Early Book-making.

This Vale is all full of devils, and hath been always. And men say there that it is one of the entries of hell. In that Vale is plenty of gold and silver; wherefore many misbelieving men, and many Christians also, oftentimes go in, to have of the treasure.… And in midplace of that Vale is an head of the visage of a devil bodily—full horrible and dreadful to see. But there is no man in the world so hardy, Christian man, ne other, but that he would be drad [afraid] for to behold it. For he beholdeth every man so sharply with dreadful eyen that ben evermore moving and sparkling as fire, and changeth and steereth so often in divers manner, with so horrible countenance, that no man dare not nighen toward him.

The author says fourteen of his party went in, and when they came out—only nine: “And we wisten never, whether that our fellows were lost or ellesturned again for dread. But we never saw them never after.” He says there were plenty of jewels and precious stones thereabout, but “I touched none, because that the Devils be so subtle to make a thing to seem otherwise than it is, for to deceive mankind.” He tells us also of the giants Gog and Magog, and of a wonderful bird—like the roc of Arabian Nights’ fable—that would carry off an elephant in its talons, and he closes all his stupendous narratives with thanks to God Almighty for his marvellous escapes.

I have spoken of its popularity. Halliwell—who edits the London edition of 1839—says that of no book, with the exception of Scriptures, are there so many MSS. of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries existing; showing that for two centuries its fables were either not exploded, or at least lost not their relish.

And now what do we mean by books and by popularity at the end of the thirteenth century? The reader must keep in mind that our notion of popularity measured by thousands of copies wouldthen have been regarded as strange as the most monstrous of Sir John Mandeville’s stories. There was no printing; there was no paper, either—as we understand. The art, indeed, of making paper out of pulp did exist at this date with the Oriental nations—perhaps with the Moors in Spain, but not in England. Parchment made from skins was the main material, and books were engrossed laboredly with a pen or stylus. It was most likely a very popular book which came to an edition of fifty or sixty copies within five years of its first appearance: and a good manuscript was so expensive an affair that its purchase was often made a matter to be testified to by subscribing witnesses, as we witness the transfer of a house. A little budget of these manuscripts made a valuable library. When St. Augustine planted his Church in Kent—he brought nine volumes with him as his literary treasure.

Lanfranc, who was one of the Norman abbots brought over by the Conqueror to build up the priesthood in learning, made order in 1072 that at Lent the librarian should deliver to the worthiest of the brotherhood each a book; and these were to have a year to read them. At the commencement ofthe fourteenth century there were only four classics in the royal library of Paris; and at the same date the library of Oxford University consisted of a few tracts kept in chests under St. Mary’s Church.—Green, in his “Making of England,”[31]cites from Alcuin a bit of that old Churchman’s Latin poem—“De Pontificibus”—which he says is worthy of special note, as the first catalogue which we have of any English Library.

“Quidquid Gregorius summus docet, et Leo Papa;Basilius quidquid, Fulgentius atque, coruscant,Cassiodorus item, Chrysostomus atque JohannesQuidquid et Athelmus docuit, quid Beda magister.”

“Quidquid Gregorius summus docet, et Leo Papa;

Basilius quidquid, Fulgentius atque, coruscant,

Cassiodorus item, Chrysostomus atque Johannes

Quidquid et Athelmus docuit, quid Beda magister.”

Beda and Aldhelm are the only English writers represented; and the catalogue—if we call it such—could be written on a half-page of note paper—Metaphors and Geography and Theology and decorative epithets included.

