Part 1

MEDIÆVAL BYWAYS

MEDIÆVAL BYWAYS

BY L. F. SALZMANN F.S.A.

AUTHOR OF 'ENGLISH INDUSTRIES OF THE MIDDLE AGES'

ILLUSTRATED BY GEORGE E. KRUGER

BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 1913

TO WHOM SHOULD I DEDICATE THESE STUDIES OF THE LIGHTER SIDE OF THE MIDDLE AGES IF NOT TO MY WIFE WHOSE STUDY IT IS TO LIGHTEN MY OWN MIDDLE AGE?

FOREWORDS

BEING SUNDRY PERSONAL OBSERVATIONS OF NO IMPORTANCE

Original research amongst the legal and other documents preserved in the Public Record Office, and similar depositories of ancient archives is a pursuit which our friends politely assume 'must be very interesting,' chiefly because they cannot believe that any one would undertake so dull an occupation if it were not interesting. And it must be admitted that there are grounds for looking askance at such work. To begin with, the financial results of historical research are usually negligible or even negative, and it is therefore clearly an undesirable, if not positively reprehensible, employment. Then it is perfectly true that the vast majority of these records are as dry as the dust which accumulates upon them, and that in many cases such interest as they possess is adventitious, being due to their association with some particular person or place whose identity appeals to us. Thus even the most trivial technical details of a suit by William S. against Francis B. for forging his signature would become of absorbing interest if S. stood for Shakespeare and B. for Bacon, but the chances are a hundred to one that S. will stand for Smith and B. for Brown. At the same time the thoroughly unpractical searcher, who allows his attention to be distracted and does not confine himself to the strict object of his search, is constantly rewarded by the discovery of entries, quaint, amusing, or grimly significant, throwing a light upon the lives of men and women whose very names perished out of memory centuries ago. Dim the light may be, but yet it is an illumination not to be got elsewhere, for the writers of History, with a big H, are concerned only with the doings of kings and statesmen, and other people of importance, while these records tell us something of the life of those who in their day, like most of us, were each the centre of their own microcosm but made no figure in the eyes of the world. It is, I think, not too much to claim that only through intimacy with the nation's records, and I would use the word in the widest sense to include also the records written on the face of our land in stone and timber and even in earthen bank and hedgerow, that some conception can be obtained of the mediæval spirit. That same spirit is so subtle a thing, though one of its leading characteristics is an extraordinary directness and simplicity, that it is more easily understood than explained. But even if it were an easy matter to dissect and analyse the mediæval spirit, ticketing so much as simplicity, such a percentage as humour, so many parts as fear of God, and so many as fear of the Devil, and so forth, it should not be done here. For though this book was written with a purpose, that purpose was not to instruct and edify, but rather to interest and amuse, which is a far higher mission, and if the reader on laying it down feels that he has acquired knowledge it will probably be due in a large measure to the work of the artist, who has translated into line something more than the material details of the incidents which the writer has strung together.

So far as the half-dozen essays which follow are concerned their origin was almost as spontaneous as Topsy's; like her, they grew. It has been my fortune to spend much time searching ancient documents of every kind, and indeed there is probably hardly a single class of pre-Reformation records preserved between Chancery Lane and Fetter Lane into which I have not delved. Being, moreover, of an unmethodical nature it has been my practice, even when hard pressed for time, to allow my eye to be caught by any strange or unusual entry which had nothing to do with the object of my search;--I may admit in passing that I can rarely look up a word in the _New English Dictionary_, because there are so many more interesting words on the other pages. In this way my notebooks became full of queer and fascinating little bits of ancientry, many of them clad in that quaint garb of archaic English which lends a piquancy, and occasionally a touch of unintentional humour, to their presentment. Feeling that it was a pity that such treasures should continue in concealment I strung some of them together, amplifying my material with parallel passages from some of the less known Chronicles and other printed sources. The resulting essays were published in the _Oxford and Cambridge Review_, and, I believe, gave a certain amount of pleasure to some of their readers. At any rate I was urged to republish them in book form, which I had all along intended to do, and the editor-proprietor of the _Oxford and Cambridge Review_ kindly gave me not only permission but even encouragement. I decided to have the book illustrated, and one or two attempts to procure the services of various artists having providentially failed I was introduced in a fortunate hour to Mr. George Kruger, whose work it would be superfluous for me to praise.

