CHAPTER IX.

Le matinet, sans contredire,Voudrai mes braies deschaucier,Et enmi nostre cort couchier;Et qui conquerre les porra,Par bone reson mousterraQu’il ert sire ou dame du nostre.Barbazan, Fabliaux, tome iii. p. 383.

Le matinet, sans contredire,

Voudrai mes braies deschaucier,

Et enmi nostre cort couchier;

Et qui conquerre les porra,

Par bone reson mousterra

Qu’il ert sire ou dame du nostre.

Barbazan, Fabliaux, tome iii. p. 383.

Dame Anieuse accepted the challenge with eagerness, and each prepared for the struggle. After due preparation, two neighbours, friend Symon and Dame Aupais, having been called in as witnesses, and the object of dispute, the breeches, having been placed on the pavement of the court, the battle began, with some slight parody on the formalities of the judicial combat. The first blow was given by the dame, who was so eager for the fray that she struck her husband before he had put himself on his guard; and the war of tongues, in which at least Dame Anieuse had the best of it, went on at the same time as the other battle. Sire Hains ventured a slight expostulation on her eagerness for the fray, in answer to which she only threw in his teeth a fierce defiance to do his worst. Provoked at this, Sire Hains struck at her, and hit her over the eyebrows, so effectively, that the skin was discoloured; and, over-confident in the effect of this first blow, he began rather too soon to exult over his wife’s defeat. But Dame Anieuse was less disconcerted than he expected, and recovering quickly from the effect of the blow, she turned upon him and struck him on the same part of his face with such force, that she nearly knocked him over the sheepfold. Dame Anieuse, in her turn, now sneered over him, and while he was recovering from his confusion, her eyes fell upon the object of contention, and she rushed to it, and laid her hands upon it to carry it away. This movement roused Sire Hains, who instantly seized another part of the article of his dress of which hewas thus in danger of being deprived, and began a struggle for possession, in which the said article underwent considerable dilapidation, and fragments of it were scattered over the court. In the midst of this struggle the actual fight recommenced, by the husband giving his wife so heavy a blow on the teeth that her mouth was filled with blood. The effect was such that Sire Hains already reckoned on the victory, and proclaimed himself lord of the breeches.

Hains fiert sa fame enmi les denzTel cop, que la bouche dedenzLi a toute emplie de sancz.“Tien ore,” dist Sire Hains, “anc,Je cuit que je t’ai bien atainte,Or t’ai-je de deux colors tainte—J’aurai les braies toutes voies.”

Hains fiert sa fame enmi les denz

Tel cop, que la bouche dedenz

Li a toute emplie de sancz.

“Tien ore,” dist Sire Hains, “anc,

Je cuit que je t’ai bien atainte,

Or t’ai-je de deux colors tainte—

J’aurai les braies toutes voies.”

But the immediate effect on Dame Anieuse was only to render her more desperate. She quitted her hold on the disputed garment, and fell upon her husband with such a shower of blows that he hardly knew which way to turn. She was thus, however, unconsciously exhausting herself, and Sire Hains soon recovered. The battle now became fiercer than ever, and the lady seemed to be gaining the upper hand, when Sire Hains gave her a skilful blow in the ribs, which nearly broke one of them, and considerably checked her ardour. Friend Symon here interposed, with the praiseworthy aim of restoring peace before further harm might be done, but in vain, for the lady was only rendered more obstinate by her mishap; and he agreed that it was useless to interfere until one had got a more decided advantage over the other. The fight therefore went on, the two combatants having now seized each other by the hair of the head, a mode of combat in which the advantages were rather on the side of the male. At this moment, one of the judges, Dame Aupais, sympathising too much with Dame Anieuse, ventured some words of encouragement, which drew upon her a severe rebuke from her colleague, Symon, who intimated that if she interfered again there might be two pairs of combatants instead of one. Meanwhile Dame Anieuse was becoming exhausted, and was evidently getting the worst of the contest, until at length, staggeringfrom a vigorous push, she fell back into a large basket which lay behind her. Sire Hains stood over her exultingly, and Symon, as umpire, pronounced him victorious. He thereupon took possession of the disputed article of raiment, and again invested himself with it, while the lady accepted faithfully the conditions imposed upon her, and we are assured by the poet that she was a good and obedient wife during the rest of her life. In this story, which affords a curious picture of mediæval life, we learn the origin of the proverb relating to the possession and wearing of the breeches. Hugues Piaucelles concludes hisfabliauby recommending every man who has a disobedient wife to treat her in the same manner; and mediæval husbands appear to have followed his advice, without fear of laws against the ill-treatment of women.

No. 81. The Fight for the Breeches.

