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 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:

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:

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.

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

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.”

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:

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:

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,”

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

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:

As to the women, one brings:

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.