These, then, were the men before whose face Gower describes his fellow-landlords as lurking like wild beasts in the woods, feeding on grass and acorns, and wishing that they could shrink within the very rind of the trees; the men who a day or two later surged like a sea round Chaucer’s tower of Aldgate, until some accomplice unbarred the gate. Chroniclers note with astonishment the paralysis of the upper classes all through this revolt, or at least until Wat Tyler’s death; and though Richard revoked his Royal promise of freedom, and bloody assizes were held from county to county until the country was sick of slaughter, and Parliament re-enacted all the old oppressive statutes, yet the landlords can never entirely have forgotten this lesson. Professor Oman, in his anxiety to kill the already slain theory that the Revolt virtually put an end to serfdom, seems hardly to allow enough for human nature; but Mr. Trevelyan sums the matter up in words as just as they are eloquent: “[The Revolt] was a sign of national energy, it was a sign of independence and self-respect in the medieval peasants, from whom three-quarters of our race, of all classes and in every continent, are descended.This independent spirit was not lacking in France in the 14th century, but it died out by the end of the Hundred Years’ War; stupid resignation then took hold of burghers and peasantry alike, from the days when Machiavelli observed their torpor, down to the eve of the Revolution. Theancien régimewas permitted to grow up. But in England there has been a continuous spirit of resistance and independence, so that wherever our countrymen or our kinsmen have gone, they have taken with them the undying tradition of the best and surest freedom, which ‘slowly broadens down from precedent to precedent.’”[250]
This chapter could not be complete without at least a passing allusion to the general uncleanliness of medieval life, even in a city like London, where there was some real attempt at organized scavenging of the streets, and where the laws commanded strictly “he that will keep a pig, let him keep it in his own house.”[251]Four great visitations of the bubonic plague occurred in Chaucer’s lifetime; the least of them would have been enough to mark an epoch in modern England. The sixty years of his life are exceptional, on the other hand, in their comparative freedom from severe famine; but there hung always over men’s lives the shadow of God’s hand—or rather, as they too often felt, of Satan’s. During the great storm of 1362 “beasts, trees and housen were all to-smit with violent lightning, and suddenly perished; and the Devil in man’s likeness spake to men going by the way”; and a good herald who watched the march past of the rioters in 1381 “saw several Devils among them; he fell sick and died within a brief while afterwards.”[252]
It has often been noted how little Chaucer referseither to this Revolt or the Great Pestilence; but the multitude interested him comparatively little. He felt with the pleasures and pains of the individual poor man; but with regard to the poor in bulk, he would only have shrugged his shoulders and said “they are always with us.” His Griselda is own sister to King Cophetua’s beggar-maid in the Burne-Jones picture. For all the real pathos of the story, her rags are draped with every refinement of consummate art. We believe in them conventionally, but know on reflection that they are there only to point an artistic contrast. Again, in the “Nuns’ Priest’s Tale” the “poure wydwe, somdel stope in age,” with her smoky cottage and the humble stock of her yard, are just the subdued and tender background which the poet needs for the mock-chivalric glories of his Chanticleer and Partlet. For glimpses of the real poor, the poor poor, we must go to “Piers Plowman.” Here we find them of all sorts, and at the top of the scale the Plowman, the skilled agricultural labourer or almost peasant-farmer—
Piers speaks here of a bad year; but even his modest comfort required hard work of all kinds and in all weathers. As the Ploughman says in another place—
THE PLOUGHMANFROM THE LOUTERELL PSALTER (EARLY 14TH CENTURY)
In contrast with Piers stands the great crowd of beggars—soldiers discharged from the wars, and sturdy vagrants who fear nothing but labour—“beggars with bags, which brewhouses be their churches,” as the poet writes in the racy style affected in modern times by Mrs. Gamp. The roads were crowded with wandering minstrels “that will neither swink nor sweat, but swear great oaths, and find up foul fantasies, and fools them maken; and yet have wit at will to work, if they would.” Lowest of all (except the outlaws and felons who haunt the thickets and forests) come the professional tramps—
But the Great Pestilence had bred yet another class odious to Piers Plowman—strikers, as they would be called in modern English—the men who thought their labour was worth more than the miserable price at which Parliament was constantly trying to fix it under the heaviest penalties. These were they of whom the Commons complained in 1376 that “they contrive by great malice prepense to evade the penalty of the aforesaid Ordinances and Statutes; for so soon as their masters chide them for evil service, or would fain pay them for their aforesaid service according to the form of the said Statutes, suddenly they flee and disperse away from their service and from their own district, from county to county, from hundred tohundred, from town to town, into strange places unknown to their said masters, who know not where to find them.... And the greater part of such runaway labourers become commonly stout thieves, wherefrom robberies and felonies increase everywhere from day to day, to the destruction of the aforesaid realm.”[254]The worst effect of a law which attempted to fix wages everywhere and chain the labourer to one master or one parish, was to drive into rebellion indiscriminately the honest man who wanted to sell his work in an open market, and the idler who was glad to escape in company with his betters. No doubt there was a half-truth in the satire on the pretensions of these labourers for whom the old wages no longer sufficed, and who, in spite of the law, often managed to enforce their claim—
But sometimes the law too had its way; and for years before the Great Revolt the countryside swarmed with such Statute-made malefactors, together with those other outcasts so graphically described in Jusserand’s “Vie Nomade” (Pt. II., c. 2).