A subject like this was well fitted for the burlesques on the stalls, and accordingly we find on one of those in the cathedral at Rouen, the group given in our cut No. 81, which seems to represent the part of the story in which both combatants seize hold of the disputed garment, and struggle for possession of it. The husband here grasps a knife in his hand, with which he seems to be threatening to cut it to pieces rather than give it up. Thefabliaugives the victory to the husband, but the wife was generally considered as in a majority of cases carrying off the prize. In an extremely rare engraving by the Flemish artist Van Mecken, dated in 1480, of which I give a copy in our cut No. 82. the lady, whileputting on the breeches, of which she has just become possessed, shows an inclination to lord it rather tyrannically over her other half, whom she has condemned to perform the domestic drudgery of the mansion.

No. 82. The Breeches Won.

In Germany, where there was still more roughness in mediæval life, what was told in England and France as a good story of domestic doings, was actually carried into practice under the authority of the laws. The judicial duel was there adopted by the legal authorities as a mode of settling the differences between husband and wife. Curious particulars on this subject are given in an interesting paper entitled “Some observations on Judicial Duels as practised in Germany,” published in the twenty-ninth volume of the Archæologia of the Society of Antiquaries (p. 348). These observations are chiefly taken from a volume of directions, accompanied with drawings, for the various modes of attack and defence, compiled by Paulus Kall, a celebrated teacher of defence at the court of Bavaria about the year 1400. Among these drawings we have one representing the mode of combat between husband and wife. The only weapon allowed the female, but that a very formidable one, was, according to these directions, a heavy stone wrapped up in an elongation of her chemise, while her opponent had only a short staff, and he was placed up to the waist in a pit formed in the ground. The followingis a literal translation of the directions given in the manuscript, and our cut No. 83 is a copy of the drawing which illustrates it:—“The woman must be so prepared, that a sleeve of her chemise extend a small ell beyond her hand, like a little sack; there indeed is put a stone weighing three pounds; and she has nothing else but her chemise, and that is bound together between the legs with a lace. Then the man makes himself ready in the pit over against his wife. He is buried therein up to the girdle, and one hand is bound at the elbow to the side.” At this time the practice of such combats in Germany seems to have been long known, for it is stated that in the year 1200 a man and his wife fought under the sanction of the civic authorities at Bâle, in Switzerland. In a picture of a combat between man and wife, from a manuscript resembling that of Paulus Kall, but executed nearly a century later, the man is placed in a tub instead of a pit, with his left arm tied to his side as before, and his right holding a short heavy staff; while the woman is dressed, and not stripped to thechemise, as in the former case. The man appears to be holding the stick in such a manner that the sling in which the stone was contained would twist round it, and the woman would thus be at the mercy of her opponent. In an ancient manuscript on the science of defence in the library at Gotha, the man in the tub is represented as the conqueror of his wife, having thus dragged her head-foremost into the tub, where she appears with her legs kicking up in the air.

No. 83. A Legal Combat.

This was the orthodox mode of combat between man and wife, but it was sometimes practised under more sanguinary forms. In one picture given from these old books on the science of defence by the writer of the paper on the subject in the Archæologia, the two combatants, naked down to the waist, are represented fighting with sharp knives, and inflicting upon each other’s bodies frightful gashes.

No. 84. The Witch and the Demon.

No. 85. The Witch and her Victim.

A series of stall carvings at Corbeil, near Paris, of which more will be said a little farther on in this chapter, has furnished the curious group represented in our cut No. 84, which is one of the rather rare pictorial allusions to the subject of witchcraft. It represents a woman who must, by her occupation, be a witch, for she has so far got the mastery of the demon that she is sawing off his head with a very uncomfortable lookinginstrument. Another story of witchcraft is told in the sculpture of a stone panel at the entrance of the cathedral of Lyons, which is represented in our cut No. 85. One power, supposed to be possessed by witches, was that of transforming people to animals at will. William of Malmesbury, in his Chronicle, tells a story of two witches in the neighbourhood of Rome, who used to allure travellers into their cottage, and there transform them into horses, pigs, or other animals, which they sold, and feasted themselves with the money. One day a young man, who lived by the profession of a jougleur, sought a night’s lodging at their cottage, and was received, but they turned him into an ass, and, as he retained his understanding and his power of acting, they gained much money by exhibiting him. At length a rich man of the neighbourhood, who wanted him for his private amusement, offered the two women a large sum for him, which they accepted, but they warned the new possessor of the ass that he should carefully restrain him from going into the water, as that would deprive him of his power of performing. The man who had purchased the ass acted upon this advice, and carefully kept him from water, but one day, through the negligence of his keeper, theass escaped from his stable, and, rushing to a pond at no great distance, threw himself into it. Water—and running water especially—was believed to destroy the power of witchcraft or magic; and no sooner was the ass immersed in the water, than he recovered his original form of a young man. He told his story, which soon reached the ears of the pope, and the two women were seized, and confessed their crimes. The carving from Lyons Cathedral appears to represent some such scene of sorcery. The naked woman, evidently a witch, is, perhaps, seated on a man whom she has transformed into a goat, and she seems to be whirling the cat over him in such a manner that it may tear his face with its claws.

