavimentum, or foundation, fine earth, hard beaten in.

“2. Statumen, or bed of the road, composed of large stones, sometimes mixed with mortar.

“3. Ruderatio, or small stones well mixed with mortar.

“4. Nucleus, formed by mixing lime, chalk, pounded brick or tile; or gravel, sand, and lime mixed with clay.

“5. Upon this was laid the surface of the paved road, technically called the summum dorsum.”[5]

All Roman roads were not built with so much care and in such an enduring fashion; they were, however, all of them substantial enough to resist for centuries, and they remained in use during the Middle Ages. Other roads besides were opened during that epoch to provide for new fortified towns and castles, and to satisfy the needs of great landowners, religious or otherwise.

The keeping of roads and bridges in repair, the latter included in the trinoda necessitas, was not considered as worldly, but rather as pious and meritorious work before God, of the same sort as visiting the sick or caring for the poor;[6] men saw in them a true charity for a certain category of sufferers, namely, travellers; this is why the clergy submitted to it. The pious character of this kind of {32} labour may suffice to prove that the roads were not so safe or in such a good state as has been sometimes maintained.[7] The noblest outcome of the religious spirit prevalent in the Middle Ages was that disinterested enthusiasm which, as soon as some distress of humanity became flagrant, created societies for help and rendered self-denial popular. One of these distresses was seen, for example, in the power of the infidel, and the Crusades were the consequence. The forsaken condition of the lowest classes in the towns was noticed in the thirteenth century, and St. Francis sent for the consolation of the neglected, those mendicant friars at first so justly popular, and who so promptly fell into disrepute. After the same fashion travellers were considered as sufferers deserving pity, and help was given to them to please God. A religious order with this end in view had been founded in the twelfth century, that of the Pontiff brothers, or makers of bridges (pons, bridge), which spread into several countries of the Continent.[8] In France they built over the Rhône the celebrated bridge of Avignon, which yet preserves four arches of their construction; and the one at Pont St. Esprit, which is still in use, nineteen out of its twenty-five arches dating from the years 1265 to 1309 when it was erected. To break the force of such a current as that of the Rhône they built, near together, piers of oblong form, ending in a sharp angle at the two extremities of their axis,[9] and their masonry was {35} so solid that in many places the waters have respected it to the present day, that is, for eight centuries. They also had establishments on the banks of rivers, and helped to cross them by boat. Their most memorable accomplishment was, however, the replacing of the same ferries and of short-lived, often dangerous timber bridges by stone ones, the normal progression for river crossing being, throughout ages, the ford, the ferry, the timber bridge, the stone bridge. Laymen learnt the secret of their art and in the thirteenth century began to take their place. Bridges multiplied in France; many still exist, such, for example, as the fine fourteenth-century bridge at Orthez, the two at Limoges, of the thirteenth century, one of them with its chapel, the beautiful bridge at Cahors, where even the machicolated turrets which formerly served to defend it are still preserved, restored, it is true, by the clever but strong hand of Viollet Le Duc.[10]

5. THE OLD BRIDGE AT AVIGNON.

(Twelfth Century; present state.)

In England, as in France, wooden bridges had in most cases preceded stone ones. The former were built of oak, like the one over the river Lune, in the city of Lancaster, for which we find John of Gaunt writing to “monsire Adam de Hoghton, nostre chief forestier de Wyresdale,” to hand to John Ermyte of Singleton, who had actually paid for them, one hundred and twenty oak trees from the said forest of Wyresdale, “selected among the properest and aptest, such as the said John will designate. And {36} mind not to fail to act thus, nor cause that the before mentioned work be thereby delayed in any way.”[11]

There is no trace in England of establishments founded by the Bridge Friars, but it is certain that there, as elsewhere, the works for constructing bridges and highways had a pious character. To encourage the faithful to take part in them, Richard de Kellawe, Bishop of Durham from 1311 to 1316, remitted part of the penance for their sins. The registry of his episcopal chancery contains frequent entries such as the following: “Memorandum . . . his lordship grants forty days indulgence to all who will draw from the treasure that God has given them valuable and charitable aid towards the building and repair of Botyton bridge.” Forty days are allowed on another occasion for help towards the bridge and the highroad between Billingham and Norton,[12] and forty days for the {39} great road from Brotherton to Ferrybridge. The wording of this last decree is characteristic:

“To all those, &c. Persuaded that the minds of the faithful are more ready to attach themselves to pious works when they have received the salutary encouragement of fuller indulgences, trusting in the mercy of God Almighty and the merits and prayers of the glorious Virgin his Mother, of St. Peter, St. Paul, and of the most holy confessor Cuthbert our patron, and all saints, we remit forty days of the penances imposed on all our parishioners and others . . . sincerely contrite and shriven of their sins, who shall help by their charitable gifts, or by their bodily labour, in the building or in the maintenance of the causeway between Brotherton and Ferrybridge on which a great many people pass.”[13]

6. THE VALENTRE BRIDGE AT CAHORS.

(Thirteenth Century; photographed by Mr. Enlart, director of the Trocadero Museum.)

Causeways, owing to the abundance of marshy ground, since drained, were scarcely less needed than bridges and were also considered a meritorious work. A passage in Leland well shows what they consisted of, how much wanted, and what a proper object they were, for generous minded, pious benefactors: “This cawsey by Skipbridge towards Yorke hathe a nineteen small bridges on it for avoydinge and overpassynge carres cuming out of the mores thereby. One Blackeburne, that was twys maior of Yorke, made this cawsey and a nothar without one of the suburbs of Yorke. This Blakeburn hathe a solemne obiit in the Minstar of Yorke and a cantuari at Richemond.”[14]

Municipal bodies, as well as gilds, those lay brotherhoods imbued with the religious spirit, took care also in many cases of roads and bridges. The Gild of the Holy Cross in Birmingham, founded under Richard II, did this, and their intervention was most valuable, as the {40} Commissioners of Edward VI remarked two centuries later. The gild then “mainteigned . . . and kept in good reparaciouns two greate stone bridges, and divers foule and daungerous high wayes, the charge whereof the towne of hitsellfe ys not hable to mainteign. So that the lacke thereof wilbe a greate noysaunce to the kinges ma^ties subjectes passing to and from the marches of Wales and an vtter ruyne to the same towne, being one of the fayrest and most proffittuble townes to the kinges highnesse in all the shyre.”[15]

An example of municipal action can be found in the Ordinances of Worcester, prescribing that “the Brugge (bridge) may be overseyn at alle tymes for the surete of the cite. And that the reparacion of the saide Brugge be overloked by the chamberleyns every quarter.”[16]

Whether Queen Mathilda (twelfth century) got wetted or not, as is supposed, on passing the ford of the river at Stratford-atte-Bow—that same village where afterwards the French was spoken at which old Chaucer smiled—certain it is that she thought she was doing a meritorious work in constructing two bridges there.[17] Several times repaired, Bow Bridge was still standing in 1839. The queen endowed her foundation, granting land and a water-mill to the Abbess of Barking with a perpetual charge thereon for the maintenance of the bridge and the neighbouring roadway. When the queen died, an abbey for men was founded at the same Stratford, close to the bridges, and the abbess hastened to transfer to the new monastery the property in the mill and the charge of the reparations. The abbot had them done at first, {41} then wearied of it, and delegated the care of them to one Godfrey Pratt. He had built this man a house on the causeway beside the bridge, and paid him an annual grant. For a long time Pratt carried out the contract, “getting assistance,” says an inquiry of Edward I, “from some passers-by, but without often having recourse to their aid.” He also received alms from travellers, and his affairs prospered. They prospered so well that the abbot thought he would withdraw his pension; Pratt indemnified himself the best way he could. He set up iron bars across the bridge and made all pay who passed over, except the rich, for he prudently made exception “for nobility; he feared them and let them pass without molesting them.” The dispute only ended in the time of Edward II; the abbot acknowledged his fault; resumed the charge of the bridge, and suppressed the iron bars, the toll, and Godfrey Pratt himself.

7. BOW BRIDGE AS IT STOOD BEFORE ITS DEMOLITION IN 1839.

(From a print dated 1831.)

This bridge, over which no doubt Chaucer must have passed, was of stone, the arches were narrow and the piers thick; strong angular buttresses strengthened them and broke the force of the current; these formed at the upper part a triangle or siding which served as a refuge for foot-passengers, for the way was so narrow that a cart sufficed to fill it. When it was pulled down in 1839, it was found that the method of construction had been very simple. To ground the piers in the bed of the river the masons had simply thrown down stones and mortar till the level of the water had been reached. {42} It was remarked also that the ill-will of Pratt or the abbot or their successors must have rendered the bridge almost as dangerous at certain moments as the primitive ford. The wheels of the vehicles had hollowed such deep ruts in the stone and the horses’ shoes had so worn the pavement that an arch had been at one time pierced through.

No less striking as a case where pious motives caused the building of a bridge is the contract of the thirteenth century, by which Reginald de Rosels allowed Peter, Abbot of Whitby, to erect a permanent bridge on the river Esk, between his own and the convent’s lands. He pledged himself in that act to permit to all comers free access to the bridge through his own property. “For which concession the aforesaid Abbot and convent have absolved in chapter all the ancestors of the same Reginald of all fault and transgression they may have committed against the church of Whiteby and have made them participant of all the good works, alms, and prayers of the church of Whiteby.”[18] Numerous other examples of the same sort might be quoted; but it will be enough to add, as being perhaps more characteristic of the times than all the rest, the recommendations which Truth in the “Vision concerning Piers the Plowman” makes to the wealthy English merchants, the number of whom had so largely increased during the fourteenth century. Truth bids them to do several works of charity, which he considers of the highest importance for their salvation; they ought, among other things, to “amenden mesondieux,” that is, hospitals for sick people and for travellers; to repair “wikked wayes,” that is to say, bad roads; and also

“ . . . brygges to-broke · by the heye weyes

Amende in som manere wise.” {43}

For this and for helping prisoners, poor scholars, etc., they will have no little recompense. When they are about to die St. Michael himself will be sent to drive away devils that they be not tormented by evil spirits in their last moments:

“And ich shal sende yow my-selve · seynt Michel myn Angel

That no devel shal yow dere · ne despeir in youre deyinge,

And sende youre soules · ther ich my-self dwelle.”[19]

The pious character of the bridges was also shown by the chapels that stood on them. Bow Bridge was thus placed under the protection of St. Catherine. London Bridge had a chapel dedicated to St. Thomas of Canterbury;[20] a roomy Gothic building of apsidal form, with high windows and wrought pinnacles, almost a church. A miniature in a manuscript, of which a reproduction on a reduced scale is given at the beginning of this chapter, shows it fixed on the middle pier, whilst along the parapet are houses with gabled roofs, whose storeys project and overhang the Thames.

This was a famous bridge. No Englishman of the Middle Ages, and even of the Renaissance, ever spoke but with pride of London Bridge; it was the great national wonder; until the middle of the eighteenth century it remained (with the exception of some small ones which have disappeared as well as the narrow waters that they crossed)[21] the only bridge of the capital. It had been commenced in 1176, on the site of an old wooden {44} structure, dating back to Saxon times,[22] by Peter Colechurch, “priest and chaplain,” who had already once repaired the wooden bridge. The whole nation was stirred by this great and useful enterprise; the King, the citizens of London, the dwellers in the shires endowed the building with lands and sent money to hasten its completion. The list of donors was still to be seen in the sixteenth century, on “a table fayre written for posterity,”[23] in the bridge chapel.

A little while before his death in 1205 another had taken the place of Peter Colechurch, then very old, as director of the works. King John, who was in France, struck with the beauty of the bridges of that country, and having heard of the magnificent bridge of Saintes which lasted till the middle of the nineteenth century, and which was approached by a Roman triumphal arch, chose, as successor to Colechurch, a Frenchman, called Isembert, “master of the Saintes schools” (1202). Isembert, who had given proof of his capacity in the bridges of La Rochelle and of Saintes,[24] set out with his assistants, furnished with a royal patent addressed to the mayor and inhabitants of London. John Lackland therein vaunted the skill of the master, a man, he said, “of both knowledge and honesty,” and declared that the revenue arising from the houses that he would build upon the bridge should be consecrated for ever to the maintenance of an edifice “so necessary for you and for all those passing thereby.”[25]

8. PART OF LONDON BRIDGE WITH THE DRAWBRIDGE AND NONE-SUCH HOUSE.

(As it stood about A.D. 1600.)

The bridge was finished in 1209, when four “worthy mar­chants of Lon­don” had be­come “prin­ci­pall maist­ers of that work.”[26] It was fur­nished with houses, a chap­el, and de­fen­sive tow­ers. It immediately became celebrated, and was the admiration of all England. The Scot, Sir David Lindesay, Earl of Crawford, having fallen out with Lord Welles, ambassador at the Scottish Court, a duel was decided on, and Lindesay chose London Bridge as the place of combat (1390). He crossed the length of the kingdom, supplied with a safe-conduct from King Richard II, and the duel solemnly came off at the place fixed in the presence of an immense concourse. The first shock was so violent that the lances were shivered, but the Scotchman remained immovable in his saddle. The people, fearing for the success of the English diplomat, shouted that his adversary was tied to his horse against all rules. Hearing this Lindesay, by way of reply, leapt lightly to the ground, with one bound returned to the saddle and, charging his adversary anew, overthrew and grievously wounded him.[27]

The houses built on the bridge were several storeys high; they had cellars in the thickness of the piers. When the inhabitants needed water they lowered their buckets by ropes out of the windows and filled them in the Thames. Sometimes they helped with their ropes poor fellows whose boat had capsized: the arches were narrow, and it was not uncommon in the dark for a boat to strike against the piers and be dashed to pieces. The Duke of Norfolk and several others were saved in this manner in 1428, but some of their companions were drowned. At other times the inhabitants themselves had need of help, for it happened occasionally that the houses, badly repaired, leaned forward and fell in one {48} block into the river. A catastrophe of this kind took place in 1481.

One of the twenty arches of the bridge, the thirteenth from the City side, formed a drawbridge to allow boats to pass,[28] and also to close the approach to the town; this was the obstacle which in 1553 hindered the insurgents led by Sir Thomas Wyatt from entering London. Beside the movable arch rose a tower on the summit of which the executioner long placed the heads of decapitated criminals. That of the Lord Chancellor, Sir Thomas More, bled for a time on the end of a pike on this tower before it was redeemed by Margaret Roper, the daughter of the thinker who had written—“Utopia.”

Travellers wondered at the gruesome sight. “In London,” wrote Joseph Justus Scaliger, who visited the city in 1566, “there ever were many heads on the bridge. . . . I have seen there, as it were [masts] of ships and at the top of them quarters of men’s corpses.”[29]

In 1576, this tower of sombre memories was splendidly reconstructed; the new one, containing fine rooms, flooded with light by innumerable windows, was entirely of wood, carved and gilt, in the “paper worke” style popular in Elizabeth’s time, censured by steady Harrison. It was called “None-such House.” The heads of the “traitors,” sometimes traitors, sometimes saints, were no more to pollute a building so cheerful in aspect; they were placed on the next tower on the Southwark side. Four years after this change, fashionable Lyly the {49} Euphuist ended one of his books with a triumphal praise of England, its products, its universities, its capital, adding: “Among all the straunge and beautiful showes, mee thinketh there is none so notable as the Bridge which crosseth the Theames, which is in manner of a continuall streete, well replenyshed with large and stately houses on both sides, and situate upon twentie arches, whereof each one is made of excellent free stone squared, euerye one of them being three-score foote in height, and full twentie in distaunce one from an other.”[30]

The same arrangement prevailed in the case of important bridges in many countries. In Paris the “Notre Dame” bridge had the appearance of a street with sixty-eight houses built on it.[31] The bridge at Poissy[32] and others were of the same sort, the most famous of those which remain being the “Ponte Vecchio” in Florence.

Even at the time when Lyly praised London Bridge as deserving a place among the “straunge and beautiful {50} showes” of the city, and Stow described it as “a worke verie rare,” the structure was giving more and more frequent signs of decay. Ben Jonson describes a little later his Pennyboy senior as minding

“A curtesie no more then London-bridge

What arch was mended last.”[33]

Upon which that sour-mouthed reformer of poetry, and of bridges, William Gifford, observed in his day: “Two hundred years have nearly elapsed since this was written, and the observation still holds. This pernicious structure has wasted more money in perpetual repairs than would have sufficed to build a dozen safe and commodious bridges, and cost the lives, perhaps, of as many thousand people. This may seem little to those whom it concerns—but there is blood on the city, and a heavy account is before them. Had an alderman or a turtle been lost there, the nuisance would have been long removed.”[34]

Without specifying whether it was out of fear of Gifford, or interest in the aldermanic turtle, or perhaps some higher motives too, the proper authorities took radical measures as to the bridge in the first part of the nineteenth century. An attempt was first made to preserve it with the houses taken down, and broad, solid arches replacing the old ones in the centre of the stream; it had finally to be removed altogether. The present bridge, built near the site of the old one, replaced the “straunge and beautiful showe” of Lylyan days, the “pernicious structure” of Giffordian ones, and was opened to circulation in 1831, the expense having been £1,458,311. It must now live five centuries more to equal the longevity of its predecessor.

9. TAKING DOWN THE HOUSES ON OLD LONDON BRIDGE.

(From a water-colour painting by C. Pyne.)

This had been, all its life long, an exceptional bridge, {53} with a biography of its own, worthy of a biographer, which it got;[35] the others presented a less grandiose appearance. People were even very glad to find bridges like the one at Stratford-at-Bow, in spite of its want of width and its deep ruts; or like the wooden bridge over the Dyke with arches so low and narrow that all water traffic was interrupted by any slight rising of the level of the water. The state of this last bridge, which, in truth, was more of a hindrance than a help to communications, at length excited the indignation of neighbouring counties. During the fifteenth century, it was granted, therefore, to the inhabitants upon their pressing request, that they might reconstruct the bridge, with a movable arch for boats.[36]

In the same way disappeared, also in the fifteenth century, a bridge described by Leland in his “Itinerary” as having been a “poore bridge of tymber and no causey to come to it,” which crossed the Avon at Stratford. It was in such a state that “many poore folkys and othar refusyd to cum to Stratford when Avon was up, or cominge thithar stoode in jeoperdy of lyfe.” The rich Sir Hugh of Clopton, sometime mayor of London, who was born at Clopton near Stratford, and died in 1497, moved by the danger of his compatriots, and “having never wife nor children, convertid a great peace of his substance in good workes in Stratford, first making a sumptuus new bridge and large of stone, wher in the middle be a vi great arches for the maine streame of Avon and at eche ende certen smaul arches to bere the causey, and so to passe commodiously at such tymes as the ryver risith.”[37] This same bridge is still in use, and well deserves the praise bestowed upon it by Leland. But fine as it {54} is, one would have less regretted its disappearance than the destruction of a “praty house of bricke and tymbre,” built by the same Hugh of Clopton with the purpose of ending his days in it. That house was purchased afterwards—also with the intent of ending his life in it—by a certain countryman of Hugh, who has since become famous enough, William Shakespeare, who repaired the house, then called New Place, and died in it in the year 1616.

The calling in of the foreign cleric Isembert to superintend the works of London Bridge seems to have been exceptional. The building of ordinary bridges was usually entrusted to local craftsmen or masons; and it would have been strange indeed if the people who could raise such splendid cathedral naves all over England, had been at a loss to span rivers with bridges. One of the few indentures for the building of a bridge which have come down to us concerns the re-construction of Catterick bridge, Yorkshire, in 1422, on the great Roman road, the Erming Street, and the contractors seem to have been English. The document is curious in many respects.

The contract binds several authorities on the one hand, and “Tho. Ampilforde, John Garette, and Robert Maunselle, masons,” on the other. It is stated in it “yat y^e foresaides Tho., John, and Rob., schalle make a brigge of stane oure (over) y^e water of Swalle atte Catrik be twix y^e old stane brigge and y^e new brigge of tree (of wood), quilke forsaid brigge, with y^e grace of God, salle be made sufficiant [and war]kmanly in mason craft accordand in substance to Barnacastelle brigge, aftir y^e ground and y^e watyr accordes, of twa pilers, twa land stathes (abutments), and thre arches.” The deed goes on to give a minute account of the way in which every part of the work must be performed, of the material that will be used, and of the time when the bridge must be entirely finished and open to circulation: “And y^e {57} saides John, Tho., and Rob., schalle this forsaid brigge sufficiantly in masoncraft make and fully perfurnist in all partiez and holy endyd be y^e Fest of Seint Michille y^e Arcangelle quilk y^t shalle fall in y^e yere of our Lorde Gode M^le ccccxxv.” It is understood besides that they will receive in payment, at certain fixed dates, “gounes,” and also sums of money, the total of which will be 260 marks sterling.[38]

10. HUGH OF CLOPTON’S BRIDGE AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON.

(Fifteenth Century.)

The bridge built by the three masons, John, Thomas, and Robert, is still in existence, but it has undergone great and grievous alterations.

We have already seen some examples of the means employed at this period to secure the maintenance of these valuable constructions, when that maintenance had to be ensured by something more than the charges incident to the ownership of the neighbouring lands (trinoda necessitas); we know that it was sometimes provided through “indulgences” promised to benefactors, sometimes by the action of gilds, or municipalities, sometimes also by the endowments with which one of the great would enrich the bridge founded by him. But without speaking of occasional gifts,[39] several other methods were employed with success, even with profit, such as the lawful levying of those tolls which Godfrey Pratt had arbitrarily imposed on his fellow citizens, or the collection of pious offerings made at the chapel of the bridge and to its warden. The right of toll was called brudtholl (bridgetoll) or pontagium; the grantee, to whom the benefit went, bound himself in return to make all the necessary repairs. Sometimes the King accorded the right as a favour during a certain period, as appears, for example, from the {58} following petition, which is of the time of Edward I or Edward II:

“To our lord the king, prays his vassal William of Latymer lord of Yarm,[40] that he will grant him pontage for five years at the bridge of Yarm, which is broken down, where men were wont to pass with carts and with horses on the king’s highway between the water of Tees towards Scotland. May it please him to do this for the soul of Madame his consort, who is to God commended, and for the common profit of the people who pass.” The King’s reply was favourable: “The King grants the pontage for the term.”[41]

Some of the tariffs in force at certain bridges during the fourteenth century have come down to us and have been printed; the most detailed of these is of the year 1306, and concerns London Bridge. It is annexed to a patent of Edward I, and enumerates not only passengers, carriages, and animals of every quality or description, but also every sort of “saleable” ware which may pass either on or under the bridge: though it may seem somewhat unfair to have drawn money from shipmen towards the expenses of a structure that was their most formidable competitor.[42] This list, which is a great help in forming an exact idea of the commodities brought {59} to London by land or by river, covers no less than four pages of printed matter: including coal, timber, beer, wines, horses, cattle, pigs, grain, sheep, butter and cheese, fish, furs and skins, metal pots and cups, millstones, silk and other cloths, etc.; the place they come from is sometimes mentioned: Northampton, Flanders, Normandy.

Another very curious petition (1334) will show the use of the other mode, that is, the collection of voluntary offerings from charitable passers-by. The share of the clergy in the care of these buildings, the greediness with which the profitable right of collecting the gifts was disputed, and the embezzlements sometimes resulting therefrom are to be noticed:

“To our lord the king and his Council showeth their poor chaplain, Robert le Fenere, parson of the church of St. Clement, of Huntingdon, of the diocese of Lincoln, that there is a little chapel lately built in his parish on the bridge of Huntingdon, the keeping of which chapel our lord the king has granted and delivered during pleasure to one Sir Adam, warden of the house of St. John of Huntingdon, who receives and takes away all manner of offerings and alms without doing anything for the repair of the bridge or of the said chapel as he is bound to do. On the other hand, it seems hurtful to God and Holy Church that offerings should be appropriated to any one except to the parson within whose parish the chapel is founded. Wherefore the said Robert prays, for God and Holy Church and for the souls of our lord the king’s father and his ancestors, that he may have the keeping of the said chapel annexed to his church, together with the charge of the bridge, and he will take heed with all care to maintain them well, with better will than any stranger, for the profit and honour of Holy Church, to please God and all people passing that way.”[43]

This jumble of human and divine interests (from the birthplace, that was to be, of Oliver Cromwell) was submitted to the usual examination, and the request was set aside, with the following note: “Non est peticio parliamenti”; it is not a petition for Parliament.

