‘... gyrd abowte his bodye in iij places with towells and gyrdylls.’

But, of course, this lay knowledge of herbs and so forth was not enough, for, as Andrew Borde, that man of wit and sound learning, said, quoting Galen, ‘“If Phisicions had nothing to do with Astronomy, Geomatry, Logycke and other sciences, coblers, curryars of lether, carpenters and smythes and al such manner of people wolde leave theyr craftes and be Phisicions,” as it apereth nowe a dayes that many coblers be; fye on such ones!’ Without a knowledge of astronomy how could Culpeper have discovered that a certain French quack was ‘as like Mars in Capricorne as a Pomewater is an Apple,’ and that therefore he was a fool? It was important also to comprehend the mystical properties of gems, many of which exercised as healing an influence as any herb. So well was this recognised that in 1217, when Alice Lunsford, a member of an old East Sussex family (whose later descendants endeavoured to extend its antiquity by forging Saxon ancestors with the delightfully improbable Christian names of David and Joseph), fell ill, she sent to Philip Daubigny and borrowed three rings from him, and when he asked for them back begged him, for the love of God, not to take them away, as without them she could not recover. Unfortunately the troops of Louis the Dauphin plundered her house shortly afterwards, and although she did recover Philip lost his rings, one of them being a sapphire for which he would not have taken 50 marks.

Gems were not only held to exercise a beneficent influence when worn in rings or held in the mouth, but were also administered internally. Amongst the long list of medicines made for Edward I. during his last illness, in 1307, is ‘a comforting electuary made with ambergis, musk, pearls, and jacinths, and pure gold and silver.’ Lower down in the list occurs ‘a precious electuary called Dyacameron,’ and a fifteenth-century book of prescriptions shows that this was composed of ginger, cinnamon, clove, and other spices, black, white, and long pepper, musk, ambergris, ‘the bone of a stag’s heart,’ coral, pure gold, and shavings of ivory, amongst other things. This same book shows a still more elaborate preparation, called ‘The Duke’s Electuary,’ containing fifty ingredients, but mostly herbal, and not so precious or indigestible as these others. These electuaries, which were a kind of medicated sweetmeat, seem to have been taken in large quantities, as Richard de Montpelier, King Edward’s apothecary, prepared over 280 pounds of electuaries made with sugar. These cost a shilling the pound, while Dyacameron ran up to 13s. 4d. the pound, and four ounces of rose comfits (sucurosset) flavoured with pearls and coral cost £3, 13s. 4d. Oriental ambergris to put in the king’s food and in his claret was another expensive item. But all these drugs and all the care of Master Nicholas de Tyngewyk, his physician, of whose skill the king held a high opinion, proved unavailing.

A list of drugs provided for the Scottish expedition in 1323 is chiefly of interest as showing that the virtue of a fine-sounding name for a medicine was recognised some six centuries before Mr. Ponderevo hit on the sonorous Tono-Bungay. Here are some of the items; Oxerocrosium, Diaterascos, Apostolicon, Dyaculon, Ceroneum, Popilion, Agrippa, Gracia Dei—all of them compounds of the patent medicine types; Galbanum, Armoniak, Apoponak, Bedellum, Collofonium, Mastik, and Dragon’s blood—simpler vegetable preparations; Seruse, Calamine, Litharge, and Tutie—which are mineral substances: Tutie being ‘bred of the sparkles of brasen furnaces, whereinto store of the mineral Calamine beaten to dust, hath been cast.’ Of the high-sounding preparations Popilion was so called from its containing poplar leaves; Diaterascos was a plaster compounded of pitch, wax, acetic acid, and various aromatics; Ceroneum was a similar plaster without the acid, containing rather more aromatics and also saffron, aloes, and litharge; and Dyaculon was a third variety of plaster, very remotely, if at all, connected with the adhesive Diachylon plasters of modern times. ‘The oynment that is called Agrippa’ was still used in the fifteenth century for deafness, and at that date Apostolicon was made as follows: Take equal quantities of ‘vermod (wormwood), smallache (water parsley), centori, waybred (? plantain), and the rote of osmond and als muche of egremoyne (agrimony) as of all the others,’ seethe in vinegar and add an ounce of ‘medwax (beeswax) that is multen in woman’s milk’ (a favourite solvent). To this is added alum, galbanum, pitch, and turpentine, and the whole worked up into an ointment. If this is not sufficiently elaborate for your purpose, ‘Her is makyng of Gracia Dei: Take betanye, pympernel and vervayn, of ilkon an handfull, bothe crope and rote, and wasshe hem clene and stamp hem smalle and do hem in a new erthen pote and put therto a galon of white wyne, and if you may get no white wyne take red, and sethe them till yt come to a potell:’ let it cool, strain through canvas, seethe again, and add half-a-pound of ‘gud mede wax, bot loke the wax be molten first, and woman’s milke of knave child and a pond of rosyn and a pond of gome litarge and a pond of galbanum and a pond of popanelke (? opoponax) and a pond of arestolog rotundum (birth-wort) and an unce of mastike wel poudred,’ stir well and then ‘do als mykill baume (balsam) als weies a peny and a ferthyng and lete it sethe whil you may say iij Miserere mei deus all the hole salme’; take off the fire, add gum turpentine, and stir till melted, strain and skim off any dirt with a feather. When cold it should be worked up between the hands until it becomes of sticky consistency, it is then to be spread on clean linen or leather, and is good for all manner of sores that be perilous. There is another method of preparing Gracia Dei which was used by ‘Hopkyn of the fermory of Killyngworth,’ that is to say in the infirmary at Kenilworth Priory, and a third, devised by ‘the gude erl of Herforth’ which is much more elaborate, the herbs used being ‘betany, vervayne, pympernel, comfrey, osmond, dayshy, mousher (mouse-ear) weybrede, rib (? rhubarb), milfoile (the yarrow, which in Saxon leechdom seems to have been held good for everything from headaches to snake-bites), centory, anence, violete, flos campi (? campion), smalache, sauge, and egremoyn.’

‘... led through the middle of the city.’

When these simple remedies were not successful recourse could always be had to charms—either sheer pagan gibberish or rhyming prayers and invocations of saints. It was obviously appropriate for the sufferer from toothache to appeal to St. Appolonia, who was tortured by having her teeth broken with a mallet, but it was less obvious why a man with the falling sickness should cut his little finger and write with his blood the names of the three kings, Jasper, Balthazar, and Melchior, on a piece of parchment and hang it round his neck; nor do I know why SS. Nichasius and Cassian should be invoked against any ‘erwig or any worme that is cropyn into a mans bed.’ It was as well in any case to be sure that the charm was genuine, as Roger atte Hache found in 1382. His wife, Joan, being ill, he accepted the word of one Roger Clerk of Wandsworth that he was skilled in medical lore and paid him 12d. to undertake her cure. Clerk took a leaf of parchment out of a book and sewed it up in cloth of gold and bade Joan put it round her neck. When she got no better her husband grew suspicious and summoned Clerk for fraud. Clerk, being asked to explain the value of the piece of parchment, said that it was a good charm for fever and contained the words ‘Anima Christi sanctifica me’ and other similar pious expressions, but upon examination it was found that there were no such words upon it, and as he proved to be ignorant of physic and illiterate, it was adjudged that he should be led through the middle of the city, with trumpets and pipes, riding on a horse without a saddle, with the parchment and a whetstone (the recognised symbol of a liar) hung round his neck, and in front of him the unseemly emblem of the medical profession.