There was still another class of subjects for satire and caricature which belongs to this part of our subject—I mean that of the trader and manufacturer. We must not suppose that fraudulent trading, that deceptive and imperfect workmanship, that adulteration of everything that could be adulterated, are peculiar to modern times. On the contrary, there was no period in the world’s history in which dishonest dealing was carried on to such an extraordinary extent, in which there was so much deception used in manufactures, or in which adulteration was practised on so shameless a scale, as during the middle ages. These vices, or, as we may, perhaps, more properly describe them, these crimes, are often mentioned in the mediæval writers, but they were not easily represented pictorially, and therefore we rarely meet with direct allusions to them, either in sculpture, on stone or wood, or in the paintings of illuminated manuscripts. Representations of the trades themselves are not so rare, and are sometimes droll and almost burlesque. A curious series of such representations of arts and trades was carved on themisereresof the church of St. Spire, at Corbeil, near Paris, which only exist now in Millin’s engravings, but they seem to have been works of the fifteenth century. Among them the first place is given to the various occupations necessary for the production of bread, that article so important to the support of life. Thus we see, in these carvings at Corbeil, the labours of the reaper, cutting the wheat and forming it into sheaves, the miller carrying it away to be ground intomeal, and the baker thrusting it into the oven, and drawing it out in the shape of loaves. Our cut No. 86, taken from one of these sculptures, represents the baker either putting in or taking out the bread with his peel; by the earnest manner in which he looks at it, we may suppose that it is the latter, and that he is ascertaining if it be sufficiently baked. We have an earlier representation of a mediæval oven in our cut No. 87, taken from the celebrated illuminated manuscript of the “Romance of Alexandre,” in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, which appears to belong to an early period of the fourteenth century. Here the baker is evidently going to take a loaf out of the oven, for his companion holds a dish for the purpose of receiving it.

No. 86. A Baker of the Fifteenth Century.

No. 87. A Mediæval Baker.

In nothing was fraud and adulteration practised to so great an extentas in the important article of bread, and the two occupations especially employed in making it were objects of very great dislike and of scornful satire. The miller was proverbially a thief. Every reader of Chaucer will remember his character so admirably drawn in that of the miller of Trumpington, who, though he was as proud and gay “as eny pecok,” was nevertheless eminently dishonest.

A theef he was for soth of corn and mele,And that a sleigh(sly), and usyng(practised)for to stele.Chaucer’s Reeves Tale.

A theef he was for soth of corn and mele,

And that a sleigh(sly), and usyng(practised)for to stele.

Chaucer’s Reeves Tale.

This practice included a large college then existing in Cambridge, but now forgotten, the Soler Hall, which suffered greatly by his depredations.

And on a day it happed in a stounde,Syk lay the mauncyple on a maledye,Men wenden wisly that he schulde dye;For which this meller stal bothe mele and cornA thousend part more than byforn.For ther biforn he stal but curteysly;But now he is a theef outrageously.For which the wardeyn chidde and made fare,But therof sette the meller not a tare;He crakked boost, and swor it was nat so.

And on a day it happed in a stounde,

Syk lay the mauncyple on a maledye,

Men wenden wisly that he schulde dye;

For which this meller stal bothe mele and corn

A thousend part more than byforn.

For ther biforn he stal but curteysly;

But now he is a theef outrageously.

For which the wardeyn chidde and made fare,

But therof sette the meller not a tare;

He crakked boost, and swor it was nat so.

Two of the scholars of this college resolved to go with the corn to the mill, and by their watchfulness prevent his depredations. Those who are acquainted with the story know how the scholars succeeded, or rather how they failed; how the miller stole half a bushel of their flour and caused his wife to make a cake of it; and how the victims had their revenge and recovered the cake.

As already stated, the baker had in these good old times no better character than the miller, if not worse. There was an old saying, that if three persons of three obnoxious professions were put together in a sack and shaken up, the first who came out would certainly be a rogue, and one of these was a baker. Moreover, the opinion concerning the baker was so strong that, as in the phrase taken from the old legends of the witches, who in their festivals sat thirteen at a table, this number waspopularly called a devil’s dozen, and was believed to be unlucky—so, when the devil’s name was abandoned, perhaps for the sake of euphony, the name substituted for it was that of the baker, and the number thirteen was called “a baker’s dozen.” The makers of nearly all sorts of provisions for sale were, in the middle ages, tainted with the same vice, and there was nothing from which society in general, especially in the towns where few made bread for themselves, suffered so much. This evil is alluded to more than once in that curious educational treatise, the “Dictionarius” of John de Garlande, printed in my “Volume of Vocabularies.” This writer, who wrote in the earlier half of the thirteenth century, insinuates that the makers of pies (pastillarii), an article of food which was greatly in repute during the middle ages, often made use of bad eggs. The cooks, he says further, sold, especially in Paris to the scholars of the university, cooked meats, sausages, and such things, which were not fit to eat; while the butchers furnished the meat of animals which had died of disease. Even the spices and drugs sold by the apothecaries, orépiciers, were not, he says, to be trusted. John de Garlande had evidently an inclination to satire, and he gives way to it not unfrequently in the little book of which I am speaking. He says that the glovers of Paris cheated the scholars of the university, by selling them gloves made of bad materials; that the women who gained their living by winding thread (devacuatrices, in the Latin of the time), not only emptied the scholars’ purses, but wasted their bodies also (it is intended as a pun upon the Latin word); and the hucksters sold them unripe fruit for ripe. The drapers, he says, cheated people not only by selling bad materials, but by measuring them with false measures; while the hawkers, who went about from house to house, robbed as well as cheated.