In many cases, the bridge was itself at once proprietor of real estate and beneficiary of the offerings made to its chapel, and sometimes also grantee of a right of toll; it had income from both civil and religious sources. Such were notably the bridges of London, of Rochester,[44] of Bedford, and many others. John de Bodenho, chaplain, explains to Parliament that the inhabitants of Bedford hold their own town at farm from the king, and have undertaken to maintain their bridge. For this they “assigned certain tenements and rents in the said town to support it, and with their alms have newly built an oratory on the side of the water belonging to Lord Mowbray, by leave of the lord, adjoining the said bridge.” The burgesses gave to the plaintiff the charge of the reparations, together with the whole revenues. But the priest, John of Derby, represented to the king that it was a royal chapel which he might dispose of, and the king has given it to him, which is very unjust, since the chapel is not the king’s; even those who founded it are still living. All these reasons were found good; the judges were ordered to grant the plaintiff’s plea, and {61} were reprimanded for not having done it sooner, as had already been prescribed to them.[45]

Enriched by so many offerings, protected by the trinoda necessitas, and by the common interest of the landed proprietors, these bridges should have been continually repaired, and have remained sound. But there was nothing of the sort, and the distance between legal theory and actual practice was great. When the taxes were regularly collected and honestly applied, they usually sufficed to support the building; even the right of collecting them, being in itself profitable, was, as has been seen, strongly contested for; but the example of Godfrey Pratt and of some others has already shown that all the wardens were not honest. Many, even in the highest positions, imitated Godfrey. London Bridge itself, so rich, so useful, so admired, was in constant need of repairs, never done until danger was imminent, or even a catastrophe had happened. Henry III granted the farm of the bridge revenues “to his beloved wife,” who neglected to maintain it, and appropriated to herself without scruple the rents of the building; none the less did the king renew his patent at the expiration of the term, that his said beloved might benefit “from a richer favour.” The result was not long awaited; it was soon found that the bridge was in ruins, and to restore it the ordinary resources were not enough; it was necessary to send collectors throughout the country to gather offerings from those willing to give. Edward I, in January 1281, begged his subjects to hasten; the bridge would give way if they did not send prompt assistance. He ordered the archbishops, bishops, all the clergy, to allow his collectors to address the people freely with “pious exhortations,” that the subsidies should be craved without delay. But nevertheless the supplies arrived too late; the catastrophe had already happened, a “sudden {62} ruin” had befallen the bridge, and to repair this misfortune the king established a special tax upon the passengers, merchandise and boats (February 4, 1282), which tax was imposed again and the new tariff afore mentioned was put into force on May 7, 1306. What this sudden ruin was we learn from Stow’s “Annales”; the winter had been very severe, the frost and snow had caused great cracks in the floor of the bridge, so that towards the Feast of the Purification (February 2), five of the arches fell in. Many other bridges, too, in the country had suffered damage, Rochester Bridge had even entirely fallen.[46]

It may be imagined what fate awaited unendowed country bridges. The alms from the passers-by proved insufficient, so that little by little, nobody repairing them, the arches wore through, the parapets were detached, not a cart passed but fresh stones disappeared in the river, and soon carriages and riders could not venture without danger over the half demolished building. If moreover a flood should occur, all was over with the bridge and often with the imprudent or hurried travellers who might be crossing late in the evening. An accident of this kind was brought up for his justification by a chamberlain of North Wales, from whom Edward III claimed a hundred marks. The chamberlain averred that he had duly sent the money by his clerk, William of Markeley; but, alas, “the said William was drowned in Severn, at Moneford bridge, by the rising flood of water, and could not be found, so that he was devoured by beasts; thus the said hundred marks chanced to be {63} lost.”[47] At that time there were still wolves in England, and the disappearance of the body, with the 100 marks, though even then wolves did not feed on marks, would appear less unlikely than at present.

In those days neglect attained a degree now impossible and which we can scarcely imagine. The Commons of the counties of Nottingham, Derby, and Lincoln, and of the town of Nottingham, declare to the Good Parliament of 1376, that there is near the town of Nottingham a great bridge over the Trent, called Heybethebridge, “to the making and repair of which nobody is bound and alms only are collected, by which bridge all the comers and goers between the north and the south parts should have their passage.” This bridge is “ruinous,” and “oftentimes have several persons been drowned, as well horsemen as carts, man, and harness.” The complainants pray for power to appoint two bridge wardens, who shall administer the property that will be given in view of its maintenance, “for God and as a work of charity.” But the king did not accede to their request.[48]

Or maybe it happened that the riverside proprietors let their obligation fall into oblivion, even when it was at the beginning formal and precise enough. The legislator had, however, taken some precautions; he had inscribed bridges on the list of the articles for those inquiries periodically opened in England by the justices in Eyre, sheriffs and bailiffs, as we shall see further on[49]; but those concerned found means to defraud the law. People had been so long used to see ruin menace the edifice, that when it actually did give way no one could say who ought to have repaired it. It then became {64} necessary to apply to the king for a special inquiry, and to seek on whom lay the service. Parliament thus decides in 1339, on the demand of the prior of St. Neots: “Item, let there be good and true men assigned to survey the bridge and causeway of St. Neots, whether they be broken down and carried away by the rising of the waters, as the prior alleges, or not. And in case they are broken down and carried away, to inquire who ought and was used to have it repaired, and who is bound of right to do it; and how the bridge and roadway may be re-made and repaired. And what they[50] find they shall return into the chancery.”

In consequence of such inquests the persons charged with the maintenance being determined by the findings of a jury convened on the spot, a tax is levied upon them for the carrying out of the repairs. But they often protest and refuse to pay; they are sued, they appeal to the king; horse, cart, anything that may come to hand and which belongs to them is promptly seized to be sold for the benefit of the bridge; the dispute drags on, and meanwhile the edifice gives way. Hamo de Morston, for example, in the eleventh year of Edward II, complains that his horse has been taken from him. Called to justify themselves, Simon Porter and two others who have made the seizure, explain that there is a bridge at Shoreham, called the Long bridge, which is half destroyed; now it has been found that the building ought to be restored at the expense of the tenants of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Hamo, who is one of them, having refused to pay his part of the contribution, Simon and the others took the horse. They acted by order of a bailiff, and their conduct is vindicated. Another case of the same period is that of the Abbot of Coggeshall who, after a similar inquest, refused to execute any {65} repairs to a bridge near his lands under pretext that within memory of man there had been no other bridge over the river “than a certain plank of board,” and that at all times it had been found sufficient for horsemen and pedestrians. Innumerable are the examples of inquests of this sort and of the difficulties in executing the measures decided on.[51]

Owing to these several causes the chronicle-history of even the most important English bridges, when it is possible to trace it, is a long tale of crumblings into the river, rebuildings, and repairs, and ever-recurring catastrophes. Sometimes when the damage was great, and much money was needed and was not forthcoming, a ferry was established as a substitute for the late bridge, and remained in use for years and years together.

Such a series of events is offered by the history of the bridge on the Tweed at Berwick, which was one of the longest in England. The first time we hear of it is in the year 1199, and the news is that it gave way at that date, owing to a rise of the river. It was rebuilt and gave way again. Sometimes it was rebuilt of wood and sometimes of stone; occasionally it fell altogether from end to end, and then a ferry was established, and was maintained for a long period. This was the case in 1294, when great harm was done by the inundations. “Where the bridge fell at this time,” says the latest historian of Berwick, “there it lay for many years. The only method of crossing was by ferry boats, worked from both sides of the river; while the ferry in times of danger was defended by soldiers. Thus, in Sir Robert Heron’s (the controller) ‘Book of Bills’ for 1310, there is allowed one half quarter of pease to each of six crossbowmen (one of them being John Sharp Arewe) guarding the ferry of the Tweed at Berwick.”[52] The ferry {66} follows vicissitudes scarcely less numerous than the bridge itself, and disputes arise as to the right of working it, or rather of collecting its tolls. The revenues of the bridge, now that there is no longer any bridge, are also a matter of difficulty, and the king has to interfere to settle the question of the rents of houses and of fisheries belonging to the ruined monument.

In 1347 at last the citizens of the town began to think seriously of rebuilding their bridge, and the king granted them the right of collecting towards the expenses a toll of sixpence on every ship entering their harbour. The bridge was then rebuilt, but not in such a way as not to fall again, which has since happened to it many times.

Not less doleful is the story of the bridge on the Dee at Chester, of which we hear in the chronicles for the first time in 1227 and 1297, on account of its being carried away by the water,[53] and the same may be said of many of the bridges of mediæval England, especially the longer ones.

When rebuilding had to be done people generally did not care to remove what remained of the old monument, for which reason, when a bridge has broken down in our time, it has been often found that it was made of an accumulation of superimposed bridges. Of this the bridge over the Teign, between Newton Abbot and Teignmouth, rebuilt in 1815, is an example. It became, in this case, apparent that four successive bridges at least had been at various times erected with or over the remains of previous constructions. Mr. P. T. Taylor, who investigated the matter at that time, gave as his opinion “that the last or upper work was done in the sixteenth century, and that the red bridge had been built on the salt marsh in the thirteenth century; since which time there has been an accumulation of soil to the depth of ten feet. He supposes the wooden bridge to be as old {69} as the Conquest, and the white stone bridge to have been a Roman work.”[54]

11. THE CHAPEL ON THE BRIDGE AT WAKEFIELD.

(Fourteenth Century; present state)

Given these circumstances, it is rather a matter of surprise than otherwise to find that a good number of mediæval bridges still subsist in England; the more so as the nineteenth century has been a great destroyer of bridges. The enormous increase of population and the proportionate want of means of communication during that period has proved fatal to many bridges, and especially to the more famous and important ones which had been built in the more largely populated districts. Owing to such necessities London Bridge itself has disappeared, and even the recollection of the long years, during which it had been, so to say, a factor in English history and associated with the life of the nation, could not save it.

Many others had the same fate, or were, at least, as at Norwich, Durham, Chester, Wakefield, Monmouth, and elsewhere, partly rebuilt or enlarged, not always in such a way as to retain much of their pristine appearance. For all that, however, enough of them remain to give an accurate idea of what they were, without having recourse merely to descriptions or drawings in contemporary manuscripts. None, it is true, can for elegance and completeness compete with such bridges as are still to be found in France; for example, with the magnificent thirteenth-century bridge of Valentré at Cahors, of which a picture has been given above (p. [37]). Those that remain are sufficient, nevertheless, to testify to the skill of old English architects in that branch of their art. As might have been expected, these bridges abound chiefly in those parts of the country where the increase of traffic and population has been the least conspicuous, on roads little more frequented to-day than in the Middle Ages, which then led to strong castles or flourishing monasteries, and only lead now to {70} ivy-clad ruins. For this reason they are more numerous in some parts of Wales than anywhere in England.

In several cases the chapels which placed them under the protection of a saint and where offerings were collected have escaped the hand of the restorer and are still extant. There is one, of the fifteenth century, at Rotherham, Yorkshire, “a chapel of stone wel wrought,” says Leland[55]; another, a fine small one, is to be seen on the bridge at Bradford-on-Avon, Wiltshire; a third, a very tall structure, stands on the middle of the bridge at St. Ives, Huntingdonshire; but the finest example by far is the chapel on the bridge at Wakefield, both chapel and bridge dating from the fourteenth century. Leland mentions them as “the faire bridge of stone of nine arches, under which runnith the river of Calder, and on the east side of this bridge is a right goodly chapel of our lady and two cantuarie preestes founded in it.” This foundation was made about 1358; Edward III, by a charter dated at Wakefield, settled “£10 per annum on William Kaye and William Bull and their successors for ever to perform divine service in a chapel of St. Mary newly built on the bridge at Wakefield.”[56]

In our century the bridge has been widened towards the west, the arches being round on that side and having been left Gothic on the other. The chapel, the foundations of which rest on an island in the river, was repaired in 1847, but its original style was carefully respected.[57] The greatest change is in the surroundings, where nothing recalls either Dr. Primrose or the clear {73} waters of Plantagenet times; and the smoke and refuse of innumerable manufactures blacken the bridge, the chapel, the river, and even the sky itself.

12. THE BRIDGE WITH A DEFENSIVE TOWER AT WARKWORTH, NORTHUMBERLAND.

(Fourteenth Century; present state.)

Several specimens also remain of bridges with the triangular recesses we have mentioned, left on the top of the piers for the safety of foot passengers. Among many other examples may be quoted the beautiful fourteenth-century bridge at Warkworth, Northumberland,[58] which also deserves notice for another characteristic much more rarely to be met with, that is, the preservation of the tower built at one end for its defence. Most of the bridges of any importance were protected in this way, which, as the country became quieter, was found useless; the consideration that they were ornamental rarely sufficed to prevent their being pulled down. Those at Chester were removed in 1782–1784; those at York were demolished with the bridge itself, of the thirteenth century, at the beginning of the nineteenth; the Durham one, built on Framwellgate Bridge, in 1760; the beautiful fortified entrance to one of the two bridges at Shrewsbury disappeared in the same century, as well as the whole structure, with the picturesque old houses it bore. It must be conceded that those towers were sometimes very inconvenient. A witness of the fact told me that, quite recently, a gipsy’s caravan was stopped at the tower on Warkworth Bridge, being unable to pass under it owing to the lowness of the arch. The pavement had to be hollowed out to allow of the caravan’s proceeding on its way.

The best example of a defensive tower is the machicolated one at Monmouth, on the Monnow Bridge; except for the opening of passages to be used by people on foot, the fortified gate looks as it did in the Middle {74} Ages. The bridge itself, familiar to the Monmouth-born “Prince Hal” of Shakespeare, and of England, has, been, however, widened, as at Wakefield and elsewhere. The ribs of the ancient arches are still visible within the modern ones.

In Elizabethan times defensive towers for bridges continued to be built, but in poetry only. Spenser raised, in his lines, a beautiful structure, of Doric style, as befitted the Renaissance days in which he lived, at the entrance to the island of Venus:

It was a bridge ybuilt in goodly wize,

With curious corbes and pendants graven faire,

And arched all with porches, did arize

On stately pillours, fram’d after the Doricke guize.

And for defence thereof, on th’ other end

There reared was a castle faire and strong,

That warded all which in and out did wend,

And flancked both the bridges sides along.[59]

But, except as castles in the air, such fortifications were no longer in demand.

The rarest of all bridges are, nowadays in England, those having houses on them, as was the fashion in the Middle Ages. The picturesque High Bridge at Lincoln, originally built in the 12th century, still preserves the lodgings built over it[60]; a solitary house remains on Elvet Bridge at Durham, and the only bridge of some length, with a complete row of houses, is a com­par­a­tive­ly recent one, being the familiar Pulteney Bridge built at Bath by William Pulteney in the eighteenth century. {75}

13. THE DEFENSIVE TOWER ON THE MONNOW BRIDGE, MONMOUTH.

The more numerous of the mediæval bridges still in existence are those of one arch; there are many of them in Wales, some being most elegant and picturesque, such as the famous Devil’s Bridge over the Mynach, near Aberystwith. In England the largest is the one over the moat of Norwich Castle; and the most curious the three-branched one at Crowland, this last belonging in its actual state to the fourteenth century. It is no longer used, as no road passes over it and no water under.[61] Another of the finest, and one of the least known, crosses the Esk, near Danby Castle, Yorkshire. Its date is about 1385; the arms of Neville, Lord Latimer, who had it built, are yet to be seen at the top of the parapet.

14. THE BRIDGE NEAR DANBY CASTLE, YORKSHIRE.

(Fourteenth Century.)]

Lastly, a word may be said of the larger bridges, most {78} of which have unfortunately undergone great alterations and repairs. Besides the Wakefield Bridge above mentioned, there is one over the Dee, at Chester, part of which is as old as the thirteenth century, thoroughly repaired since Ormerod disrespectfully described it as “a long fabric of red stone extremely dangerous and unsightly.”[62] At Durham there are the Framwellgate and Elvet bridges, both originally built in the twelfth century. A six-arched bridge, rebuilt in the fifteenth century, exists at Hereford; another, repaired in 1449, with the help of indulgences, remains at Bidford.[63] A four-arched one, built in the fourteenth century, over the Dee is to be seen at Llangollen, being “one of the Tri Thlws Cymru, or three beauties of Wales;”[64] the arches are irregular in size, for the builder, in this and many other cases, minding more the solidity of the structure than its regularity, erected the piers at the places where the presence of rocks in the bed of the river made it most convenient. A very noteworthy one is the thirteenth-century bridge over the Nith, at Dumfries, in Scotland, which had formerly thirteen arches, seven of which only are now in use. It was long considered the finest after that of London. Other mediæval bridges of several arches remain at Huntingdon,[65] at St. Ives, at Norwich (Bishop’s Bridge), at Potter Heigham (a most picturesque one), at Tewkesbury, etc.[66] The Tewkesbury one, with the middle arch enlarged in modern times, but the {79} triangular recesses for foot passengers still in use, dates back to King John, teste Leland, whose biography of the bridge shows that it went through the vicissitudes usual in the life of such buildings: “King John beyng Erle of Glocester by his wife caussid the bridge of Twekesbyri to be made of stone. He that was put in truste to do it first made a stone bridge over the gret poure of booth the armes [of the Avon] by north and weste: and after, to spede and spare mony, he made at the northe ende a wodde bridge of a greate length for sodeyne land waters, putting the residue of the mony to making of the castel of Hanley . . .

“King John gave to the mayntenance of this bridge the hole tolle of the Wensday and Saturday markets in the towne, the which they yet possesse, turnyng it rather holely to their owne profit then reparation of the bridge.”[67]

The maintenance of the roads much resembled that of the bridges; that is to say, it greatly depended upon chance, opportunity, or the goodwill or piety of those to whom the adjoining land belonged. In the case of roads, as of bridges, petitions were sent to Parliament asking that a tax be levied for the repair of the road upon those who used it: an early attempt at the establishment of that toll system which survived in England until the highways were “disturnpiked” in the second half of the nineteenth century. “Walter Godelak of Walingford, prays for the establishment of a custom to be {80} collected from every cart of merchandise using the road between Jowermersh and Newenham, on account of the depth and for the repair of the said way. Reply: The King will do nothing therein.”[68] Again, a lady arrogates to herself the right to levy a tax on all comers: “To our lord the King show the commonalty of the people of Nottinghamshire passing between Kelm and Newur, that whereas the King’s highway between the said two towns has been wont to be for all persons freely to pass, on horseback, in carts, and on foot from time immemorial, the Lady of Egrum has got hold to herself of the said road in severalty, taking from those passing along there grievous ransoms and exactions, in disheritance of the King and his crown and to the great hurt of the people.” The king orders an inquest.[69]

Even a bishop would occasionally set a bad example, though bound more than any to set a good one. The inhabitants of Huntingdonshire and “the Island of Ely” remonstrate in 1314–15, because the men of those parts, either on foot or on horseback, have always used the Horketh causeway, “which causway the bishop of Ely is bound to repair and maintain, they say, for certain rents which he gets; and the causway is broken by the fault of the bishop, and the same bishop does not allow ships to pass there under the bridge without levying a heavy water tax (“theolonium”), which tax ought to be applied to the reparation and maintenance of the same bridge and causway, and they crave remedy.” An inquest is ordered.[70]

Sometimes the sheriffs in their turns ordered the levy of taxes on those who did not repair the roads; the law, as we have seen, allowed it; but those who were fined protested before Parliament under the pretext that the {81} roads and the bridges were “sufficient enough”:—“Item, humbly pray the Commons of your realm, as well spiritual as temporal, complaining that several sheriffs of your kingdom feign and procure presentments in their turns that divers roads, bridges, and causways are defective from non-reparation, with purpose and intent to amerce abbots, priors, and seculars, sometimes up to ten pounds, sometimes more, sometimes less, and levy the said amercements by their officers called out-riders, without delay or any reply of the parties, in places where the said roads, bridges, and causeys are sufficient enough, or perhaps are not in charge of the said amerced men.” Reply: “Let the common law be kept, and the amercements reasonable in this case.”[71]

Where negligence began, the ruts, or rather the quags, began. Those numerous little subterranean arches, which the foot-passenger now does not even notice, made to carry off rivulets dry during a part of the year, did not exist then, and the rivulet flowed through the road. In the East at the present day, the caravaneers talk in the bazaars of the town about the roads and pathways; we speak of them ourselves on returning home, as books of travel show. There, however, a road is often nothing else than a place along which men are accustomed to pass; it little resembles the dignified highways the idea of which the word road evokes in European minds. During the rainy season pools of water cut off the ordinary track of the horsemen and camels; they increase little by little, and at {82} length overflow and form temporary rivers. At evening the sun sets in the heavens and also in the empurpled road; the innumerable puddles along the way, dotting the ground, reflect the red flaming clouds; the wet horses and splashed riders shiver in the midst of all these glimmerings, while overhead and underfoot the two suns approach one another to meet on the horizon. The roads of the Middle Ages sometimes were like those of the modern East; the sunsets were magnificent after showers, but to face long journeys one had to be a robust horseman, inured to fatigue, with unshakable health. The usual education and training prepared people, it is true, for all these trials.

The roads in England would have been entirely impassable, and religious zeal would, no more than the indulgences of the Bishop of Durham and his peers, have been sufficient to keep them in condition, if the nobility and the clergy, that is to say, the mass of the landed proprietors, had not had an immediate and daily interest in maintaining possible roads. The English kings had had the prudence not to form great compact fiefs like those which they themselves owned in France, and which made of them such dangerous vassals. Their own example had taught them, and, from the beginning, they are found distributing to the shareholders in that great undertaking, the Conquest, domains scattered in every part of the island. This kind of chequered proprietorship, still subsisting in the fourteenth century, was noticed by Froissart: “And several times,” he says, giving an account of a talk with his friend and patron, Edward le Despenser,[72] “it happened that when I rode about the country with him, for the lands and revenues of the English barons are here and there and much scattered, he called me and said: ‘Froissart, do you see that great town with the high steeple?’ {83}

“ ‘Yes, my lord,’ I answered, ‘Why do you say so?’

“ ‘I say so because it should be mine, but there was a bad queen in this country who took all from us.’

“And thus, on one occasion or another, did he show me, here and there in England, more than forty such places.”[73]

The tragic fated Despensers were not alone in having the lands which they owed to the prince’s favour sown haphazard in every county; all the great of their rank were in the same case. The king himself, with all his court, as well as the landed nobility, ceaselessly went from one country place to another,[74] partly from choice and partly because they could not do otherwise. In times of peace it was a semblance of activity that was not displeasing, but especially it was an economical necessity. All, however rich, were obliged, like landowners of every age, to live upon the produce of their domains, first of one, then of the other, and as they went from place to place, it was very important for them to have passable roads, where their horses would not stumble and where their baggage wagons, which served for veritable removals, might have a chance of not being overturned.

Military necessity, Scottish wars, French wars, Welsh or Irish wars had a similar effect, and so had, to a degree, nowadays incredible, the kings’ passion for hawking. They did not want to be stopped when following their birds by a broken bridge, and they would order the commonalty, whether or not it was bound to do so, to make prompt repairs in view of their coming. Hence Article 23 in the Great Charter, meant to check this {84} propensity: “Let no community or man be constrained to make bridges on rivers except those who were legally bound from old to do so.” As late, however, as October 6, 1373, we find that Edward III commanded “the sheriff of Oxfordshire to declare that all bridges should be repaired and all fords marked out with stakes for the crossing of the King ‘with his falcons’ during the approaching winter season.”[75]

In the same way the monks, those vast-landed husbandmen, were much interested in the proper maintenance of the roads. Their agricultural undertakings were of considerable extent; an abbey such as that of Meaux, near Beverley, had in the middle of the fourteenth century, 2,638 sheep, 515 oxen, and 98 horses, with land in proportion.[76] Besides, as we have seen, the care of watching over the good condition of the roads was more incumbent on the clergy than on any other class, because it was a pious and meritorious work.

All these motives combined were enough to provide roads sufficient for the usual needs, but in those days people were content with little. Carts and even carriages were heavy, lumbering, solid machines, which stood the hardest jolts. People of any worth journeyed on horseback, the use of a carriage being exceptional. As to those who travelled on foot, they were used to all sorts of misery. Little then sufficed; and if other proofs were wanting of the state into which the roads were liable to fall, even in the most frequented places, we should find them in a patent of Edward III of November 20, 1353, which orders the paving of the highroad, alta via, running from Temple Bar to Westminster. This road, being almost a street, had been paved, but, the king explains, it is “so full of holes and bogs . . . and the pavement is so damaged {85} and broken,” that the traffic has become very dangerous for men and carts. He orders, in consequence, each landowner on both sides of the road to remake, at his own expense, a footway of seven feet up to the ditch, usque canellum. The middle of the road—inter canellos—the width of which is unfortunately not given, is to be paved, and the expense covered by means of a tax laid on all the merchandise going to the staple at Westminster.[77]

Three years later a general tax was laid by the City of London on all carts and horses bringing merchandise or materials of any kind to the town. The regulation which imposed it, of the thirtieth year of Edward III, first states that all the roads in the immediate environs of London are in such bad condition that the carriers, merchants, etc., “are oftentimes in peril of losing what they bring.” Henceforth, to help the reparations, a due will be levied on all vehicles and all laden beasts coming to or going from the city; a penny per cart and a farthing per horse each way; reductions were granted in case of constant traffic: a cart bringing sand, gravel, or clay, paid only threepence a week. By an article the unfairness of which had nothing exceptional, the richer were made to pay less than the poorer: “But for the carts and horses of great people and other folks that bring their own victuals and other goods for the use and consumption of their own hostels, nothing shall be taken.”[78]

The environs of Paris about the same time presented roads and bridges quite as badly kept as those in the neighbourhood of London. Charles VI, in one of his ordinances, states that the hedges and brambles have greatly encroached on the roads, and that there are even some in the midst of which trees have shot up: {86}

“Outside the said town of Paris, in several parts of the suburbs, prévosté and vicomté of the same, there are many notable and ancient highways, bridges, lanes, and roads, which are much injured, damaged, or decayed and otherwise hindered, by ravines of water and great stones, by hedges, brambles, and many other trees which have grown there, and by many other supervening hindrances, because they have not been maintained and provided for in time past; and they are in such a bad state that they cannot be securely used on foot or horseback, nor by vehicles, without great perils and inconveniences; and some of them are entirely abandoned because men cannot resort there.” The Provost of Paris is ordered to cause the repairs to be made by all to whom it pertained; and, if necessary, to compel by force “all” the inhabitants of the towns in the neighbourhood of the bridges and highways to help in the work.[79]

15. THE PARLIAMENT SITTING AT WESTMINSTER, OCT., 1399.

(From the Harl. MS. 1319, painted circa A.D. 1400.)