V

It is a common delusion, or, not to beg the question before producing evidence, a common opinion, that England in olden times, by which I mean that vague period when all words were spelled with an ‘e’ at their end and most with a ‘y’ in the middle, was a ‘merrie’ place. This idea is held not only by the laudatores temporis acti, who find it safer to repine for a past which can never be recovered than to enthuse over a future which may arrive and prove disappointing, but also by those energetic persons who set out to make the world enjoy itself and imagine that their schemes for compulsory happiness will really only restore a lost gaiety to the nation. Life in the Middle Ages was undoubtedly more highly coloured, more varied, more picturesque, but that it was merrier is at least a doubtful assumption. As the life of a people is reflected in their arts, we may compare the life of the Middle Ages to the quaint, irregular lines of some unimproved village street, or to the older parts of such towns as Winchester and Guildford, and contrast it with the mid-Victorian era, the flattest and dullest of all periods, as typified by Brixton, or with the frivolity of the present day, portrayed in the outbreak of terra-cotta and white wood flimsinesses all over the country. But the picture is not complete. In the background, behind the straight sameness of ‘Alma Terrace,’ or the quirked and joggled sameness of ‘Mafeking Avenue,’ lies nothing more terrible than the ‘desirable residence’ or the ‘eligible mansion.’ Behind your picturesque old-world cottages frowns the shadow of the feudal fortress. And, as Huxley remarked to the young man who said that he did not see what difference it would have made to him if his great-grandfather had or had not been a monkey, ‘it must have made a lot of difference to your great-grandmother.’

It was not without reason that such names as Batvilayne, Scorchevilayne, and Maungevilayne are found amongst the landowning classes. There were men who would beat, scorch, or devour their villeins, and some six-and-a-half centuries ago an ancestor of the present Lord Ashburnham could oppress his tenants until they were reduced to literal beggary, and when they complained to the Justices could airily reply that they were his villeins and, short of injury to life and limb, he need not answer them. Such was the position of the bulk of the peasantry, but in practice they did not often suffer by it, for it was obviously to the advantage of the landlord to have prosperous tenants. It was at the hands of the officials, the swarm of stewards, bailiffs, catchpoles, and so forth, that the peasants, yeomen, and smaller gentry suffered. These men, secure in the protection of a chain of superiors reaching back to some great noble, lived on their neighbours, wringing money from them on every, or no, pretext. A favourite weapon was the jury list; the frequency with which juries were summoned and the resulting inconvenience to those called away from their work made the more wealthy willing to pay well for exemption; then money could be obtained by summoning four or five times as many jurors as were required and taking bribes from the superfluous to let them go home again. Another common object of the country-side was the ‘scotale,’ which was a kind of bean-feast. No doubt this lent an appearance of merriness to life in the country, just as the wriggling of the worm on the hook lent it a superficial air of gaiety which deceived old Isaak Walton, but it is questionable if the feasters really enjoyed themselves, as they knew that the ale which formed the main feature of the meal was brewed from malt which they had unwillingly contributed, and that they were paying for the (compulsory) privilege of consuming their own produce. Nor did the townsmen escape entirely; even five hundred years ago the Christmas box was an established extortion, and, in 1419, William Sevenok, Mayor of London, had to forbid the custom of the servants of the mayor, sheriffs, and corporation begging gifts from the tradesmen at Christmas, as it was found that they used threats towards those who would not give and accepted the gifts of others as bribes to overlook their offences against the trading laws. Not only at Christmas did the servants of the city and the court fleece the tradesmen; the doubtful privilege of supplying the royal court with provisions could be, and frequently was, avoided by a gift to the purveyors, and one result was that rogues from time to time went round the breweries pretending to be court purveyors and taking money to leave the ale alone. A rogue of a similar type, with a turn of humour, was William Pykemyle, who in 1379 went to the town house of the Countess of Norfolk, and, pretending to be a royal messenger, left word that she was to dine with the King at Leeds Castle, near Maidstone, next day; having received from her a reward of 3s. 4d. (royal messengers always expecting a substantial tip) he went on to the Countess of Bedford and gave a similar message, only making the place of dining Eltham. Whether the ladies kept their appointments is not recorded, but the gay deceiver was caught and committed to Newgate.

If the men of the Middle Ages had had nothing more to complain of than extortion by threats and trickery they might have been merry enough, but when the bailiffs exercised their powers of arbitrary arrest and imprisonment it was another matter. From the sheriffs downwards those ‘clothed with a little brief authority’ used it unscrupulously to fill their own pockets, dragging men off to prison on false accusations, or on none, and causing convicted felons to accuse the innocent of participation in their crimes. Release from prison depended solely upon the payment of a fine to the officer concerned, and was almost as easily available for the guilty as for the innocent. Upon occasion the powers of the law could be used to assist the criminal and punish his victim. During the misrule of the last years of Henry III., one, Wilkin of Gloseburne, accused Gilbert Wood of killing his son; Gilbert promptly turned the tables by bribing the gaoler of York, who arrested Wilkin on a charge of theft, bound him naked to a post in the prison, and kept him without food until he paid 40s. About the same time, in Suffolk, a man stole six geese belonging to Constance de Barnaucle; possibly he would have argued that they were ‘barnacle geese,’ and as this species notoriously grew on trees they were feræ naturæ, in which there could be no property. If so, he must have felt that his case was weak, as he ran away, pursued by the lady’s servant. The thief was caught by the bailiffs of Thingoe Hundred, but either they were friends of his or they saw a chance of getting the geese themselves, for they let him go free, and when the pursuer came up they showed half-a-dozen other geese, which he naturally failed to identify; they then talked big about libel actions and false accusations and terrified 4s. out of the unlucky man’s pockets.

‘... failed to identify the geese.’

Besides accusations of actual misdeeds, charges of opposing a predominant or favouring a fallen faction could be used for purposes of extortion. Towards the end of the reign of Edward II., when the Despensers were in power, Alan of Teesdale, chamberlain to the younger Despenser, with the assistance of Geoffrey Eston, the villainous gaoler of York, started a report that Sir John de Barton had spoken ill of Hugh le Despenser, whereat Hugh was much moved and furiously threatened Sir John, who for fear of his power had to give them lands to appease their lord. The same two scoundrels burnt down part of one of Alan’s own mills and then laid the blame first on Sir John de Barton, then on Thomas Vipont, and finally on the Abbot of Byland, all of whom, for fear of the Despenser, paid heavy compensation. They further extorted lands from Master Thomas de Leuesham by threatening to accuse him of having been a partisan of Andrew de Harclay, who, after winning the earldom of Carlisle by his loyalty at Boroughbridge in 1322, had, the following year, been dramatically degraded and executed as a traitor. Nearly a century earlier, Robert Passelewe, Justice of the Jews, had extorted £60 from John le Prestre, a wealthy Jew, by threatening to commit him to Corfe Castle for having financed the Bishop of Carlisle and Hubert de Burgh, then in disgrace. From the same Jew Passelewe extorted, amongst other things, a cameo worth 40 marks; he seems to have had an appreciation for jewels, as he appropriated a ‘camehew’ and an emerald belonging to a Jew who was hanged, and made Benedict Crispin give him another cameo, which he afterwards gave to the Queen. Crispin was fleeced by several persons in high places and had to part with another of his cameos, ‘on which was engraved a chariot with two angels,’ to Peter de Rievaux, the Treasurer.