M. Jubinal has published in his curious volume entitled“Jongleurs et Trouvères,”a rather jocular poem on the bakers, written in French of, perhaps, the thirteenth century, in which their art is lauded as much better and more useful than that of the goldsmith’s. The millers’ depredations on the corn sent to be ground at the mill, are laid to the charge of the rats, which attack it by night, and the hens, which find their way to it by day; and he explains the diminution the bakingsexperienced in the hands of the baker as arising out of the charity of the latter towards the poor and needy, to whom they gave the meal and paste before it had even been put into the oven. The celebrated English poet, John Lydgate, in a short poem preserved in a manuscript in the Harleian Library in the British Museum (MS. Harl. No. 2,255, fol. 157, vo, describes the pillory, which he calls their Bastile, as the proper heritage of the miller and the baker:—

Put out his hed, lyst nat for to dare,But lyk a man upon that tour to abyde,For cast of eggys wil not oonys spare,Tyl he be quallyd body, bak, and syde.His heed endooryd, and of verray prydePut out his armys, shewith abrood his face;The fenestrallys be made for hym so wyde,Claymyth to been a capteyn of that place.The bastyle longith of verray dewe ryghtTo fals bakerys, it is trewe herytageSeveralle to them, this knoweth every wyght,Be kynde assygned for ther sittyng stage;Wheer they may freely shewe out ther visage,Whan they tak oonys their possessioun,Owthir in youthe or in myddyl age;Men doon hem wrong yif they take hym down.Let mellerys and bakerys gadre hem a gilde,And alle of assent make a fraternité,Undir the pillory a letil chapelle bylde,The place amorteyse, and purchase lyberté,For alle thos that of ther noumbre be;What evir it coost afftir that they wende,They may clayme, be just auctorité,Upon that bastile to make an ende.

Put out his hed, lyst nat for to dare,

But lyk a man upon that tour to abyde,

For cast of eggys wil not oonys spare,

Tyl he be quallyd body, bak, and syde.

His heed endooryd, and of verray pryde

Put out his armys, shewith abrood his face;

The fenestrallys be made for hym so wyde,

Claymyth to been a capteyn of that place.

The bastyle longith of verray dewe ryghtTo fals bakerys, it is trewe herytageSeveralle to them, this knoweth every wyght,Be kynde assygned for ther sittyng stage;Wheer they may freely shewe out ther visage,Whan they tak oonys their possessioun,Owthir in youthe or in myddyl age;Men doon hem wrong yif they take hym down.

The bastyle longith of verray dewe ryght

To fals bakerys, it is trewe herytage

Severalle to them, this knoweth every wyght,

Be kynde assygned for ther sittyng stage;

Wheer they may freely shewe out ther visage,

Whan they tak oonys their possessioun,

Owthir in youthe or in myddyl age;

Men doon hem wrong yif they take hym down.

Let mellerys and bakerys gadre hem a gilde,And alle of assent make a fraternité,Undir the pillory a letil chapelle bylde,The place amorteyse, and purchase lyberté,For alle thos that of ther noumbre be;What evir it coost afftir that they wende,They may clayme, be just auctorité,Upon that bastile to make an ende.

Let mellerys and bakerys gadre hem a gilde,

And alle of assent make a fraternité,

Undir the pillory a letil chapelle bylde,

The place amorteyse, and purchase lyberté,

For alle thos that of ther noumbre be;

What evir it coost afftir that they wende,

They may clayme, be just auctorité,

Upon that bastile to make an ende.

