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]

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.

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.”

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]

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]

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.

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]

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:

Bread 4d. Beer 2d. Wine 1 ¼d. Meat 5 ½d. Potage ¼d. Candles ¼d. Fuel 2d. Beds 2d. Fodder for Horses 10d.

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]