Meanwhile there lived and died, in the background, the thousands who, for all their honest toil, struggled on daily from hand to mouth, knowing no Bible truth more true than this, that God had cursed the ground for Adam’s sake. These are the true poor—“God’s minstrels,” as they are called in “Piers Plowman”; those upon whom our alms cannot possibly be ill-spent—
How many such cottages did Chaucer, like ourselves, pass on his ride to Canterbury? In all ages the sufferings of the very poor have been limited only by the bounds of that which flesh and blood can endure.
MERRY ENGLAND
“In the holidays all the summer the youths are exercised in leaping, dancing, shooting, wrestling, casting the stone, and practising their shields; the maidens trip in their timbrels, and dance as long as they can well see. In winter, every holiday before dinner, the boars prepared for brawn are set to fight, or else bulls and bears are baited. When the great fen, or moor, which watereth the walls of the city on the north side, is frozen, many young men play upon the ice; some, striding as wide as they may, do slide swiftly; others make themselves seats of ice, as great as millstones; one sits down, many hand in hand to draw him, and one slipping on a sudden, all fall together; some tie bones to their feet and under their heels; and shoving themselves by a little piked staff, do slide as swiftly as a bird flieth in the air, or an arrow out of a cross-bow. Sometime two run together with poles, and hitting one the other, either one or both do fall, not without hurt; some break their arms, some their legs, but youth desirous of glory in this sort exerciseth itself against the time of war.”—Fitzstephen’s“Description of London,” translated by John Stow.
Wherein the meantime was Merry England? In the sense in which the phrase is often used, as a mere political or social catchword, it lay for Chaucer, as for us, in the haze of an imaginary past. Englishmen were even then more fortunate in their lot than many continental nations; but they had already serious responsibilities to bear. The glory of that age lies less in thoughtless merrymaking than in a brave and steady struggle—with the elements, with circumstances, and with fellow-man. Even in Chaucer’s time Englishmen took their pleasures sadly in comparison with Frenchmen and Italians. We cannot say that our forefathers enjoyed life less than we do, but we can certainly say that theirs was a life which we could enjoy only after a process of acclimatization; and they lacked almostaltogether one of the most valued privileges of modern civilization—the undisturbed conduct of our own little house and our own small affairs, the established peace and order under cover of which even an artisan may now pursue his own hobbies with a sense of personal independence and a tranquil certitude of the morrow for which Roger Bacon would cheerfully have sacrificed a hand or an eye. Such tranquillity might conceivably be bought at the price of nobler virtues, but it is in itself one of the most justly prized conquests of civilization, and we may seek it vainly in our past.
However, as life was undoubtedly more picturesque in the 14th century, so the enjoyment also was more on the surface. Fitzstephen’s brief catalogue of the Londoners’ relaxations is charming; and, even when we have made all allowance for the poetical colours lavished by an antiquary who saw everything through a haze of distant memory and regret, Stow’s descriptions of city merrymakings are among the most delightful pages of history. Hours of labour were long,[257]and for village folk there was no great choice of amusements; yet there is a whole world of delight to be found in the most elementary field sports. Moreover, the most expansive enjoyment is often natural to those who have otherwise least freedom; witness the bank-holiday excitement of our own days and the negro passion for song and dance. The holy-days on which the Church forbade work amounted to something like one a week; and though there are frequent complaints that these were ill kept, equally widespread and emphatic is the testimony to noisy merriment on them; they bred more drunkenness and crime, we are assured by anxiousChurchmen, than all the rest of the year.[258]Indeed, it is from judicial records that we may glean by far the fullest details about the games of our ancestors; and a brilliant archivist like Siméon Luce, when he undertakes to give a picture of popular games in the France of Chaucer’s day, draws almost exclusively on Royal proclamations and court rolls.[259]
From the Universities, sacred haunts of modern athleticism, down to the smallest country parish, we get the same picture of sports flourishing under considerable discouragement from the powers in being, but flourishing all the same, and taking a still more boisterous tinge from the injudicious attempts to suppress them altogether. “Alike in the Universities and out of them,” writes Dr. Rashdall on the subject of games, “the asceticism of the medieval ideal provoked and fostered the wildest indulgence in actual life.” Even chess was among the “noxious, inordinate, and unhonest games” expressly forbidden to the scholars of New College by William of Wykeham’s Statutes,[260]and indeed throughout the Middle Ages this was a pastime which led to more gambling and quarrels than most others. A very curious quarrel at cudgel-play outside the walls of Oxford is recorded in the “Munimenta Academica” (Rolls Series, p. 526). At Cambridge it was forbidden under penalty of forty pence to play tennis in the town. At Oxford we find four citizens compelled to abjure the same game solemnly before the vice-chancellor; and readers both of Froissart and of the preface to “Ivanhoe” will remember violent feuds arising from it.[261]In 1446the Bishop of Exeter, while pleading that he has always kept open the doors of the cathedral cloisters at all reasonable times, adds, “at which times, and in especial in time of divine service, ungodly-ruled people (most customably young people of the said Commonalty) within the said cloister have exercised unlawful games, as the top, queke, penny-prick, and most at tennis, by the which all the walls of the said cloister have been defouled and the glass windows all to-burst.”[262]