As to the particular sources from which my tales are drawn, they range wide, but it may interest the curious to know that the proceedings of the Court of Chancery, which at a later date, in _re_ Jarndyce and Jarndyce, afforded Dickens material for _Bleak House_, proved the most fruitful class for my purposes. This is due to the fact that in this class of records, more than in any other of equally early date, the vernacular is of common occurrence, and it must be admitted that many incidents which would read but dully in formal Latin or in that atrocious language legal French acquire merit by being told in the vulgar tongue and eccentric orthography of the fifteenth or sixteenth century. From a historical point of view there is one great thing to be said for legal records of this type:--they are completely free from unprejudice. No one expects a plaintiff or defendant to be impartial. And there is nothing so hopelessly misleading, speaking historically, as impartiality. For one thing the unprejudiced historian is practically bound to be uninteresting; the works of the most judicially impartial historian of the present time--so far as English history goes--are unreadable. Moreover, although he is carefully accurate and painstaking, they give a totally wrong impression so far as they give any at all. A 'History of the Reformation,' were such to be written by him, would be infinitely farther from the truth than one by Froude or Gasquet. To illustrate my meaning from contemporary events: some future historian will undoubtedly write fairly and impartially about Tariff Reform, Women's Suffrage, and National Insurance. He will thereby completely miss the significance of those movements; for the propaganda and personalities of Mr. Lloyd George, Mrs. Pankhurst, and Mr. Joseph Chamberlain are not matters for cool and impartial consideration, and it will only be by the blessed gift of prejudice that the future historian will be able to enter into the feelings of the present generation and obtain the true neo-Georgian atmosphere.

The Chronicles which form the chief of my subsidiary sources are sufficiently full of life and prejudice. Very human were many of those old writers, from that brilliant Welsh proto-journalist Gerald de Barri down to those worthy Londoners Gregory and Fabyan. Best of all are the rhymesters; there is a vigour and a wealth of detail in their work which endears them to me, and I could view the loss of Lydgate's _Siege of Troye_ or of the unreadable grandfather of English poetry, Beowulf, with greater equanimity than the loss of such pieces as the account of the Siege of Rouen which John Page wrote

'Alle in raffe and not in ryme By cause of space he hadde no tyme.'

Few poems can equal this piece in its spirited portrayal of military operations in the fifteenth century, the two sides to the picture, the pageantry of the army and the sufferings of the non-combatants, being contrasted with remarkable dramatic power in the passage which tells how two pavilions were pitched between the English camp and the walls of the city for the delegates appointed by the rival nations to discuss terms of peace.

'That was a syght of solempnyte, To beholde eyther other parte, To se hir pavylyons in hir araye The pepylle that on the wallys laye, And oure pepylle that was with owte, Howe thycke they stode and walkyd abowte. Also hyt was solas to sene The herrowdys of armys that went by twyne; Kyngys, herrowdys and pursefauntys In cotys of armys suauntys, The Englysche beeste, the Fraynysche floure, Of Portynggale castelle and toure; Othyr in cotys of dyversyte, As lordys berys in hys degre. Gayly with golde they were begon, Ryght as the son for sothe hyt schone. Thys syght was bothe joye and chere; Of sorowe and payne the othyr were. Of pore pepylle there were put owte And nought as moche as a clowte But the clothes on there backe To kepe them from rayne I wotte. The weder was unto them a payne, For alle that tyme stode most by rayne. There men myght se grete pytte, A chylde of ij yere or iij Go aboute to begge hyt brede. Fadyr and modyr bothe were dede. Undyr sum the watyr stode; Yet lay they cryyng aftyr foode. And sum storvyn unto the dethe, And sum stoppyde of ther brethe, Sum crokyd in the kneys, And sum alle so lene as any treys, And wemmen holden in thir armys Dede chyldryn in hyr barmys.

* * * * *

Thes were the syghtys of dyfferauns, That one of joye and that other of penaunce, As helle and hevyn ben partyd a to, That one of welle and that othyr of wo.'