Thus in these times a book was a book: some of them cost large sums; the mere transcription into plain black-letter or Old English was toilsome and involved weeks and months of labor; and when itcame to illuminated borders, or initials and title-pages with decorative paintings, the labor involved was enormous. There were collectors in those days as now—who took royal freaks for gorgeous missals; and monkish lives were spent in gratifying the whims of such collectors. In the year 1237 (Henry III.) there is entry in the Revenue Roll of the costs of silver clasps and studs for the King’sgreat book of Romances. Upon the continent, in Italy, where an art atmosphere prevailed that was more enkindling than under the fogs of this savage England, such work became thoroughly artistic; and even now beautifulmotifsfor decoration on the walls of New York houses are sought from old French or Latin manuscripts of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

And where was this work of making books done? There were no book-shops or publishers’ houses, but in place of them abbeys or monasteries—each having itsscriptoriumor writing-room, where, under the vaulted Norman arches and by the dim light of their loop-holes of windows, the work of transcription went on month after mouth and year after year. Thus it is recorded that in that old monasteryof St. Albans (of which we just now spoke) eighty distinct works were transcribed during the reign of Henry VI.; it is mentioned as swift work; and as Henry reigned thirty-nine years, it counts up about two complete MSS. a year. And the atmosphere of St. Albans was a learned one; this locality not being overmuch given to the roisterings that belonged to Bolton Priory—of which you will remember the hint in a pleasant picture of Landseer’s.

If you or I had journeyed thither in that day—coming from what land we might—I think we should have been earnest among the first things, to see those great monasteries that lay scattered over the surface of England and of Southern Scotland;—not perched on hills or other defensible positions like the Norman castles of the robber Barons—not buried in cities like London Tower, or the great halls which belonged to guilds of merchants—but planted in the greenest and loveliest of valleys, where rivers full of fish rippled within hearing, and woods full of game clothed everyheadland that looked upon the valley; where the fields were the richest—where the water was purest—where the sun smote warmest; there these religious houses grew up, stone by stone, cloister by cloister, chapel by chapel, manor by manor, until there was almost a township, with outlying cottages—and some great dominating abbey church—rich in all the choicest architecture of the later Norman days—lifting its spire from among the clustered buildings scarce less lovely than itself.

Not only had learning and book-making been kept alive in these great religious houses, but the art of Agriculture. Within their walled courts were grown all manner of fruits and vegetables known to their climate; these monks knew and followed the best rulings of Cato, and Crescenzius (who just now has written on this subject in Northern Italy, and is heard of by way of Padua). They make sour wine out of grapes grown against sunny walls: they have abundant flocks too—driven out each morning from their sheltering courts, and returned each night; and they have great breadth of ground under carefullest tillage.

Of such character was Tintern Abbey—in thevalley of the Wye—now perhaps the most charming of all English ruins. Such another was Netley Abbey, on Southampton water, and Bolton Priory, close by that famous stream, the Wharfe, which you will remember in Wordsworth’s story of the “White Doe of Rylstone.” Fountain’s Abbey, in Yorkshire, was yet another, from whose ruin we can study better perhaps than from any other in England, the extent and disposition of these old religious houses. Melrose was another; and so was Dryburgh, where Scott’s body lies, and Abingdon, close upon Oxford—where was attached that Manor of Cumnor, which Scott assigns for a prison to the sad-fated Amy Robsart, in the tale of “Kenilworth.” Glastonbury was another: this too (once encircled by the arms of the river Brue), was the “Isle of Avalon” in Arthurian romance;

“Where falls not hail, or rain or any snow,Nor ever wind blows loudly.”

“Where falls not hail, or rain or any snow,

Nor ever wind blows loudly.”

Here (at Glastonbury) is still in existence the abbot’s barn of the fourteenth century, and here, too, a magnificent abbot’s kitchen—thirty-three feet square and seventy-two feet high: Think what the cookingand the meats must have been in a kitchen of that style!

Now, these shrewd people who lived in these great monasteries, and built them, and enjoyed the good things kept in store there—made friends of the vassals about them; they were generous with their pot-herbs and fruits; they were the medicine-men of the neighborhood; they doled out flasks of wine to the sick; they gave sanctuary and aid to the Robin Hoods and Little Johns; and Robin Hood’s men kept them in supply of venison; they enlivened their courts with minstrelsy. Warton says that at the feast of the installation of Ralph, Abbot of St. Augustine’s, Canterbury, in 1309, seventy shillings was expended for minstrels in the gallery, and six thousand guests were present in and about the halls. Many abbeys maintained minstrels or harpers of their own; and we may be sure that the monks had jolly as well as religious ditties.