If the Jews were plundered we may at least put it to the credit of our ancestors that they showed a fine impartiality in according similar treatment to Christian clergy. The sheriff of Yorkshire, in 1315, wishing to persuade Master Henry de Percy, rector of Wharrom, to surrender his church, handed him over to Geoffrey Eston,[2] the gaoler of York, of whom we have already said something, who bound him to a convicted criminal and kept him five days without food or drink; at the end of that time he paid £20 to be released, but he kept his church. Encouraged by this, the sub-sheriff followed his superior’s example and brought the rector of Whixley to Geoffrey, who confined him ‘in a horrible place in the prison’ until he produced 20 marks. Most prisons, probably, had a ‘horrible place,’ usually an underground dungeon, such as ‘the pit of the gaol’ at Exeter, or the ‘fosse’ at Newgate, or the place in the King’s Bench prison called by the grim humour of the fifteenth century ‘Paradise,’ from which Alexander Lokke, who had been detained there ‘alle this holy tyme of Cristemasse,’ begged to be removed to some other prison. Apart from these dungeons the comfort of the prisoners depended largely on their possession of money; they were not ‘lodged at his majesty’s expense,’ but were dependent upon money supplied by friends or on the alms of the charitable, and their position when the gaoler was a tyrant was unenviable. In the reign of Henry VIII. the keeper of Norwich gaol, Andrew Asketell, ‘of his uncharitabill and covetous mind’ oppressed the poor prisoners, charging them twice as much for ale as it cost outside—and ale, it must be remembered, was in those days really ‘the people’s food in liquid form’—and when kind people sent ‘a potte ale’ to the prisoners he made his servants pour the drink in the streets and break the vessels. But he did this once too often, when ‘a litill boy haveng a veray power woman to his moder in prison brought to her to ye prison wyndow a crok with ale.’ Edward Rede, alderman and J.P., seeing her drink thus snatched from her, kindly sent her ‘a cruse with drynk.’ The arrival of this widow’s cruse so annoyed the keeper that he came up to the alderman and insulted him, calling him ‘a Bedlam man,’ and as a result he saw prison life from a fresh point of view. Some two centuries earlier Newgate was controlled by Edmund le Lorimer, who ill-treated his prisoners shockingly, keeping them short of food, depriving them of their share in the common alms, and preventing them communicating with their friends. He robbed them, taking from Roger Martel a gold cross with four garnets and a ‘pere crapaudyn’ or toad-stone, the precious jewel which a toad bears in its head and which is an invaluable antidote to poison, and he inflicted such severe ‘penaunce’ to extort money that many died, including a knight, Sir John de Horn, and that Roger de Colney, being loaded with irons and deprived of food, snatched a knife from a companion and cut his throat.

All those in authority were not brutes; it is even recorded of a Suffolk bailiff that finding on his recovery from illness that his deputy had been guilty of extortion, he returned the money and dismissed the deputy. But the reports from Yorkshire in 1275 were fairly typical; the bailiff of the Earl of Lincoln had done ‘many acts of oppression, rapine, and injuries beyond belief’; ‘many other things, beyond number and astonishing,’ were related of the sub-sheriff, and ‘innumerable devilish acts of oppression’ were accredited to the steward of Earl Warenne. The earl himself was a man of violence, who had turned about a fifth part of the county of Sussex into a game preserve, and maintained armed keepers to prevent the peasants from driving the deer out of their corn. The story is well known how, when King Edward’s commissioners demanded by what title he held his lands, he produced a rusty sword and said ‘by this my ancestors won their lands and by this I will defend them.’ Like most well-known stories this is apocryphal, and in any case a distaff would have been more appropriate, as his lands had descended through an heiress, but that he would have been willing to protect his lands with the sword is likely enough. One of his descendants, the Earl of Surrey of the time of Henry VIII. seems to have inherited some of his lawlessness, as he was charged with ‘a lewde and unsemely manner of walking in the night abowght the stretes and breaking wyth stonebowes (i.e. catapults) of certeyne wyndowes.’ It does not appear that he wanted ‘Votes for Peers’ and, in fact, he admitted that he ‘hadde verye evyll done therein,’ and was sent to the Fleet prison.

Life must certainly have been more exciting, if not merrier, in now peaceful Sussex when Earl John de Warenne was alive. He was carrying on a sort of private war with his neighbour, Robert Aguillon, who was also on bad terms with his other neighbour, William de Braose, while further west, at Midhurst, was John de Bohun, who displayed his contempt for the law by attacking Luke de Vienne on the high road and ducking him in a horse-pond when he was on his way to hold a court. The son and namesake of this William de Braose showed his temper by insulting one of the Justices of the King’s Court who had given judgment against him. Edward I. was not the man to excuse such conduct; he had, indeed, banished the Prince of Wales from court for insolence towards a judge, and Braose had to walk in penitential garb through Westminster Hall when the court was sitting and apologise to the justice. With such examples set by their lords it is not surprising that the smaller men adopted an attitude of swagger and arrogance, riding with armed followers through markets and fairs for the mere pleasure of frightening the people. As an example of apparently pointless insolence, the constable of Shrewsbury gave his groom 4d. to go through the village of Cressage calling out ‘Wekare, Wekare,’ to insult both men and women. The character of the insult is not obvious, but it was evidently clear to those concerned, as a woman dared to remonstrate; the groom struck at her and wounded a man who came to her assistance, but then had to fly and was shot—for which his lord obtained full compensation.

‘... ducking him in a horse-pond.’