As early as 1314, the laws of London forbade playing at football in the fields near the city; and this was among the games which, by Royal proclamation of 1363, were to give place to the all-important sport of archery. Others forbidden at the same time were quoits, throwing the hammer, hand-ball, club-ball, and golf. Indeed, from this ancient and royal game down to leap-frog and “conquerors,” nearly all our present sports were familiar, in more or less developed forms, to our ancestors. In 1332, Edward III. had to proclaim “let no boy or other person, under pain of imprisonment, play in any part of Westminster Palace, during the Parliament now summoned, at bars [i.e.prisoners’ base] or other games, or at snatch-hood”; and John Myrc instructs the parish clergy to forbid to their parishioners in general all “casting of ax-tree and eke of stone ... ball and bars and suchlike play” in the churchyard.[263]Wrestling, again, was among the most popular sports, and one of those which gave most trouble to coroners. The two great wrestling matches in 1222 between the citizens of London and the suburbans ended in a riot which assumed almost the dignity of a rebellion. Fatal wrestling-bouts, like fatal games of chess, are among the stock incidents of medieval romance; whether the enemy was to be got rid of through the hands of a professional champion (asin the quasi-Chaucerian “Tale of Gamelyn”) or by such foul play as is described in the Pardoner’s Tale—
Moreover, the same tragedy might only too easily be played unintentionally, as in the ballad of the “Two Brothers”—
Or, as it is recorded in the business-like prose of an assize-roll: “Richard of Horsley was playing and wrestling with John the Miller of Tutlington; and by mishap his knife fell from its sheath and wounded the aforesaid John without the aforesaid Richard’s knowledge, so that he died. And the aforesaid Richard fled and is not suspected of the death; let him therefore return if he will, but let his chattels be confiscated for his flight. (N.B. He has no chattels).”[264]In this same assize-roll, out of forty-three accidental deaths, three were due to village games, and three more to sticks or stones aimed respectively at a cock, a dog, and a pig, but finding their fatal billet in a human life. Ecclesiastical disciplinarians endeavoured frequently, but with indifferent success, to put down the practice of wrestling in churchyards, with the scarcely less turbulent miracle-plays or dances, and the markets which so frequently stained the holy ground with blood. Even the State interfered in the matter of churchyard fairs and markets “for the honour of Holy Church”; but they went ongaily as before. Dances, as I have already had occasion to note, were condemned with a violence which is only partially explained even by Chaucer’s illuminating lines about the Parish Clerk—
To quote here again from Dr. Rashdall, “William of Wykeham found it necessary for the protection of the sculpture in the Chapel reredos to make a Statute against dancing or jumping in the Chapel or adjoining Hall. His language is suggestive of that untranslatable amusement now known as ‘ragging,’ which has no doubt formed a large part of the relaxation of students—at least of English students—in all ages. At the same College there is a comprehensive prohibition of all ‘struggling, chorus-singing, dancing, leaping, singing, shouting, tumult and inordinate noise, pouring forth of water, beer, and all other liquids and tumultuous games’ in the Hall, on the ground that they were likely to disturb the occupants of the Chaplain’s chamber below. A moderate indulgence in some of the more harmless of these pastimes in other places seems to be permitted.”[266]
In this, the good bishop was only following the very necessary precedent of many prelates before him. As early as 1223, when the reform of the friars had stimulated a great effort to put down old abuses throughout the Church, Bishop Poore of Salisbury and his diocesan council decreed “we forbid the holding of dances, or base and unhonest games which provoke to lasciviousness, in the churchyard.... We forbid the proclaiming of scot-ales in church by layfolk, or by priests or clerkseither in or without the church.” Similar prohibitions are repeated by later councils with an emphasis which only shows their inefficiency. The University of Oxford complained to Henry V. in 1414 that fairs and markets were held “more frequently than ever” on consecrated ground; and the Visitation of 1519 among churches appropriated to York Cathedral elicited the fact that football and similar games were carried on in two of the churchyards. These holy places sometimes witnessed rougher sports still; especially cathedral cemeteries during the great processions of the ecclesiastical year. “Moreover,” writes Bishop Grosseteste in a circular letter to all his archdeacons, “cause it to be proclaimed strictly in every church that, when the parishes come in procession for the yearly visitation and homage to the Cathedral church, no parish shall struggle to press before another parish with its banners; since from this source not only quarrels are wont to spring, but cruel bloodshed.” Bishop Giffard of Worcester was compelled for the same reason to proclaim in every church of his diocese “that no one shall join in the Pentecostal processions with a sword or other kind of arms”; and a similar prohibition in the diocese of Ely (1364) is based on the complaint that “both fights and deaths are wont to result therefrom.” Even more were the minds of the best clergy exercised by the corpse-wakes in churches, which “turned the house of mourning and prayer into a house of laughter and excess”; and again by “the execrable custom of keeping the ‘Feast of Fools,’ which obtains in some churches,” and which “profanes the sacred anniversary of the Lord’s Circumcision with the filth of lustful pleasures”; yet here again the tenacity of popular custom baffled even the most vigorous prelates.[267]