But what makes us understand better than ordinances the difficulty of journeys in bad weather, and enables us to picture to ourselves flooded roads resembling those of the East in the rainy season, is the impossibility sometimes acknowledged in official documents of responding to the most important royal summons, owing to the inclemency of the elements. Thus, for example, it might happen that the bulk of the members called to Parliament from all parts of England would fail at the appointed day, for no other reason than bad weather having, as the event showed, caused the roads to be impassable. The record of the sittings of the second Parliament of the thirteenth year of Edward III (1339) show that it was necessary to declare to the few representatives of the Commons and of the nobility who had been able to reach Westminster, “that because the prelates, earls, barons, and {89} other lords and knights of the shires, citizens and burgesses of cities and boroughs were so troubled by the bad weather that they could not arrive that day, it would be proper to await their coming.”[80]

Yet these members were not poor folks, they had good horses, good coats, thick cloaks covering their necks up to their hats, with large hanging sleeves falling over their knees;[81] no matter: the snow or the rain, the floods or the frost, had been the stronger. Battling against the weather that hampered their journey, prelates, barons, or knights, halted their steeds at some roadside inn, and as they listened to the tap of the sleet on the wooden panels closing the window, with their feet at the fire in the smoky room while awaiting the subsidence of the waters, they must have thought on the royal displeasure which soon, no doubt, would show itself in the “painted chamber” at Westminster. In short, though there were roads, though land was burdened with service for their support, though laws from time to time recalled their obligations to the owners of the soil, though the private interest of lords and of monks, in addition to the interest of the public, gave occasion to reparation now and then, the fate of the traveller in a snowfall or in a thaw was very precarious. Well might the Church have pity on him, and include him, together with the sick and the captive, among the unfortunates whom she recommended to the daily prayers of pious souls.[82] {90}

16. A COMMON CART.

(From the MS. 10 E. IV. in the British Museum. English; Fourteenth Century.)

CHAPTER II THE ORDINARY TRAVELLER AND THE CASUAL PASSER-BY

I

Thus kept up, the roads stretched away from the towns and plunged into the country, interrupted by rivulets in winter and dotted with holes; the heavy carts slowly followed their devious course, and the sound of creaking wood accompanied the vehicle. These carts were numerous and in very common use. Some were square-shaped timbrels, simple massive boxes made of planks borne on two wheels; others, somewhat lighter, were formed of slatts latticed with a willow trellis. To add to their solidity, the wheels were studded with big-headed nails.[83] Both sorts were used for labour in the {91} country; they were to be found everywhere, and as they abounded their hire was not expensive. Twopence for carrying a ton weight a distance of one mile was the average price; for carrying corn, it was about a penny a mile per ton.[84] All this does not prove that the roads were excellent, but that these carts, indispensable to agriculture, were numerous. They did not cost much to the villagers, who usually were the makers thereof; they were built solid and massive because they were easier to set up thus and resisted better the jolts of the roads; a modest remuneration would suffice for their owners. The king always employed a number; when he moved from one manor to another, the brilliant cortège of the lords was followed by an army of loud-creaking borrowed carts.

The official purveyors found the carts wherever they went and freely appropriated them; they exercised their requisitions ten leagues on either side of the road followed by the royal convoy. They even took without scruple the carts of travellers who had come perhaps thirty or forty leagues distance, and whose journey was thus abruptly interrupted. There were indeed statutes against forced loans, which specifically provided that suitable payment should be made, that is to say, “ten pence a day for a cart with two horses, and fourteen pence for a cart with three horses.” But often no payment came. The “poor Commons” renewed their protests, the parliament their statutes, and the purveyors their exactions.

Besides the carts they required corn, hay, oats, beer, meat; it was a little army that had to be fed, and the requisitions caused the villagers painful apprehension. People did what they could to be exempted; the simplest way was to bribe the purveyor, but the poor could not. Yet numberless regulations had successively promised {92} that there should never be any further abuse. The king was powerless; under an imperfect government, laws created to last for ever rapidly lose their vitality, and those made at that time died in a day.

Purveyors swarmed; impostors gave themselves out as king’s officers who were not, and did not prove the least greedy. All bought at inadequate prices and limited themselves to fair promises of payment. The statute of 1330 shows how these payments never came; how also when twenty-five quarters of corn were taken only twenty were reckoned because they were measured by “the heaped bushel.”[85] In the same way, for hay, straw, etc., the purveyors found means to reckon at a halfpenny what was worth two or three pence; they ordered that supplies of wine should be held in readiness for them, kept the best for themselves in order to sell it again to their own profit, and exacted payment for returning a part to the original owners, which was a strange reversal of things. The king acknowledged all these evils and decreed reforms accordingly. A little later he did so again, with no more result. In 1362 he declared that henceforth the purveyors should pay ready money at the current market price; and he gravely added, as an important guarantee, that the purveyors should lose their detested name and should be called buyers: “that the heinous name of purveyor be changed, and named achatour.”[86] A word reform, if any.[87]

17. A REAPER’S CART GOING UP-HILL.

(From the Louterell Psalter; Fourteenth Century; “Vetusta Monumenta,” vol. vi.)

The same abuses existed in France, and numerous ordinances may be read in the pages of Isambert, conceived in exactly the same spirit and corresponding to {95} the same complaints; ordinances of Philip the Fair in 1308, of Louis X in 1342, of Philip VI, who willed that the “preneurs pour nous” (takers for us), should not take unless they had “new letters from us,” which shows the existence of false purveyors as in England. John of France renews all the restrictions of his predecessors, December 25, 1355, and so on.

The king and his lords journeyed on horseback for the most part, but they had carriages too. Nothing gives a better idea of the awkward, cumbersome luxury which gave its splendour to civil life during this century, than the structure of these heavy machines. The best had four wheels, and were drawn by three or four horses, one behind the other, one of them mounted by a postilion provided with a short-handled whip of many thongs; solid beams rested on the axles, and above this framework rose an archway rounded like a tunnel;[88] an ungainly whole. But the details were extremely elegant, the wheels were carved and their spokes expanded near the hoop into ribs forming pointed arches; the beams were painted and gilded, the inside was hung with those dazzling tapestries, the glory of the age; the seats were furnished with embroidered cushions; a lady might stretch out there, half sitting, half lying; pillows were placed in the corners as if to invite sleep or meditation, square windows opened on the sides and were hung with silk curtains.[89] {96}

Thus travelled the noble lady, slim in form, tightly clad in a dress which outlined every curve of the body, her long slender hands caressing the favourite dog or bird. The knight, equally tight in his cote-hardie, looked at her with a complacent eye, and, if he knew good manners, opened his heart to his nonchalant companion in long phrases imitated from romances, themselves supposed to imitate the language of his peers. The broad forehead of the lady, who has perhaps coquettishly plucked out some of her hair as well as her eyebrows, a process about which satirists were bitter,[90] brightens up occasionally, and her smile is like a ray of sunshine. Meanwhile the axles groan, the horse-shoes crunch the ground, the machine advances by fits and starts, descends into the hollows, bounds all of a piece at the ditches, and comes down with a heavy thud. The knight must speak pretty loud to make his dainty discourse, Round Table flavoured, heard by his companion. So trivial a necessity ever sufficed to break the charm of the most delicate thought; too many shocks shake the flower, and when the knight presents it, it has lost its perfumed pollen.

18. AN ENGLISH CARRIAGE OF THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY.

(From the Louterell Psalter.)

The possession of such a carriage was a princely luxury. They were bequeathed by will from one to another, and the heirloom was valuable. On September 25, 1355, Elizabeth de Burgh, Lady Clare, wrote her last will and endowed her eldest daughter with “her great carriage {99} with the covertures, carpets, and cushions.” In the twentieth year of Richard II Roger Rouland received £400 sterling “for making the Queen’s chariot”; and John le Charer, in the sixth of Edward III, received £1,000 for the carriage of the Lady Eleanor.[91] These were enormous sums. In the fourteenth century the average price of an ox was thirteen shillings, one penny farthing; of a sheep, one shilling and five pence; of a cow, nine shillings and five pence; and a penny for a fowl.[92] Lady Eleanor’s carriage thus represented the value of a herd of sixteen hundred oxen.

Scarcely less ornamented were the horse-litters sometimes used by people of rank, especially by ladies. They were of the same shape as the carriages, being covered with a sort of rounded vault, in which were cut more or less large openings. Two horses carried them, one before, the other behind, each being placed between the shafts with which the contrivance was provided at both ends.[93]

Between these luxurious carriages and the peasants’ carts there was nothing analogous to the multitude of middle-class conveyances to which we are now accustomed; the middle class itself being as yet but imperfectly developed. True, there were some not so expensive as {100} those belonging to the princesses of Edward’s Court, but not many. Every one at this time knew how to ride on horseback, and it was much more practical to use one’s mount than the heavy vehicles of the period. One went much faster, and was more certain to arrive. “The Paston Letters” show that matters had changed little in the fifteenth century. John Paston being ill in London, his wife wrote asking him to return as soon as he could bear the horse-ride; the idea of returning in a carriage did not even occur to them. Yet it was a serious case, “a grete dysese.”

19. A YOUNG SQUIRE (CHAUCER’S SQUIRE) TRAVELLING ON HORSEBACK.

(From the Ellesmere MS.)

Margaret Paston writes on September 28, 1443, “If I might have had my will, I should have seen you ere this time; I would ye were at home, if it were your ease, and your sore might be as well looked to here as it is where {103} ye be, now liefer than a gown though it were of scarlet. I pray you if your sore be whole, and so that ye may endure to ride, when my father comes to London, that ye will ask leave, and come home, when the horse shall be sent home again, for I hope ye should be kept as tenderly here as ye be at London.”[94]

20. TRAVELLING IN A HORSE LITTER.

(From the MS. 118 Français, in the Bibliothèque Nationale, late Fourteenth Century.)

Women were accustomed to riding almost as much as men, and when they had to travel they usually did it on horseback. A peculiarity of their horsemanship, which we have seen of late becoming again the fashion after a lapse of five centuries, was that they habitually rode astride. The custom of riding sideways did not spread in England before the latter part of the fourteenth century, and even then it was not general. In the invaluable manuscript of the Decretals in the British Museum,[95] ladies on horseback are constantly represented, always riding astride. At one place[96] horses are shown being brought for a knight and a lady; both saddles are exactly the same; each have tall backs, so as to form a sort of comfortable chair. The numerous ivories of the fourteenth century in the Victoria and Albert Museum and in the British Museum often represent a lady and her lover, both on horseback, and hawking. In almost all cases the lady unmistakably rides astride. Both ways of riding are shown in the fifteenth-century illuminations in the Ellesmere manuscript of Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales.” The wife of Bath rides astride, with large spurs; the prioress sits sideways.

II

There were few places in England where the sight of the royal train was not familiar. For the motives {104} mentioned above, the Court’s journeys were incessant. The royal itineraries that have come down to us throw a flood of light on this continual need of movement. The itinerary of King John shows that he rarely passed a month in the same place, most frequently he did not even remain there a week. Within a fortnight he is often found at five or six different towns or castles.[97] The same with Edward I, who, as we have seen, would change his abode three times every fortnight.[98]

And when the king moved, not only was he preceded by twenty-four archers in his pay, receiving threepence a day,[99] but he was accompanied by all those officers whom the author of “Fleta” enumerates with so much complacency. The sovereign took with him his two marshals, his outer marshal (forinsecus) who in time of war disposed the armies for battle, selected the halting-places on his journeys, and at all times arrested malefactors found in the virgata regia, that is to say, within twelve leagues around his dwelling;[100] and his inner marshal (intrinsecus), who guarded the palace and castles, and cleared them as much as possible of courtesans. He collected from every common harlot (meretrice communi) four pence by way of fine the first time that he arrested her; if she returned she was brought before the steward, who solemnly forbid her ever to present herself at the dwelling of the king, queen, or their children; the third time she was imprisoned and the tresses of her hair were shorn off; {107} the fourth time one of those hideous punishments was resorted to which the Middle Ages in their brutality tolerated; the upper lip of these women was cut off, “ne de cætero concupiscantur ad libidinem.”[101] There was also the chamberlain, who took care that the interior of the house was comfortable: “He has to arrange decently for the king’s bed, and to see that the rooms be furnished with carpets and benches;” the treasurer of the wardrobe, who kept the accounts; the marshal of the hall, whose mission it was to eject unworthy intruders and dogs,—“non enim permittat canes aulam ingredi,”—and a crowd of other officers.[102]

21. A WOMAN RIDING ASTRIDE (CHAUCER’S WIFE OF BATH)

(From the Ellesmere MS.)

22. A LADY RIDING SIDEWAYS (CHAUCER’S PRIORESS).

(From the Ellesmere MS.)

Overtopping all the rest, there was, moreover, the king’s seneschal or steward, first officer of his household, and his great justiciary. Wherever the king went the apparatus of justice was transported with him; when he was about to start the steward gave to the sheriff notice of the place where the Court would stop, in order that he might bring his prisoners to the town where the prince was to be stationed.[103] All the cases amenable to the jurisdiction of the justices in eyre were then determined by the steward, as the king’s justiciary, who prescribed, if necessary, the judicial duel, pronounced sentences of outlawry, and judged in criminal and civil cases.[104] This {108} right of criminal justice even accompanied the king abroad, but he only exercised it when the criminal had been arrested in his own royal place of abode. One such case happened in the fourteenth year of the reign of Edward I. This sovereign being at Paris, Ingelram de Nogent came into his house to steal, and was caught in the act. After some discussion it was acknowledged that Edward, by his royal privilege, should remain judge in the matter; he delivered the robber over to Robert Fitz-John, his steward, who caused Ingelram to be hung from the gibbet of St. Germain-des-Prés.[105]

For a long time the chancellor himself, and the clerks who made out the writs, followed the king on his journeys, and Palgrave notes that frequently a strong horse was requisitioned from the nearest convent to carry the rolls;[106] but this custom came to a close in the fourth year of Edward III, when the Chancery was permanently established at Westminster.

The tribunal moving on, a crowd of suitors moved with it. No matter though they were not inscribed on the rolls, they followed without losing patience, as gulls follow the ship, hoping that something may come their way. Parties with a lawsuit, petitioners of every kind, women “of ill life” (de fole vie), a whole herd of individuals with no one to vouch for them, persisted in escorting the prince and his courtiers. They quarrelled among each other, robbed by the way, sometimes committed murders, and, as may be imagined, did not contribute to render the news of the king’s arrival welcome to his subjects.

23. A FAMILY DINNER AMONG THE GREAT, WITH DOGS, MUSICIANS, CARVER, CUPBEARER, MARSHAL OF THE HALL (EXPELLING A LAZAR).

(From the MS. Addit. 28162 in the British Museum. Fourteenth Century.)

In the ordinances of his household, Edward II enumerates and deplores all these abuses; he orders that masterless men who follow the Court shall be put in irons for forty days on bread and water, and that the women of ill life shall be likewise imprisoned and branded with a {111} hot iron; he forbids his knights, clerks, squires, valets, grooms, in short, all who accompany him, to bring their wives with them, unless these have any post or employment at Court, this host of feminine beings increasing the chances of trouble. He also limits the number of persons who should accompany the marshal, which had, as will happen, increased little by little beyond all bounds. His ordinances, like so many others in the Middle Ages, were conspicuous for their wisdom, their minuteness, and their prompt decay.

Justice did not travel only in the king’s suite. She was peripatetic in England, visiting the counties in the company of the royal itinerant judges and going from hundred to hundred with that governor, military chief, police magistrate, financial agent, the sheriff, a functionary of great local, and sometimes tyrannical, power, appointed and dismissed at will by the king during certain periods, elected at others.

Both kinds, at fixed times, were on the move and caused a considerable portion of the inhabitants to leave their work, take to the road and be on the move too, in order to come to the court that was to be held. Both kinds put before the jurors a number of questions which the twelve men had to answer under oath, some of those questions being obviously quite uncomfortable to reply to.

The sheriff goes about the hundreds[107] in his shire and holds the “view of frank pledge,” chiefly established for the maintenance of that ancient system of enforced solidarity which obliged, theoretically at least, every male {112} to belong to a particular group of inhabitants of ten or more (tithing), jointly responsible for the misdeeds of any of their number in case the culprit cannot be found, fined, jailed or hanged, according to the occasion. By degrees the old “articles of the view,” greatly varying from place to place,[108] had increased in number, and the jurors had to answer as to a variety of smaller offences often duplicating the justices’ own interrogatories.[109]

The “turns” or “tourns” of the sheriffs might, according to the Great Charter, only take place twice a year, not oftener, because their coming occasioned loss of time and money to the sworn men and others who had to leave home and attend the court, and to the king’s subjects at whose houses these officers and their train went to lodge.[110] In spite of institutions which, as we shall see, had made the very men placed under the jurisdiction of the sheriffs, bailiffs, etc. themselves the censors of these same officials, abuses were numerous, the Commons were ever complaining, and frequent statutes, one after the other, denounced corrupt practices and stopped them—for a time.[111] {113}

The itinerant justices’ inquiry covered a much larger field; their “Articles of the Eyre,” or Capitula Itineris, included every imaginable misdeed from highest to lowest, from “crimen læsæ Majestatis,” above which nothing could be imagined, to fishing by means of “kidels” (weirs) or the using of nets to capture pigeons without the owner’s permit.

Coming four times a year in accordance with Art. 18 of the Great Charter, sitting in the full court of the county, growing in importance, while that of the sheriff as a judge went diminishing and the system of the frankpledge was falling into disuse, the itinerant justices submitted to the jury a ceaselessly increasing number of questions, a whole quire of them in the first half of the fourteenth century.[112] They asked what crimes, what misdemeanours, what infractions against the statutes had come to their knowledge. And in these minute interrogatories at every moment came up the names of the sheriff, the coroner,[113] the bailiff, the constable, of all the royal functionaries, whose conduct was thus placed under popular control. Has any of these officers, says the judge, released some robber, or counterfeiter or a clipper of coin? Has he for any consideration neglected the pursuit against a vagabond or an assassin? Has he unjustly received fines? Has he been paid by men who wished to avoid a public charge (for example, of being sworn as member of a jury)? Has the sheriff claimed more than reasonable hospitality from those in his jurisdiction, in tourns held too oft? Has he come with more than five or six horses? And {114} the juror was obliged in the same way to denounce, under his oath, the great who had arbitrarily imprisoned travellers passing through their lands, and all those who had neglected to assist in arresting a thief and running with the “hue and cry;”[114] for in this society each man is by turns peace officer, soldier, and judge, and even the humbler ones, menaced by so many exactions, have their share too in the administration of justice and the maintenance of public order. Highly important were, therefore, from a social point of view, these judicial tourns, which periodically reminded the mere man that he was a citizen, and that the affairs of the State were also his affairs.[115]

Juries could at times, like so many other picturesque groups of inhabitants, become one of the sights of the road. If they perjured themselves or accepted bribes, they would be sent to London and be jailed in the Tower; they were to travel along, not by night, but “by clear day, in the view of all, so that the country people might see the pain and shame of those guilty men who will be thereby the better punished.”[116]

Or else, if that unanimity which became obligatory in the latter part of the fourteenth century had not been secured, the itinerant justices, in order to get it any way, {115} were free to place the twelve men in carts and carry them about wherever they went, until the twelve chose to agree.[117]

When monks came out of the cloister and travelled, they wilfully modified their costume, and it became difficult to distinguish them from the great. I saw, writes Chaucer:

“I saugh his sleves purfiled atte hond

With grys, and that the fynest of a lond,

And for to festne his hood undur his chyn

He hadde of gold y-wrought a curious pyn,

A love-knotte in the gretter end ther was.”[118]

But the councils are still more explicit, and do more than justify the satire of the poet. Thus the Council of London in 1342, reproaches the religious with wearing clothing “fit rather for knights than for clerks, that is to say short, very tight, with excessively wide sleeves, not reaching the elbows, but hanging down very low, lined with fur or with silk.” They made themselves conspicuous by their long beards, rings on their fingers, costly girdles, purses or bags whereon figures were embroidered in gold, knives resembling swords, boots red or party-coloured, or slashed long-pointed shoes (the Polish-born poulaine); in a word, all the luxury of the magnates of the land. Later, in 1367, the Council of York renewed the same criticisms; the religious have “ridiculously short” clothing; they dare publicly to wear those coats “which do not come down to the middle of the legs, and do not even cover the knees.” Severe prohibitions were made for the future, though on a journey tunics shorter than the regulation gown were tolerated.[119]

24. A COOK ON A JOURNEY (CHAUCER’S COOK).

(From the Ellesmere MS.)

A bishop did not start on a journey without a great train; and the bishops, besides their episcopal visitations, {116} had, like the nobility, to travel to visit their lands and to live on them. On all these occasions they took with them their servants of different kinds and their followers, as the king did his court. The accounts of the expenses of Richard de Swinfield, Bishop of Hereford, give an idea of the lordly life led by well-to-do prelates. He was a bishop of some importance, and rich in proportion; many manors belonged to his bishopric; he could hold his rank as prelate and as lord, be hospitable, charitable to the poor, and spend much on requests and suits at the court of Rome and elsewhere. He had constantly in his pay about forty persons of different ranks, the greater part of whom accompanied him in his numerous changes of residence. His squires (armigeri) had from a mark (13s. 4d.) to a pound a year; his valleti, that is, the clerks of his chapel and others, his carters, porters, falconers, grooms, messengers, etc., had from a crown to eight {117} shillings and eightpence. In the third category came the kitchen servants, the baker, with two to four shillings a year; in the fourth, that of the boys or pages who helped the other servants, and whose wages greatly varied, being from one to six shillings a year. All the household was dressed alike, in striped cloth (pannus stragulatus), supplied by the bishop, besides the fixed salary. One of the most peculiar retainers of the bishop belonged to a now extinct race, and was his champion, Thomas de Bruges, who received an annual payment to fight in the prelate’s name in case any lawsuit should have to be terminated by a judicial duel.[120]

III

At eventide, monks, great men, and travellers of all degree sought shelter for the night. When the king, preceded by his twenty-four archers, and escorted by his lords and the officers of his household, was expected in a town, the marshal selected a certain number of the best houses, which were marked with chalk. The chamberlain asked the inhabitants to make room, and the Court settled as well as it could in the lodgings. Even the capital was not exempt from the annoyance of this burden; the marshal had, however, to come {118} there to an understanding with the mayor, sheriffs, and city officers for the selection of the habitations. Sometimes the royal agent chose to forget this wise proviso, and trouble followed. In the nineteenth year of Edward II, that prince having come to the Tower, the people of his household quartered themselves on the citizens without the mayor and aldermen having been consulted; the very sheriff’s house was marked with chalk. Great was the wrath of this officer when he found Richard de Ayremynne, the king’s own secretary, established in his house, the stranger’s horses in his stable, his servants in the kitchen. Undaunted by the thought of a royal secretary’s importance, the sheriff, counting on the privilege of the city, drove out the secretary and his suite by force, rubbed off the marks of the chalk, and became once more master of his own abode. Cited to appear before the Court steward, and accused of having contemned the king’s orders to the extent of at least £1,000, he stoutly defended himself, and appealed in defence to the mayor and citizens, who produced the charters of the city privileges. The charters were clear, their purport could not be denied; the sheriff’s boldness was excused; Ayremynne consoled himself as best he could, and did not receive any indemnity.[121]

In the country, if the king did not happen to be within easy reach of one of his own or his lieges’ castles, he often went to lodge at the neighbouring monastery, sure of being received there as master. The great on their journeys did their best to imitate the prince in this respect.[122] In {119} the convents hospitality was a religious duty; for the order of St. John of Jerusalem the first of duties. This order had establishments all over England, and it was a piece of good fortune for the poor traveller to come to one of them. No doubt he was treated there according to his rank, but it was much not to find the door closed. The accounts of the year 1338,[123] show that these knight-monks did not seek at all to avoid the heavy burden of hospitality; in their lists of expenditure are always to be found charges occasioned by supervenientibus (strangers). When it was an affair of kings or princes, they outdid themselves; thus the Prior of Clerkenwell mentions “much expenditure which cannot be given in detail, caused by the hospitality offered to strangers, members of the royal family, and to other grandees of the realm who stay at Clerkenwell and remain there at the cost of the house.” In consequence, the account closes with this sad summing up: “Thus the expenditure exceeds the receipts by twenty-one pounds, eleven shillings and fourpence.” The mere proximity of a great man was a source of expense, for, even if he did not go himself, he would send his suit to profit of the hospitality of the convent. In the accounts for Hampton, the list of people to whom beer and bread have been furnished ends by these words: “because the Duke of Cornwall is staying in the vicinity.”[124]

It should be noted that most of these houses had been endowed by the nobles, and each one, recognizing his own land or that of a relative, a friend, or an ancestor, {120} felt himself at home in the monastery. But these turbulent lords, friends of good cheer, abused of the monks’ gratitude, and their excesses caused complaints which came to the ears of the king.[125] Edward I forbade any one to venture to eat or lodge in a religious house, unless the superior had explicitly invited him, or he were the founder of the establishment, and even then his consumption should be moderate. The poor only, who more than any one lost by the excesses of the great, might continue to be lodged for nothing: “The king intendeth not that the grace of hospitality should be withdrawn from the destitute.”[126] Edward II, in 1309, confirmed these rules, which had apparently fallen into abeyance, and promised again, six years later, that neither he nor his family would make inordinate use of the hospitality of the monks.[127]

All in vain; these abuses were already comprised among those which the Articles of the Eyre had for their object to discover, but failed to suppress. Periodically the magistrate came to question the country folk on the subject. Have “any lords or others gone to lodge in religious houses without being invited by the superiors, or gone at their own expense, against the will of the same?” Have any been so bold as to “send to the houses or mansions belonging to the monks or others, men, horses, or dogs to sojourn there at an expense not their own?” The application of these rules did not go without difficulty or even danger, for the magistrate questioned also the jury about “any who may have taken revenge for refusal of food or lodging.”[128]

The Commons in parliament, mindful as they were in such matters of the fate of the poorest, were not unmindful of their own, and took steps to prevent, in a general way and without reference to the impecunious, {121} the falling into disuse of monachal hospitality. The non-residence of the clergy, which was to be one of the causes of the Reformation two hundred years later, occasioned bitter protests during the fourteenth century. The Commons object especially because from this abuse there results a decay of the duties of hospitality. “And that all other persons advanced to the benefices of Holy Church,” they request of the king, “should remain on their said benefices in order to keep hospitality there, on the same penalty, exception made for the king’s clerks and the clerks of the great of the realm.”[129] Parliament protests also against the bestowal by the pope of rich priories on foreigners who remain abroad. These foreigners “suffer the noble edifices built of old time when they were occupied by the English to fall quite to ruin,” and neglect “to keep hospitality.”[130]

Only people of high rank were admitted into the monastery proper. The mass of travellers, pilgrims and others, were housed and fed in the guest-house, a building made on purpose to receive passers-by; it usually stood by itself, and was even, sometimes, erected outside the precincts of the monastery. Such, for instance, was the case in Battle Abbey, where the guest-house is still to be seen outside the large entrance gate. These edifices commonly consisted of a hall with doors opening on each side into sleeping rooms. People slept also in the hall; old inventories, for instance the one concerning the Maison-Dieu or hospital at Dover, show that beds were set up in the hall and remained, it seems, permanently there.[131] {122}

It is hardly necessary to recall that hospitality was also exercised in castles; noblemen who were not at feud willingly received one another; there were much stricter ties of brotherhood among them than now exist among people of the same class. We do not often now give lodging to unknown persons who knock at the door; at the most, and but rarely, do we permit a poor man passing along in the country to sleep for a night in our hay-loft. In the Middle Ages, men received their equals, not by way of simple charity, but as a habit of courtesy and also for pleasure. Known or unknown, the travelling knight was rarely refused the door of a country manor. His coming in time of peace was a happy diversion from the monotony of the days. There was in every house the hall, or large room where the meals were taken in common; the new-comer ate with the lord at a table placed on a raised platform called the dais, erected at one end of the room; his followers were at the lower tables disposed along the side walls. Supper finished, all soon retired to rest, people went to bed and rose early in those days. The traveller withdrew sometimes into a special room for guests, if the house were large; sometimes into that of the master himself, the solar (room on the first storey), and spent the night there with him. Meanwhile, in the hall, the lower tables were taken out, for in general these were not standing, but movable;[132] mattresses were placed on the ground over the litter of rushes which day and night covered the pavement, and the people of the household, the suite of the traveller, the strangers of less {123} importance, stretched themselves out there till morning. Such a litter of herbs or rushes was in constant use, and was to be found in the king’s palace as well as in the houses of mere merchants in the city: it was spread in lieu of a carpet, to keep the room warm and to give a feeling of comfort. It is still to be met with, and this is, apparently, the last place where it has found refuge, in old-fashioned French provincial diligences; the straw in English country omnibuses is also its lineal descendant. So it was at least when, in pre-automobile times, these lines were originally written.