The wine-dealer and the publican formed another class in mediæval society who lived by fraud and dishonesty, and were the objects of satire. The latter gave both bad wine and bad measure, and he often also acted as a pawnbroker, and when people had drunk more than they could pay for, he would take their clothes as pledges for their money. The tavern, in the middle ages, was the resort of very miscellaneous company;gamblers and loose women were always on the watch there to lead more honest people into ruin, and the tavern-keeper profited largely by their gains; and the more vulgar minstrel and“jogelour”found employment there; for the middle classes of society, and even their betters, frequented the tavern much more generally than at the present day. In the carved stalls of the church of Corbeil, the liquor merchant is represented by the figure of a man wheeling a hogshead in a barrow, as shown in our cut No. 88. The graveness and air of importance with which he regards it would lead us to suppose that the barrel contains wine; and the cup and jug on the shelf above show that it was to be sold retail. The wine-sellers called out their wines from their doors, and boasted of their qualities, in order to tempt people in; and John de Garlande assures us that when they entered, they were served with wine which was not worth drinking. “The criers of wine,” he says, “proclaim with extended throat the diluted wine they have in their taverns, offering it at four pennies, at six, at eight, and at twelve, fresh poured out from the gallon cask into the cup, to tempt people.” (“Volume of Vocabularies,” p. 126.) The ale-wife was an especial subject of jestand satire, and is not unfrequently represented on the pictorial monuments of our forefathers. Our cut No. 89 is taken from one of the misereres in the church of Wellingborough, in Northamptonshire; the ale-wife is pouring her liquor from her jug into a cup to serve a rustic, who appears to be waiting for it with impatience.

No. 88. The Wine Dealer.

No. 89. The Ale-Wife.

No. 90. The Ale-Drawer.

The figure of the ale-drawer, No. 90, is taken from one of the misereres in the parish church of Ludlow, in Shropshire. The size of his jug is somewhat disproportionate to that of the barrel from which he obtains the ale. The same misereres of Ludlow Church furnish the next scene, cut No. 91, which represents the end of the wicked ale-wife. The day of judgment is supposed to have arrived, and she has received her sentence. A demon, seated on one side, is reading a list ofthe crimes she has committed, which the magnitude of the parchment shows to be a rather copious one. Another demon (whose head has been broken off in the original) carries on his back, in a very irreverent manner, the unfortunate lady, in order to throw her into hell-mouth, on the other side of the picture. She is naked with the exception of the fashionable head-gear, which formed one of her vanities in the world, and she carries with her the false measure with which she cheated her customers. A demon bagpiper welcomes her on her arrival. The scene is full of wit and humour.

No. 91. The Ale-Wife’s End.

The rustic classes, and instances of their rusticity, are not unfrequently met with in these interesting carvings. The stalls of Corbeil present several agricultural scenes. Our cut No. 92 is taken from those of Gloucester cathedral, of an earlier date, and represents the three shepherds, astonished at the appearance of the star which announced the birth of the Saviour of mankind. Like the three kings, the shepherds to whom this revelation was made were always in the middle ages represented as three in number. In our drawing from the miserere in Gloucester cathedral, the costume of the shepherds is remarkably welldepicted, even to the details, with the various implements appertaining to their profession, most of which are suspended to their girdles. They are drawn with much spirit, and even the dog is well represented as an especially active partaker in the scene.

No. 92. The Shepherds of the East.

No. 93. The Carpenter.

No. 94. The Shoemaker.

Of the two other examples we select from the misereres of Corbeil, the first represents the carpenter, or, as he was commonly called by our Anglo-Saxon and mediæval forefathers, thewright, which signifies simply the “maker.” The application of this higher and more general term—for the Almighty himself is called, in the Anglo-Saxon poetry,ealra gescefta wyrhta, the Maker, or Creator, of all things—shows how important an art that of the carpenter was considered in the middle ages. Everything made of wood came within his province. In the Anglo-Saxon “Colloquy” of archbishop Alfric, where some of the more useful artisans are introduced disputing about the relative value of their several crafts, the “wright” says, “Who of you can do without my craft, since I make houses and all sorts of vessels (vasa), and ships for you all?” (“Volume of Vocabularies,” p. 11.) And John de Garlande, in the thirteenth century, describes the carpenter as making, among other things, tubs, and barrels, and wine-cades. The workmanship of those times was exercised, before all other materials, on wood and metals, andthe wright, or worker in the former material, was distinguished by this circumstance from the smith, or worker in metal. The carpenter is still called a wright in Scotland. Our last cut (No. 94), taken also from one of the misereres at Corbeil, represents the shoemaker, or as he was thenusually called, the cordwainer, because the leather which he chiefly used came from Cordova in Spain, and was thence calledcordewan, orcordewaine. Our shoemaker is engaged in cutting a skin of leather with an instrument of a rather singular form. Shoes, and perhaps forms for making shoes, are suspended on pegs against the wall.

GROTESQUE FACES AND FIGURES.—PREVALENCE OF THE TASTE FOR UGLY AND GROTESQUE FACES.—SOME OF THE POPULAR FORMS DERIVED FROM ANTIQUITY; THE TONGUE LOLLING OUT, AND THE DISTORTED MOUTH.—HORRIBLE SUBJECTS: THE MAN AND THE SERPENTS.—ALLEGORICAL FIGURES: GLUTTONY AND LUXURY.—OTHER REPRESENTATIONS OF CLERICAL GLUTTONY AND DRUNKENNESS.—GROTESQUE FIGURES OF INDIVIDUALS, AND GROTESQUE GROUPS.—ORNAMENTS OF THE BORDERS OF BOOKS.—UNINTENTIONAL CARICATURE; THE MOTE AND THE BEAM.