We must not pass away from popular amusements without one glance at these above-mentioned scot-ales,which were probably relics of the Anglo-Saxon semi-religious drinking-bouts. In the later Middle Ages they appear as forerunners of the modern bazaar or religious tea; a highly successful device for raising money contributions by an appeal to the convivial instincts of a whole parish or district. In the early 13th century we find them denounced among the methods employed by sheriffs for illegal extortion; and about the same time they were very frequently condemned from the religious point of view. The clergy were not only forbidden to be present at such functions, but also directed to warn their parishioners diligently against them, “for the health of their souls and bodies,” since all who took part at such feasts were excommunicated. But the custom died hard; or rather, it was probably rebaptized, like so many other relics of paganism; and the change seems to have taken place during Chaucer’s lifetime. In 1364 Bishop Langham of Ely was still fulminating against scot-ales; in 1419, if not before, we find an authorized system of “church-ales” in aid of the fabric. These were held sometimes in the sacred edifice itself; more often in the Church Houses, the rapid multiplication of which during the 15th century is probably due to the equally rapid growth of church-ales. The puritanism of the 13th century was by this time somewhat out of fashion; parish finances had come far more under the parishioners’ own control; and it was obviously convenient to make the best of these time-honoured compotations, as of the equally rough-and-ready hock-day customs, in order to meet expenses for which the parish was legally responsible. Earnest Churchmen had, all through this century, more important abuses to combat than these quasi-religious convivialities; and we find no voice raised against church-ales until the new puritanism of the Reformation. The Canons of 1603 forbade, among other abuses, “church ale drinkings ... in the church, chapel, or churchyard.” While Bishop Piers of Bath and Wells testified that hesaw no harm in them, the puritan Stubbes accused the participants of becoming “as drunk as rats, and as blockish as brute beasts.” No doubt the truth lies between these extremes; but church-ales must not be altogether forgotten when we read the numerous medieval testimonies to the intimate connection between holy days and crime.[268]
Perhaps the most widespread and most natural of all country sports was that of poaching. As Dr. Rashdall has pointed out, it was especially popular at the two Universities, where the paucity of authorized amusements drove the students into wilder extremes. We have also abundant records of clerical poachers; and in 1389 Richard II. enacted at the petition of the Commons “that no priest or clerk with less than ten pounds of yearly income should keep greyhounds, ‘leetes’ or other hunting dogs, nor ferrets, nets, or snares.” The same petition complained that “artificers and labourers—that is to say, butchers, cobblers, tailors, and other working-folk, keep greyhounds and other dogs; and at the time when good Christians are at church on holy-days, hearing their divine services, these go hunting in the parks, coney-covers, and warrens pertaining to lords and other folk, and destroy them utterly.” It was therefore enacted that no man with an income of less than forty shillings should presume to keep hunting dogs or implements.
But in spite of squires and church synods, the working-man did all he could to escape, in his own untutored fashion, from the dullness of his working days. Every turn of life, from the cradle to the grave, was seized upon as an excuse for rough-and-ready sports. When a witness wishes to give a reason for remembering a christening on a certain day, he testifies to having broken his leg in the baptismal football match. Bishops struggled against the practice of celebratingmarriages in taverns, lest the intending bride and bridegroom should plight their troth in liquor; and weddings in general were so uproarious as to be sometimes ruled out as too improper not only for a monk’s attendance but even for that of serious and pious layfolk. Similar survivals of barbaric sports clung to the funeral ceremonies—thewakë-pleyesof Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale; and Archbishop Thoresby’s constitutions of 1367 seem to speak of wrestling matches held even in the church by the side of the dead man’s bier. Such things could scarcely have happened without some clerical connivance; and in fact, the sporting parson was as common in Chaucer’s as in Fielding’s day. The hunting Monk of his “Prologue” is abundantly vouched for by the despairing complaints of ecclesiastical disciplinarians; and the parish parson, so often a peasant by birth, constantly set at naught the prohibitions of his superiors, to join with tenfold zest in the least decorous pastimes of his village flock. While archbishops in council legislated repeatedly and vainly against the hunting and tavern-haunting priest, swaggering about with a sword at his side or the least decent of lay doublets and hosen on his limbs, the homely Lollard satirist vented his scorn on this Parson Trulliber, who contrasted so startlingly with Chaucer’s Parson Adams—
THE KING’S PEACE
“Accident plays a greater part in the fourteenth century than perhaps at any other epoch.... At bottom society was neither quite calm nor quite settled, and many of its members were still half savage.”—Jusserand, “English Wayfaring Life.”
