Part 8

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 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.

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_.

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.'

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.

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.'

Transcriber's Notes:

Passages in italics are indicated by _italics_.

Superscripted characters are indicated by {superscript}.