Prices paid for the purchase of rushes constantly recur in the accounts of the royal expenses.[133] They were so largely used in towns as well as in the country, that people in cities did not know what to do with the soiled ones, and the local authorities had to interfere over and over again, especially in London, where the inhabitants were apt to throw them into the Thames, with the result of greatly damaging and polluting the water.

Through a window opened in the partition between his room and the hall, over the dais, the lord could see and even hear all that was done or said below. In the king’s house itself the hall was used for sleeping as is shown by the ordinances of Edward IV;[134] at a period much nearer our day (1514), Barclay still complains that at Court the same couch serves for two:

And never in the court shalt thou have bed alone,

and that the noise from the comers and goers, from brawlers, {124} coughers, and chatterers never ceases, and prevents sleep.[135] At the first streak of dawn, sending through the white or coloured panes of the high windows shafts of light on the dark carved timber-work, which, high above the pavement, supported the roof, all stirred on their couches; soon they were out of doors, horses were saddled, and the clatter of hoofs sounded anew on the highway.

Towards the latter part of the fourteenth century a change became noticeable in the use of the hall. It was first pointed out by that acute observer of manners, William Langland, the author of the “Visions.” Life was becoming, by degrees, less patriarchal and more private; people were less fond of dining almost publicly in their halls. Well-to-do individuals began to prefer having their meals by themselves in rooms with chimneys, which last particular Langland is careful to note as a sign of the growing luxuriousness of the times. “Elyng” (dull, silent) “is the hall,” he said, in a well-known passage:

“There the lorde ne the lady · liketh noughte to sytte,

Now hathe uche riche a reule · to eten bi hym-selve

In a prive parloure · for pore mennes sake,

Or in a chambre with a chymneye · and leve the chief halle,

That was made for meles · men to eten inne.”[136]

Less and less inhabited, the hall gradually became little more than a sort of thoroughfare leading to the rooms where people were living a life more private than before. It decreased in size as well as in importance, until it was nothing in ordinary houses but the vestibule which we now see.

It must have been chiefly to the very poor, or the very rich or powerful that the monastery served as a hostelry. Monks received the former out of charity, {125} and the latter out of necessity, the common inns being at once too dear for the one and too miserable for the other. They were intended for the middle class: merchants, small landowners, itinerant packmen, etc. A certain number of beds were placed in one room, and a certain number of men in each bed, usually two, but sometimes three, the latter number being in any case frequent in Germany, according to Chaucer’s friend, Eustache Des Champs, sent to those parts as “ambassador and messenger” by the French king: “No one lies apart, but two and two in a dark room, or oftener three and three, in the same bed as it chances.” He regrets the better manners and more refined customs of his own country, “doux pays, terre très honorable.”[137]

Travellers bought separately their food and drink, chiefly bread, a little meat, and beer. Complaints as to excessive prices were not less frequent than now. The innkeeper’s extortions were supplemented by those of his assistants. Chaucer’s good parson, branding those men who encourage the evil practices of their subordinates, does not forget “thilke that holden hostelries,” and who “sustenen the theft of hir hostilers (ostlers).”[138] The people petitioned parliament and the king interfered accordingly with his wonted useless good will. Edward III promulgated, in the 23rd year of his reign, a statute to constrain “hostelers et herbergers” to sell food at reasonable prices; and again, four years later, tried to put an end to the “great and outrageous cost of victuals kept up in all the realm by inn-keepers and other retailers of {126} victuals, to the great detriment of the people travelling through the realm.”[139]

To have an example of ordinary travelling, we may follow the warden and two fellows of Merton College, who went with four servants from Oxford to Durham and Newcastle in 1331.[140] They travelled on horseback; it was in the dead of winter. Their food was very simple and their lodging inexpensive, the same items constantly recur; they comprise, on account of the season, candles and fire, sometimes a coal fire. One of their days may give an idea of the rest: for a Sunday spent at Alreton they write down:

25. THE NEW HABITS OF LUXURY. A GENTLEMAN DRESSING BEFORE THE FIRE.

(From the MS. 2 B. vii., in the British Museum. Fourteenth Century.)

Beds, we see, were not expensive; our men did not spend more for them than for their beer. Another time, the servants alone are at the inn, and the sleeping of the four comes to a penny for two nights. Generally, when the party is complete, the whole of their beds cost twopence; at London the price was a little higher, that is {129} a penny a head.[141] Sometimes they have eggs or vegetables for a farthing, a chicken or a capon. When they had sauce or condiments, they put them down separately, for example: fat, ½d.; gravy, ½d.; pickle, the same price; sugar, 4d.; pepper, saffron, mustard. Fish recurs regularly every Friday. Evening comes, the roads are dark; the way is lost, they take a guide, to whom they give a penny: “In famulo ducenti nos de nocte, 1d.” On crossing the Humber they pay eightpence, which may appear much, compared with the other prices; but we must remember that the river was wide and difficult to cross, especially in winter. The annals of the Abbey of Meaux frequently tell of the ravages caused by the river’s overflow, of farms and mills destroyed, of entire domains submerged, and of crops swept away. The ferry owners benefited by these accidents, in continually augmenting their prices, and at last the king himself was obliged to intervene in order to re-establish the normal rate, which was a penny for a horseman; this is what the warden and fellows {130} with their company paid.[142] Some­times our travel­lers fur­nished them­selves before­hand with pro­vi­sions to carry with them; a salmon was bought, “for the journey,” eight­een­pence, and for having it cooked, doubtless with some complicated sauce, they pay eightpence.

26. AN ENGLISH INN IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY.

(From the Louterell Psalter.)

Life-like specimens of dialogues on arrival, between traveller and innkeeper, and discussion as to the price of victuals, may be read in the Manual of French Conversation, composed at the end of the fourteenth century by an Englishman, under the title of “La Manière de Language que t’enseignera bien à droit parler et escrire doulz François.”[143]

Chapter iii is particularly interesting. It shows “how a man who is going far out of his own country, riding or walking, should behave himself and talk upon the way.” The servant sent forward to engage the room utters the fond hope “ ‘that there are no fleas, nor bugs, nor other vermin.’ ‘No, sir, please God,’ replies the host, ‘for I make bold that you shall be well and comfortably lodged here—save that there is a great peck of rats and mice.’”

The provisions are passed in review, the fire lighted, supper prepared: the traveller arrives, and it is curious to note in what unceremonious fashion he assures himself before dismounting that he will find at the inn “good supper, good lodging, and the rest.”[144]

27. THE NEW INN, GLOUCESTER.

(Built for Pilgrims, Fifteenth Century, still in use.)

Further on (chap. xiii) another hostelry is described, and the conversation between two travellers who have just slept in the same bed shows what a trouble the fleas were: “William, undress and wash your legs, and then dry them with a cloth, and rub them well for love of the fleas, that they may not leap on your legs, for {133} there is a peck of them lying in the dust under the rushes. . . . Hi! the fleas bite me so! and do me great harm, for I have scratched my shoulders till the blood flows.”

28. ON THE ROADSIDE. THE ALEHOUSE.

(From the MS. 10 E. IV.; English; Fourteenth Century.)

Beer was drunk along the way, and was found in other places besides the inn where travellers slept at night. At the cross-roads, in the more frequented parts of the country, alehouses, with a long projecting pole above the door and a bush at the end of it, invited the traveller to have a rest and a drink. Chaucer’s pilgrims, riding on the way to Canterbury, dismounted at a house of this kind. The pardoner, who had his habits, would not begin his tale without a little comfort:

“But first, quod he, her at this ale-stake

I wil bothe drynke and byten on a cake.”

A miniature of the fourteenth century, of which we give a reproduction, represents the alehouse with its long horizontal pole holding its bush well out in front above the road. The house consists but of one storey, a woman stands before the door with a large beer-jug, and a hermit is drinking from a large cup. It was the fashion to have extremely long poles, which offered no inconvenience in the country, but in town they had to be regulated, and a maximum length fixed. According to the wording of the Act, poles so long were used, that they “did tend to the great deterioration of the houses in which they {134} were placed,” and they reached so far and had signs so low, that they were in the way of the riders’ heads. The Act of 1375 relating these grievances orders that in future poles shall not extend more than seven feet over the public way,[145] which was enough to give picturesqueness to streets not so wide as ours.

There were taverns of ill-fame, especially in towns, so bad some of them, that they might almost have gone by another name. In one of the Latin dramas of Hrotsvitha,[146] tenth century, is shown the holy hermit Abraham, who, learning that the girl Mary, whom he had reared in virtue, lived as a courtesan in a hostelry, goes to her, pretending love, and converts her. In most mediæval story books telling of the prodigal son, he is usually represented sowing his very wild oats at the inn or tavern. Musicians of the meanest order would entertain the sitters at the table with their pipings, and then pass the hat.[147] Having to answer before Archbishop Arundel for his disparaging statements concerning pilgrimages, the Lollard William Thorpe declares in 1407 that pilgrims are frequenters of ill-famed hostelries, “spending their goods upon vitious hostelars, which are oft uncleane women of their bodies.”[148] In some such inn, the “Cheker of the Hope” (hoop) in Canterbury, the continuator of Chaucer leads his pilgrims, and shows how the pardoner’s advances to Kit the tapster had the edifying result of getting for him many more blows than caresses.[149]

In London it was forbidden by the king to keep open {135} house after curfew, and for very sufficient reasons, “because such offenders as aforesaid, going about by night, do commonly resort and have their meetings and hold their evil talk in taverns more than elsewhere, and there do seek for shelter, lying in wait and watching their time to do mischief.”[150]

It was for fear of such dangers that when the sheriffs and bailiffs held their Views of Frankpledge, they asked the juries of their hundreds to say upon oath what they knew “of such as continually haunt taverns, and no man knoweth whence they come; of such as sleep by day and watch by night, eat well and drink well, and possess nothing.”[151]

Langland’s life-like picture of a tavern in the fourteenth century is well known. With a vivid realism worthy of Rabelais he makes us hear and see the tumultuous scenes at the alehouse, the discussions, the quarrels, the big bumpers, the drunkenness which ensues; every face is plainly visible, coarse words, laughter and attitudes strike the on-looker in that strange assembly, where the hermit meets the cobbler and “the clerk of the churche,” a band of cut-purses and bald-headed tooth-drawers:

“Thomme the tynkere · and tweye of hus knaves,

Hicke the hakeneyman · and Howe the neldere,[152]

Claryce of Cockeslane · the clerk of the churche,

Syre Peeres of Prydie · and Purnel of Flanders,

An haywarde and an heremyte · the hangeman of Tyborne,

Dauwe the dykere · with a dosen harlotes,

Of portours and of pyke-porses · and pylede toth-drawers. . . .

Ther was lauhyng and lakeryng and ‘let go the coppe!’

Bargeynes and bevereges · by-gunne to aryse,

And seten so til evesong rang.”[153]

Peasants, too, are found there. Christine de Pisan, that poetess whose writings and character so often recall steady John Gower, shows them drinking, fighting, gambling; they have to appear before the provost, and fines accrue to augment their losses:

“At these taverns each day will you find them established, and enjoying long potations. As soon as their work is over, many agree to go there and drink, and they spend, you may be sure, more than they have earned all day. Do not ask if they fight when they are tipsy, the provost has several pounds in fines from it during the year. . . . And there also are to be seen some of those idle gallants who haunt taverns, handsome and gay.”[154]

Art, literature, the trend of thought were changed at the time of the Renaissance, but taverns remained the same; witness Skelton’s description of an alehouse on the highroad, quite similar to those which Langland had known a century and a half earlier. The ale-wife, who brews, God knows how, her beer herself, is a withered old crony, not unlike the “weird sisters” who were to welcome {137} Macbeth on the heath. She keeps her tavern near Leatherhead, in Surrey, on a declivity by the highroad, and there gathers as motley a crowd as that in the “Visions,”

“Her nose somdele hoked,

And camously croked. . . .

Her skynne lose and slacke,

Grained like a sacke,

With a croked backe. . . .

She breweth noppy ale,

And maketh therof port sale

To travellars, to tynkers,

To sweters, to swynkers,

And all good ale drinkers.”

Passers-by and dwellers in the neighbourhood flock to her house:

“Some go streyght thyder,

Be it slaty or slyder;

They holde the hye waye,

They care not what men say,

Be that as be may;

Some, lothe to be espyde,

Start in at the back syde,

Over the hedge and pale,

And all for the good ale.”

The reputation of the houses with a long pole and bush had not improved, and many of those who frequented them had, as we see, little wish to be “espyde.” As for paying the score, there was the rub! Devotees of drink whose purse was empty would not deprive themselves, however, and they paid in kind:

“Instede of coyne and monny,

Some brynge her a conny,

And some a pot with honny,

Some a salt, and some a spone,

Some their hose, some theyr shone.”

As to the women, one brings:

“her weddynge-rynge

To pay for her scot,

As cometh to her lot.

Som bryngeth her husbandes hood,

Because the ale is good.”[155]

The worst-famed of these houses began a little later to receive the visits of the most illustrious of their customers, one who held his court under their smoky rafters and came there to his earthly end, “babbling of green fields,” immortal Sir John Falstaff.

IV

Other isolated houses along the roads, by the fords or the bridges, on sacred spots, on the cliffs by the sea, had also much to do with travellers, those of the hermits. Such holy men would tell the way, help to cross a river, sometimes give shelter, sometimes absolution.[156] One shrives passers-by in that gem of mediæval French stories, “Le chevalier au barisel”; another, in the “Roman de Renard,” being favoured with a visit from no less a person than the hero of the romance. Led by a peasant through the pathless wood, Master Reynard reaches the secluded spot; the mallet was hanging before the door, and the peasant having given with it a loud knock the hermit hastened to draw the bolt: {141}

Tant ont erré par le bocage

Qu’ils sont venu à l’ermitage.

Le maillet trovèrent pendant

A la porte par de devant.

Li vileins hurte durement

Et l’ermite vint erraument (promptly),

Li fermai oste de la roille (bolt).[157]

29. THE HERMITAGE CHAPEL OF ST. ROBERT.

(Hewn out of the rock, Knaresborough; the knight of a much later date.)

Most holy in early times, living examples of renouncement, teaching virtue and piety by their words and deeds, hermits became, some of them, canonized saints, like St. Robert of Knaresborough,[158] or devotional writers of fame like Richard Rolle, the hermit of Hampole; pilgrims flocked to their cells in order to be sanctified by their advice and presence. An “officium de Sancto Ricardo eremita” was composed after Richard Rolle’s death, in the thought that he would surely be canonized some day:

Letetur felix Anglorum patria . . .

Pange lingua graciosi

Ricardi preconium,

Pii, puri, preciosi,

Fugientis vitium.[159]

These men fasted, had ecstasies, were tempted by the devil, who in the case of Richard, instead of clumsily taking some hideous shape (see further, p. [290]) took the much more enticing one of “a faire yonge womane, the whilke,” wrote the hermit, “I had sene be-fore and the whilke luffed (loved) me noght a little in gude lufe.”[160]

The cave or hermitage in which Saint Robert spent {142} most of his life still exists at Knaresborough, entirely hollowed out of the rock, with a later-date perpendicular window.[161]

Persuaded, rightly or wrongly, that they had much to atone for, the kings included among the redeeming good works to be performed by them aid to holy hermits. One of the pilgrims who visited St. Robert was King John, who came unheralded and who, according to the metrical life of the saint, had some trouble in making him notice his presence:

Roberd he fand knelan prayand,

Hys orysons contynuand,

That for nai noyse that thai couth maike

Nay mare he mowed than dose ane ake (oak).[162]

Edward III gives to “three hermits and eight anchorite recluse persons within the city of London and in the suburbs thereof, to wit to each of them, 13s. 4d. in aid of their support.”[163] Welcomed on his landing, in 1399, by a seaside hermit called Matthew Danthorp, “in quodam loco called Ravenserespourne” (Ravenspur), Bolingbroke, {143} soon to be King Henry IV, grants him and all the hermits his successors a variety of favours, including the right to any waif or wreck cast by the sea on the sand for two leagues about his hermitage: “Cum wrecco maris, et wayfs et omnibus aliis proficuis et commoditatibus super sabulum per duas leucas circa eundem locum contingentibus imperpetuum,” in spite of any statute to the contrary.[164]

Less brilliant fortunes and less holy a fame usually fell to the lot of English hermits of the fourteenth century. Those like Rolle of Hampole, doing ceaseless penance, consumed by divine love, were rare exceptions; they lived by preference in cottages, built at the most frequented parts of the highway, or at the entrance to bridges.[165] They throve there, like Godfrey Pratt,[166] on the charity of the passers-by; the bridge with its chapel was in itself almost a sacred building; the presence of the hermit sanctified it still further. He attended to the keeping in order of the building, or was supposed to do so, and was willingly given a farthing.[167] A strange race of men, which in that century of disorganization and reform, when everything seemed either to die or undergo a new birth, multiplied in spite of rules and regulations. They swelled the number of parasites of the religious edifice, cloaking under a dignified habit a life that was less so. These evil growths {144} clung, like moss in the damp of the cathedral, to the fissures of the stones, and by the slow work of centuries threatened the noble structure with ruin. What remedy was there? To mow down the ever-growing weeds was scarcely possible; a patient hand, guided by a vigilant eye, was needed to pluck them out one by one, and to fill up the interstices: saints can do this, but saints are rare. Episcopal prescriptions might often seem to do great work; a mere seeming. Though the heads were beaten down, the roots remained, and the lively parasite struck yet deeper into the heart of the wall.

30. A HERMIT TEMPTED BY THE DEVIL.

(From the MS. 10 E. IV; English; Fourteenth Century.)

Solemn interdictions and rigorous rules were not wanting, bowing down heads which ever rose again. To become a hermit a man must be resolved on an exemplary life of poverty and privations, and, that imposture should be impossible, he must have episcopal sanction, that is, possess “testimonial letters from the ordinary.”[168] These {145} rules were broken, however, without scruple. Inside his dwelling the not very devout creature in hermit’s garb could lead a quiet, easy life, and it was so hard elsewhere! The charity of passers-by was enough for him to live upon, especially if he was not harassed by an over-exacting conscience and knew how to beg; no labour, no pressing obligation, the bishop was distant and the alehouse near. All these reasons caused a never-ending growth of the mischievous species of false hermits who only took the habit to live by it, without asking any permit from any one. In the statutes they were bracketed with beggars, wandering labourers, and vagabonds of all kinds, pell mell, to be imprisoned awaiting judgment. There was exception only for “approved” hermits: “Except men of religion and approved hermits having letters testimonial from the ordinary.” A statute like this is enough to show that Langland did not exaggerate; his verse is but a commentary on the law. The author of the “Visions” is impartial and does justice to sincere anchorites: true Christians resemble them.[169] But what are these false saints who have pitched their tent by the side of the highroads or even in the towns, at the door of the alehouse, who beg under the church porches, who eat and drink plentifully, and leisurely pass the evenings warming themselves?

“Ac eremites that en-habiten · by the heye weyes,

And in borwes a-mong brewesters · and beggen in churches.”[170]

What is that man who rests and roasts himself by the hot coals, and when he has drunk his fill has nothing to do but go to bed? {146}

“lewede eremytes,

That loken ful louheliche · to lacchen[171] mennes almesse,

In hope to sitten at even · by the hote coles,

Unlouke hus legges abrod · other lygge at hus ese,

Reste hym and roste hym · and his ryg (back) turne,

Drynke drue and deepe · and drawe hym thanne to bedde;

And when hym lyketh and lust · hus leve ys to aryse;

When he ys rysen, rometh out · and ryght wel aspieth

Whar he may rathest have a repast · other a rounde of bacon,

Sulver other sode mete · and som tyme bothe,

A loof other half a loof · other a lompe of chese;

And carieth it hom to hus cote · and cast hym to lyve

In ydelnesse and in ese.”[172]

All these are unworthy of pity, and, adds Langland, with that aristocratic touch which now and then recurs in his lines, all these hermits were common artisans, “workmen, webbes and taillours, and carters’ knaves”; formerly they had “long labour and lyte wynnynge,” but they noticed one day that these deceitful friars swarming everywhere, “hadde fatte chekus” (cheeks); they thereupon abandoned their labour and took lying garments, as though they were clerks:

. . . “Other of som ordre, other elles a prophete.”

They are seldom seen at church, these false hermits, but they are found seated at great men’s tables because of their cloth. Look at them eating and drinking of the best! they who formerly were of the lowest rank, at the side tables, never tasting wine, never eating white bread, without a blanket for their bed:

“Ac while he wrought in thys worlde · and wan hus mete with treuthe,

He sat atte sydbenche · and secounde table;

Cam no wyn in hus wombe · thorw the weke longe,

Nother blankett in hus bed · ne white bred by-fore hym.

The cause of al thys caitifte · cometh of meny bisshopes

That suffren suche sottes.”[173]

These rascals escape the bishops, who ought to have their eyes wider open. “Alas!” said, in charming language, a French poet of the thirteenth century, Rutebeuf, “the coat does not make the hermit; if a man dwell in a hermitage and be clothed in hermit’s dress, I don’t care two straws for his habit nor his vesture if he does not lead a life as pure as his frock betokens. But many folk make a fine show and marvellous seeming of worth; they resemble those over-blossoming trees that fail to bring forth fruit.”[174]

Under the eyes of the placid hermit, comfortably established by the roadside, calmly preparing himself by a carefree life for a blissful eternity, moved the variegated flow of travellers, vagabonds, wayfarers, and wanderers. His benediction rewarded the generous passer-by; the stern look of the austere man did not disturb his sanctimonious indifference. The life of others might rapidly consume itself, burnt by the sun, gnawed by care; his own endured in the shade of the trees, and continued without hurt, lulled by the murmur of human passions—

Et je dirai, songeant aux hommes, que font-ils?