Thekey to these contrasts, and much else that we are slow to imagine in medieval life, lies in the comparative simplicity of that earlier civilization. We must indeed beware of exaggerating this simplicity; there were already many complex threads of social development; again, the subtle tyranny of custom and opinion has in all primitive societies a power which we find it hard to realize. But certainly work and play were far less specialized in Chaucer’s day than in ours; far less definitely sorted into different pigeon-holes of life. The drinking-bouts and rough games which scandalized the reformers of the 13th century had once been religious ceremonies themselves; and the two ideas were still confused in the popular mind. If, again, Justice was so anxious to forbid popular sports, this was partly because some of her own proceedings still smacked strongly of the primeval sporting instinct for which her growing dignity now began to blush. The scenic penances of the pillory and cucking-stool were among the most popular spectacles in every town; and a trial by battle “till the stars began to appear” must often have been a better show than a tournament, even without such further excitement as would be afforded by the match between a woman and a one-armed friar, or the searching of a bishop’s champion for the contraband prayers and incantations sewn under hisclothes, or the miracle by which a defeated combatant, who was supposed to have been blinded and emasculated in due course of justice, was found afterwards to be perfectly whole again by saintly intercession. Still more exciting were the hue and cry after a felon, his escape to some sanctuary, and his final race for life or “abjuration of the realm.” What vivid recollections there must have been in Chaucer’s family, for instance, of his great-uncle’s death under circumstances which are thus drily recorded by the coroner (November 12, 1336): “The Jurors say that Simon Chaucer and one Robert de Upton, skinner, ... after dinner, quarrelled with one another in the high street opposite to the shop of the said Robert, in the said parish, by reason of rancour previously had between them, whereupon Simon wounded Robert on the upper lip; which John de Upton, son of Robert, perceiving, he took up a ‘dorbarre,’ without the consent of his father, and struck Simon on the left hand and side, and on the head, and then fled into the church of St. Mary of Aldermari-chirche; and in the night following he secretly escaped from the same. He had no chattels. Simon lived, languishing, till the said Tuesday, when he died of the blows, early in the morning.... The Sheriffs are ordered to attach the said John when he can be found in their bailiwick, ...” There was an evident sporting element in this race for sanctuary, and the subsequent secret escape; and we cannot help feeling some sympathy with the son whose dorbarre had intervened so unwisely, yet so well. But this affair, except for its Chaucerian interest, is commonplace; to realize the true humours of criminal justice one needs to read through a few pages of the records published by the Surtees Society, Professors Maitland and Thorold Rogers, Dr. Gross, and Mr. Walter Rye. We may there find how Seman the hermit was robbed, beaten, and left for dead by Gilbert of Niddesdale; how Gilbert unluckily fell next day into the hands of the King’sserjeant, and the hermit had still strength enough to behead his adversary in due form of law, the Northumberland custom being that a victim could redeem his stolen goods only by doing the executioner’s dirty work; how, again, Thomas the Reeve wished to chastise his concubine with a cudgel, but casually struck and killed the child in her arms, and the jury brought it in a mere accident; how an unknown woman came and bewitched John of Kerneslaw in his own house one evening, so that the said John used to make the sign of the cross over his loins when any man saidBenedicite; how in a fit of fury he thrust the witch through with a spear, and her corpse was solemnly burned, while he was held to have done the deed “in self-defence, as against the Devil;” or, again, how Hugh Maidenlove escaped from Norwich Castle with his fellow sheep-stealer William the Clerk, and carried him stealthily on his back to the sanctuary of St. John in Berstreet, by reason that the said William’s feet were so putrefied by the duress of the prison that he could not walk.[269]Let us take in full, as throwing a more intimate light on law and police, another case with a different beginning and a different ending to Simon Chaucer’s (November 6, 1311). “It came to pass at Yelvertoft ... that a certain William of Wellington, parish chaplain of Yelvertoft, sent John his parish clerk to John Cobbler’s house to buy candles, namely a pennyworth. But the same John would not send them without the money; wherefore the aforesaid William waxed wroth, took a stick, and went to the house of the said John and broke in the door upon him and smote this John on the fore part of the head with the same stick, so that his brains gushed forth and he died forthwith. And [William] fled hastilyto the Church of Yelvertoft.... Inquest was made before J. of Buckingham by four neighbouring townships, to wit, Yelverton, Crick, Winwick and Lilbourne. They say on their oath as aforesaid, that they know no man guilty of John’s death save the said William of Wellington. He therefore came before the aforesaid coroner and confessed that he had slain the said John; wherefore he abjured the realm of England in the presence of the said four townships brought together [for this purpose]. And the port of Dover was assigned to him.”[270]
This “abjuration of the realm,” a custom of English growth, which our kings transplanted also into Normandy, was one of the most picturesque scenes of medieval life. It was designed to obviate some of the abuses of that privilege of sanctuary which had no doubt its real uses in those days of club-law. What happened in fact to William of Wellington, we may gather not only from legal theorists of the Middle Ages, but from the number of actual cases collected by Réville.[271]The criminal remained at bay in the church; and no man might as yet hinder John his clerk from bringing him food, drink, or any other necessary. The coroner came as soon as he could, generally within three or four days at longest; but he might possibly be detained for ten days or more, and meanwhile (to quote from an actual case in 1348) “the parish kept watch over him ... and the coroner found the aforesaid William in the said church, and asked him wherefore he was there, and whether or not he would yield himself to the King’s peace.” The matter was too plain for William to deny; his confession was duly registered, and he took his oath to quit the realm within forty days.[272]Coming to the gate of the church or churchyard, heswore solemnly before the assembled crowd: “Oyez, oyez, oyez! Coroner and other good folk: I, William de Wellington, for the crime of manslaughter which I have committed, will quit this land of England nevermore to return, except by leave of the kings of England or their heirs: so help me God and His saints!” The coroner then assigned him a port, and a reasonable time for the journey; from Yelverton it would have been about a week. His bearing during this week was minutely prescribed: never to stray from the high-road, or spend two nights in the same place; to make straight for his port, and to embark without delay. If at Dover he found no vessel ready to sail, then he was bound daily to walk into the sea up to his knees—or, according to stricter authorities, up to his neck—and to take his rest only on the shore, in proof that he was ready in spirit to leave the land which by his crimes he had forfeited. His dress meanwhile was that of a felon condemned to death—a long, loose white tunic, bare feet, and a wooden cross in his hand to mark that he was under protection of Holy Church.