Whatever the meaning of ‘Wekare,’ there can be no doubt of the insult conveyed by Robert Sutton to Roger of Portland, clerk of the Sheriff of London, when he exclaimed in full court, ‘Tprhurt, tprhurt!’ This monosyllable is a very trumpet blast of contempt and its significance surely did not require to be emphasised by Robert’s ‘raising his thumb’—whether to his nose or not it is not stated, which is a pity, as it would have been interesting to find the ‘long nose’ flourishing in 1290. City Officers, and more particularly mayors and aldermen, were very touchy, seeing and punishing ‘vile and abominable abuse’ in the most harmless retort, and my sympathy is certainly with Collard, the cobbler, who was sent to prison at Norwich because, when the mayor ordered him to take off his beard he refused to do so and said, ‘Noo, I was ones shaven and I made an othe I wolde never have off my berde again, I was so evell shaven.’ Still there is no doubt that however arbitrary the authorities may have been they also had their trials, and, if officials often abused their powers, their was another side to the question. Smaller men than William de Braose could, upon occasion, tell the judges what they thought of them. In 1300 one Henry de Biskele came into the Sussex county court and asked leave to say certain matters ‘on the king’s behalf,’ and having thus obtained silence and the attention of the whole court, he broke out into violent abuse of one of the justices, calling him a liar and using other opprobrious terms, for which he was lucky to escape with a fine of 20s. Some fifty years later a more violent act of contempt of court occurred at Pevensey. John de Molyns, the Queen’s steward, came to hold a court there, but being busy appointed a deputy to take his place in the morning; this official seems to have irritated the townsmen, and when he ordered them to withdraw outside the bar, contrary to their local custom, Roger Porter replied by challenging him to come outside and fight. During the luncheon interval the deputy reported the state of affairs, and in the afternoon the steward himself came to the court, preceded by the portreeve carrying his white wand of office, but the townsmen refused to come when summoned, Roger and Simon Porter in particular declaring that they were not bound to attend. At last the steward rose in wrath and started to seize the two Porters, who fled to their house and with drawn swords stood in the doorway. A pitched battle ensued between them and the steward’s men, in which several were injured, but in the end victory rested with the law.

‘... with drawn swords stood in the doorway.’

Even the King’s Court at Westminster was not safe from disturbance. In 1332 John Parles, acting as attorney for Adam Basset in a plea of debt against Florence de Aldham, was waiting in the great hall at Westminster, where the court was in session. He was sitting on a table ‘close to the sellers of jewels,’ from which it would seem that the lower end of the hall was used for stalls, or at any rate for peddling jewellery, even while cases were proceeding. Presently Florence came up with two men and abused John Parles, threatening to kill him if he did not abandon the suit; Richard Calware dragged him off the table and struck him a blow which drew blood and Thomas Newark whipped out a knife and would have killed him if he had not been restrained. John at once made his way to the bar and complained to the judges, who ordered the arrest of his assailants, but they struggled towards the door and were joined by Thomas of Thornhamton with his sword drawn. But the clerks of the court, apprentices, and attorneys barred the doors and disarmed them, and they were all handed over to the warden of the Tower.

In all these cases the disturbers of the peace met with prompt defeat, but sometimes they were more successful, though their success was usually temporary and vengeance overtook them sooner or later. No courts seem to have been so unpopular as those of the Church; dealing with moral offences, they touched the lives of the people in a way which must have led to constant irritation, even if the archdeacons and their summoners had not been unfair and extortionate. That they were so was the pretty general opinion of mediæval Englishmen, from Chaucer to his contemporary John Belgrave, who, when the archdeacon of Leicester was going to hold a court, set up in his church a clearly written bill setting forth that the archdeacon and his officials might well rank with the judges who condemned Susannah, giving unrighteous judgment, oppressing the innocent, and suffering evildoers. This so terrified the archdeacon and his officials, possibly made cowards by their consciences, that they dared not hold their courts. Civil courts were also liable to be broken up, especially the open-air courts held by sheriffs. On one occasion, in the fourteenth century, when the sheriff of Sussex was holding such a court, John Ashburnham rode up, with a small boy bearing his tabard, and so threatened the sheriff that he incontinently fled. To hasten his going Ashburnham whistled on his fingers—a street-boy’s accomplishment to which I must admit I have never managed to attain in spite of repeated efforts—at which whistle his esquire and other men in ambush suddenly rose up. Even the assize courts were liable to be interfered with, especially in the north, and at the end of the reign of Edward II. there were in Lancashire several men of position who rode about with armed bands and turned up at the courts with fifty or sixty ruffians to persuade their adversaries not to proceed with their suits, or, if such peaceful picketing proved unavailing, to terrorise the justices. Chief of these was Sir Walter Bradshaw. He had been one of the sworn adherents of Sir Adam Banaster in his rebellion, and having assisted in the attack on Liverpool Castle and the capture of Halton, had fled the country after the defeat of his friends at Preston. Returning later, he carried on a private war with Sir Richard de Holand, another ruffian of the same kidney, each of them riding about with small armies, oppressing each other’s tenants and openly defying the courts. These quarrels between county families were undoubtedly more exciting when the process of cutting one another was conducted with swords instead of with averted eyes and upturned noses, but whether they were more conducive to the merriness of their rival retainers may be doubted. These retainers, if we may trust Sir Ralph Evers, did not always play their parts with the politeness and courtesy which their masters displayed, and, in fact, on one occasion he remonstrated with Sir Roger Hastings’ servant, saying, ‘Ye false hurson kaytyffes, I shall lerne you curtesy and to knowe a gentilman.’ It is possible that he was feeling irritated at the time, as he had been lying in wait to ambush Sir Roger, and it must have been annoying to find that he had only caught his servants. Sir Roger himself seems to have been rather quick-tempered; he had a grudge against one Ralph Jenner, and on his way to church on Christmas Day discovered that Ralph was in the church; he at once decided that the season of peace and goodwill was a suitable occasion to make an end of his quarrel (and of his adversary), but the vicar flung himself on his knees before him, while Lady Hastings ran up to Ralph Jenner exclaiming, ‘Woo worthe man this day! The chirche wolbe suspended and thou slayn withoute thou flee away and gette thee oute of his sighte.’ Whereupon Ralph, either out of consideration for the parishioners or himself, prudently fled.

‘He incontinently fled.’

It sometimes happened that these imperious gentry reaped the reward of their own lawlessness and goaded their oppressed tenants to active rebellion. As early as the twelfth century the sheriff of Hants is found grimly entering in his accounts money spent on doing justice on the peasants who burned their lord. At Faccombe in the same county, in 1426, John Punchardon, lord of the manor, was dragged from his bed one Sunday night, carried out into the fields, and there done to death. In this case there was probably some personal feeling in the matter, as the murderers included five members of the family of Cosyn, whose ancestors had formerly held the manor, but who had now come down to the position of labourers. A case in which the motive of rebellion was more clearly resentment to oppression occurred at Preston in Sussex, in 1280, when the villeins of Simon de Pierpoint set fire to his manor-house, and with drawn knives and flourished axes compelled him to swear upon the Gospels that he would demand no services from them without their consent, and would take no action against them for their violence. At the same time they destroyed their lord’s tabard, so beat his charger that it could never be used again and slew his ‘gentle falcon,’ thus wreaking their wrath on the outward signs of his nobility. Such revolts were much more common in towns; for instance, at Lynne, in 1313, when Robert Muhaut tried to exercise his authority in a new direction, a crowd of tradesmen, under the leadership of the prior, assaulted his house, dragged him out and made him stand on a stall in the market-place and swear on the Host that he would not interfere with the town officers. At Bristol, also about the same time, the burgesses quarrelled with the castellan, barricaded the streets and erected an embattled wall from behind which they shot into the castle, and at Oxford the watchmen were on several occasions shot at with arrows:—I have known, in more recent times, a casual shot at a proctor with a lump of sugar have more disastrous effects—to the shooter.