Et le ressouvenir des amours et des haines

Me bercera pareil au bruit des mers lointaines.

(Sully Prudhomme.)

Good or bad, the whole race (still surviving in the East) disappeared in England at the Reformation, leaving but a memory, and surviving only in poetry:

It is the Hermit good!

He singeth loud his godly hymns

That he makes in the wood.

He’ll shrive my soul, he’ll wash away

The Albatross’s blood.

31. AN ESCAPED PRISONER FLYING TO SANCTUARY.

(From the MS. 10 E. IV.)

CHAPTER III SECURITY OF THE ROADS

These roads, thus followed in every direction by the king and the lords moving from one manor to another, by the merchants and peasants going to the fair, the market, or the staple, by sheriffs, monks and itinerant justices, by ladies in carriages and villains driving their carts, were they safe? The theorist studying the legal ordinances of the period, and the manner in which the county police and the town watch and ward were organized, might come to the conclusion that precautions were well taken for the prevention of misdeeds, and that travelling did not present more danger than it does at present. If we add, as Mr. Thorold Rogers has shown, that common carriers plied their trade between Oxford and London, Winchester, Newcastle, etc., and that the price of transport was not dear, we might be persuaded that the roads were quite safe, and we should be wrong; wrong too, if on the faith of romantic tales, we pictured to ourselves brigands in every thicket, a hanged man on {150} every branch, and robber barons at every cross-road. But accident, or the unexpected, must be taken into account.

Accident played a great part in the social life of the fourteenth century. It was the moment when modern life began, the outward brilliancy of a novel civilization had recently modified society from top to bottom, the need to be constantly on the watch had become less apparent; the moated castle with its drawbridge, battlements and loop-holes, had begun to change into a villa or a mansion, while the hut was growing into a house. Confidence was greater, but not always justified: accidents are unexpected mishaps.

More means were taken than formerly to hinder ill-doing; but numerous occurrences happened to destroy this incipient security. Society was in reality neither calm nor quite settled, and many of its members were still half savage. The term “half” may be taken literally. If a list were made of the characteristics of such or such an individual of the time, it would be found that some belonged to a refined, and some to a barbarous world. Hence these contrasts: on one side order, which it would perhaps be unjust not to consider as the normal condition; and on the other, the frequent ebullitions of the untamed nature. Let us select an example of such accidents which could take at times remarkable proportions. Here are a knight and his men at the corner of a road, waiting for a troop of merchants. The text itself of the victims’ petition gives all the details of the encounter.[175]

The facts happened in 1342. Some Lichfield merchants state to their lord, the Earl of Arundel, that on a certain Friday they sent two servants and two horses laden with “spicery and mercery,” worth forty pounds, to Stafford for the next market day. When their men “came beneath Cannock Wood” they met Sir Robert de Rideware, Knight, waiting for them, together with {151} two of his men, who seized on the servants, horses, and goods, and took them to the priory of Lappeley. Unfortunately for the knight, during the journey, one of the servants escaped.

At the priory the band found “Sir John de Oddyngesles, Esmon de Oddyngesles, and several others, knights as well as others.” It was evidently a pre-arranged affair, carefully devised; all was done according to rule; they shared “among them the aforesaid mercery and spicery, each one a portion according to his degree.” That done, the company left Lappeley and rode to the priory of Blythebury, a nuns’ priory. Sir Robert declared that they were the king’s men, quite exhausted, and begged for hospitality. But the company had obviously a suspicious appearance, and the abbess refused. Indignant at this unfriendly reception, the knights burst open the doors of the barns and lofts, gave hay and oats to their horses, and so passed the night.

But they were not the only people to have made a good use of their time. The escaped servant had followed them at a distance; when he saw they had taken up their quarters at the priory he returned with all speed to Lichfield and warned the bailiff who hastened to collect his men for the pursuit of the robbers. The latter, men of the sword, as soon as they were met, stood their ground, and a real battle took place, in which they had at first the upper hand, and wounded several of their pursuers. At length, however, they were worsted and fled; all the spices were recovered, and four of their company taken, who, without further ado, were beheaded on the spot.

Robert de Rideware was not one of the latter, and did not lose heart. He met his relative Walter de Rideware, lord of Hamstall Rideware, with some of his followers, while the bailiff was on his way back to Lichfield; all together veered around in pursuit of the bailiff. A fresh fight. This time the king’s officer was routed and fled, {152} while the highway gentlemen once more captured the spices.

What resource remained for the unhappy William and Richard, authors of the petition? Resort to justice? This they wanted to do. But as they were going for this purpose to Stafford, chief town of the county, they found at the gates some retainers of their persecutors, who barred their passage and even attacked them so hotly that they had difficulty in escaping without grievous hurt. They returned to Lichfield, watched by their enemies, and led there a pitiable existence. “And, sir, the aforesaid William and Richard, and several people of the town of Lichfield, are menaced by the said robbers and their maintainers, so that they dare not go anywhere out of the said town.”[176]

This legal document, the original of which has been preserved, is, in many ways, characteristic, and shows us local tyrants not unlike the latter day ones in the Promessi Sposi and their terrible bravi. One may, especially, notice the coolness and determination of the knights, not disconcerted by the death of four of their number; the attack under cover of a wood; the selection of the victims, “garsuns” belonging to rich merchants; the request for hospitality in a priory under pretext of journeying in the king’s service; the expeditious justice of the bailiff, and the persistent surveillance to which the victims were subjected by their lordly robbers.

These, though remarkable, are not quite exceptional facts, and Robert of Rideware was not the only man on the look out in the copses along the roads. Other noblemen were, like him, supported by devoted retainers, ready for any enterprise. Capes and liveries of their masters’ colours were given to them, and they went about as the {153} uniformed soldiers of their chief; a lord well surrounded with his partizans considered himself as above the common law, and it was no easy matter for justice to make herself respected by him. The custom of having a number of resolute followers wearing one’s colours became universal at the end of Edward III’s reign and under Richard II; it survived in spite of statutes[177] during the whole of the fifteenth century, and contributed to render even more embittered and bloody the War of the Roses.

But even outside the periods of civil war, the misdeeds of certain barons and their retainers, or of retainers acting on their own account under cover of their lord’s colours—“notoirs meffesours et meintenours of meffesours,” the statute said of both,[178]—were at times so frequent and serious that parts of the country seemed to be in a state of war. Throughout the fourteenth century, the abuse called maintenance, which word meant in old French protection, was on the increase, in spite of all the efforts of king and Parliament. The great of the land, and some lesser people too, had their own men, sworn to their service and ready to do anything they were commanded, which consisted sometimes in the most monstrous deeds, such as securing property or other goods to which neither their masters, nor any claimant paying their master in order to be thus “protected,”[179] had any title. They terrorized the rightful {154} owners, the judges and the juries, ransoming, beating and maiming any opponent.[180]

Statutes were, as usual, numerous, well-meant, peremptory, and inefficient. The evil was so general that Edward III had to forbid the people nearest him, the chief officers of his court, his “dearest consort, the queen,” his son the prince of Wales, the prelates of Holy Church,[181] to thus interfere with the regular course of the law. The will of the king is that “the poor should enjoy their right just as the rich.”[182] But they do not; great ladies practice maintenance, one among others even dearer to the king than his dear consort, namely his mistress, Alice Perers.[183]

A new reign begins; maintenance flourishes better than ever before. The preamble of a statute of the second year of Richard II[184] gives a perhaps somewhat exaggerated picture of these disorders so as to better justify rigorous measures, but the description must have been at least partly true. We there see—and the king, it is stated, has learnt it both from the petitions addressed to parliament and by public rumour—that certain people in several parts of the kingdom claimed “to have right to divers lands, tenements and other possessions, and some espying women and damsels unmarried, and some desiring to make maintenance in their marches, do gather together to a great number of men of arms and archers, to the manner of war, and confederate themselves by oath and other confederacy.” These people, having no “consideration to God, nor to the laws of Holy Church, nor of the land, {155} nor to right, nor justice, but refusing and setting apart all process of the law, do ride in great routs in divers parts of England, and take possession and set them in divers manors, lands, and other possessions of their own authority, and hold the same long with such force, doing many manner apparelments of war; and in some places do ravish women and damsels, and bring them into strange countries, where please them; and in some places lying in await with such routs do beat and maim, murder and slay the people, for to have their wives and their goods, and the same women and goods retain to their own use; and sometimes take the king’s liege people in their houses, and bring and hold them as prisoners, and at the last put them to fine and ransom as it were in a land of war; and sometimes come before the justices in their sessions in such guise with great force, whereby the justices be afraid and not hardy to do the law; and do many other riots and horrible offences, whereby the realm in divers parts is put in great trouble, to the great mischief and grievance of the people.”[185] Which shows how vainly the Good Parliament had worked, for, in 1376, the Commons had already made exactly similar complaints: “Now great riot begins anew by {156} many people in different parts of England who ride with a great number of armed men,” etc.[186]

Besides these organized and quasi-seignorial bands, there were ordinary robbers, numerous enough for chantries to have been founded “for the safety of travellers who were in danger from thieves.”[187] Against those people who impeded travelling much more grievously than ever the floods and broken bridges, Edward I had taken, in 1285, special measures in the Statute of Winchester. These men were described there as accustomed to crouch down in the ditches, coppice, or brushwoods near the roads, especially those linking two market towns. This was, of course, the passage-way of many easy victims, richly laden. The king orders therefore that, for a space of two hundred feet, the ground on each side of the road should be cleared in such a manner that there remain neither coppice nor brushwood, nor hollow nor ditch which serve as shelter for malefactors: “où leur peut tapir pur mal fere.” Only large trees such as oaks might be left. The owner of the soil had to do the work; if he neglected it, he would be responsible for robberies and murders, and have to pay a fine to the king. If the road went through a park, the same obligation lay on the lord, unless he consented to close it by a wall or a hedge so thick, or by a ditch so wide and deep, that robbers could not cross them: “qe meffesurs ne pussent passer ne returner pur mal fere.” The king sets the example and orders such clearings to be made at once on the lands belonging to the crown.[188]

After which, things continued pretty much as before: “Mean­while,” writes a chronicler for the years 1303–05, {157} “certain male­fac­tors, bound together, four, six, ten or twenty went in company to fairs and markets, rifled the houses of honest people and were not ashamed to capture through their misdoings the goods of the faithful and rich people.”[189] Worse than that: we find as we progress in the fourteenth century, that these common thieves had improved their methods and increased their profits. They allied themselves, sometimes secretly, sometimes openly, to the seignorial bands, and were not henceforward unticketed men for whom no one was responsible. The Commons were aware of the fact, and complained accordingly: “Whereas it is notoriously known throughout all the shires of England that robbers, thieves, and other malefactors on foot and on horseback, go and ride on the highway through all the land in divers places, committing larcenies and robberies: may it please our lord the king to charge the nobility of the land that none such be maintained by them, privately nor openly; but that they help to arrest and take such bad ones.”[190] In the preceding parliament the same complaints had been made, and the king had already promised that he would order “such remedy as should be pleasing to God and man.”[191] But neither God nor man had had apparently cause to be pleased.

In addition to the support of the great, these evildoers enjoyed various privileges. Some of them could be met along the roads, cross in hand; both king and church forbade seizing them, they were men who had forsworn the realm. When a robber, a murderer, or any felon found himself too hard pressed, he fled into a church and found safety. In almost all societies having reached a certain stage of civilization the same privilege has existed or still exists. It was known to the Romans, {158} was legislated about by Theodosius the Great, Justinian and the early councils,[192] and is still in constant use in many parts of the East. A church in the Middle Ages was an inviolable place: whoever crossed its threshold was under the protection of God, and many wonderful miracles, the history of which was familiar to everybody, attested with what particular favour the right of sanctuary was regarded especially by the Holy Virgin. At Walsingham, one of the most famous British pilgrimages, people never failed to go and see the “Gate of the Knight,” a gate which had stretched itself so as to give miraculous shelter to a man on horseback, hard pursued by his enemies, and who found himself thus opportunely placed beyond the reach of men as well as beyond the reach of law.

32. THE KNOCKER OF THE DURHAM SANCTUARY (NORMAN).

Several interesting relics of old English sanctuaries are still in existence, such as stone sign-posts which helped the fugitive to avoid either vengeance or justice: “Even to-day, in various parts of England, curious stone crosses, {159} inscribed with the word SANCTUARIUM, are to be met with. Such crosses probably marked the way to a sanctuary and served to guide fugitives.”[193] At Durham is to be seen a beautiful bronze knocker, cast and chiselled in Norman times, still affixed to the cathedral door through which malefactors were admitted to the sanctuary.[194] As soon as they had knocked, the door was opened, the bell in the Galilee tower was rung, and after having confessed before witnesses their crime, which was at once put into writing, the culprits were allowed to enjoy the peace of St. Cuthbert. Several churches had a chair or stool called the fridstool, or peace chair (originally, in some cases, a presbyteral or episcopal seat) the reaching of which by the fugitive secured for him the maximum protection. Beverley has one of the oldest, in stone, perfectly plain, formerly accompanied with a Latin inscription, saying: “This stone seat is called freedstoll, that is, chair of peace, on reaching which a fugitive criminal enjoys complete safety.”[195] The Beverley sanctuary was the most celebrated and safest in England.[196] In this case, and in some others, at Hexham for example, the privilege extended not only to the church, but to one mile or more round it, the space being divided into several circles, usually marked by stone crosses, and it was more and more sinful to remove fugitives violently from the sanctuary the nearer {160} they were to the inner circle. If they were dragged from the altar or the fridstool, no money atonement was accepted from the abductor, who thus apparently forfeited his life. Describing the several circles around the Hexham sanctuary, Prior Richard, who wrote between 1154 and 1167, says of the inner one: “If any one, moved by a spirit of madness, ventured with diabolical boldness to seize one in the stone chair near the altar which the English call fridstol, that is a chair of quiet or peace, or at the shrine of the holy relics, back of the altar, no compensation will be determined for such a glaring sacrilege, no amount of money will serve as an atonement, for it is what the English call botolos (bootless), that is a thing for which there can be no compensation.”[197]

33. THE FRIDSTOOL AT HEXHAM ABBEY, NORTHUMBERLAND (NORMAN).

34. THE FRIDSTOOL AT SPROTBOROUGH, YORKSHIRE.

Fourteenth Century.

That same fridstool has been preserved, being not improbably the original episcopal seat of the famous St. Wilfrid, born about 634, the builder of the old church {163} at Hexham, a crypt of which, with some Roman stones used for the walls, is still in existence.

Near the fridstool was to be seen a queer, short, stone statue now moved to another place in the church, of a man, with brutal features, “wearing a long coat, buttoned in front from the neck to the waist, having three coils or clumsy ligatures . . . round his ankles; and he holds erect with both hands a staff or club as tall as himself.” A. B. Wright, author of an “Essay towards the history of Hexham,” expresses the opinion that, “it was intended to represent an officer of justice, with his staff and plume, his feet bared and manacled, to show that within the bounds of sanctuary he dared not move towards his design and that there his authority availed him not.”[198]

A confirmation of this opinion may be found in the figures carved on the little known but very curious fridstool at Sprotborough, Yorkshire, apparently of the fourteenth century: the fugitive who could not be properly represented seated in the chair, since this would have made it impossible of use, is shown protected and covered by it, while a clumsy and much deteriorated image of some law official, carrying his staff, stands at one of the sides of the chair, but unable to move, being bound to it by a collar or carcannum.[199]

Among the most curious remembrances of the English sanctuaries figure the registers still preserved in some few places, in which were entered the confessions of the criminals at the moment they asked for admittance. The Beverley and the Durham ones have been printed; both date from the fifteenth century; that of Durham covers the years 1464 to 1524; it includes, besides other crimes, 195 murders and homicides, in which 283 persons {164} are concerned, and which are divided as follows, according to the trades and avocations of the perpetrators:

“The occupations of the remainder
are not mentioned.”[200]

The entries in the two registers are much alike; the formalities are of the same kind; the Galilee bell is tolled, the culprit confesses; witnesses are called to hear him, and the names of all concerned are given in full. Here is an example translated from the Latin original: “To be remembered that on the 6th day of October, 1477, William Rome and William Nicholson, of the parish of Forsate, fled to the cathedral church of St. Cuthbert in Durham, where on account, among other things, of a felony committed and publicly confessed by them, consisting of the murder by them of William Aliand, they asked from the venerable and religious men, Sir Thomas Haughton, sacristan of the said church, and William Cuthbert, master of the Galilee there, both brothers and monks of the same church, to be admitted to the benefit of the immunity of the church, according to the liberties and privileges conceded in old time to the most glorious confessor Cuthbert. And by the ringing of one bell according to custom, they obtained this benefit. There were present there, seeing and hearing, the discreet men William Heyhyngton, Thomas Hudson, John Wrangham, {165} and Thomas Strynger, witnesses called in especially for the occasion.”[201]

At Beverley there were no witnesses: the culprit swore, his hand on the Book. Besides stating the cause of his flying to sanctuary he took his oath to remain peaceful, to help in case of fire or strife, to be present at mass on the commemoration day of King Athelstan, benefactor of the church, etc.:

“Also ye shall bere no poynted wepen, dagger, knyfe, ne none other wapen, ayenst the kynges pece.

“Also ye shalbe redy at all your power, if ther be any debate or stryf, or oder sodan case of fyre within the towne, to help to surcess it.

“Also ye shalbe redy at the obite of Kyng Adelstan, at the dirige, and the messe, at such tyme as it is done, at the warnyng of the belman of the towne, and doe your dewte in ryngyng, and for to offer at the messe on the morne,”[202] etc.

To drag men out of the sanctuary was a sacrilege punished with whipping, heavy fines, excommunication, or even death. Nicholas le Porter had helped to snatch from the church of the Carmelites of Newcastle some laymen who had taken refuge there “for the safety of their lives,” and who, once delivered to the civil authority, had been executed. Only the Pope’s nuncio could secure for him his pardon, and he had to submit to a public penance very little in accord with our present customs:

“We order,” wrote Bishop Richard to the parson of St. Nicholas of Durham, “that on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of the Whitsun-week just coming, he shall receive the whip from your hands publicly, before the chief door of your church, in his shirt, bare-headed, {166} and barefoot.[203] He shall there proclaim in English the reason for his penance and shall admit his fault; and when he has thus been whipped the said Nicholas will go to the cathedral church of Durham, bareheaded, barefoot, and dressed as above, he will walk in front, you will follow him; and you will whip him in the same manner before the door of the cathedral these three days, and he will repeat there the confession of his sin.”[204]

Excommunication was the punishment meted out to Ralph de Ferrers, one of the retainers of the then all-powerful John of Gaunt, for having dragged from the Westminster sanctuary, at mass time, two prisoners escaped from the Tower where his master had sent them, and for having killed one in the process, 1378. The Duke of Lancaster, in alliance then with Wyclif, caused the reformer to write one of his most virulent treatises against the right of sanctuary, asking for its abolition.

The right was, however, maintained; the king himself did not dare to infringe upon it, and, though unwilling, had to let traitors escape, by such means, his revenge or justice. In a case of this kind, one of the Henries wrote to the Prior of Durham, and careful as he was to state that he bound himself only “for the present occasion,” there is no doubt that his acknowledgment of the full immunities enjoyed by St. Cuthbert’s church had nothing {167} exceptional: “Trusty and welbeloved in God,” says the king,[205] “we grete you well. And wheras we undirstand that Robert Marshall late comitted to prison for treason is now escapid and broken from the same into youre church of Duresme, we havyng tender zele and devocion to ye honour of God and St. Cuthbert, and for the tendir favour and affection that the right reverend father in God our right trusty and welbeloved the Bisshop of Duresme our chauncellor of England we have for his merits wol that for that occasion nothyng be attempted that shud be contrarie to the liberties and immunities of [your] church. We therefor wol and charge you that he be surely kept there as ye wol answere unto us for him.” As there could be very little need for the king to declare such an obvious feeling as his respect for St. Cuthbert, the earnest recommendation by which he ends his epistle is most likely to have been the real cause of his writing to his wellbeloved the Prior of Durham. Another characteristic instance is the rebellion of Jack Cade in 1450, when one of his accomplices fled to St. Martin-le-Grand, the most famous of the London sanctuaries. The king in this case wrote to the Dean of St. Martin’s ordering him to produce the traitor. This the Dean refused to do, and he exhibited his charters, which being found correct and explicit, the fugitive was allowed to remain in safety where he was.[206]

The right of sanctuary was most valuable, not only for political offenders, but also, and more frequently, for robbers. They escaped from prison, fled to the church, and saved their lives. “In this year,” 1324, say the “Croniques de London,”[207] “ten persons escaped out of Newgate, of whom five were retaken, and four escaped {168} to the church of St. Sepulchre, and one to the church of St. Bride, and afterwards all for-swore England.” But when the refugees were watched in the church by their personal enemies, their situation, as evidenced by the statute of 1315–1316, became perilous. The authors of a petition[208] to the king set forth in that year that armed men established themselves in the cemetery, and even in the sanctuary, to watch the fugitive, and guarded him so strictly that he could not even go out to satisfy his natural wants. They hindered food from reaching him; if the felon decided to swear that he would quit the kingdom his enemies followed him on the road, and in spite of the law’s protection dragged him away and beheaded him without judgment. The king reforms all these abuses,[209] and re-enacts the old regulations as to abjuration, which were as follows: “When a robber, murderer, or other evil-doer shall fly unto any church upon his confession of felony, the coroner shall cause the abjuration to be made thus: Let the felon be brought to the church door, and there be assigned unto him a port, near or far off, and a time appointed for him to go out of the realm, so that in going towards that port he carry a cross in his hand, and that he go not out of the king’s highway, neither on the right hand, nor on the left, but that he keep it always until he shall be gone out of the land; and that he shall not return without special grace of our lord the king.”

The felon took oath in the following terms: “This hear thou, sir coroner, that I, N., am a robber of sheep, or of any other beast, or a murderer of one or of more, and a felon to our lord the King of England, and because I have done many such evils or robberies in this land, I {169} do abjure the land of our lord Edward King of England, and I shall haste me towards the port of such a place which thou hast given me, and I shall not go out of the highway, and if I do I will that I be taken as a robber and felon to our lord the king; and at such a place I will diligently seek for passage, and that I will tarry there but one flood and ebb, if I can have passage; and unless I can have it in such a place I will go every day into the sea up to my knees assaying to pass over; and unless I can do this within forty days, I will put myself again into the church as a robber and a felon to our lord the king. So God me help and his holy judgment.”[210]

Dover was the port oftenest assigned to abjurors. The time limit varied, being on occasions so brief, that it must have been almost impossible for people on foot to fulfil the condition: which was most probably what the coroner had in view, for he would assign sometimes different delays to different refugees for the same distance. “The distance from York to Dover over London Bridge was nearly 270 miles, and there are several entries of eight days being the allotted time, thus maintaining a rate of over 33 miles a day.”[211] {170}

In the church robbers found themselves side by side with insolvent debtors. These before seeking refuge were usually careful to make a general donation of all their property, and the creditors who cited them to justice remained empty handed. In 1379,[212] Richard II enacted remedial legislation. During five weeks, once a week, the debtor is to be summoned, by proclamation made at the door of the sanctuary, to appear in person or by attorney before the king’s judges. If he does not choose to appear justice shall take its course; sentence will be passed, and the property that he had given away will be shared among the creditors.

This, however, served, as usual, only for a time. In the first years of the following reign the Commons are found lamenting the same abuses. Apprentices who have plundered their masters, tradesmen in debt, robbers, flee to St. Martin-le-Grand and live there in quiet on the money they have stolen. They employ the leisure which this peaceful existence leaves them in patiently forging “obligations, indentures, acquitances,” imitating the signatures and seals of honest city merchants and of other people. Felons, murderers and thieves avail themselves of this restful seclusion for preparing new crimes; they go out at night to commit them, and safely return in the morning to their inviolate retreat. The king, apparently puzzled as to what to do, when the abuse is so great and the privilege {171} so sacred, vaguely promises that “reasonable remedy shall be had.”[213]

Some years later (A.D. 1447) the Goldsmiths’ Company of London was startled on finding that a quantity of sham gold and silver plate and jewellery had been issued from the privileged precincts of St. Martin-le-Grand’s sanctuary, to the great detriment of their own worshipful company. They brought the facts to the notice of the king, who wrote to the Dean recommending him to check this abuse if possible: “Trustie and welbeloved, we grete you wel, and let you to wote that we be informed that there be divers persons dwellinge within our seinctuarie of St. Martin’s that forge and sell laton and coper, some gilt and some sylverd for gold and silver, unto the great deceipt of our lege people. . . . ”[214] The tone of the king’s letter is very moderate; he seems to write only to please the Goldsmiths’ Company, while realizing that he is powerless in the matter, and that his recommendations will come to nothing.

A priest who took refuge in a church was not obliged to quit England; he swore that he was a priest, and “enjoyed ecclesiastic privilege, according to the praiseworthy custom of the kingdom.”[215] But the church, who accorded to all comers the benefit of sanctuary, reserved to herself the power of removal from it. “In this year (1320), a woman who was named Isabel of Bury, killed the priest of the church of All Saints, near London Wall, and she remained in the same church five days, so that the Bishop of London issued his letter that the church would not save her, wherefore she was brought out of the church to Newgate and was hanged on the third day afterwards.”[216] {172}

In those days, when riots and rebellions were not uncommon, the right of sanctuary might be valuable for any one; reformers like Wyclif vainly protested against this exorbitant but useful custom.[217] A bishop even, however sacred his person, might have to spur his horse and fly towards a church to save his head. The Bishop of Exeter tried and failed when Isabella and her son came to overthrow Edward II:[218] “The same day came one Sir Walter de Stapleton, who was Bishop of Exeter, and the king’s treasurer the previous year, riding to his house in Elde Deanes lane to his dinner, and there he was proclaimed traitor; and he seeing that fled on his horse towards the church of St. Paul’s, and was there met and quickly unhorsed, and brought to Cheap, and there he was stripped and his head cut off.”