Such abjurations were matters of common occurrence; yet Dover beach was not crowded with these unwilling pilgrims. A few, of course, were overtaken and slain on the way, in spite of their sacred character, by the friends of the murdered man. But many more must have reflected that, since they would find neither friends nor welcome abroad, there was less risk in taking their chance as runaways at home. If caught, they were liable to be strung up out of hand; but how many chances there must have been in the fugitive’s favour! and, even in the last resort, some plausible excuse might possibly soften the captors’ hearts. One criminal, who might possibly even have rubbed shoulders with Chaucer in London, pleaded that he had taken sanctuary and been torn from the altar. This was disproved, and he took refuge in a convenient dumbness. For such afflictions the Middle Ages knew a sovereign remedy, and he wasled forthwith to the gallows. Here he found his tongue again, and pleaded clergy; but he failed to read his neck-verse, and was hanged. Often the miserable homesick wanderers came back and tried to save their lives by turning approvers against fellow-criminals. In 1330 Parliament had to interfere, and ruled that John English [Lengleyse], who three years before had slain the Mayor of Lynn, taken sanctuary, and abjured the realm, could not now be suffered to purchase his own pardon by accusing others.
What happened, it may be asked, if William refused either to acknowledge his guilt or to stand his trial, and simply clung to the sanctuary? At least half the criminals thus refused; and here even theory was uncertain. If, at the end of his forty days of grace, the lay authorities tore him from the altar, then they were pretty sure of excommunication from the bishop. The lawyers held, therefore, that it was for the Ordinary, the Archdeacon, the Parson, to expel this man who had outstayed even the ecclesiastical welcome; but we all know the risk of dragging even a good-tempered dog from under a chair where he has taken refuge; and how could the poor bishop be expected to deal with this desperado? The matter was thus, like so many others, left very much to chance. The village did its best to starve the man out, and meanwhile to watch him night and day. One offending William, whose forty days had expired on August 12, 1374, held out against this blockade until September 9, when he fled. Then there was a hue and cry of the whole village; he might indeed run the gauntlet and make good his escape, leaving his quondam neighbours to prove before the justices that they had done all they could, or to pay a fine for their negligence. Often, however, a stick or stone would bring him down at close quarters, or an arrow from afar; then in a moment he was overpowered and beheaded, and that chase was remembered for years as the greatest event in Yelvertoft.
There was indeed one gross irregularity in the caseof Sir William de Wellington, but an irregularity which modern readers will readily pardon. Becket had given his life for the freedom of the Church as he conceived it, and especially for the principle that no cleric should be punished by the lay courts for any offence, however heinous. The death of “the holy blissful martyr” did indeed establish this principle in theory; and, with the most powerful corporation in the world to protect it, it was, in fact, kept far more strictly than most legal theories. William, therefore, after dashing John the Cobbler’s brains upon the floor, might well have found it necessary to take refuge in the church from the blind fury of summary and illegal vengeance; but he need not have abjured the realm. In theory he had simply to confess his offence, or to stand his trial and suffer conviction from the King’s judges; then the bishop’s commissary stepped forward and claimed the condemned clerk in the name of the Church. The bishop, disregarding the verdict of the jury, would try him again by the primitive process of compurgation; that is, would bid him present himself with a specified number of fellow-clergy or persons of repute, who would join William in swearing on the Bible to his innocence. In this particular case William would probably have failed to find proper compurgators, and the bishop might, if he had chosen, have imprisoned him for life. But this involved very considerable expense and responsibility; it was a more invidious and costly matter than to prosecute nowadays for alleged illegal practices, and the documents show us very clearly that only the smallest fraction of these criminous clerks were imprisoned for any length of time. Indeed, for any such strict system, the episcopal prisons would have needed to be ten times their actual size. Equally seldom do we find notices of the next drastic punishment in the bishop’s power—the total degradation of the offender from his Orders, after which the lay judges might punish him unchallenged for his second crime. Many of the guilty parties did,in fact, “purge” themselves successfully, and were thus let loose on society as before; this we have on the unimpeachable testimony of the Oxford Chancellor Gascoigne, even if it were not sufficiently evident from the records themselves. The notoriously guilty received more or less inadequate punishments, and were sometimes simply shunted on to another diocese, a shifting of responsibility which was practised even by the strictest of reforming prelates. The curious reader may trace for himself, in the English summaries from Bishop Giffard’s register, the practical working of these clerical privileges.[273]First, there are frequent records of criminous clerks handed over to the bishop, in the ordinary routine, by the lay justices. Sometimes the bishop had to interfere in a more summary fashion, as when he commissioned four rural deans “to cause Robert, rector of the Church of the Blessed Mary in the market of Bristol, to be released, he being suspected of homicide having fled to the church, and having been besieged here; and to excommunicate all who should oppose them” (49). Robert had not yet gone through any formal trial; the bishop apparently rescued him merely from the fury of the people; but, even if he had been tried and condemned by the King’s courts, he had still a liberal chance of escape. A few pages further in the register (79) we find a declaration “that whereas William de Capella, an acolyte, was accused and condemned for the death of John Gogun of Pershore, before the justices itinerant at Worcester, and was on demand of the bishop’s commissary delivered up by the same justices, the same William being afterwards examined before the sub-prior of Worcester and Geoffrey de Cubberlay, clerk, solemnly declared that he was in nowise guilty; and at length upon proclamations, no one opposing, with four priests, two sub-deacons, and six acolytes, his compurgators, he was admitted to purgation and declared innocent of the said crime; andafter giving security to answer any accusers if required, he was permitted to depart freely. And it is forbidden under pain of anathema to any one to lay such homicide to the charge of the said William.” Sometimes, however, the scandal was too notorious; and, though no mere layman had the least legal right to interfere with the bishop’s own private justice, the King would apply pressure in the name of common sense. So on page 408 we find a “letter from King Edward I. to John Peckham, Archbishop of Canterbury, desiring him to refuse purgation to Robert de Lawarre, a clerk accused of theft and homicide and in the gaol of Worcester;” and a few months later the same strenuous champion of justice sent a more general warning to the Bishop of Worcester, “forbidding him to take the purgation of clerks detained in his prison, whose crimes are notorious; but with regard to others he may take such purgation” (410). The system was, indeed, notoriously faulty, and did much to encourage that venality in the clerical courts which moved Chaucer’s laughter and the indignation of his contemporaries. The clergy, says Gower, are judges in their own cause, and each shields the other: “My turn to-day; to-morrow thou shalt do the like for me.” In vain did councils decree year after year that they should bear no arms; rectors (as we have seen in Chapter VIII.) imperturbably bequeathed their formidable daggers by will, and duly registered the bequest in the Bishop’s court. “O Priest, answer to my call; wherefore hast thou so long a knife dangling at thy belt? art thou armed to fight in God’s quarrel or the devil’s?... The wild beast in rutting-season becomes fiercer and more wanton; if ever he be thwarted, forthwith he will fight and strike; and that is the same cause why the priests fight when they turn to lechery like beasts; they wander idly everywhere seeking and hunting for women, with whom they corrupt the country.”[274]A century later the Commonspressed the King for fresh and more stringent laws to remedy the notorious fact that “upon trust of the privilege of the Church, divers persons have been the more bold to commit murder, rape, robbery, theft, and other mischievous deeds, because they have been continually admitted to the benefit of the clergy as often as they did offend in any of the [aforesaid].”