The whole poem shows a Pre-Raphaelite love of detail combined with a remarkable appreciation of dramatic values, and the same is true of many of the other rhyming chronicles, political poems, and topical ballads. As an example of the value of these poems for interpreting the mediæval spirit I might instance the light thrown on 'the days of chivalry' by the 'Maréchal' poem. In this glorification of the great Earl of Pembroke the business-like record of the monetary profits resulting from his prowess at tournaments takes the gilt off the gingerbread 'Knight errant' as completely as the details of the wholesale slaughter and subsequent sale of the bag after a fashionable _battue_ strip the gilt from the modern 'sportsman.' In view of the eminently quotable character of these rhymes it is really rather remarkable that I should have made so little use of them in any of my essays, covering, as these do, so wide a range of subject. It is also a great pity that they are so much neglected by those whose business it is to teach history. The intelligent use of such materials as these would make history live, but unfortunately there is a widespread idea that dates are the be-all and end-all of history, which delusion is fostered by the importance attached to dates in the ordinary accursed examination. Whereas in reality dates are utterly unimportant and of no value in themselves, but useful solely as _memoriæ technicæ_ for grasping the sequence of events; there being, for instance, no significance whatever--except possibly for astrologers--in the isolated facts that the Black Death occurred in 1349, and that the Peasants' Rising happened in 1381, but very great significance in the fact that the one event was a generation after the other. However, a discussion of the right and wrong methods of teaching history is rather too big a subject to be dragged in at the end of these rambling remarks, which were intended to be an introduction to the essays which follow, so, if any readers have followed the unusual course of starting with the introduction, I will take my leave of them at this point and wish them a pleasant journey through these Mediæval Byways.

CONTENTS

PAGE

I. WISE MEN--AND OTHERS 1

II. HIGHWAYS 39

III. CORONATIONS 66

IV. DEATH AND DOCTORS 89

V. THOSE IN AUTHORITY 125

VI. IVORY AND APES AND PEACOCKS 159

ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE

'... sat for its portrait to Matthew Paris' _Frontispiece_

'A young novice of the priory' 10

Robert Berewold in the pillory 15

... sware 'gret othes' and took himself by the hair 21

'... caused to sytte down and in large wyse to gape' 24

'... thrust a leaden bodkin into the head of that image' 29

'Diabolus ligatus' 38

'A wonderful sight' 44

'An impromptu entertainment by three minstrels' 48

Pilgrims 53

'St. Piran' 59

'... crossed to England' 64

'Henry's badge' 69

A 'herauld' 70

'The young Edward III.' 76

Crowns ancient and modern 78

'Dymoke of Scrivelsby' 82

'The tiger and the mirror' 87

'... got his arms round a branch' 94

'The broken bough fell on the head of a man standing down below' 95

'... cast her into a cauldron' 102

'... called secretly at the chamber dore' 110

'... gyrd abowte his bodye in iij places with towells and gyrdylls' 113

'... led through the middle of the city' 123

'... failed to identify the geese' 132

'... ducking him in a horse-pond' 141

'... with drawn swords stood in the doorway' 145

'He incontinently fled' 148

'... compellyd them for to devour the same writte' 154

'... thrust him out of the church' 156

'latten "Agnus Dei"' 162

'... playing innumerable pranks' 166

'When a lion looks at you it becomes a leopard' 170

'The unfortunate "fowle" was "hurten so sore"' 173

'... constructed a pantomime dragon on the pattern of the real article' 179

'Hakeney' 184

'... showed him his injuries' 188

'... fully armed with swords and bucklers' 191

I

WISE MEN--AND OTHERS

THE ALCHEMISTS

The cyclic tendency so obvious in Nature is not least notable in the domain of knowledge. The discovery of one era is lost in the next, only to reappear at a later day, welcomed as a triumph of modern ingenuity or science. In maps of three centuries ago the Nile is shown rising from great lakes, but in the atlases that our fathers used the lakes have vanished and a range of imaginary mountains lies like a little woolly caterpillar in the heart of Africa as the source of the Nile, only to be replaced once more in our own days by the great lakes. Dragons, after being commonplaces of ancient time, fell into undeserved contempt, their very existence denied by a sceptical generation, and have only been rescued and rehabilitated in recent years by men of science, who, ashamed to admit that they have found the fabulous monsters of faery, have disguised them in polysyllabic nomenclature of 'saurus.' The 'travellers' tales' of old Herodotus, scoffed at by the superior minds of the unimaginative Victorian era, are daily gaining acceptance; King Chedorlaomer and other worthies, who, after centuries of blameless biblical existence, were conclusively demolished by the High German Critics, have reappeared on contemporary tablets of imperishable clay unkindly disinterred by archæological explorers; and, in more mundane matters, the very latest developments of sanitary science prove to have been anticipated by a trifle of sixty centuries in the palaces of Crete.