‘... compellyd them for to devour the same writte.’

But if the lords of manors, town officials, and judges occasionally found their authority slighted and their persons endangered by the disrespect of those who should have been subservient to them, their trials were not to be compared with those of the inferior officers such as bailiffs. In the fourteenth century, when Philip of Berwick was elected as bailiff of Hailsham, he had to fly for his life to escape from a certain John of Buckholt, who terrorised the whole neighbourhood, chasing the vicar into his church, killing several persons, and so frightening the coroner that he dared not hold any inquests. With such men about as this John of Buckholt, who was known as king among his people, the life of a bailiff was not a happy one, and in particular, the life of the process-server was exciting, but not necessarily merry. It can hardly have been cheering to the man who had to serve a writ in Drayton Basset to know that the offenders were boasting that ‘whoo so ever wold be so bolde to serve any warrant there shuld runne upon a pycheforke.’ It was also not an uncommon experience that Thomas Talbot and Thomas Gaiford had when they served a writ on Agnes Motte, who ‘reysyd upp her neghburs with wepyns drawen for to slee and mordre the said bryngers of the writte and compellyd them for to devour the same writte and ther, sitting upon ther knees, in saving of ther lyves, eete the writte bothe wex and parchement,’ in fact, from the number of similar instances recorded it would almost seem that writ-servers must have been accustomed to a diet of wax and parchment. There seems also to have been a custom of serving writs in church, not unattended with risk, as the sacredness of the place does not seem always to have subdued the temper of the recipient. When William Nash served a writ on John Archer in Ilmingdon churchyard he retorted by threatening to make him eat it, and afterwards, as Nash was kneeling in the church, he came up to him and said, ‘Pray, longenekked horesson, by Goddes armes, thou shalt be hanged ere I ete holy bred.’ John Cheyney, also, when he was served with a writ in church, took the server by the shoulders and thrust him out of the church, saying that he would slit his nose, stove his eyes, crop his ears, and ‘make hym a curtall.’

‘... thrust him out of the church.’

No, taking into consideration the injuries inflicted by the more powerful men in authority upon those subject to them and the pains suffered by those having the responsibilities of office without its powers, I do not think the mediæval populace was always merry and bright, and if any one, after reading this article, still thinks that England in the Middle Ages was a ‘merrie’ place, I can only say with Robert Sutton, ‘Tprhurt, tprhurt!’

VI

There is a sentence in the biblical account of the wonders of Solomon’s reign that has always had a fascination for me. ‘Once in three years came the navy of Tarshish bringing gold and silver, ivory and apes and peacocks.’ And the fascination lies not in the crude magnificence of tusks and ingots, the burnished brilliance of peacocks, or the uncanny, too human, grotesqueness of apes, but in all the varied multitude of unnamed articles which must have constituted the cargo of those far-faring ships of Tarshish—gaudy tissues interwoven with bettle-wings, strange shells, jewel-crusted swords, carvings in sandal-wood and in the wood of the mysterious almug tree. Possibly the almug tree is not mysterious to the well-informed man, but I admit that I have always carefully avoided looking it up; I might say, as was said of the purple cow, ‘I never saw an almug tree, I never want to see one,’ because I am certain that it would prove a vast disappointment. The unlading of a ship is an enlarged and, it must be admitted, less personal version of the unpacking of a Christmas hamper, a joy apportioned to childhood, not, in nine cases out of ten, because in our maturer years we lose the appreciation of disinterring the unexpected from swathings of paper, string, and straw, but because the opportunities are denied us. Of course, it is given to few to unpack a ship, and there may be persons of little imagination to whom a bill of lading seems dull and uninspiring, but to me every such list is a potential hamper. When the bill of lading is of the fifteenth century there is added something of the feeling which we have when turning out a drawer in an old forgotten bureau of our great-grandmother’s. The everyday objects of that time are now unfamiliar, and our ingenuity is taxed to guess the use of some of them, while on the other hand it is quite a shock to find that other things which we still use were known so long ago.

‘latten “Agnus Dei.”’

The hold of a ship, like poverty, makes strange bed-fellows acquaint. A hundred distaves, emblems of peaceful home-life, came into London port in 1390 side by side with ninety-three dozen swords, these latter for Gerard van Barle, who must have been either an armourer in business on a very large scale, or else an army contractor. Six hundred oranges, at fifteen a penny, we find sandwiched between eight barrels of varnish and nine glass cups; a jar of preserved dates is thrust in between twelve yards of linen cloth and a barrel containing seven and a half dozen beaver hats. A ship of Dieppe came into Winchelsea harbour in 1490 with damask and satin and pipes of wine, razors and needles and mantles of leopard skins, five gross of playing-cards and eight gross of latten ‘Agnus Dei.’ These last, which I regret to say seem to have been considerably less valued than the ‘devil’s books’ which accompanied them, were plaques stamped with the figure of the holy Lamb, and it would seem that they were so common that the word became a synonym for a plaque, as in an inventory of the jewels of Henry VII. occurs ‘an Agnus of the Salutation of Our Lady.’ In the same way the component parts of the rosary became so intimately associated in men’s minds with prayers that when we read in a list of cargo of ‘pater-nosters’ or ‘bedys’ of amber, coral, tin, or ‘tree’ it is impossible to be sure whether they were rosaries or beads in the modern sense of ornaments. Devotional objects naturally figured largely in the imports of mediæval days, images of painted wood or tin occurring with frequency in the London customs accounts of 1390, and the alabaster carvings for which England, and in particular Nottingham, was famous form quite the most interesting of our exports in the fifteenth century. As a whole it must be admitted that our exports at that time were very dull compared to our imports; cloth, hides, and corn are but uninspiring merchandise, and although the frequent mention of ale and beer might cheer the heart of Mr. Belloc or the late Mr. Calverley it leaves me cold. One item, however, is interesting in the fifteenth-century exports from Bristol, and that is the constant occurrence in cargoes for Ireland, and for nowhere else, of casks of ‘corrupt wine.’ This looks like ‘another injustice to Ireland.’ With this untempting liquor went a good quantity of honey, possibly to counteract its acidity, and of ‘battery-ware,’ which was really such things as kettles, but may have been endeared to the Irish from an imaginary connection with assault.