Under Richard III might be seen a queen and a king’s son refuse to quit the sacred enclosure of Westminster, in which their lives were safe, thanks to the sanctity of the place. Sir Thomas More has left in his history of the usurper, the first real history in the national language, a moving picture of the plucky defence of Edward IV’s widow and of the persistent efforts of Richard to snatch the second child of the late king from the abbey. To reiterated demands the queen replied: “In what place coulde I recken him sure, if he be not sure in this the sentuarye whereof was there never tiraunt yet so develish, that durst presume to breake. . . . For soth he hath founden a goodly glose, by whiche that place that may defend a thefe, may not save an innocent.”[219] The “goodly glose” of Richard III consisted simply in having the right of sanctuary abolished. In a speech in favour of {173} the measure, which was aimed especially at the places of refuge of St. Paul’s and Westminster, the Duke of Buckingham is represented by More drawing a very lively as well as an exact picture of the disorders there: “What a rabble of theves, murtherers, and malicious heyghnous traitours, and that in twoo places specyallye. . . . Mens wyves runne thither with theyr housebandes plate, and saye, thei dare not abyde with theyr housebandes for beatinge. Theves bryng thyther theyr stolen goodes, and there lyve thereon. There devise thei newe roberies; nightlye they steale out, they robbe and reve, and kyll, and come in again as though those places gave them not only a safe garde for the harme they have done, but a license also to doo more.”[220]

This privilege endured, however, and even survived the Reformation; but from that hour it was less respected. Lord Chancellor Bacon speaks of the sanctuary of Colnham, near Abingdon, as being considered “insufficient” for traitors, under Henry VII; several political criminals who had taken refuge there, were seized, therefore, and one of them was executed.[221] Sanctuaries were suppressed, legally at least, in the twenty-first year of the reign of James I: “And be it alsoe enacted by the authoritie of this present parliament that no sanctuarie or priviledge {174} of sanctuary shal be hereafter admitted or allowed in any case.”[222] But they lingered on in England as well as on the continent. Cromwell complains, in one of his most famous speeches, of the difficulties his Government sometimes experience on that account when they have to ask from foreign potentates that justice be done. He alludes to the recent assassination of an English messenger, and says: “It is the pleasure of the Pope at any time to tell you that though the man is murdered, yet his murderer has got into the sanctuary.” Another proof that, after the statute of James I, the right of sanctuary did not fall entirely into disuse in England is that it had to be re-abolished in 1697; sanctuaries are to be found even so late as the reign of George I, when the one at St. Peter’s, Westminster, was demolished.

With all their penal severity, law and custom still gave other encouragements to malefactors. They often received charters of pardon which the royal chancery willingly granted because they must be paid for, while the Commons unweariedly renewed their complaints against this abuse. The priest, John Crochille, states to the king in parliament that while he was at the Court of Rome he has been outlawed, and was imprisoned on his return. The chancellor has granted him a charter of pardon, but he is “so impoverished that he has not wherewith to pay for the said charter.”[223]

Charters were thus given to the innocent for money, and to “common felons and murderers” also, which had two results: the number of brigands increased by reason of their impunity, and men dared not bring the most formidable criminals to justice for fear of seeing them return pardoned and ready to wreak a terrible revenge.

Most unluckily, the interest that the great had in {175} the continuance of this abuse tended also to its maintenance. In league with their retainers, they wanted to defend them from justice as they themselves were defended by them in the street or on the road; and the best means of saving these bravi from the consequences of some assassination was to obtain or buy for them a charter of pardon. The Commons knew it, and reminded the king that often the protectors of such criminals secured charters for them on the representation that these men were abroad, occupied in fighting for the prince. The charter once obtained, the malefactors returned and renewed their ill-deeds, without fear of being troubled by any one.[224]

For all these reasons the traveller would not have been prudent if he had not foreseen on starting the chance of some untoward meeting, and if he had not armed himself in consequence. This was such a recognized necessity that the Chancellor of the University of Oxford allowed the students, on the occasion of a journey, to carry arms, otherwise strictly forbidden.[225]

There was, then, at best, but moderate safety against robbers, and there was not always much against the sheriff’s officers themselves. At a time when prowlers were so numerous, it was enough to be a stranger in the district, especially if it were night, to be sent to gaol on suspicion, {176} as shown by a statute of Edward III.[226] Nothing more general than the terms of this law; the power to arrest is almost unlimited: “Whereas, in the statute made at Winchester in the time of King Edward, grandfather to the king that now is, it is contained, That if any stranger pass by the country in the night, of whom any have suspicion, he shall presently be arrested and delivered to the sheriff, and remain in ward till he be duly delivered; and because there have been divers manslaughters, felonies, and robberies[227] done in times past, by people that be called roberdesmen, wastors, and draw-latches . . . ” whoever suspects any to be one such, “be it by day or by night,” shall cause him immediately to be arrested by the constables of the towns; the man shall be kept in prison till the justices of gaol delivery come down, and meanwhile inquiry shall be made.

Think now of a stranger passing through the town by night; some constable feels suspicious and wants to arrest him; imagining himself already in prison “till the justices come down,” the man runs away instead of allowing himself to be taken. The statute has provided for his case.[228] “If they will not obey the arrest, hue and cry shall be levied upon them, and such as keep the watch shall follow with hue and cry with all the town, and the towns near, and so hue and cry shall be made from town to town until that they be taken and delivered {177} to the sheriff.”[229] A singular picture: night wraps in its shadows the crooked lanes of the unlit city; the stranger is perhaps a robber, perhaps an honest man, who has lost his way, not knowing the place; his fault is not to be within doors by curfew; he gropes his way as best he can; the watch perceives and challenges him; fearing the result he takes to his heels, and behold! the hue and cry begins, the watch runs, the town wakes up, lights appear, and one after the other the more zealous join in the chase. If the town is fortified, the postern gates have long been closed, and he will be surely taken. Scarcely can he hope to cast himself into some unshut doorway at a turning of the street, behind which he will cower, listening with trembling hand and beating heart to the watch who pass heavily along at a charging pace, followed by a crowd of furious shouters. The number of steps lessen, and the shouts become fainter, then die away, lost in the depths of the city.

If the place is not important enough to be enclosed by walls, the first thought of the fugitive will be to gain the open, and then he must not fear marshes, ditches, hedges; he must know how, at a bend of the ground, to leave the high-road and profit by any place where the Statute of Winchester has been negligently applied. But for that he is lost, the constables follow, the town follows, the “cry” continues, and at the next village the scene of the start will begin over again. The inhabitants, warned by the clamour, light their lanterns, and see, they are already in the chase. Before he reaches the end of the high-street some peasant will be found on the alert, ready to bar the passage of the road to him. All have an interest in it, all have been robbed, or their friends, or relatives; {178} someone of their kin may have been wounded or murdered on the road as he returned from market. Every one has heard of such misfortunes, and feels himself personally menaced. Hence this zeal in joining the chase with the hue and cry, and the conviction that, running so hard and making so many folk run, the fugitive must be a famous brigand ready for the gibbet.[230]

PART II LAY WAYFARERS

35. AN ADVENTURE SEEKER.

(From the MS. 2 B. vii; English; early Fourteenth Century.)

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

“Qui ne s’ad­ven­ture n’a che­val ni mule, ce dist Sal­o­mon.—Qui trop s’ad­ven­ture perd che­val et mule, respon­dit Mal­con.”

VIE DE GARGANTUA.

We have seen the aspect and usual con­di­tion of En­glish roads; we must now take sep­a­rate­ly the prin­ci­pal types of the wan­der­ing class and see what sort of a life the way­farer led, and what was his importance in society or in the State.

Wayfarers belonging to civil life were, in the first place, quacks and drug-sellers, glee-men, tumblers, minstrels, and singers; then messengers, pedlars, and itinerant chapmen; lastly, outlaws, thieves of all kinds, peasants out of bond or perambulating workmen, and beggars. To ecclesiastic life belonged preachers, mendicant friars, and those strange dealers in indulgences called pardoners. Lastly there were palmers and pilgrims, whose journeyings {182} had a religious object, but in whose ranks, as in Chaucer’s book, clerk and lay were mingled.

Many of these individuals, the friars for instance, had, it is true, a resting-place, but their existence was spent, for the greater part, on the roads; when they left their abode their purpose was not to reach this or that place, they had no fixed itinerary, but spent their time in ceaseless rambles about the country, begging as they went. They had, in the long run, caught the manners and the language of true nomadic wayfarers, and in common opinion were generally confounded with them; they belonged to that caste or family of beings.

As for the strange race which we still see at the present day wandering from country to country, and which, later than any, will represent among us the caste of wanderers, it had not yet made its appearance in the British world, and are outside the limits of the present work. The Bohemians or Gipsies remained entirely unknown in England till the fifteenth century.

36. BLIND BEGGAR AND HIS DOG.

(From the MS. 10 E. IV.)

37. “THER WAS ALSO A DOCTOUR OF PHISIK” (CHAUCER’S DOCTOR).

(From the Ellesmere MS.)

CHAPTER I HERBALISTS, CHARLATANS, MINSTRELS, JUGGLERS, AND TUMBLERS

The most popular of all the wanderers were naturally the most cheerful, or those held to be the most beneficent. These latter were the folks with a universal panacea, very numerous in the Middle Ages; they went about the world selling health. They established themselves in the village green, or the market place, on holidays, spreading a carpet or a piece of cloth on the ground; they displayed their drugs, and began to harangue the people. Their numbers go diminishing nowadays, for the laws are more and more unkind to them, but they have not yet entirely disappeared, so natural to man {184} are credulity and the longing for health. One may still hear at the present day discourses not very different from those they spoke in the fourteenth century in England, France, or Italy; their profession is one that has changed less than any. In the thirteenth century the herbalist of Rutebeuf spoke like Ben Jonson’s mountebank of the seventeenth, like the charlatan who yesterday a few steps from our door attracted the crowd to his trestle, limiting however his sales, on account of the churlishness of the legislator, to tonics, tooth pastes and the like. Big words, marvellous tales, praise of their noble and distant origin, enumeration of the extraordinary cures they have made, ostentatious display of an unbounded devotion to the public good, and of entire pecuniary disinterestedness: all this is found, and always will be found, in the talk of these insinuating itinerants, as it is also found to-day in the advertisements, on walls or in newspapers, of wondrous cures discovered by a priest, by a convent, by a gentleman of worth and disinterestedness; which advertisements have, to some extent, replaced the itinerant healer of olden times.

“Good people,” said Rutebeuf’s medicinal herb-seller six hundred years ago, “I am not one of those poor preachers, nor one of those poor herbalists who stand in front of churches with their miserable ill-sown cloak, who carry boxes and sachets and spread out a carpet. Know that I am not one of these; but I belong to a lady whose name is Madame Trote de Salerno, who makes a kerchief of her ears, and whose eyebrows hang down as silver chains behind her shoulders: know that she is the wisest lady that is in all the four parts of the world. My lady sends us into different lands and countries, into Apulia, Calabria, Burgundy, into the forest of Ardennes to kill wild beasts in order to extract good ointments from them, and give medicine to those who are ill in body. . . . And because she made me swear by the saints when I {185} parted from her, I will teach you the proper cure for worms, if you will listen. Will you listen?

“. . . Take off your caps, give ear, look at my herbs which my lady sends into this land and country; and because she wishes the poor as well as the rich to have access thereto, she told me that I should make pennyworths of them, for a man may have a penny in his purse who has not five pounds; and she told and commanded that I might take pence of the current coin in the land and country wherever I should come. . . .

“These herbs, you will not eat them; for there is no ox in this country, no charger, be he never so strong, who if he had a bit the size of a pea upon his tongue would not die a hard death, they are so strong and bitter. . . . You will put them three days to sleep in good white wine; if you have no white take red, if you have no red take fine clear water, for one may have a well before his door who has not a cask of wine in his cellar. If you breakfast from it for thirteen mornings you will be cured of your various maladies. For if my father and mother were in danger of death and they were to ask of me the best herb I could give them, I should give them this. This is how I sell my herbs and my ointments; if you want any, come and take them; if you don’t, let them alone.”[231]

This herbalist was of those early maligned in France and England by royal ordinances for the illegal practice of medicine. Philip the Fair in 1311, John the Good in 1352, had issued severe decrees against them. They were berated with being “ignorant of men’s temperament, of the time and mode of administering, of the virtues of medicines, above all, of laxative ones in which lies danger of death.” These people “often come from abroad,” go through town and suburbs, and venture to administer to the confiding sick, “clisteria multum laxativa et alia {186} eis illicita,”[232] at which the royal authority was justly indignant.

In England the itinerant drug-sellers had no better reputation; the popular songs, satires and farces always show them associating in taverns with the meanest rabble, and using—true to nature—the most ridiculous rant. Master Brundyche’s man, in a play of the fifteenth century, thus prepares the minds of the hearers for the advent of the “leech,” his master, deriding both:

What dysease or syknesse y^t ever ye have,

He wyl never leve yow tylle ye be in your grave.[233]

To have an idea of what their recipes might be, one must recall what the medicine was that the statutes of the kingdom protected. John of Gaddesden, court doctor under Edward II, got rid of the marks of the small-pox by wrapping the sick man in red cloths, and he thus cured the heir to the throne himself.[234] He had for a long time been troubled how to cure stone: “At last,” says he, in his “Rosa Anglica,” “I bethought myself of collecting {187} a good number of those beetles which in summer are found in the dung of oxen, also of the crickets which sing in the fields. I cut off the heads and the wings of the crickets and put them with the beetles and common oil into a pot; I covered it and left it afterwards for a day and night in a bread oven. I drew out the pot and heated it at a moderate fire, I pounded the whole and rubbed the sick parts; in three days the pain had disappeared”; under the influence of the beetles and the crickets the stone had broken into bits.[235] It was almost always thus, by a sudden illumination, bethinking himself of beetles or of something else, that the learned man discovered his most efficacious remedies: Madame Trote de Salerno never confided to her agents in the various parts of the world the secret of more marvellous and unexpected recipes.

The law, however, made a clear distinction between a court physician and a quack of the cross-ways. Kings and princes had their own healers, attached to their persons, whom they trusted more than they did their ministers. Securing by indentures of 1372 and 1373 the services of “frere William de Appleton, phisicien et surgien,” and of “Maistre Johan Bray,” granting them forty marks yearly pension with the “bouche en court,” or right to be fed at his tables, and other advantages, John of Gaunt, “roy de Castille,” was careful to bind those men of learning to attend on him “in peace and in war, so long as they lived,” a pledge which his brother, King Edward, never exacted from his chancellors. A Gaddesden had the support of an established reputation to apply any medicament to his patients, and he offered the warranty of his high position. He had studied at Oxford, and he was an authority; a grave physician like Chaucer’s “doctour,” who had grown rich during the plague, his wealth increasing his repute— {188}

“For gold in physik is a cordial,”

had not neglected to pore over the works of “Gatesden.”

With lesser book-knowledge but an equal ingenuity, the wandering herbalist was not so advantageously known: he could not, like the royal physician, rely on his good reputation and his “bouche en court” to make his patients swallow glow-worms, rub them with beetles and crickets, or give them “seven heads of fat bats”[236] as remedies. The legislator kept his eye on him. In the country, like most of the other wayfarers, the man nearly always found means to escape the rigour of the laws; but in towns the risk was greater. The unhappy Roger Clerk was sued in 1381 for the illegal practice of medicine in London, because he tried to cure a woman by making her wear a certain parchment on her bosom. Though such a nostrum could not possibly be more hurtful than the use of fat bats, he was carried to the pillory “through the middle of the city, with trumpets and pipes,” on a horse without a saddle, his parchment and a whetstone round his neck, unseemly pottery hanging round his neck and down his back, in token that he had lied.[237]

Uneasy at the increase of these abuses, Henry V issued in 1421 an Ordinance against the meddlers with physic and surgery, “to get rid of the mischiefs and dangers which have long continued within the kingdom among the people by means of those who have used the art and practice of physic and surgery, pretending to be well and sufficiently taught in the same arts, when of truth they are not so.” Henceforth there would be severe punishments for all practitioners who have not been approved in their speciality, “that is to say, those of physic by the universities, and the surgeons by the masters of that art.”[238] The mischief {189} continued just as before; which seeing, in order to give more authority to the medicine approved by the State, Edward IV, in the first year of his reign, erected the Company of Barbers of London using the faculty of surgery, into a corporation.[239]

The Renaissance came and found barbers, quacks, empirics, and sorcerers continuing to prosper on British soil, and still the subject of song, satire and play. John Heywood’s Pothecary is a lineal descendant of Rutebeuf’s herbalist; he sells a wonderful Syrapus de Byzansis, and advertises it in such a way that, anything that happens, he is right:

“These be the thynges that breke all stryfe

Betweene mannes sycknes and his lyfe;

From all payne these shall you delever

And set you even at reste for ever.”[240]

Henry VIII deplored the hold those men kept on the com­mon people, and on some of their bet­ters too; he con­sid­ered it his duty to enact new rules. “The science and connyng of physyke and surgerie,” said the king in his statute, “to the per­fecte know­lege wherof bee re­qui­site bothe grete lernyng and ripe ex­per­i­ence, ys daily within this Royalme exer­cised by a grete mul­ti­tude of ignoraunt persones, of whom the grete partie have no maner of insight in the same nor in any other kynde of lernyng; some also can no lettres on the boke, soofarfurth that common artificers, as smythes, wevers, and women boldely and custumably take upon theim grete curis and thyngys of great difficultie, in the which they partely use sorcery and which-crafte, partely applie such medicine unto the disease as be verey noyous and nothyng metely therfore, to the high displeasoure {190} of God . . . and destruccion of many of the kynge’s liege people, most specially of them that cannot descerne the uncunnyng from the cunnyng.”[241] The examples above have shown how difficult it must often have been to “descerne” between them.

Consequently, the king continues, every one who may wish to practise in London or seven miles round, must previously submit to an examination before the bishop of that city, or before the Dean of St. Paul’s, assisted by four “doctors of phisyk.” In the country the examination will take place before the bishop of the diocese or his vicar-general. In 1540, the same prince united the corporation of the barbers and the college of surgeons, and granted each year to the new association the bodies of four condemned criminals “for anathomies.”

Hardly were all these privileges conceded than doubts filled the mind of the legislator himself, and who, it may be wondered, did he regret? precisely those old unregistered quacks, those possessors of infallible secrets, those village empirics so harshly treated in the statute of 1511. A new law was enacted, which is but one long enumeration of the guilty practices of qualified doctors; they poison their clients as thoroughly as the quacks of old, the chief difference is that they take more for it, refusing even to interfere if the patient is poor:

“Mynding oonelie theyre owne lucres, and nothing the profite or ease of the diseased or patient, [they] have sued, troubled and vexed divers honest persones aswell men as woomen, whome God hathe endued with the knowledge of the nature, kinde, and operacion of certeyne herbes, rotes, and waters, . . . and yet the saide persones have not takin any thing for theyre peynes and cooning, but have mynistred the same to the poore people oonelie for neighbourhode and Goddes sake, and of pite and {191} charytie; and it is nowe well knowen that the surgeons admytted wooll doo no cure to any persone, but where they shall knowe to be rewarded with a greater soome or rewarde than the cure extendeth unto, for in cace they wolde mynistre theyre coonning to sore people unrewarded, there shoulde not so manye rotte and perishe to deathe for lacke of helpe of surgerye as dailie doo.” Besides, in spite of the examinations by the Bishop of London, “the most parte of the persones of the said crafte of surgeons have small coonning.” For which cause all the king’s subjects who have, “by speculacion or practyse,” knowledge of the virtues of plants, roots, and waters, may as before, notwithstanding enactments to the contrary, cure any malady apparent on the surface of the body, by means of plasters, poultices, and ointments “within any parte of the realme of Englande, or within any other the kinges dominions.”[242]

A radical change, as we see; the secrets and “speculacions” of country people were no longer those of sorcerers, but precious recipes which they had received from God by intuition; the poor, subject to die without a doctor, rejoiced, the quacks breathed once more—but were led again onto the boards of the comic stage just as before. Ben Jonson, that bold pedestrian who walked all the way from London to Scotland, and who, in his long rambles through villages or cities, had become familiar with the variegated characters haunting their market places, painted, in his turn, the portrait of the “mountebank doctor,” one of the best, not better however than Rutebeuf’s, and very similar to it, for, as we said, the type passed on from century to century, unchanged.

Old Ben, as usual, paints from life, having seen and heard more than once at Bartholomew and other fairs the drug-seller pacing his scaffold and exclaiming, “O, health, health! the blessing of the rich! the riches of the {192} poor! who can buy thee at too dear a rate, since there is no enjoying this world without thee.” Upon which the man makes game of the despicable “asses” his rivals, boasts of his incomparable panacea, into which enters a little human fat, which is worth a thousand crowns, but which he will part with for eight crowns, no, for six, finally for sixpence. A thousand crowns is what the cardinals Montalto and Farnese and his friend the Grand Duke of Tuscany have paid him, but he despises money and he makes sacrifices for the people. Likewise he has a little of the powder which gave beauty to Venus and to Helen; one of his friends, a great traveller, found it in the ruins of Troy and sent it him. This friend also sent a little of it to the French Court, but that portion had become “sophisticated,” and the ladies who use it do not obtain from it such good results.[243]

Three years later, an English traveller, finding himself at Venice, was filled with wonder at the talk of the Italian mountebanks, and describing them, he too, from life, gave another copy of the same immutable original. “Truely,” wrote Coryat, “I often wondered at many of these natural orators. For they would tell their tales with such admirable volubility and plausible grace, even extempore, and seasoned with that singular variety of elegant jests and witty conceits, that they did often strike great admiration into strangers that never heard them before.” They sell “oyles, soueraigne waters, amorous songs printed, apothecary drugs, and a common-weale of other trifles. . . . I saw one of them holde a viper in his hand, and play with his sting a quarter of an houre together, and yet receive no hurt. . . . He made us all beleeve that the same viper was lineally descended from the generation of that viper that lept out of the fire upon St. Paul’s hand, in the island of Melita, now called Malta.”[244] {193}

No doubt the loquacity, the volubility, the momentary conviction, the grace, the insinuating tone, the light, winged gaiety of the southern charlatan were not found so fully or so charmingly at the festivals of old England. These festivals were, however, merry and boisterous, attended by large crowds, among which moved many an artful character so full of jest and guile that Shakespeare thought them worthy of immortality; he gave it them indeed in creating, as a model of those men whose “revenue is the silly cheat,” his incomparable “Autolycus, a rogue.”

Country labourers went in numbers to these meetings, to stand jests which, aimed at them, were an amusement even to themselves, and to buy some drug which would do them good: they are to be seen there still. At the present day they continue to collect before the vendors of cures for the toothache and other troubles. Certificates abound round the booth; it seems as though all the illustrious people in the world must have been benefited by the discovery; the man now addresses himself to the rest of humanity. He talks, gesticulates, gets excited, leans over with a grave tone and a deep voice. The peasants press around, gaping with inquisitive eye, uncertain if they ought to laugh or to be afraid, and in the end get confident. The large hand fumbles in the new coat, the purse is drawn forth with an awkward air, the piece of money is held out and the medicine received, while the shining eye and undecided physiognomy say plainly that the cunning and the habitual practical sense are here at fault; that these good souls, clever and invincible in their own domain when it is a question of a sheep or a cow, are the victims of every one in an unknown land, the land of medical lore. The vendor bestirs himself, and now, as formerly, triumphs over indecision by means of direct appeals.

In England the incomparable Goose Fair at {194} Nottingham should be chosen as the place to see these spectacles, which shine there in all their infinite variety, with quacks as racy as those of pristine days, scenes reminding one of Rubens’ great “Kermesse” at the Louvre, and at every turn and before every shop living confutations of St. Evremond and others’ ideas of the temper of the English, ever lost in their thoughts, as if merry England were no more.[245]

Greater still was, in the Middle Ages, the popularity of those wayfarers, numerous too at the Goose Fair, who came not to cure, but to amuse, and who, if they did not offer remedies for diseases, at least brought forgetfulness of troubles; the minstrels, tumblers, jugglers, and singers. Minstrels and jongleurs, under different names, exercised the same profession, that is, they chanted songs and romances to the accompaniment of their instruments, as is still done in the East, in Persia for instance, where poems are not told but chanted, in various keys according to the subject. At a time when books were rare, and the theatre, properly so called, did not exist, poetry and music travelled with the minstrels and gleemen along the roads; such guests were always welcome. They were to be found at every feast, wherever there were rejoicings; it was expected from them, as from wine or beer, that care would be lulled to sleep, and merriment would replace it. They had many ways to fulfil the expectation, some dignified, some not. Of the first sort was the singing and reciting, either in French or English, of the loves and deeds of ancient heroes.