So with Alchemy. The transmutation of the base into the noble, above all of the baser metals into gold, was accepted as feasible from the earliest historic times until the seventeenth century. Then the spread of printing enabled so many votaries of the science to publish their ideas and theories that all belief in Alchemy was swept away by the flood of mystical nonsense, but now science is back on the threshold of the knowledge of transmutation. The old alchemists seem to have based their theories on the belief that all metals, and indeed all matter, contained one common element, of which the purest and most perfect form on this earth was gold. This theory was knocked on the head when scientists discovered the Atomic Theory. Proof positive was adduced that certain substances, such as gold and silver, were elements, and that elements consisted simply and solely of agglomerations of indivisible atoms, each of which possessed the characteristics of its particular element. In other words, Gold was Gold and Silver was Silver, and there was an end to it. But now the indivisible atoms are beginning to fly in pieces before the skilful and remorseless attack of modern scientists, and it will be no surprising thing if we live to see the 'elements' of our schooldays reduced to combinations of two or three Primary Elements, even if the Primordial Element, the great First Cause, is not weighed, measured, and photographed. If, then, gold and silver can be split into the same constituents it might well be possible to recombine those constituents in such manner that the silver should become gold and the gold silver. To the scientific mind the two transmutations would be of equal value, but to the philosopher aiming ever at perfection, and to the sordid speculator, aiming ever at profit, the production of gold from the baser metal has always been the goal.

We naturally hear little of mediæval alchemists in the legal records. Their proceedings were inoffensive and little calculated to bring them within the jurisdiction of any court, except possibly that of bankruptcy. One of the scarce exceptions of this rule of silence occurred in 1463, when Edward IV. granted to Sir Henry Grey of Codnor in Derbyshire, authority to labour by the cunning of philosophy for the transmutation of metals, with all things requisite to the same, at his own cost, provided he answer to the King if any profit grow therefrom. The terms of the grant can scarcely be called liberal. Two years later the King decided that Sir Henry had had sufficient time for his experiments and called upon him to render an account of his gains. The philosopher, who had probably very little to account for, did not appear and his case was postponed from term to term for five years. At last a date was fixed for him to appear in court in the middle of October 1470, 'but before that date the Lord King, certain necessary and urgent causes moving him, made a journey from his realm of England to foreign parts, leaving no regent or guardian in the same realm, wherefore the Barons of the Exchequer did not come to hear pleas.' Reading the courtly sentence it is hard to realise that on the 3rd of October King Edward had, in the words of Speed, 'fled from his host besides Nottingham, passing the Washes towards Lynne, with greater difficulties than was befitting a Prince to adventure, and thus without any order taken for his Realme, in two Hulkes of Holland and one English ship, destitute of all necessary provisions, set sail towards Burgundy, and in the way was encountered by the Easterlings, England's great enemies, having much adoe to clear himself of their surprize.' The politer version of the legal roll has been written over an entry which, although completely erased, we may be sure set out how Henry VI. had recovered the realm from Edward, 'king in fact but not in right.' The alchemy of the pen, by which the roseate Lancastrian version faded to the colourless statement of the Yorkists, was more successful, we may well believe, than was ever the alchemy of Sir Henry Grey.

But in spite of the ill-success of Sir Henry Grey the King in 1476 licensed David Beaupee and John Merchaunt to practise for four years 'the natural science of the generation of gold and silver from mercury.' Alchemy, indeed, was clearly flourishing in the fifteenth century. In 1468 Richard Carter received authority to practise the art, while under Henry VI. several such licences were granted. Thus in 1444 Edward Cobbe was authorised 'to transmute the imperfect metals from their own kind by the art of Philosophy and to transubstantiate them into gold or silver'; two years later Sir Edmund Trafford and Sir Thomas Ashton were empowered to transmute metals, and in 1446 John Fauceby, John Kirkeby, and John Rayny received the royal permission to search for the philosopher's stone or the elixir of life and to transmute metals. Presumably the need for royal licence in all these cases was based on the royal claim to all mines, and therefore to all other sources, of precious metals. Covetous eyes had been cast upon Alchemy as a possible source of revenue at least as early as 1330, when Thomas Cary was ordered to bring before King Edward III. John le Rous and Master William de Dalby, who were said to be able to make silver by alchemy, with the instruments and other things needful to their craft. But of all these scientists and philosophers no more is heard, and, although I have not searched the accounts of bullion purchased for the Mint, it may safely be asserted that the revenue profited little by all their science and philosophy.