If the exported cloth was uninspiring in its lack of variety the same charge cannot be brought against the imported stuffs. There is some room for imagination in the cargo of Matthew Clayson’s boat, which brought kerchiefs of Cyprus and Syria (so at least I interpret cirian), oriental kerchiefs and glittering (relusant) kerchiefs, with 707 lb. of pins wherewith to fasten them. There is also something satisfactory about baudrik powdered with Cyprian gold, and even about chamelet and sarcenet. I own to a delight in the old drapery terms, and, whatever their merits as materials, I feel that our modern trade terms such as viyella and eoline (if these be their names) are feeble and finicking besides arras, bayes, bewpers, boulters, borratoes, buffins, bustyans, bombacyes, calimancoes, carrells, dornicks, frisadoes, fustians, grograines, mockadoes, minnikins, makarells, oliotts, pomettes, plumettes, perpetuanas, rashes, russells, sayes, stamells, tukes, tamettes, and woadmolles. But if these and similar words have a fascination it is partly a fascination of the unknown, and I should be grateful to any one who could tell me what it was that Walter Hake brought into London port in 1390, for, besides two barrels with fourteen nests of mazer cups and other recognisable goods, he carried three thousand five hundred ‘redwark,’ ten hundred ‘ruskyn,’ as much ‘popl,’ and, most puzzling of all, eight thousand ‘of good work’ (boni operis). I admit the temptation to endow the work with plurality and to set this load of good works in opposition to a contemporary Rabelaisian cargo of ‘fartes of Portingale.’

‘... playing innumerable pranks.’

So far the cargoes of our ships have not greatly resembled those of the ships of Tarshish, but, if the peacocks are to seek, we can easily find the ivory, in the shape of combs, and as to the apes the Clement of Rye in 1490 brought home four dozen baboons (baboynes). It must, however, be admitted that these baboons would not have found a home at the Zoo—they were in fact little grotesque figures, and in that sense the word occurs often in mediæval inventories. Edward III. had not only a number of pieces of plate with ‘babewyns’ upon them, but one cup described as gilt and enamelled with ‘diverse babwynrie.’ At the same time the real monkey was a common enough object; he figures in the margin of scores of illuminated manuscripts, playing innumerable pranks, not infrequently in the dress of a priest, a monk, or a friar. Monkeys were kept by many of the nobles, and when Thomas Becket went, as Chancellor of England, on an embassy to the court of France an ape sat on every pack horse of his gorgeous cavalcade. The merchandise of Venice in 1436 included ‘Apes and japes and marmusettes tayled,’ and so far was the ape a common import that at many seaports monkeys figured in the customs lists, the due at Norwich being 40d. each, no small sum. With the monkey in these lists is also found the bear, who at Norwich paid 42d. for admission to the country. Bears were even commoner sights than monkeys, for not only were there the performing bears in charge of itinerant showmen, but many of the poor brutes were kept for sport, to be baited by dogs. It was probably for purposes of sport that Sir John Bourchier, Earl of Bath, kept half-a-dozen bears, which after the Reformation he stabled in the dismantled priory of the Black Friars at Fisherton, near Salisbury. There they lived happily until, according to Harry Sutton, their keeper, John Davy and Agnes his wife with other naughty and evil-disposed persons broke into the close where they were kept, and Agnes, ‘being thene of most wyckyd and damnable disposicion,’ scattered poisoned bread on the ground and in the water where the bears drank. As a result three of the bears died, as did also a poor man’s sow that drank of the pond; and a poor woman who washed her face in the water ‘so swelled that she was like to have died,’ which I take leave to think was an exaggeration on the part of Harry Sutton. There is always another side to every story, and according to John Davy he had a lease of part of the friary lands, and his wife was quite peaceably walking there when Sutton, to frighten her away, untied ‘the grettyste and most terryble bere’ and set him at her, whereat she being ‘sore affrayed and abashed’ ran away and in running fell over a sow, not the poor man’s sow that died, but a sow of lead, and received a hurt from which she died. The two versions are singularly divergent, and if Sutton could show three dead bears and a sow in support of his story, Davy could show a dead wife in support of his.

Henry III. was the proud possessor of a polar bear, which used to be taken for a swim in the Thames to disport itself and to catch fish, no doubt to the great joy of the young Londoners. This was a present from the King of Norway, and gifts of strange beasts were often made to our kings, the favourites naturally being lions and leopards, in allusion to the royal arms, the Black Prince on one occasion sending his father a lion and a leopard. In passing it may be remarked that it is a curious trait of the heraldic lion that it cannot look a man in the face; when a lion looks at you it becomes a leopard. This, I admit, sounds rather like the schoolboy’s description of the tortuous river of Palestine, ‘The Jordan runs straight down the middle of the map, but when you look at it it wriggles,’—but it is none the less a fact. In early heraldry the lean and fearsome beast that does duty for a lion when seen in profile is called a leopard when its full face is shown; it is true that a later generation of heraldic writers converted the three golden leopards of England into ‘lions passant guardant,’ but leopards they were, and, for those of us who prefer the heraldry of the classic period to its debased and jargonised descendant, leopards they remain. At the same time, as the live lions could hardly be expected to look continuously over their left shoulders, the royal menagerie at the tower was usually stocked with real leopards as well as lions. For generations, and indeed centuries, the lions of the Tower enjoyed much the same privileged position as the eponymous bears of Berne, and were so emphatically the sight to which all country cousins, by a humane version of ‘Christianos ad leones,’ had to be taken that their name became, and remains, synonymous with all that is double-asterisked by Baedeker.

‘When a lion looks at you it becomes a leopard.’

Mediæval Englishmen seem to have a partiality for strange beasts, combined with a reluctance to pay exorbitant fees for seeing them. In 1364 Edward III. had to order the mayor and sheriffs of London to protect Roger Owery and John Want, to whom he had committed the custody of a certain Egyptian beast called an ‘Oure,’ various persons, who apparently wished to see the beast without paying, having threatened to assault them and kill the ‘Oure.’ What this creature was is not clear; possibly it was the aurochs or buffalo—Borde’s ‘vengeable beast,’ the Bovy of Bohemia. Whatever it was its keepers, who had no doubt looked forward to making a good thing out of exhibiting it, seem to have had a doubtful bargain, and the same fate befell Thomas Charles, ‘squier,’ and William Lynde just about a century later when they obtained from the king the keeping of his ‘foul called an Estrich.’ They sent the ostrich round the country in charge of Richard Axsmith and John Piers, ‘for to disporte with the sight of hym the kynges true lieges,’—and incidentally, though they do not think that worth mentioning, to put money in their own pockets. ‘How be hit that oother mysdoers in certain places wher lite reverence is doon or shewed to anything of the kinges, as the dede hathe proven, have withoute cause wrongfully doon grete trespasses and offenses as wel to the said foul as to Richard Axsmyth and John Piers.’ At Royston a mob, egged on by the prior, assaulted the keepers and caused the ostrich ‘to ben seyn of alle peuple’ and the unfortunate ‘fowle’ was ‘hurten so sore that he may never be hool, as hit on hym wel appereth.’ When they came to Norwich one of the sheriffs cast them into prison as ‘false Flemings,’ and ‘caused the foul to be seyn in the common strete of alle peuple that list to come seen hym for nought.’ Nor did they have any better luck at the next town, Bury St. Edmunds, where they were again imprisoned and the bird exhibited for nothing, the townsmen ‘axing hem who made hem so hardy as to go on with the kinges foule about among his peuple without a commission.’ This seems to have been the end of their tour in the eastern counties.

‘The unfortunate “fowle” was “hurten so sore.”’