This petition of the Commons and the Act which resulted from it, had already often been anticipated by the rough-and-ready justice of the people themselves. In 1382, the citizens of London took these matters into their own hands, and Chaucer had probably seen more than one unchaste priest marched with his guilty partner to the common lock-up in Cornhill, to the accompaniment of derisive music, and amid the jeers of the populace. Eight years after his death, the city authorities began to keep a regular record of such cases, and “Letter-Book,” I, “contains some dozens of similar charges, mostly against chaplains celebrating in the city, temp. Henry IV. to Henry VI.”[275]This lynch-law is abundantly explained by the very disproportionate numbers of criminous clerks whom we often find recorded in coroners’ or assize rolls, and who were frequently no mere shavelings, but priests and substantial incumbents.[276]In 1200 these men were almost above the law; in 1600 they were amenable to justice as though they had not been anointed with oil; in 1400 it depended (as in London and in this Yelvertoft case) whether the popular indignation was strong enough to beat down the clerical privilege.
“Accident plays a more important part in the 14th century than in any other age,” and in many ways England was no doubt the merrier for this. Prosaic and uniform modern Justice, bewigged as well as blindfolded,could no more have been foreseen by Chaucer than railways or life insurance. First of all, there was the chance of bribing the judge in the regular and acknowledged way of business.[277]Then, the prospect of a Royal pardon; Edward III. more than once proclaimed such a general amnesty; and a petition of the Commons in 1389, forthwith embodied in an Act of Parliament, is eloquent on the “outrageous mischiefs and damages which have befallen the Realm because treasons, murders, and rapes of women are too commonly perpetrated; and all the more so because charters of pardon have been too lightly granted in such cases.” The terms of the petition and bill, and the heroic measures of remedy, are sufficiently significant of the state of things with which the reformers had to contend.[278]
Moreover, justice offered at every point a series of splendid uncertainties, and a thousand giddy turns of fortune’s wheel. Apart from the practical impunity of the powerful, even the poorest felon had more chances in his favour than the modern plutocrat; for there is no higher prize than a man’s own life, and no American millionaire enjoys facilities for homicide equal to those of our 14th-century villagers. Such regrettable incidents, as reckoned from the coroners’ rolls, were from five to forty times more frequent then than in our days—it depends whether we count them as mere manslaughters or, according to the stricter idea of modern justice, as downright murders. No doubt stabbing was never so frequent or so systematic in England as at Naples; but thousands of worthy Englishmen might have cried with Chaucer’s Host, “for I am perilouswith knife in hand!” Many readers have doubtless noted how, in this very passage, Harry Bailey reckons as probable punishment for homicide not the gallows, but only outlawry—
The fact is that judicial statistics of the Middle Ages show the murderer to have had many more chances of survival than a convicted thief. The Northumberland Roll of 1279 (to choose a typical instance) gives 72 homicides to only 43 accidental deaths. These 72 deaths were brought home to 83 culprits, of whom only 3 are recorded to have been hanged. Of the remainder, 69 escaped altogether, 6 took sanctuary, 2 were never identified, 1 pleaded his clergy, 1 was imprisoned, and 1 was fined. To a mind of any imagination, such bare facts will often open wider vistas than a great deal of so-called poetry. There can be no truer commentary on the “Tale of Gamelyn” or the “Geste of Robin Hood” than these formal assize rolls. The justice’s clerk drones on, with damnable iteration, paragraph after paragraph, “Alan Fuller ... and he fled, and therefore let him be outlawed; chattels he hath none”; “Patrick Scot ... fled ... outlawed”; “William Slater ... fled ... outlawed”; but all the while we see the broad sunshine outside the windows, and hear the rustle of the forest leaves, and voices whisper in our ear—
PRIESTS AND PEOPLE
Whenthe greatest Pope of the 13th century saw in his dream a vision of St. Francis propping the tottering church, both he and the saint augured from this happy omen a reformation more sudden and complete than was actually possible. Church historians of all schools have often seemed to imply that if St. Francis had come back to earth on the first or second centenary of his death, he would have found the Church rather worse than better; and certainly Chaucer’s contemporaries thought so. It is probable that in this they were mistaken; that the higher life was in fact unfolding no less surely in religion than in the State, but that men’s impatience of evils which were only too obvious, and a restlessness bred by the rapid growth of new ideas, tempted them to despair too easily of their own age. The failure of the friars became a theme of common talk, as soon as enough time had gone by for the world to realize that Francis and Dominic had but done what man can do, and that there was as yet no visibly new heaven or new earth. Wycliffe himself scarcely inveighedmore strongly against many of the worst abuses in the Church than Bonaventura a century before him—Bonaventura, the canonized saint and Minister General of the Franciscans, who as a boy had actually seen the Founder face to face. The current of thought during those hundred years is typified by Dante and the author of “Piers Plowman.” Dante, bitterly as he rebuked the corruptions of the age, still dreamed of reform on conservative lines. In “Piers Plowman” it is frankly recognized that things must be still worse before they can be better. The Church is there described as already succumbing to the assaults of Antichrist, aided by “proud priests more than a thousand”—