They made friends of all strong and influential people near them; their revenues were enormous. They established themselves by all the arts of conciliation. Finding among their young vassals one keener and sharper witted than his fellows, they beguiledhim into the abbey—instructed him—perhaps made a clerk of him, for the transcription of the MSS. we have spoken of (it was thus Cædmon was brought into notice); if very promising, he might come to place of dignity among the monks—possibly grow, as Thomas à Becket did, from such humble beginnings to an archbishopric and to the mastership of the religious heart of England.

These houses were the fat corporations of that day, with their lobby-men and spokesmen in all state assemblages. Their representatives could wear hair shirts, or purple robes and golden mitres, as best suited the needs of the occasion. They could boast that their institutions were established—like our railways—for the good of the people, and in the interests of humanity; but while rendering service, waxing into such lustiness of strength and such habits of corruption and rapacity, that at last, when fully bloated, they were broken open and their riches drifted away under the whirlwind of the wrath of King Henry VIII. Great schemes of greed are very apt to carry an avenging Henry VIII. somewhere in their trail. But let us not forget that there was a time in the early centuries of Christian Englandwhen these great religious houses—whose ruins appeal to us from their lovely solitudes—were the guardians of learning, the nurses of all new explorations into the ways of knowledge, the expounders of all healing arts, and the promoters of all charities and all neighborly kindliness.[32]Whatever young fellow of that day did not plant himself under shadow of one of these religious houses for growth, or did not study in the schools of Oxford or Cambridge, must needs have made his way into favor and fame and society with a lanceand good horse—just as young fellows do it now with an oar or a racket.

But what shall be said of a young person of the other sex of like age and tastes—to whose ambitions war and knight-errantry and the university cloisters are not open? Whither should the daughters of the great houses go, or how fill up the current of their young lives in that old thirteenth-century England?

It is true, there are religious houses—nunneries—priories—for these, too, with noble and saintly prioresses, such as St. Hilda’s, St. Agatha’s, St. Margaret’s; all these bountiful in their charities, strict for most part in their discipline. To these cloistered schools may go the cousins, sisters, nieces of these saintly lady superiors; here they may learn of music, of embroidery, of letter-writing, and Christian carols—in Latin or English or French, as the case may be. If not an inmate of one of these quiet cloisters, our young thirteenth-century damsel will find large advantage in itsneighborhood; in the interchange of kindly offices—in the loan of illuminated missals, of fruits, of flowers, of haunches of venison, and in the assurance that tenderest of nurses and consolers will be at hand in case of illness or disaster; and always there—an unfailing sanctuary. At home, within the dingy towers of a castle or squat Saxon homestead, with walls hung in tapestry, or made only half bright with the fire upon the hearthstone—with slits of windows filled with horn or translucent bits of skin—there must have been wearisomeennui. Yet even here there were the deft handmaids, cheery and companionable; the games—draughts of a surety (in rich houses the checkers being of jasper or rock crystal); the harp, too, and the falcons for a hunting bout in fair weather; the little garden within the court—with its eglantine, its pinks, its lilies fair. Possibly there may be also transcripts of oldchansonsbetween ivory lids—images carven out of olive wood—relics brought to the castle by friendly knights from far-away Palestine. And travelling merchants find their way to such homes—bringing glass beads from Venice, and little dainty mirrors, just now the vogue in thatgreat City by the Sea; and velvet and filigree head-dresses, and jewels and bits of tapestry from Flemish cities. Perhaps a minstrel—if the revenues of the family cannot retain one—will stroll up to the castle-gates of an evening, giving foretaste of his power by a merry snatch of song about Robin Hood, or Sir Guy, or the Nut Brown Maid.