The grimaces and strange postures of the jougleurs seem to have had great attractions for those who witnessed them. To unrefined and uneducated minds no object conveys so perfect a notion of mirth as an ugly and distorted face. Hence it is that among the common peasantry at a country fair few exhibitions are more satisfactory than that of grinning through a horse-collar. This sentiment is largely exemplified in the sculpture especially of the middle ages, a long period, during which the general character of society presented that want of refinement which we now observe chiefly in its least cultivated classes. Among the most common decorations of our ancient churches and other mediæval buildings, are grotesque and monstrous heads and faces. Antiquity, which lent us the types of many of these monstrosities, saw in her Typhons and Gorgons a signification beyond the surface of the picture, and her grotesque masks had a general meaning, and were in a manner typical of the whole field of comic literature. The mask was less an individual grotesque to be laughed at for itself, than a personification of comedy. In the middle ages, on the contrary, although in some cases certain forms were often regarded as typical of certain ideas, in general the design extended no farther than the forms which the artist had given to it; thegrotesque features, like the grinning through the horse-collar, gave satisfaction by their mere ugliness. Even the applications, when such figures were intended to have one, were coarsely satirical, without any intellectuality, and, where they had a meaning beyond the plain text of the sculpture or drawing, it was not far-fetched, but plain and easily understood. When the Anglo-Saxon drew the face of a bloated and disfigured monk, he no doubt intended thereby to proclaim the popular notion of the general character of monastic life, but this was a design which nobody could misunderstand, an interpretation which everybody was prepared to give to it. We have already seen various examples of this description of satire, scattered here and there among the immense mass of grotesque sculpture which has no such meaning. A great proportion, indeed, of these grotesque sculptures appears to present mere variations of a certain number of distinct types which had been handed down from a remote period, some of them borrowed, perhaps involuntarily, from antiquity. Hence we naturally look for the earlier and more curious examples of this class of art to Italy and the south of France, where the transition from classical to mediæval was more gradual, and the continued influence of classical forms is more easily traced. The early Christian masons appear to have caricatured under the form of such grotesques the personages of the heathen mythology, and to this practice we perhaps owe some of the types of the mediæval monsters. We have seen in a former chapter a grotesque from the church of Monte Majour, near Nismes, the original type of which had evidently been some burlesque figure of Saturn eating one of his children. The classical mask doubtless furnished the type for those figures, so common in mediæval sculpture, of faces with disproportionately large mouths; just as another favourite class of grotesque faces, those with distended mouths and tongues lolling out, were taken originally from the Typhons and Gorgons of the ancients. Many other popular types of faces rendered artificially ugly are mere exaggerations of the distortions produced on the features by different operations, such, for instance, as that of blowing a horn.

The practice of blowing the horn, is, indeed, peculiarly calculated toexhibit the features of the face to disadvantage, and was not overlooked by the designers of the mediæval decorative sculpture. One of the large collection of casts of sculptures from French cathedrals exhibited in the museum at South Kensington, has furnished the two subjects given in our cut No. 95. The first is represented as blowing a horn, but he is producing the greatest possible distortion in his features, and especially in his mouth, by drawing the horn forcibly on one side with his left hand, while he pulls his beard in the other direction with the right hand. The force with which he is supposed to be blowing is perhaps represented by the form given to his eyes. The face of the lower figure is in at least comparative repose. The design of representing general distortion in the first is further shown by the ridiculously unnatural position of the arms. Such distortion of the members was not unfrequently introduced to heighten the effect of the grimace in the face; and, as in these examples, it was not uncommon to introduce as a further element of grotesque, the bodies, or parts of the bodies, of animals, or even of demons.

No. 95. Grotesque Monsters.

No. 96. Diabolical Mirth.

No. 97. Making Faces.

Another cast in the Kensington Museum is the subject of our cut No. 96, which presents the same idea of stretching the mouth. The subject is here exhibited by another rather mirthful looking individual, but whether the exhibitor is intended to be a goblin or demon, or whether he is merely furnished with the wings and claws of a bat, seems rather uncertain. The bat was looked upon as an unpropitious if not an unholy animal; like the owl, it was the companion of the witches, and of the spirits of darkness. The group in our cut No. 97 is taken from one of the carved stalls in the church of Stratford-upon-Avon, and represents a trio of grimacers. The first of these three grotesque faces is lolling out the tongue to an extravagant length; the second is simply grinning; while the third has taken a sausage between his teeth torender his grimace still more ridiculous. The number and variety of such grotesque faces, which we find scattered over the architectural decoration of our old ecclesiastical buildings, are so great that I will not attempt to give any more particular classification of them. All this church decoration was calculated especially to produce its effect upon the middle and lower classes, and mediæval art was, perhaps more than anything else, suited to mediæval society, for it belonged to the mass and not to the individual. The man who could enjoy a match at grinning through horse-collars, must have been charmed by the grotesque works of the mediæval stone sculptor and wood carver; and we may add that these display, though often rather rude, a very high degree of skill in art, a great power of producing striking imagery.