This was a grand part to play, one held in much reverence; the harpers and minstrels who arrived at the castle gates, their heads full of war stories, or sweet tales, or lively songs to excite laughter, “ad ridendum,” were received with the highest favour. On their coming they announced themselves without by some “murie {195} singing” overheard in the house; soon came the order to bring them in; they were ranged at one end of the hall, and every one gave ear to them.[246] They preluded on their instruments, and then began to sing. On what subject?

“Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow

For old unhappy far off things

And battles long ago:

Or is it some more humble lay

Familiar matter of to-day?

Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain

That has been and may be again?”[247]

Like Taillefer at Hastings, they told of the prowess of Charlemagne and of Roland, or they spoke of Arthur, or of the heroes of the wars of Troy, undoubted ancestors of the Britons of England:

“Men lykyn jestis for to here,

And romans rede in diuers manere

Of Alexandre the conqueroure,

Of Julius Cesar the emperoure,

Of Grece and Troy the strong stryf,

There many a man lost his lyf, {196}

Of Brute that baron bold of hond

The first conqueroure of Englond,

Of kyng Artour that was so riche,

Was non in his tyme him liche,

•••••

How kyng Charlis and Rowlond fawght

With Sarzyns nold they be cawght,

Of Tristrem and of Ysoude the swete

How they with love first gan mete,

Of kyng John and of Isombras,

Of Ydoyne and of Amadas,

Stories of diuerce thynggis

Of pryncis, prelatis, and of kynggis,

Many songgis of diuers ryme,

As english, frensh, and latyne.”[248]

In the fourteenth century most of these old romances, heroic, forceful, or touching, had been re-cast and put into new lan­guage; florid de­scrip­tions, com­pli­cat­ed ad­ven­tures, marvels and prod­i­gies had been added to them; many had been turned into prose, and instead of being sung they were read.[249] The lord listened with pleasure, and his taste, palled by surfeit, caused him to take delight in the strange entangle­ments with which every event was hence­forth enveloped. He now lived a more complex life than formerly; being more refined he had more wants, and grand, simple pictures in poems like the Song of Roland no longer satisfied his imag­i­na­tion: he preferred variety to grandeur. The heroes of romance {197} found harder and harder tasks imposed on them, and were obliged to triumph over more and more marvellous en­chant­ments. As the hand became more alert the modelling improved; the softer-hearted heroes of amorous adven­tures were endowed by the poet with that charm, at once mystic and sensual, so characteristic of the sculptured figures of the fourt­eenth cen­tury. The author of “Sir Gawayne” takes a scarcely con­cealed pleasure in describing the visits which his knight receives, in painting his lady, so gentle, so pretty, with easy motions and gay smile; he puts into his picture all his art, all his soul; he finds words which seem caresses, and verses which shine as with a golden gleam.[250]

These pictures, not rare in the thirteenth century, greatly multiplied in the fourteenth, but toward the end thereof passed from the romance into the tale, or into poems, half tale, half romance, such as the “Troilus” of Chaucer. After many transformations the metrical romance was gradually giving way to new forms and styles which better suited the tastes of the hour. A hundred years earlier such a man as Chaucer would have taken up the Arthur legends in his turn, and would have written some splendid long-winded poetical romance for the minstrels; but he left us tales and lyric poems because his own taste and that of the age were different, and he felt that people were still curious but not enthusiastic about old heroic stories, that few any longer followed them with passion to the end, and that they were rather made the ornament of libraries than the subject of daily thought.[251] Thenceforward men liked to find separately in {198} ballads and in tales the lyric breath and the spirit of observation formerly contained with all the rest in the great metrical romances, the poetical summæ of earlier days; and these, abandoned to the less expert of the itinerant rhymers, became such wretched copies of the old originals that they were the laughing-stock of people of sense and taste.

Many of the grand French epics were thus abridged and put into skipping, barren English verse, the epics being out of fashion, their substitutes valueless. So, when Chaucer, surrounded by his fellow pilgrims, favoured them with a story of Sir Thopas, popular good sense, personated by the host, rebelled, and the performance was rudely interrupted. Yet from Sir Thopas to many of the romances which ran the streets or the roads the distance is small, and the laughable parody was hardly more than a close imitation. Robert Thornton, in the first half of the fifteenth century, copied from older texts a good number of these remodelled romances. In turning their pages one is struck by the excellence of Chaucer’s jesting, his caricature being almost a portrait.

These poems are all cut after one and the same pattern, tripping and sprightly, with little thought and less sentiment; the cadenced stanzas march on, clear, easy, and empty; no constraint, no effort; one may open and close the book without a sigh, without regret, with no positive weariness nor really-felt pleasure. Were it not for the proper names, the reader might pass chancewise from one romance to another without noticing the change. Take no matter which, “Sir Isumbras” for example: {199} after a prayer for form’s sake, the rhymer vaunts the valour of the hero, then praises a quality of especial value, with which he was happily endowed, his fondness for minstrels and his generosity towards them:

“He luffede glewmene well in haulle

He gafe thame robis riche of palle (fine cloth)

Bothe of golde and also fee;

Of curtasye was he kynge,

Of mete and drynke no nythynge,

On lyfe was none so fre.”

Isumbras, his wife, and his son, are without peers; he is the most valiant of knights, his wife the most lovely of women:

“I wille yow telle of a knyghte

That bothe was stalworthe and wyghte,

And worthily undir wede;

His name was hattene syr Ysambrace.”

So is also Sir Eglamour:

“Y shalle telle yow of a knyght

That was bothe hardy and wyght,

And stronge in eche a stowre.”

So is also Sir Degrevant:

“And y schalle karppe off a knyght

That was both hardy and wyght,

Sire Degrevaunt that hend hyght,

That dowghty was of dede.”[252] {200}

So is also Chaucer’s Sir Thopas:

“. . . I wol telle verrayment

Of myrthe and of solas,

Al of a knyght was fair and gent

In batail and in tornament,

His name was Sir Thopas.”

And though Sir Thopas almost comes within the scope of the present work, being an adventure seeker, “a knight auntrous,” ever on his way, never sleeping in a house—

“And for he was a knight auntrous,

He nolde slepen in non hous,

But liggen in his hode;

His bright helm was his wonger (pillow),”

yet must we abide by the ruling of mine host and leave him alone:

“No more of this for Goddes dignitee.”

But, even at a com­par­a­tive­ly late date, the inmate of an out of the way castle usually proved more lenient. He welcomed the minstrel, his verse and his viol as he welcomed change; he lent a complacent ear to his commonplace romances, his ballads on every subject, his praise of flowers, women, wine, spring, heroes and saints, his goliardic dispraise of women,[253] monks and friars, his tales of love or laughter, his patriotic songs the rarest of all, for the Hundred Years War was for the English chiefly a royal and not a national war, and this alone can explain the scant place occupied in the songs of the time by Crécy {201} and Poictiers, never mentioned by Chaucer, never mentioned by Langland (who disapproved of the war), celebrated only by one solitary songster known by name and otherwise unknown, the unimitated and ungifted Laurence Minot.[254] The noble listened; he had few intellectual diversions; he gave little time if any to reading, which was not for him then an unmixed pleasure, and needed effort; there was no theatre for him to go to. At long intervals only, when the great yearly feasts came round, the knight might go, in company with the crowd, to see Pilate and Jesus on the boards. There he found sometimes not only the crowd but the king too. Richard II, for example, witnessed a religious play or mystery in the fourteenth year of his reign, and had ten pounds distributed among several clerks of London who had played before him at Skinnerwell “the play of the Passion and of the creation of the world.”[255] A few years later he saw the famous York plays, at the feast of Corpus Christi, performed in the streets of that city.[256] In ordinary times the knight was only too happy to receive in his home men of vast memory, who knew more verse and more music than could be heard in a day.

The king himself liked their coming. He had them sometimes brought up to him in his very chamber, where he was pleased to sit and hear their music. Edward II received four minstrels in his chamber at Westminster and heard their songs, and when they went he ordered twenty ells of cloth to be given them for their reward.[257] No one thought in those days of rejoicings without minstrels; there were four hundred and twenty-six of them {202} at the marriage of the Princess Margaret, daughter of Edward I.[258] Edward III gave a hundred pounds to those who were present at the marriage of his daughter Isabella,[259] some figured also at his tournaments.[260] When a bishop went on his pastoral rounds he was occasionally greeted by minstrels, hired on purpose to cheer him; they were of necessity chosen among local artists, who were apt to fiddle cheap music to his lordship. Bishop Swinfield, in one of his rounds, gave a penny a piece to two minstrels who had just played before him; but on another occasion he distributed twelve pence a piece.[261]

When men of importance were travelling they sometimes had the pleasure of hearing minstrels at the inn, and in that manner whiled away the long empty evenings. In the curious manual already quoted, called “La manière de langage,” composed in French by an Englishman of the fourteenth century, the traveller of distinction is represented listening to the musicians at the inn, and mingling his voice at need with their music: “Then,” says our author, “come forward into the lord’s presence the trumpeters and horn-blowers with their frestels (pipes) and clarions, and begin to play and blow very loud, and then the lord with his squires begin to move, to sway, to dance, to utter and sing fine carols till midnight without ceasing.”[262]

In great houses minstrels’ music was the usual seasoning of meals. At table there are only two amusements, {203} says Langland, in his “Visions”: to listen to the minstrels, and, when they are silent, to talk religion and to scoff at its mysteries.[263] The repasts which Sir Gawain takes at the house of his host the Green Knight are enlivened with songs and music. On the second day the amusement extends till after supper; they listen during the meal and after it to many noble songs, such as Christmas carols and new songs, with all possible mirth:

“Mony athel songez,

As coundutes of kryst-masse, and carolez newe,

With all the manerly merthe that mon may of telle.”

On the third day,

“With merthe and mynstralsye, with metez at hor wylle,

Thay maden as mery as any men moghten.”[264]

In Chaucer’s “Squire’s Tale,” King Cambynskan gives a

“Feste so solempne and so riche

That in this worlde ne was ther noon it liche.”

And this prince is shown sitting after the third course among his nobles, listening to the music:

“. . . So bifelle after the thridde cours,

Whil that the kyng sit thus in his nobleye,

Herkyng his mynstrales her thinges pleye

Byforn him atte boord deliciously. . . .”

During all these meals the sound of the viol, the voice of the singers, the “delicious things” of the minstrels, were interrupted, it is true, by the crunching of the bones {204} gnawed by the dogs under the tables, by the quarrels of the same, or by the sharp cry of some ill-bred falcon; for many noblemen kept during dinner these favourite birds on a perch behind them. Their masters, enjoying their presence, were indulgent with the liberties they took.

The minstrels of Cambynskan are represented as attached to his person; those belonging to the King of England also had permanent functions. The sovereign was seldom without them, and even when he went abroad was accompanied by them as well as by his hawks and hounds, a complete orchestra. Henry V engaged eighteen, who were to follow him to Guyenne and elsewhere.[265] Their chief is sometimes called king or marshal of the minstrels.[266] On May 2, 1387, Richard II gave a passport to John Caumz (? Camuz), “rex ministrallorum nostrorum,” who was setting out for a journey beyond the sea.[267] On January 19, 1464, Edward IV grants a pension of ten marks “to our beloved Walter Haliday, marshall of our minstrels.”[268] The Roll of Thomas Brantingham, treasurer to Edward III, bears frequent mention of royal minstrels, to whom a fixed salary of seven pence-halfpenny a day is paid.[269] King Richard II had in the same manner minstrels in his pay, and enjoyed their music {205} when travelling. When he went for the last time to Ireland he had to wait for ten days at Milford on account of contrary winds. That French gentleman, Créton, who was with him, and wrote afterwards a most interesting account of what befell the unfortunate king during the last year of his reign, states in his chronicle that the time was merrily passed at Milford while expecting a change in the weather, and that day and night they had music and songs of minstrels.[270]

The richer nobles imitated, of course, the king, and had their own companies, whom they allowed to play at times in various parts of the country (as was the case later with regular actors), and whom they supplied with testimonial letters vouching for them and their artistic ability.[271] The accounts of Winchester College under Edward IV show that this college recompensed the services of minstrels belonging to the king, the Earl of Arundel, Lord de la Ware, the Duke of Gloucester, the [Earl] of Northumberland, and the Bishop of Winchester; these last often recur. In the same accounts, time of Henry IV, mention is made of the expenses occasioned by the visit of the Countess of Westmoreland, accompanied by her suite. Her minstrels formed part of it, and a sum of money was given them.[272] {206}

When visiting towns and performing before the citizens, itinerant troups made a collection among the bystanders, having, however, themselves a fee to pay for the privilege. A curious example of this is recorded in John of Gaunt’s register,[273] where his seneschal of Newcastle-under-Lyme is ordered to see to it that 4d. be paid to William de Brompton a burgess of that city and Margery his wife, “by every minstrel coming there to make his minstralcy against the feast of St. Giles the Abbot,” and that a payment be also made to the same for every bear brought there to be baited, a regular inquest having shown that such fees had been paid to that couple and to Margery’s ancestors from time immemorial.

Like lords and princes, from the early fifteenth century at least, cities themselves had their troups of minstrels: “London, Coventry, Bristol, Shrewsbury, Norwich, Chester, York, Beverley, Leicester, Lynn, Canterbury, had them, to name no others. They received fixed fees or dues, wore the town livery and badge of a silver scutcheon, played at all local celebrations and festivities and were commonly known as waits.”[274]

Besides money and good meals, those musical wanderers often received a variety of gifts, such as cloaks, furred robes, and the like. Langland alludes more than once to these largesses, which proves that they were considerable, and he regrets that all this was not distributed to the poor who go, they too, from door to door, and are the minstrels of God: {207}

“Clerkus and knyghtes · welcometh kynges mynstrales,

And for love of here lordes · lithen hem at festes:

Much more, me thenketh · riche men auhte

Have beggers by-fore hem · whiche beth godes mynstrales.”[275]

38. PLAYING UPON THE VIELLE.

(From the MS. 10 E.IV; English; early Fourteenth Century.)

But his advice was not heeded, and long after his time the min­strels con­tinued to be ad­mit­ted to the castle halls. In erect­ing the hall the builder took into ac­count the prob­able visits of mu­si­cians, and often raised a gal­lery for them above the en­trance door, op­po­site to the dais, the place where the master’s table was set.[276] This cus­tom long survived the Mid­dle Ages. At Hat­field a min­strels’ gal­lery of the seven­teenth cen­tury adorns the hall of that beaut­i­ful place, and is still, on great oc­ca­sions, put to the use it was orig­i­nal­ly in­tended for.

The classic instrument of the minstrel was the vielle, a kind of violin or fiddle with a bow, something like ours, a drawing of which, as used in the thir­teenth cen­tury, is to be found in the album of Villard de Honne­court.[277] It was delicate to handle, and required much skill; in pro­por­tion there­fore as the pro­fes­sion lowered, the good per­former on the vielle became rarer; the common tam­bour­ine or tabor, which needed but little training, replaced the vielle, and true artists complained of the music and the taste of the {208} day. It was a tabor that the glee-man of Ely wore at his neck when he had his famous dialogue with the King of England, which proved so bewildering for the monarch: “He came thence to London; in a meadow he met the king and his suite; around his neck hung his tabor, painted with gold and rich azure.”[278]

The minstrels played yet other instruments, the harp, the lute, the guitar, the bag-pipe, the rota (a kind of small harp, the ancient instrument of the Celts), and others.[279]

39. THE MINSTRELS’ GALLERY AT EXETER.

(Fourteenth Century.)

The presents, the favour of the great, rendered enviable the lot of the minstrels; they multiplied accordingly, and the competition was great, which made the trade less profitable. In the fifteenth century, the king’s minstrels, clever and able men, protested to their master against the increasing audacity of the false minstrels, who deprived them of the greater part of their revenues. “Uncultured peasants,” said the king, who sided with his own men, “and workmen of different trades in our kingdom of England have passed themselves off as minstrels; some have worn our livery, which we did not {211} grant to them, and have even given themselves out to be our own minstrels.” By means of these guilty practices, they extorted much money from the king’s subjects, and although they had no understanding nor experience of the art, they went from place to place on festival days and gathered all the profits which should have enriched the true artists, those who had devoted themselves entirely to their profession, and did not exercise any low trade.

The king, to protect his men against such un­law­ful comp­e­ti­tion, au­thor­ized them to re­con­sti­tute and con­sol­i­date the pre-exist­ing gild of minstrels; no one could hence­forth exercise this pro­fes­sion, whatever his talent, if he had not been admitted into the gild. A power of inquiry was granted to the members of the society, who had the right to have false minstrels fined, the money to be applied to candles lit in the chapel of the Holy Virgin at St. Paul’s and in the “royal free chapel of St. Anthony.” For a pious motive was associated then with most actions, and minstrels, so badly treated by the generality of religious writers, were in this case bound, says the king, to pray in those two chapels for him while alive and for his soul when dead, for his “dearest consort Elizabeth queen of England,” and for the soul of his “dearest lord and father”; this till the end of time. Women were, as well as men, admitted into the fraternity.[280]

Such was the will of the king; in the same manner, and without any better success, the price of bread and the wage for a day’s labour were lowered by statute, all of which had but a limited and temporary effect. {212}

The authorities had other reasons for watching over singers and itinerant musicians; while they showed indulgence to the armed retainers of the great, they feared the rounds made by those glee men with no other arms than their vielle or tabor, but sowing sometimes strange disquieting doctrines under colour of songs. These were more than liberal, and went at times so far as to recommend social or political revolt. The Commons in parliament denounced by name, at the beginning of the fifteenth century, the Welsh minstrels as fomentors of trouble and causes of rebellion. Their political songs encouraged the insurgents to resistance; and parliament, who bracketed them with ordinary vagabonds, knew well that in having them arrested on the roads, it was not simple cut-purses whom it sent to prison. “Item: That no westours and rimers, minstrels or vagabonds, be maintained in Wales to make kymorthas or quyllages on the common people, who by their divinations, lies, and exhortations are partly cause of the insurrection and rebellion now in Wales. Reply: Le roy le veut.”[281]

Popular movements were the occasion for satirical songs against the great, songs composed by minstrels and soon known by heart among the crowd. It was a popular song which furnished to John Ball the text for his famous speech at Blackheath in the revolt of 1381:

“When Adam delved and Eve span,

Who was then the gentleman?”

Again, under Henry VI, when the peasants of Kent rose, and their allies the sailors took and beheaded the Duke of Suffolk at sea, a satirical song was composed, became popular and has come down to us. As before killing him they had given a mock trial to the king’s favourite, so in the song they present the comedy of his funeral; {213} nobles and prelates are asked to come and sing their responses, and in this pretended burial service, which is in reality a hymn of joy and triumph, the minstrel calls down heavenly blessings on the murderers. At the end the Commons are represented coming in their turn to sing a sarcastic Requiescant in pace over all English traitors.[282]

The renown of the popular rebel, Robin Hood the outlaw, who lived in the twelfth century if he ever lived at all, went on increasing. His manly virtues were extolled; picturesque companions were, later, invented for him: Friar Tuck, Maid Marian, Little John and all the imaginary inhabitants of Sherwood Forest; listeners were told how this pious man, who, even in the worst danger, waited till mass was over before thinking of his safety, boldly robbed great lords and high prelates, but was merciful to the poor;[283] which was an indirect notice to the brigands of the time that they should be careful to discern in their rounds between the tares and the wheat.

The sympathy of the minstrels for ideas of emancipation, which had made such progress in the fourteenth century, was not only evinced in these songs, but also in the remodelled romances recited by them in presence of the nobles, and which henceforth were full of high-flown declarations on the equality of men. The hearer did not take offence; the greater poets, favourites of all that counted, the king himself in his public statements proclaimed liberal truths which it was hardly expected would be acted upon literally. Thus Chaucer {214} celebrates in his most eloquent verse the only true nobility in his eyes, that which comes from the heart.[284] Thus also King Edward I, on summoning the first true English parliament in 1295, declared that he did so inspired by the old maxim which prescribes that what concerns all should be approved by all, proclaiming a principle whence have since issued the most radical reforms of society, and on which the American insurgents founded, centuries later, their claim to independence.[285]

Such direct appeals from the king to his people contributed early to develop among the English the sense of duty, of political rights and responsibilities. In days of trouble, when parliament scarcely yet existed, the same king thought he should explain his conduct to the people and allow them to form an opinion: “The king about this, and about his estate and as to his kingdom, and how the business of the kingdom has come to naught, makes known and wishes that all should know the truth of it; which ensues . . .”[286]

In France the enunciation of liberal principles was frequent in royal edicts, but the emptiness of these fine words and the interested motives which caused them to {215} be used were scarcely veiled at all. Louis X, “le Hutin,” in his ordinance of July 2, 1315, declares that, “as according to the law of nature every one is born free,” he has resolved to enfranchise the serfs on his own estates. He adds, however, that he will do so for money. Three days later, fearing that his benefit is not sufficiently prized, he supplements his first statement by a new one in which his exalted ideas and his present needs are boldly intertwined: “It may be that some, ill-advised and in default of good counsel, might misunderstand such great benefit and favour and wish rather to remain in the baseness of servitude than to come to free estate: wherefore we order and commit to you that, for the aid of the present war, you levy on such persons according to the amount of their property, and the conditions of servitude of each one, as much and sufficiently as the condition and riches of those persons may bear and as the necessity of our war may require.”[287]

Well then might the minstrels imitate the king himself in repeating axioms so well known, and which, according to appearance, there was so little chance of seeing carried out. But ideas, like the seeds of trees falling on the soil, are not lost, and the noble who had gone to sleep to the murmur of verses chanted by the glee-man waked up one day to the tumult of the crowd collected before London, with the refrain of the priest John Ball for its war-cry. And then he had to draw his sword and show by a massacre that the time was not yet come to apply these axioms, and that there was nothing in them save song.

Still were the trees dropping their seeds. Poets and popular singers had thus an influence over social movements, less through the maxims scattered throughout their great works than by those little unpolished pieces, struck off on the moment, which the lesser among them composed and sang for the people, at the cross-roads in {216} times of trouble, or by the peasants’ hearth in ordinary times, as a reward for hospitality.[288]

40. A FOUR­TEENTH-CEN­TU­RY JUG­GLER.

(From MS. 10 E. IV.)

Minstrels, however, as singers of songs, pro­pa­ga­tors of thoughts, tellers of romances, were to disappear. An age was be­gin­ning when books and the art of reading spread among the people, and a more and more numerous public would read and cease to listen; the theatres were, moreover, about to offer a spectacle much superior to that of the little troop of musicians and wandering singers, and would compete with them more power­ful­ly than the “rude hus­band­men and art­i­fic­ers of various crafts,” against whose im­pert­i­nence Ed­ward IV was so in­dignant. Re­placed, un­want­ed, the mins­trels proper ceased to exist as a class, leaving how­ever behind them a variety of men who could claim them as ancestors, street mu­si­cians, mirth mon­gers, or the “blind crouder with no rougher voice then rude stile,” who sang for Sir Philip Sidney “the olde song of Percy and Douglas.”

In fact, the period of the Taillefers who would go to death in the fight while singing of Charle­magne was a limited one; the lustre which the jongleurs or trouvères of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, who confined themselves to the recitation of poetry, had shed on their profession, was effaced in proportion as they associated {217} more closely with the mannerless bands of tumblers, jugglers, leaders of performing bears (ursinarii, the Latin documents of the time name them),[289] conjurors, and ribalds of all kinds.[290]

These bands had always existed, but the chanters of romances, tellers of knights’ high deeds, and of saints’ edifying examples, admitted even into the cloister, finding grace before St. Thomas Aquinas,[291] had, in the heyday of their fame stood above them, or apart from them. At all times, however, in castles and at fairs, were to be found buffoons and jugglers, whose coarseness exhilarated the spectators. The precise details which the contemporaries give as to their performances show not only that their jokes would not be tolerated among the rich of to-day, but that there are even few out of the way villages where {218} peasants on a festival would accept them without disgust. The great of former days found pleasure, however, in them, and in the troop of mummers and tumblers who went about wherever mirth was wanted, there always were some who excited laughter by the ignoble means described in John of Salisbury’s “Polycraticus”—“so shameful that even a cynic would blush at seeing them.”[292] But people of high degree did not blush, they laughed. Two hundred years later, some sacrilegious clerks, out of hate for the Archbishop of York, made themselves guilty of the same monstrous buffooneries in his very cathedral, and the episcopal letter relating their misdeeds with the precision of a legal report, adds that they were committed more ribaldorum.[293] Langland, at the same epoch, shows that one of his personages is not a true minstrel, either of the higher or of the lower sort, since he is neither able to “telle faire gestes,” nor to practise those welcome turpitudes.[294]

The greater was the feast, the coarser were often the deeds and songs of the mirth-mongers. In this way, in particular, were they accustomed to celebrate Christmas. Thomas Gascoigne, in the sort of theological dictionary compiled by him, beseeches his readers to abstain from hearing such Christmas songs, for they leave on the mind images and ideas which it is almost impossible afterwards to wash out. He adds as a warning the story of a man he personally knew: “I have known, I, Gascoigne, Doctor in Divinity, who am writing this book, a man who had heard at Christmas some of those repulsive songs. {219} It so happened that the shameful things he had heard had made such a deep impression on his mind that he could never in after time get rid of those remembrances nor wipe away those images. So he fell into such a deep melancholy that at length it proved deadly to him.”[295]

41. FAVOURITE DANCES IN MEDIÆVAL ENGLAND.

(From MS. 10 E. IV.)