Some company of priests with a lordly abbot at their head, journeying up from St. Albans, may stop for a day, and kindle up with cheer the great hall, which will be fresh strown with aromatic herbs for the occasion; and so some solitary palmer, with scollop shell, may make the evening short with his story of travel across the desert; or—best of all—some returning knight, long looked for—half doubted—shall talk bravely of the splendors he has seen in the luxurious court of Charles of Anjou, where the chariot of his Queen was covered with velvet sprinkled with lilies of gold, and men-at-arms wore plumed helmets and jewelled collars; he may sing, too, snatches of those tender madrigals of Provence, and she—if Sister Nathalie has taught her thereto—may join in a roundelay, and the minstrel and harpist come clashing in to therefrain.

Then there is the home embroidery—the hemming of the robes, the trimming of the mantles, the building up of the head pieces. Pray—in what age and under what civilization—has a young woman ever failed of showing zeal in those branches of knowledge?

So, we will leave England—to-day—upon the stroke of thirteen hundred years. When we talk of life there again, we shall come very swiftly upon traces of one of her great philosophers, and of one of her great reformers, and of one of her greatest poets.

In our last chapter I spoke of that Geoffrey of Monmouth who about the middle of the twelfth century wrote a history—mostly apocryphal—in which was imbedded a germ of the King Arthur fables. We traced these fables, growing under the successive touches of Wace and Map and Layamon into full-fledged legends, repeated over and over; and finally, with splendid affluence of color appearing on the literary horizon of our own day. I spoke of King Richard I. and of his song loving, and of his blood loving, and of his royal frankness: then of John, that renegade brother of his—of how he grantedMagna Charta, killed poor Prince Arthur, and stirred such a current of war as caused the loss of Normandy to England. I spoke of the connection of this loss with the consolidation of the language; of how Robert of Gloucester made a rhyminghistory that was in a new English; of how the name of Sir John Mandeville was associated with great lies, in the same tongue; how the religious houses made books, and fattened on the best of the land, and grew corrupt; and last—of how we, if we had lived in those days, would have found disport for our idle hours and consolation for our serious ones.

Starting now from about the same point in time where we left off, our opening scene will take us to the old University town of Oxford. It is a rare city for a young American to visit; its beautiful High Street, its quaint Colleges, its Christ Church Hall, its libraries, its Magdalen walks and tower, its charming gardens of St. John’s and Trinity, its near Park of Blenheim, its fragrant memories—all, make it a place where one would wish to go and long to linger. But in the far-away time we speak of it was a walled city, with narrow streets, and filthy lodging houses; yet great parliaments had been held there; the royal domain of Woodstock was near by with its Palace; the nunnery was standing, where was educatedthe Fair Rosamund; a little farther away was the great religious house of Abingdon and the village of Cumnor; but of all its present august and venerable array of colleges only one or two then existed—Merton, and perhaps Balliol, or the University.[33]

But the schools here had won a very great reputation in the current of the thirteenth century, largely through the scholarship and popularity of Grosseteste, one while Bishop of Lincoln, who held ministrations at Oxford by reason of his connection with a Franciscan brotherhood established here; and among those crop-haired Franciscans was a monk—whom we have made this visit to Oxford to find—named Roger Bacon. He had been not only student but teacher there; and a few miles south from the King’s Arms Hotel in Broad Street, Oxford, is still standing a church tower, in the little parish of Sunningwell, from which—as tradition affirms—Roger Bacon studied the heavens: for hebelieved in Astrology, and believed too in the transmutation of metals; and he got the name of magician, and was cashiered and imprisoned twice or thrice for this and other strange beliefs. But he believed most of all in the full utterance of his beliefs, and in experimenting, and in interrogating nature, and distrusting conventionalisms, and in search for himself into all the mysteries, whether of nature or theology.