These mediæval artists loved also to produce horrible objects as well as laughable ones, though even in their horrors they were continually running into the grotesque. Among the adjuncts to these sculptured figures, we sometimes meet with instruments of pain, and very talented attempts to exhibit this on the features of the victims. The creed of the middle ages gave great scope for the indulgence of this taste in the infinitely varied terrors of purgatory and hell; and, not to speak of the more crude descriptions that are so common in mediæval popular literature, the account to which these descriptions might be turned by the poet as well as the artist are well known to the reader of Dante. Coils of serpents and dragons, which were the most usual instruments in the tortures of the infernal regions, were always favourite objects in mediæval ornamentation, whether sculptured or drawn, in the details of architectural decoration, or in the initial letters and margins of books. They are often combined in forming grotesque tracery with the bodies of animals or of human beings, and their movements are generally hostile to the latter. We have already seen, in previous chapters, examples of this use of serpents and dragons, dating from the earliest periods of mediæval art; and it is perhaps the most common style of ornamentation in the buildings and illuminated manuscripts in our island from the earlier Saxon times to the thirteenth century. This ornamentation is sometimes strikingly bold and effective. In the cathedral of Wells there is a seriesof ornamental bosses, formed by faces writhing under the attacks of numerous dragons, who are seizing upon the lips, eyes, and cheeks of their victims. One of these bosses, which are of the thirteenth century, is represented in our cut No. 98. A large, coarsely featured face is the victim of two dragons, one of which attacks his mouth, while the other has seized him by the eye. The expression of the face is strikingly horrible.

No. 98. Horror.

The higher mind of the middle ages loved to see inner meanings through outward forms; or, at least, it was a fashion which manifested itself most strongly in the latter half of the twelfth century, to adapt these outward forms to inward meanings by comparisons and moralisations; and under the effect of this feeling certain figures were at times adopted, with a view to some other purpose than mere ornament, though this was probably an innovation upon mediæval art. The tongue lolling out, taken originally, as we have seen, from the imagery of classic times, was accepted rather early in the middle ages as the emblem or symbol of luxury; and, when we find it among the sculptured ornaments of the architecture especially of some of the larger and more important churches, it implied probably an allusion to that vice—at least the face presented to us was intended to be that of a voluptuary. Among the remarkableseries of sculptures which crown the battlements of the cloisters of Magdalen College, Oxford, executed a very few years after the middle of the fifteenth century, amid many figures of a very miscellaneous character, there are several which were thus, no doubt, intended to be representatives of vices, if not of virtues. I give two examples of these curious sculptures.

No. 99. Gluttony.No. 100. Luxury.

No. 99. Gluttony.

No. 100. Luxury.

The first, No. 99, is generally considered to represent gluttony, and it is a remarkable circumstance that, in a building the character of which was partly ecclesiastical, and which was erected at the expense and under the directions of a great prelate, Bishop Wainflete, the vice of gluttony, with which the ecclesiastical order was especially reproached, should be represented in ecclesiastical costume. It is an additional proof that the detail of the work of the building was left entirely to the builders. The coarse, bloated features of the face, and the “villainous” low forehead,are characteristically executed; and the lolling tongue may perhaps be intended to intimate that, in the lives of the clergy, luxury went hand in hand with its kindred vice. The second of our examples, No. 100, appears by its different characteristics (some of which we have been unable to introduce in our woodcut) to be intended to represent luxury itself. Sometimes qualities of the individual man, or even the class of society, are represented in a manner far less disguised by allegorical clothing, and therefore much more plainly to the understanding of the vulgar. Thus in an illuminated manuscript of the fourteenth century, in the British Museum (MS. Arundel, No. 91), gluttony is represented by a monk devouring a pie alone and in secret, except that a little cloven-footed imp holds up the dish, and seems to enjoy the prospect of monastic indulgence. This picture is copied in our cut No. 101. Another manuscript of the same date (MS. Sloane, No. 2435) contains a scene, copied in our cut No. 102, representing drunkenness under the form of another monk, who has obtained the keys and found his way into the cellar of his monastery, and is there indulging his love for good ale in similar secrecy. It is to be remarked that here, again, the vices are laid to the charge of the clergy. Our cut No. 103, from a bas-relief in Ely Cathedral, given in Carter’s“Specimens of Ancient Sculpture,” represents a man drinking from a horn, and evidently enjoying his employment, but his costume is not sufficiently characteristic to betray his quality.

No. 101. Monkish Gluttony.