The ostrich does not often occur under that name, but its egg was often made into a cup, under the name of a griffon’s egg or ‘grype’s ey.’ Edward III. had more than one ‘oef de greffon,’ and Henry IV. had half-a-dozen ‘gryppesheys,’ but possibly by this time the term was only conventional and the true origin of the egg was known, as one of these ‘gryppesheys’ was mounted on ‘two white ostriches.’ The griffin, half eagle and half lion, was a very popular mediæval beast; that no specimen is ever recorded to have been taken round on show may have been due to the fact that this beast ‘so much disdaineth vassalrey and subjection that he will never be surprised alive.’ The appearance amongst the jewels of Richard II. of an almsdish supported by two griffons suggests an analogy with its modern relation the Jubjub, of which it is said that ‘In charity meetings it stands at the door, And collects though it does not subscribe.’ If doubt is to be thrown on examples of the griffon’s eggs, still more dubitable is the ‘drinking vessel made of the horn of a griffon, mounted in copper gilt,’ which belonged to Edward III. This may well rank with a relic preserved in the Cathedral Priory of Rochester,—‘the rod of Moses which budded,’—in view of the fact that it was Aaron’s rod which budded and that a griffon has no horns.

If our forefathers never had a chance of seeing a griffon and failed to appreciate an ostrich when they did see one, there is no question that they saw and appreciated the first elephant that landed in England. It was a present from King Louis of France to Henry III. and landed at Sandwich in 1255, whence it proceeded leisurely to London, filling all beholders with astonishment. It only lived a couple of years, and when its successor came over I do not know, but I suspect that there was a very long interval before England was again visited by an elephant. Before its lamented decease it sat for its portrait to Matthew Paris and another contemporary chronicler, and the resulting sketches are quite recognisable. The elephant was not a very favourite subject with mediæval artists, though the Earl of Arundel in 1397 had a piece of tapestry (probably oriental) ‘powdered with lions, olyfauntes and imagery,’ and if any one wants to know what it was like they have only to go to an old house in Market Street at Rye, where they can see just such a piece of tapestry, ‘olyfauntes’ and all, reproduced as a wall-painting. Talking of elephants, a learned man not many years back wrote an article with the fascinating title, ‘How the Elephant became a Bishop’; as a matter of fact it dealt with the evolution of the chess ‘bishop,’ but what a title for a fairy tale!

Elephants, to one mediævally minded, infallibly suggest dragons, for it is notorious that there was bitter enmity between elephants and dragons. And the subject of dragons is a wide one. So far as I know the last, in Western Europe at least, was killed in the Roman Campagna in 1660, its slayer himself dying from the poison in its breath, but it was less than half a century before that, in 1614 to be precise, that a young half-fledged dragon—it was nine feet long and its wings were only just sprouting—was seen in Sussex, at Faygate in St. Leonards Forest. Of course in earlier times they were much more numerous; Switzerland swarmed with them, in fact Lucerne seems to have been almost as much the happy hunting-ground of the dragon and the cockatrice as it is now of the Cook’s tourist. The northern counties, especially Durham and Northumberland, were also much pestered by ‘laidly worms’; two estates were held of the Bishop of Durham from early time by exhibiting to him annually the swords with which redoubtable ancestors of the tenants had slain the Worm of Sockburn and the fearsome Brawn of Brancepeth, a boar to which all ordinary boars were but as ordinary cattle to the Dun Cow, slain by Guy of Warwick with a sword still shown at Warwick Castle. Perhaps the most satisfactory dragon on record was that slain at Rhodes in 1345 by Deodatus de Gonzago. That wily and prudent knight constructed a pantomine dragon on the pattern of the real article and made two of his servants get inside and work it realistically; in this manner he accustomed his horse and his dogs to dragon-baiting, and his trouble was rewarded by the death of the monster and his own election to the mastership of the Knights of St. John. Another famous dragon was the Tarask. It seems that when St. Mary Magdalene landed at Marseilles she installed herself in a dragon’s cave; the dragon was unceremoniously ejected and went off higher up the Rhone; but he had no luck; the first person he met on landing was St. Martha, who gave him a good dressing down and handed him over to the peasants, who slew him but immortalised his name in Tarascon. There were a great many varieties of dragons, but I think the most curious that I have met was one of silver gilt belonging to Henry IV. which was described as ‘au guyse d’un boterflie’; anything less like a dragon than a butterfly it would be difficult to imagine. At the same time some of these terrible beasts seem to have been quite insignificant. The amphisbæna, though it developed in the Bestiaries into a fearsome dragon with a head at each end, started as quite a small worm, so small indeed that a whole one could be carried on the person without inconvenience. So carried it prevented the wearer from ever feeling chilly; in which respect it would seem to have been the opposite of the salamander, whose flesh was so cold that it quenched fire. Henry V. bought a parrot, two monkeys, and three salamanders from a fishmonger. I wonder what the salamanders were; if they were the squabby and unattractive lizard, black, with yellow spots, which now goes by that name I fear the king must have been disappointed. If he experimented upon their alleged ability to live in fire, or at least to extinguish it, I fear the disappointment would have been shared by the salamanders.

‘... constructed a pantomime dragon on the pattern of the real article.’

Besides the monsters of the land and air there were, of course, mediæval varieties of the sea-serpent. Matthew Paris records that in 1255 a monster bigger than the biggest whale was thrown up on the coast of Norfolk. As this was the year in which the first elephant came over I almost wondered if two had started and one had fallen overboard and been drowned, but quite by accident I came upon a legal case connected with this very sea monster, arising out of foreshore rights and rights of wreck, which showed that the creature, whatever it was, was very much alive when first seen, as no less than six boats were sunk in effecting its capture. Unfortunately no description of the monster is given, but probably it was a great sperm whale. Fifteen years earlier, in 1240, according to the same chronicler, there was a great battle of whales off the mouth of the Thames, and one of the wounded came up the river, just managed to squeeze through the arches of London Bridge and got as far as Mortlake before it was killed. A fresh-water monster, or at least one which started life in a river and developed in a well but afterwards took to the land, was the terrible Lambton worm, which seems after all to have been more of a nuisance than a danger, as, so long as it got its trough full of milk regularly, it was content to lie about, coiled round Lambton Hill.