One friar, however, is admitted, Brother “Creep-into-Houses,” but he turns out the worst traitor of all, benumbing Contrition by his false absolutions—
So ends this dreamer on the Malvern Hills, and so thought many more good Christians of Chaucer’s time. It would be tedious even to enumerate the orthodox authorities which testify to the deep corruption of popular religion in the 14th century. Two books of Gower’s “Vox Clamantis” (or one-third of the whole work) are devoted to invectives against the Church of his time; and he goes over the same ground with equal minuteness in his “Mirour de l’Omme.” The times are out of joint, he says, the light of faith grows dim; the clergy are mostly ignorant, quarrelsome, idle, and unchaste, and the prelates do not correct them because they themselves are no better. The average priests do the exact opposite of what Chaucer praises in his Poor Parson; they curse for tithes, and leave their sheep in the lurch to go mass-hunting into the great towns. If, again, they stay unwillingly in the villages, then instead of preaching and visiting they waste their own time and the patrimony of the poor in riot or debauchery; nay, the higher clergy even encourage vice among the people in order to gain money and influence for themselves. Their evil example among the multitude, and the contempt into which they bring their office among the better laity, are mainly responsible for the decay of society. Of monks and nuns and friars, Gower writes even more bitterly; the monks are frequently unchaste; nuns are sometimes debauched even by their own official visitors, and the friars seriously menace the purity of family life. In short, the reign of Antichrist seems to be at hand; if the world is to be mended we can only pray God to reform the clergy. Wycliffe himself wrote nothingmore bitter than this; yet Gower was a whole horizon removed from anti-clericalism or heresy; he hated Lollardy, and chose to spend his last days among the canons of Southwark. Moreover, in the next generation, we have an equally scathing indictment of the Church from Gascoigne, another bitter anti-Wycliffite and the most distinguished Oxford Chancellor of his generation. St. Catherine of Siena, who knew Rome and Avignon only too well, is proportionately more vehement in her indignation. Moreover, the formal records of the Church itself bear out all the gravest charges in contemporary literature. The parish churches were very frequently reported as neglected, dirty, and ruinous; the very service books and most necessary ornaments as either dilapidated or lacking altogether; priests and people as grossly irreverent.[282]Wherever we find a visitation including laity and clerics alike, the clergy presented for unchastity are always numerous out of all proportion to the laity; sometimes more than ten times as numerous. Episcopal registers testify plainly to the difficulty of dealing with monastic decay and to the neglect of proper precautions against the intrusion of unworthy clerics into benefices. Many of the anti-Lollard Articles solemnly presented by the University of Oxford to the King in 1414 might have been drawn up by Wycliffe himself. These pillars of the Church pray Henry V., who was known to have religion so much at heart, to find some remedy for the sale of indulgences, the “undisciplined and unlearned crowd which daily pressed to take sacred orders”;the scandalous ease with which “illiterate, silly, and ignorant” candidates, even if rejected by the English authorities, could get ordained at the Roman court; the system which allowed monasteries to prey upon so many parishes; the pardoners’ notorious frauds, the irreverence of the people at large, the embezzlement of hospital endowments, the debasement of moral standards by flattering friar-confessors, and lastly the numbers and practical impunity of fornicating monks, friars, and parish priests. As early as 1371, the Commons had petitioned Edward III. that, “whereas the Prelates and Ordinaries of Holy Church take money of clergy and laity in redemption of their sin from day to day, and from year to year, in that they keep their concubines openly ... to the open scandal and evil example of the whole commonalty,” this system of hush-money should now be put down by Royal authority; that the ordinary courts of justice should have cognizance of such cases; and that such beneficed clergy as still persisted in concubinage should be deprived of their livings.[283]
To comment fully on Chaucer’s clerical characters in the light of other contemporary documents would be to write a whole volume of Church history; but no picture of that age could be even roughly complete without such a summary as I have just given. We must, of course, discount to some extent the language of indignation; but, to understand what it was that drew such bitter words from writers of such acknowledged gravity, we must try to transport ourselves, with our own common human feelings, into that strange and distant world. So much of the old framework of society was either ill-made or long since outworn; a new world was struggling to grow up freely amid the mass of dying conventions; the humanspirit was surging vehemently against its barriers; and much was swept boisterously away.