The subject of grotesque faces and heads naturally leads us to that of monstrous and grotesque bodies and groups of bodies, which has already been partly treated in a former chapter, where we have noticed the great love shown in the middle ages for monstrous animated figures, not only monsters of one nature, but, and that especially, of figures formed by joining together the parts of different, and entirely dissimilar, animals, of similar mixtures between animals and men. This, as stated above, was often effected by joining the body of some nondescript animal to a human head and face; so that, by the disproportionate size of the latter, the body, as a secondary part of the picture, became only an adjunct to set off still further the grotesque character of the human face. More importance was sometimes given to the body combined with fantastic forms, which baffle any attempt at giving an intelligible description. The accompanying cut, No. 104, represents a winged monster of thiskind; it is taken from one of the casts from French churches exhibited in the Kensington Museum.

No. 102. The Monastic Cellarer.No. 103. Drunkenness.

No. 102. The Monastic Cellarer.

No. 103. Drunkenness.

No. 104. A Strange Monster.

No. 105. Rolling Topsy Turvy.

No. 106. A Continuous Group.

Sometimes the mediæval artist, without giving any unusual form to his human figures, placed them in strange postures, or joined them in singular combinations. These latter are commonly of a playful character, or sometimes they represent droll feats of skill, or puzzles, or other subjects, all of which have been published pictorially and for the amusement of children down to very recent times. There were a few of these groups which are of rather frequent occurrence, and they were evidently favourite types. One of these is given in the annexed cut, No. 105. It is taken from one of the carved misereres of the stalls in Ely cathedral, as given in Carter, and represents two men who appear to be rolling over each other. The upper figure exhibits animal’s ears on his cap, which seem to proclaim him a member of the fraternity of fools: the ears of the lower figure are concealed from view. This group is not a rare one, especially on similar monuments in France, where the architectural antiquaries have a technical name for it; and this shows us how even the particular forms of art in the middle ages were not confined to any particular country, but more or less, and with exceptions, they pervaded allthose which acknowledged the ecclesiastical supremacy of the church of Rome; whatever peculiarity of style it took in particular countries, the same forms were spread through all western Europe. Our next cut, No. 106, gives another of these curious groups, consisting, in fact, of two individuals, one of which is evidently an ecclesiastic. It will be seen that, as we follow this round, we obtain, by means of the two heads, four different figures in so many totally different positions. This group is taken from one of the very curious seats in the cathedral of Rouen in Normandy, which were engraved and published in an interesting volume by the late Monsieur E. H. Langlois.

No. 107. Border Ornament.

Among the most interesting of the mediæval burlesque drawings are those which are found in such abundance in the borders of the pages of illuminated manuscripts. During the earlier periods of the mediæval miniatures, the favourite objects for these borders were monstrous animals, especially dragons, which could easily be twined into grotesque combinations. In course of time, the subjects thus introduced became more numerous, and in the fifteenth century they were very varied. Strange animals still continued to be favourites, but they were more light and elegant in their forms, and were more gracefully designed. Our cut No. 107, taken from the beautifully-illuminated manuscript of the romance of the“Comte d’Artois,”of the fifteenth century, which has furnished us previously with several cuts, will illustrate my meaning. The graceful lightness of the tracery of the foliage shown inthis design is found in none of the earlier works of art of this class. This, of course, is chiefly to be ascribed to the great advance which had been made in the art of design since the thirteenth century. But, though so greatly improved in the style of art, the same class of subjects continued to be introduced in this border ornamentation long after the art of printing, and that of engraving, which accompanied it, had been introduced. The revolution in the ornamentation of the borders of the pages of books was effected by the artists of the sixteenth century, at which time people had become better acquainted with, and had learnt to appreciate, ancient art and Roman antiquities, and they drew their inspiration from a correct knowledge of what the middle ages had copied blindly, but had not understood. Among the subjects of burlesque which the monuments of Roman art presented to them, the stumpy figures of the pigmies appear to have gained special favour, and they are employed in a manner which reminds us of the pictures found in Pompeii. Jost Amman, the well-known artist, who exercised his profession at Nüremberg in the latter half of the sixteenth century, engraved a set of illustrations to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which were printed at Lyons in 1574, and each cut and page of which is enclosed in a border of very fanciful and neatly-executed burlesque. The pigmies are introduced in these borders very freely, and are grouped with great spirit. I select as an example, cut No. 108, a scene which represents a triumphal procession—some pigmy Alexander returning from his conquests. The hero is seated on a throne carried by an elephant, and before him a bird, perhaps a vanquished crane, proclaims loudly his praise. Before them a pigmy attendant marches proudly, carrying in one hand the olive branch of peace, and leading in the other a ponderous but captive ostrich, as a trophy of his master’s victories. Before him again a pigmy warrior, heavily armed with battle-axe and falchion, is mounting the steps of a stage, on which a nondescript animal, partaking somewhat of the character of a sow, but perhaps intended as a burlesque on the strange animals which, in mediæval romance, Alexander was said to have encountered in Egypt, blows a horn, to celebrate or announce the return of the conqueror. A snail, also advancing slowly up the stage, implies, perhaps, a sneer at the whole scene.

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