Terrible beasts were the basilisk—for which I have always felt an affection since I saw his portrait by Carpaccio in the church of St. George of the Sclavs (after much furious argument with a gondolier who knew no St. George but S. Giorgio Maggiore) at Venice—the cockatrice, and that strange hybrid of the two, the basilcok, known chiefly for its mean and unrelenting enmity to the centichore or yale, the strange pig-antelope who now sits once more as he sat of yore on the bridge at Hampton Court. Terrible beasts all; but none so morally destructive as that noble friend of man, the horse. Everybody knows the famous derivation of hypocrite, ‘from two Greek words—hippos, a horse, and krites, a judge: a horse-dealer, therefore, a deceiver.’ The Archbishop of York would seem to have been of the same opinion when he inhibited the cellarer of Newburg from dealing in horses, on the ground that it was not fitting for a man of religion, because in the negotiations between buyer and seller it is almost impossible to avoid sin. It would have been well if John Hill, vicar of Coliton in Devon in 1426, had considered this before he sold a horse to Walter Trouns, ‘knowing the horse to have contracted divers diseases and to be incapable of working.’ From the description the horse would seem to have been of the same breed as the ‘hakeney’ hired by William Driffeld from Thomas Plevener, a London innkeeper, who ‘promysed and warantized the said hakeney to be of helth and of habilitie and well and trewlay’ to carry Master William to Walsingham, whither he was going, no doubt, on pilgrimage. In spite of the warranty, the hackney, before he had covered twenty miles, ‘wold nor myght go no ferther’ and had to be left at Ware, where he died ‘of dyverse infyrmytes.’ Richard Chapman had a similar experience when he hired a horse from Christopher Thomas to carry him to York; at the end of the first day it ‘failed hym and was morefounded.’ Probably the hirers out of the horses threw the blame on their clients, as did Robert Grene, ‘corsour’ (i.e. horse-dealer, not to be confused with corsair, a pirate), who, having sold a horse to John Bonauntre, complained that ‘the said John rode upon the said hors’ with the result that it was ‘perished and utterly destroyed,’ though whether that was due to the delicacy of the horse, which was only intended for ornament, or to the ‘unresonable and outrajus rydyng’ of the purchaser is not clear. Mules, as we might expect, occasionally gave as much trouble as horses. There was a Welsh clergyman in the fifteenth century, John Yevan by name, upon whom a brother clerk, John Grigge, managed to plant a mule ‘the whiche he wold not have had, but through the gret labour and desyre of the said Sir John Grigge he toke the same mule upon his warantie that he shuld bere hym from Rome to London, orells not to paye therefore.’ Exactly what happened on that journey is not revealed, but the mule would seem to have proved several degree more aggravating than Modestine in the Cevennes, for John Yevan ‘was fayne and glad to make a cambicion (exchange) by the waye, to his gret hurte and hynderance,’ and felt much injured at being called upon to account for the missing mule on his return. The good man’s knowledge of legal jargon seems to have been oral rather than literary, as he invoked the magic of the law by demanding a ‘wryte of sorserare,’ in which it is not easy to recognise a writ of certiorari.

‘Hakeney.’

One of the most deadly of vicarious insults was to crop the tails of your adversary’s horses; it would seem to have been as bad as the biblical custom of cutting off the skirts of his messengers. John Enot, archdeacon of Buckingham in the fifteenth century, complained tearfully that one Thomas Coneloye (was he a lawless Irish Connelly?) prevented him from carrying out his duties in the punishment of sinners and had caused the tails of his horses to be cut. It was a similar insult to the hot-tempered Thomas Becket that caused that archbishop’s furious denunciation of his enemies and led to his murder and so to his canonisation, from which it follows that we owe Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to the curtailment of the archbishop’s horses. From insult to assault is a short journey, and horses have brought so many to the ‘demnition bow-wows,’ that I am reminded at this point of the adventure of the vicar and the dog and the door-key, which fell out in this wise. William Russell, vicar of Mere in Somerset, some time during the reign of Henry VI., left his church at five o’clock one Good Friday evening, having been ‘bysyly occupyed all that day before in hyryng of confessions.’ He locked up his church and turned homewards, but on his way met one of his parishioners, John Totyn, an evil man, ‘not dredyng God ne the censers of the chirche.’ Totyn had in his hand a seven-foot staff with ‘a grete pyke of yren’ at one end and with him was ‘an horryble grete Dogge called a lymer,’ and he at once attacked the vicar and ‘provoked and stered his saide dogge to renne upon hym, callyng hym by his name and saide Hay Dewgarde.’ I am not clear whether the dog’s name was Dieugarde, which seems rather unlikely, or Dugald, which is possible, but I rather incline to the idea that Totyn really said ‘good dog,’ with a provincial accent—‘Hey! gude darg!’ in fact. Anyhow, ‘the saide dogge, knowyng the condicions of his maister, ran upon (the vicar) and bote hym by the arme in iij places and pullyd hym downe to grounde twyes and so was likely then to have been murthored by the saide John Totyn and his dogge,’—the good vicar at the recollection of the exciting incident becomes oblivious of grammar and changes the subject of his verbs—‘but as God woold he smote the said dogge with the chirche dore key under his ere, and with that the said dogge departed.’ Next day worthy William Russell trotted off to his patron, the Abbot of Glastonbury, and showed him his injuries—‘his shurte beyng full of blode, his gowne to torne, his arme sore byten’; but he got cold comfort and scant sympathy. Totyn was the abbot’s servant and the abbot said, ‘that that was doon it was doon in the defence of my man, and it shall coste me xl^li or thou shalte do my man any wrong, for I lete the wete I wyll defende hym.’

‘... showed him his injuries.’

Dogs of all kinds,—

‘Mastiff, greyhound, mongrel grim,
Hound or spaniel, brach or lym,
Or bobtail tike or trundle tail,’

figure often enough in our old records, and often enough got their owners into trouble for poaching, but they were not so frequently complained of for assault as might have been expected. I remember coming across one rather interesting case in which a man complained that a neighbour’s dogs had chased a tame deer belonging to his daughter, and when she interfered to rescue it had bitten her hands. The keeping of tame deer was common enough; Edward III. had a tame hind brought from St. Albans to Woodstock on one occasion, and about a couple of centuries later a Lincolnshire clergyman, John Barnardiston, rector of Great Coates, for his own recreation and comfort and the amusement of his friends, ‘norysched, kept and brought up a tame hynde calfe.’ Unfortunately he had annoyed Sir Christopher Askew, who instigated William Morecropp and other ‘lyght and evyll disposed persons’ to kill the hind. They discovered where it frequented day and night and carried it off to Morecropp’s house, where they assembled next day ‘with force and aryms; that is to saye wyth staves, bylles, swordes and bokelers,’—an almost excessive armament for the purpose,—and slew the unfortunate hind and carried its body to Sir Christopher, who, when Barnardiston complained, ‘lyghtly and wantonly made a gret game and sport therat’ and threatened that worse should befall him if he did not sit still. While sympathising with the rector for the loss of his pet, it is difficult to deny that the assembly of half-a-dozen ruffians fully armed with swords and bucklers to tackle one tame little fawn suggests the four-and-twenty tailors who set out to kill a snail, and is not without its ludicrous side.

‘... fully armed with swords and bucklers.’

Printed by T. and A. Constable, Printers to His Majesty
at the Edinburgh University Press

Footnotes:

[1] June 1911.

[2] The record of one of this man’s acts of torture is worth preserving, though it is, for obvious reasons, best left in the original Latin: ‘cepit unum vermem qui vocatur clok [i.e. a sheep tick] et posuit infra virgam Roberti de Alverton et ligavit virgam cum parva corda et posuit ipsum Robertum super unam cordam et ligavit cordam de una trabe ad aliam et fecit ipsum moveri super cordam predictam et membra sua frotari quousque finem fecit pro x marcis.’