The representations of the dance of Salome to be found in mediæval stained glass or manuscripts give an idea of the sort of tricks and games considered the fittest to amuse people of importance while sitting in their hall or having their dinner. It is by dancing on her hands, head downwards, that the young woman gains the suffrages of Herod. As the idea of such a dance could not be drawn from the Bible, it obviously arose from the customs of the time. At Clermont-Ferrand, in the stained glass of the cathedral (thirteenth century), Salome dances on knives which she holds with each hand, she also having her head downwards. In a window at the Lincoln cathedral she has no knives, but her “dance” is of the same sort and her red-stockinged feet touch the upper line of the glass panel. At Verona, she is represented on the {220} most ancient of the bronze gates of St. Zeno (ninth century) bending backwards and touching her feet with her head. Those standing by are filled with surprise and admiration, one puts his hand to his mouth, the other to his cheek, in an involuntary gesture of amazement. She may be seen in the same posture in several manuscripts in the British Museum; Herod is sitting at his table with his lords, while the young woman dances head downwards.[296] In another manuscript, also of the fourteenth century, minstrels are shown playing on their instruments, while a professional dancing girl belonging to their troop performs as usual head downwards, but this time, as at Clermont, her hands rest on two swords. The accounts of the royal exchequer of England sometimes mention sums paid to passing dancers, who, no doubt, must also have performed surprising feats, for the payments are considerable. Thus, in the third year of his reign, Richard II pays to John Katerine, a dancer of Venice, six pounds thirteen shillings and fourpence for having played and danced before him.[297]

42. FAVOURITE DANCES IN PERSIA.

(From a pencil-case.)

In the East, where, in our travels, we have sometimes the surprise of finding ancient customs still living {221} which we can at home only study in books, the fashion for buffoons and mimics survives, and even remains the great distraction of princes. The Bey of Tunis, when I was there years ago, had fools to amuse him in the evening, who insulted and diverted him by the contrast between their permitted insolence and his real power. Among the rich Moslem women of the same city, few of whom could read, the monotony of days spent by them till death came under the shadow of the same walls, behind the same gratings, was broken by the tales of the female fool, whose duty was to enliven the harem by sallies of the strangest liberty. As for dances, they frequently consist, in the East, in performances similar to that of Salome, such as shown in our manuscripts. Women dancing head downwards constantly appear in Persian pictures; several examples may be seen in the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the same subject often occurs on the valuable pencil-cases formerly made with so much taste and art in Persia.

If our ancestors of the fourteenth century could enjoy such pleasures, no wonder that moralists declared more and more openly against both minstrels and mimics and ranked them with those rogues and vagabonds denounced as a public danger by parliament. As years pass the discredit grows. In the sixteenth century Philip Stubbes saw in minstrels the personification of all vices, and he justified in bitter words his contempt for “suche drunken sockets and bawdye parasits as range the cuntreyes, ryming and singing of uncleane, corrupt and filthie songes in tavernes, ale-houses, innes, and other publique assemblies.” Their life is like the shameful songs of which their heads are full, and they are the origin of all abominations; the more dangerous because their number is so great:

“Every towne, citie, and countrey is full of these minstrelles to pype up a dance to the devill: but of dyvines, so few there be as they maye hardly be seene. {222}

“But some of them will reply, and say, What, sir! we have lycences from justices of peace to pype and use our minstralsie to our best commoditie. Cursed be those lycences which lycence any man to get his lyving with the destruction of many thousands!

“But have you a lycence from the archjustice of peace, Christe Jesus? If you have not . . . than may you, as rogues, extravagantes, and straglers from the heavenlye country, be arrested of the high justice of peace, Christ Jesus, and be punished with eternall death, notwithstanding your pretensed licences of earthly men.”[298]

Such was the state of degradation the noble pro­fes­sion of the old singers had reached; the necessity either of ob­taining a licence or of joining a gild, as prescribed by Edward IV, had been powerless to check the decay. With new man­ners and in­ven­tions their raison d’être dis­ap­peared; the ancient reciters of poems, after having mingled with the dis­re­put­able troops of cat­er­ers to public amuse­ment, saw these troops survive them, and, regular players apart, there hence­forth only re­mained upon the roads those coarse buf­foons, bear­wards, and vul­gar music makers whom thoughtful men held as re­pro­bates.

43. A PERFORMING BEAR.

(From MS. 10 E. IV.)

44. A SHAM MESSENGER.

(From MS. 10 E. IV.)

CHAPTER II MESSENGERS, ITINERANT MERCHANTS AND PEDLARS

All his life long, kind, loving, merry Chaucer, a good observer, a good listener and good talker, was fond of travels and travellers, of roamers and tale-tellers, of people who came from afar, bringing home with them many stories if little money, stories in which much invention no doubt was mingled with a little truth: but what is the good of raising a protest against harmless invention? Is not sometimes their mixture with “sooth” a pleasant one? Thus, he said:

“Thus saugh I fals and sothe compouned

Togeder fle for oo (one) tydynge.”

Interested in all that was human he studied ordinary types and rare ones; he observed mine Host, and looked also for seekers of adventure, and was never tired of hearing their tales: {224}

“Aventure,

That is the moder of tydynges,

As the see is of welles and of sprynges.”

No greater pleasure for him than to see:

“Winged wondres faste fleen,

Twenty thousand in a route,

As Eolus hem blew aboute.”

He was in this a real connoisseur, fully appreciating the merit of a well-told fable and knowing how useful and pleasant some such may be found to beguile slow-winged time. Long before he started from the Tabard, “faste by the Belle,” for a journey which millions of Englishmen have since performed at his heels, allured by the music or merriment of his word, he had this same taste for “unkouthe syghtes and tydynges,” as well as for “thinges glad.” Finding himself once in great “distresse” of mind, with a heavy heart, “disesperat of all blys,” what did he dream of to “solace” himself, but of meeting and hearing the whole innumerable tribe of tale-tellers, wayfarers, and adventure seekers, by fancy assembled in an immense house, “made of twigges, salwe, rede and green eke?” He wanted us to know, and he wrote of the “House of Fame,” where after having met the bard “that bare of Thebes up the fame” (Statius), and “gret Omere,” and “Venus’ clerke Ovide,” “Englyssh Gaunfride” (of Monmouth, of Arthurian fame), and many more, he thought that there was no room for him, and feeling his distress as keen as ever, dreamed of something else, willing

“Somme newe tydyngis for to lere,

Somme newe thinge, Y not what,

Tydyngs other this or that,

Of love, or suche thinges glad.”[299]

In this he had full satisfaction; his dream took another turn, and he was led towards the place he wanted, where things glad were to be found, a temple not of fame, but of tales and tidings, of noise and merriment:

“And theroute come so grete a noyse,

That had hyt stonde upon Oyse,

Men myght hyt have herd esely

To Rome, Y trowe sikerly.”

The noise went up to the sky from innumerable apertures, for

“This hous hath of entrees

As feele (many) as of leves ben on trees,

In somer whan they grene ben.”

Never for one instant is the place quiet nor silent; it is always

“Filde ful of tydynges,

Other loude or of whisprynges;

And over alle the houses angles,

Ys ful of rounynges and of jangles,

Of werres, of pes, of mariages,

Of restes, of labour and of viages.”

War and peace, and love and travels, all this he was to make in after-time the subject of his “Canterbury Tales,” and he represents himself in this earlier poem as if coming to the well and spring of all tales, placed somewhere in the land of dreams and fancy, yet surrounded by people who were neither fanciful nor dreamy creatures, but bony beings, on the contrary, with strong muscles and alert tongues, and the dust of the road to Rome or the East on their feet; surrounded, in fact, by these very roamers we are now trying to call up one by one from the past, and who receive in the “House of Fame” such an apotheosis as befits their quaint if rather questionable character. Good Chaucer {226} lends a willing ear, and the ways of speech of these people are carefully preserved in his verse for those who after him may find interest in them. In this manner they spoke: every person, says the poet,

“Every wight that I saugh there

Rouned (muttered) in eche others ere,

A newe tydynge prevely,

Or elles tolde alle oppenly

Ryght thus, and seyde; ‘Nost not thou

That ys betyd, late or now?’

—‘No,’ quod he, ‘Telle me what.’

And than he tolde hym this and that,

And swore therto that hit was sothe;

‘Thus hath he sayde’ and ‘Thus he dothe,’

And ‘Thus shal hit be’ and ‘Thus herde Y seye.’”

And the delight is that the tale repeated by many is always new, for it is never exactly the same; the fib fattens as it grows old, so that it may serve your pleasure many a time and oft:

“Whan oon had herde a thinge ywis,

He come forthright to another wight,

And gan him tellen anon ryght,

The same thynge that him was tolde,

Or hyt a forlonge way was olde,

But gan sommewhat for to eche (increase)

To this tydynge in this speche

More than hit ever was . . .

As fire ys wont to quyk and goo

From a sparke sprongen amys,

Tille alle a citee brent up ys.”

That there may be no mistake about the sort of people to whom the pleasant art of stretching a lie is so familiar, Chaucer is careful to name them, and there we find almost every one of our friends already mentioned or hereafter described, the sea or land wayfarers:

“And lord! this hous in alle tymes

Was ful of shipmen and pilgrimes,

With scrippes (bags) bret-ful of leseyngs (lies)

Entremedled with tydynges, {227}

And eke allone be hemselve,

O many a thousand tymes twelve

Saugh I eke of these pardoners,

Currours, and eke of messangers

With boystes crammed ful of lyes.”

What Chaucer gathered from these shipmen, pardoners, couriers, and messengers, he assures us it was not his intention to tell the world,

“For hit no nede is redely;

Folke kan hit synge bet than I.”

Whether or not some doubt may have afterwards entered his mind about the great poetical faculty of “folke,” certain it is that, for the delight of future ages, he did not stick to his word, as every reader of the “Canterbury Tales” well knows.

45. A PROFESSIONAL MESSENGER.

(From the MS. 10 E. IV.)

These “boystes” which Chaucer represents, carried by messengers and couriers, were filled in the way he describes only in a metaphorical sense, and this left room for more solid ware, for letters and parcels too, since in those old simple days, the messengers were the only equivalent for mail and for parcels post. They were to be found in the service of abbots, bishops, nobles, sheriffs, courts of justice,[300] and of the king. Such a costly forerunner of the post was not, of course, available for everybody; people did as they best could. The poor man {228} waited till some friend was going a journey; the rich only had express messengers, entrusted with their errands to distant places and with the carrying of their letters, generally written at dictation by a scribe on a sheet of parchment, and then sealed in wax with the master’s signet.[301] The king kept twelve messengers with a fixed salary; they followed him everywhere, in constant readiness to start; they received threepence a day when they were on the road, and four shillings and eightpence a year to buy shoes.[302] They were entrusted with letters {229} for the kings of France and Scotland; sent to call together the representatives of the nation for Parliament; to order the publication of the papal sentence against Guy de Montfort; to call to Windsor the knights of St. George; to summon the “archbishops, earls, barons, and other lords and ladies of England and Wales” to London to be present at the funeral of the late queen (Philippa); to prescribe the proclamation in the counties of the statutes made in Parliament; to command the “archbishops, bishops, abbots, priors, deans, and chapters of the cathedral churches of all the shires to pray for the soul of Anne, late Queen of England, deceased.”[303]

Edward III sends messengers or heralds to foreign parts, viz., France, Germany, Brabant, Flanders, Scotland, to call the nobility of these countries to a great tournament, a sort of international match to be held on St. George’s Day. The amount of the expense so incurred, which is not less than thirty-two pounds, shows that the messengers must have had long protracted journeys and must have had to visit every part of the countries allotted to each of them.[304]

Sometimes the king got into trouble with his Commons on account of expenses for messengers, which he did not always feel inclined to pay from his own purse. Such a case happened in 1378, and the Commons took this opportunity to once more assert their views about {230} the French and other foreign possessions of their sovereign, Ireland being included among them. They plainly state, as they had before, that these countries and the expenses concerning them are a matter for the king, not for them; it is a sort of kingly luxury with which they will have nothing to do. They remonstrate, therefore, that about forty-six thousand pounds sterling have been spent and entered as an item of national expense “for the safeguard of certain countries, places and fortresses, for which the Commons ought in no way to be charged. These are partly in the march of Calais and partly at Brest, Cherbourg, in Gascony, and in Ireland; and also expenses over certain messengers to Flanders, Lombardy, Navarre, and Scotland.”

The Government peremptorily refuses to accept this kind of reasoning, and returns a spirited reply: “To which it was answered that Gascony and the other forts which our lord the king has in the parts beyond, are and must be as barbicans for the kingdom of England, and if the barbicans are well kept, with the safeguard formed by the sea, the kingdom will be secure of peace. Otherwise we shall never find rest nor peace with our enemies; for then they would push hot war to the thresholds of our houses, which God forbid. Besides, through these barbicans our said lord the king has convenient gates and entrances towards his enemies to grieve them when he is ready and can act.” Telling reasons are also given for retaining among public expenses the costs of the journeys of messengers north and south.[305] None the less did the Commons of England long continue to consider the French wars, glorious perhaps, but undoubtedly expensive, as a personal quarrel of their sovereign, and as, in fact, little more than a rivalry between two French sovereigns speaking the same language and belonging to the same family. {231}

Besides letters, couriers and messengers had many strange parcels to carry from one place in the country to another: presents to fair ladies, commodities of all sorts for their own masters. Thus, in the year 1396, we find a servant of the Duke de Berri sent as a messenger to Scotland, and travelling all the way thither from France across England to fetch certain greyhounds of which his master was especially fond. He is accompanied by three men on horseback, to help him in taking care of the hounds, and he carries a safe-conduct from Richard II, to travel without hindrance through the English dominions with his followers and their belongings.[306]

Among the missions given by the king to his servants are some which, at the present day, would seem singularly repugnant. He might, for instance, charge one of his faithful retainers to carry the quarters of a criminal’s body executed for treason to the great towns of England. In this case he did not employ simple messengers; they were personages of trust, followed by an escort to convey the remains. Thus Edward III, in the fifty-first year of his reign, paid not less than twenty pounds to “Sir William de Faryngton, knight, for the costs and expenses he had incurred for transporting the four quarters of the body of Sir John of Mistreworth, knight, to different parts of England.”[307]

Of all travellers, the messenger was the swiftest; first, because travelling was his business; he was a good horseman, an experienced person, clever in getting out of trouble on the road and at the inns; then he had the right of way; woe to whoever thought to stop him; there were immense fines if the master were powerful, still more if the man were the king’s messenger. A messenger of the queen, who had been imprisoned by {232} the constable of Roxburgh Castle, did not hesitate to claim £10,000 sterling for contempt of his sovereign, and £2,000 as indemnity for himself.[308]

When, on August 7, 1316, Jacques d’Euse, cardinal-bishop of Porto, was chosen pope at Lyons, and assumed the name of John XXII, Edward II being at York learnt the news ten days afterwards through Laurence of Ireland, messenger of the house of the Bardi. And indeed we find by the accounts of the king’s household that this prince paid Laurence twenty shillings on the 17th of August to reward him for his trouble. It was only on the 27th of September that, being still at York, the king received by Durand Budet, a messenger of cardinal de Pelagrua, the official letters announcing the election; he gave five pounds to the messenger. Finally, the pope’s nuncio having arrived in person shortly afterwards, bearing the same news no longer so fresh, the king made him a present, inversely proportionate to his speed, of a hundred pounds.[309]

Such was the custom, presents were made to the bringers of good news; royal messengers had thus a chance of casually increasing their meagre pay of threepence a day. Most fortunate were those who brought word to the king himself of happy events. Edward III gave a forty marks pension for life to the queen’s messenger who came announcing the birth of the Prince of Wales, the future Black Prince; he gave thirteen pounds, three shillings and fourpence to John Cok of Cherbourg, who told him of the capture of King John at Poictiers; he settled a pension of one hundred shillings upon Thomas of Brynchesley who brought him the good news of the capture of Charles of Blois.[310] {233}

Sometimes messengers, in spite of their privileges and cleverness, were liable to find themselves in very difficult plight. In time of war they had to conceal their real function, and were in constant danger of being stopped and having their bag searched and their letters opened. People felt strongly about foreigners living in England, many of them being friars who might disclose the secrets of the realm in their private correspondence. The Commons therefore asked for very strict rules to be passed in order to remedy this possible evil, and we find them, in the year 1346, when England was at war with France, recommending the creation of something like the cabinets noirs of a later date.[311]

Langland in his “Visions” graphically compares the different modes of travelling of messengers and such other wayfarers as merchants going with their goods from one place to another. The one is the swiftest of all, no one would dare to stop him; the other is retarded by his pack, his debts, his fear of robbers which prevents his travelling at dark, the impossibility for him to use short cuts across the fields, while short {234} cuts are freely allowed to messengers: no hayward would disturb them; no man in his senses, no “wys man” would “wroth be” on account of his crops being spoiled by a messenger; the messenger shows his letters and is free to go:

“ . . . Yf a marchaunt and a messager · metten to-gederes,

And scholde wende o way · where both mosten reste . . .

The marchante mote nede be lette (kept) · lengere then the messagere;

The messager doth na more · bote with hus mouthe telleth

Hus erande and hus lettere sheweth · and is a-non delyvered.

And thauh thei wende by the wey · tho two to-gederes,

Thauh the messager make hus wey · a-mydde the whete,

Wole no wys man wroth be · ne hus wed (pledge) take;

Ys no haiwarde yhote (bidden) · hus wed for to take:

Necesitas non habet legem.

Ac yf the merchaunt make hus way · overe menne corne,

And the haywarde happe · with hym for to mete,

Other hus hatt, other hus hode · othere elles hus gloves

The marchaunt mot for-go · other moneye of hus porse . . .

Yut thauh thei wenden on way · as to Wynchestre fayre,

The marchaunt with hus marchaundise · may nat go so swithe

As the messager may · ne with so mochel ese.

For that on (one) bereth bote a boxe · a brevet (letter) ther-ynne,

Ther the marchaunt ledeth a male (trunk) · with meny kynne thynges,

And dredeth to be ded there-fore · and (if) he in derke mete

With robbours and revers (thieves) · that riche men dispoilen;

Ther the messager is ay murye · hus mouthe ful of songes.”[312]

Wayfarers there were in whom both characteristics were united, the slowness of pace of the merchant and the lightness of heart of the messenger. These were the pedlars, a very numerous race in the Middle Ages, one of the few sorts of wanderers that have not yet entirely disappeared. A jovial race they seem to have been; they are so now, most of them, for their way to success is through fair speech and enticing words; and how could they be enticing if they did not show good humour and jollity? “Gaiety” mends their broken wares, and colours the faded ones, and blinds customers to otherwise {235} obvious defects. They have always been described thus; they were merry and sharp-tongued; such was Shakespeare’s Autolycus; such is, in a novel of our time, the jovial owner of the dog Mumps, Bob Jakin of “The Mill on the Floss.” “ ‘Get out wi’ you, Mumps,’ said Bob, with a kick; ‘he is as quiet as a lamb, sir’—an observation which Mumps corroborated by a low growl, as he retreated behind his master’s legs.” About the exact scrupulousness prevailing among the tribe the opinion has perhaps not been quite so consistent, which is the best that can be said for it.

One good point about them, however, is that in mediæval England, whatever may have been their reputation, they entirely escaped legislation. Very possibly they were impliedly included in statutes against vagrants and rovers; but they may at least argue that as a matter of fact they are not named in any Act of Parliament, and pass unobserved or nearly so by the Westminster legislator down to a com­par­a­tive­ly recent date. They are for the first time named in a statute during the reign of Edward VI, in which, it is true, they are treated in a contemptuous manner, being described as more “hurtful than necessary to the common wealth.” This is called “an acte for tynkers and pedlers,” and is to the following effect: “For as muche as it is evident that tynkers, pedlers and suche like vagrant persons are more hurtfull than necessarie to the Common Wealth of this realm, Be it therefore ordeyned . . . that . . . no person or persons commonly called pedler, tynker or pety chapman shall wander or go from one towne to another or from place to place out of the towne, parishe or village where such person shall dwell, and sell pynnes, poyntes, laces, gloves, knyves, glasses, tapes or any suche kynde of wares whatsoever, or gather connye skynnes or suche like things or use or exercise the trade or occupation of a tynker,” except those that shall have a licence from two justices {236} of the peace; and then they will be allowed to travel only in the “circuyte” assigned to them.[313]

Queen Elizabeth, too, had a word for pedlars, and it was not more complimentary than what her brother had to say about them, although “scollers of the Universityes” joined them on her list of disreputable roamers. They figure in her “Acte for the punishment of vacabondes”; and a very curious list of wanderers is found in it: “It ys nowe publyshed,” says the queen, “that . . . all ydle persones goinge aboute in any countrey of the said Realme, using subtyll craftye and unlawfull games or playes, and some of them fayninge themselves to have knowledge in phisnomye, palmestrye, . . . and all fencers, bearwardes, comon players in interludes and minstrels not belonging to any baron of this realme . . . all juglers, pedlars, tynkers, and petye chapmen . . . and all scollers of the Universityes of Oxford or Cambridge y^t goe about begginge . . . and all shipmen pretendinge losses by sea . . . shalbee deemed roges vacabounds and sturdy beggers intended of by this present act.”[314] But the case of pedlars was not seriously taken in hand before the reign of William III who put a tax upon them and, ominously enough, bound them to certify commissioners for transportation how they travelled and traded.[315]

The late date of this statute of pedlars, if it may be called so, is the more remarkable that they swarmed along the roads in the Middle Ages, more numerous than tinkers or any other wandering representatives of petty trades. There were not then as now large shops in every village with all the necessaries of life ready provided for the inhabitants. The shop itself was itinerant, being nothing else than the pack of travelling chapmen. In the same way {237} as the literature propagated by the minstrels, as news, tales, and letters, pardons from Rome and many other commodities, so household wares were carried about the country by indefatigable wayfarers. A host of small useful things, or sometimes useless, but so pleasing! were concealed in their unfathomable boxes. The contents of them are pretty well shown by a series of illuminations in a fourteenth-century manuscript, where a pedlar is represented asleep at the foot of a tree, while monkeys have got hold of his box and help themselves to the contents. They find in it vests, caps, gloves, musical instruments, purses, girdles, hats, cutlasses, pewter pots, and a number of other articles.[316]

As to the means by which pedlars came by their goods, a variety seem to have been used by them, and purchase was only one among several. A proverbial saying preserved for us by Langland shows how they secured furs for their country customers. The author of the “Visions” states how Repentance came once to Avarice, and examined him as to his usurious doings:

“ ‘Hastow pite on pore men · that mote nedes borwe?’

‘I have as moche pite of pore men · as pedlere hath of cattes,

That wolde kille hem, yf he cacche hem myghte · for coveitise of here skynnes.’ ”[317]

a practice which cannot fail to be deeply resented by all lovers of cats.

The regular merchants whom Langland and Chaucer describe, so splendid to look at that no one knew they were “in dette,” adorned with Flaundrish hats and “botes clasped faire and fetisly,” were a very different sort of {238} people; but though no mere wanderers, they were, too, great wayfarers. Many of them had had to visit the continent to find markets for their goods, and for their purchases. Through them too, and it was in fact, perhaps, the safest and most reliable among many such channels of information, ideas of what was going on in the outer world and how things were managed in France and elsewhere, points of similitude and comparison, were introduced into England and made the subject of thought and discussion.

46. A PEDLAR ROBBED BY MONKEYS.

(From MS. 10 E. IV.)

During the fourteenth century the foreign trade of England had greatly increased; there was a constant intercourse with Flanders, with Bruges above all other towns, for the sale of home produce: wools especially, and woolfels, cheese, butter, tin, coal,[318] etc., with the {239} Rhine country, with Gascony, with Spain, for the purchase of wines;[319] with the Hanse towns, Lombardy, Venice, and the East. Unintelligent regulations constantly interfered, it is true, with this development, but so strong was the impulse that it went on steadily. One of the most persistent and most noxious of these regulations was the prohibition to export money or bullion, which governments were never tired of renewing.[320] English merchants were forbidden, when purchasing goods in foreign countries, to pay for them with money; they had to pay in kind, with wools, cheese and other home produce, which of course might or might not be found acceptable by the vendor. It was, in other words, forbidden to use money as a means of facilitating exchange, which is its very raison d’être, and people had to return to the primitive practice of troc, or exchange in kind. It had sometimes worse effects than that of impeding transactions; foreign merchants might, as once did the Flemings, show their appreciation of the rules imposed on their English purchasers by answering their proffer of wools and cheese with a beating and imprisonment until they would alter their laws or their minds. For {240} which treatment, English merchants sent doleful complaints to Parliament. In such cases retaliation upon Flemings in England might be demanded, but no thought was entertained, even by the injured party, of repealing laws considered as an indispensable safeguard for the kingdom.[321]

Not much wiser were the rules applied to merchant shipping, made worse by constant change, a defect which was noticeable in every trade regulation of that time. Some are curious as being an attempt to establish the long lived, but more moderate rules devised by Cromwell in 1651: “Item, to increase the navy of England which is now greatly diminished, it is assented and accorded, that none of the king’s liege people do from henceforth ship any merchandize in going out or coming within the realm of England in any port, but only in ships of the king’s liegeance.” But the very next year this impossible statute was altered so as to practically annul it: “It is ordained and granted that the said ordinance only have place as long as ships of the said ligeance in the parts where the said merchants happen to dwell be found able and sufficient.”[322] The same unsteadiness of purpose was shown in almost every branch of the yet unbaptized science of political economy.

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]

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]

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.”

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]

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]

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.