He had sprung from worthy and well-to-do parents in the Western County of Somersetshire. He had spent very much money for those days on his education; had obtained a Doctorate at Paris; his acuteness and his capacity for study were everywhere recognized; he knew more of Greek than most of his teachers, and more of Hebrew than most of the Rabbis, and more of Chemistry and Physics generally than probably any other man in England. He took a Friar’s vows, as we have said; but these did not save him from interdiction by the Chief of his Order, by whom he was placed under ten years of surveillance at Paris—his teachings silenced, and he suffering almost to starvation. A liberal Pope (for those days), Clement IV., by his intervention setfree the philosopher’s pen again; and there came of this freedom theOpus Majusby which he is most worthily known. Subsequently he was permitted to return to his old sphere of study in Oxford, where he pursued afresh his scientific investigations, but coupled with them such outspoken denunciations of the vices and ignorance of his brother Friars, as to provoke new condemnation and an imprisonment that lasted for fourteen years—paying thus, in this accredited mediæval way, for his freedom of speech.

It is not improbable that we owe to him and to his optical studies—in some humble degree—the eye-glasses that make reading possible to old eyes: and his books, first of any books from English sources, described how sulphur and charcoal and saltpetre properly combined will make thunder and lightning (sic facies tonitrum et coruscationem). We call the mixture gunpowder. In hisOpus Majus(he wrote only in Latin, and vastly more than has appeared in printed form) scholars find some of the seeds of the riper knowledges which came into theNovum Organumof another and later Bacon—with whom we must not confound this sharp,eager, determined, inquiring Franciscan friar. He is worthy to be kept in mind as the Englishman who above all others living in that turbid thirteenth century, saw through the husks of things to their very core.

He died at the close of the century—probably in the year 1294; and I have gone back to that far-away time—somewhat out of our forward track—and have given you a glimpse of this Franciscan innovator and wrestler with authorities, in order that I might mate him with two other radical thinkers whose period of activity belonged to the latter half of the succeeding century: I mean Langlande and Wyclif. And before we go on to speak of these two, we will set up a few way-marks, so that we may not lose our historic bearings in the drift of the intervening years.

Bacon died, as we have said, in 1294. William Wallace fought his great battle of Cambuskenneth in 1297. Those who have read that old favorite of school-boys, Miss Porter’s “Scottish Chiefs,” will not need to have their memories refreshed about William Wallace. Indeed, that hero will be apt to loom too giant-like in their thought, and with a haloabout him which I suspect sober history would hardly justify. Wallace was executed at Smithfield (Miss Porter says he died of grief before the axe fell) in 1305; and that stout, flax-haired King Edward I., who had humbled Scotland at Falkirk—who was personally a match for the doughtiest of his knights—who was pious (as the times went), and had set up beautiful memorial crosses to his good Queen Eleanor—who had revived King Arthur’s Round Table at Kenilworth, died only two years after he had cruelly planted the head of Wallace on London Bridge. Then came the weak Edward II., and the victories of Bruce of Bannockburn, and that weary Piers Gaveston story, and the shocking death of the King in Berkeley Castle. The visitor to Berkeley (it is in Gloucestershire, and only two miles away from station on the Midland Railway) can still see the room where the murder was done: and this Castle of Berkeley—strangely enough—has been kept in repair, and inhabited continuously from the twelfth century until now; its moat, its keep, and its warders walks are all intact.

After this Edward II. came the great Edward III.—known to us through Froissart and the BlackPrince[34]and Crécy and Poitiers, and by Windsor Castle—which he built—and by Chaucer and Wyclif and Langlande and Gower, who grew up while he was king; known to us also in a worse way, for outliving all his good qualities, and becoming in his last days a peevish and tempestuous voluptuary.

Some few foreign way-marks I also give, that the reader may have more distinctly in mind this great historic epoch. Dante died in exile at Ravenna, six years before Edward III. came to power. Boccaccio was then a boy of fourteen, and Petrarch nine years his elder. And on the year that Crécy was fought and won—through the prowess of the Black Prince, and when the Last of the Tribunes, as you see him in Bulwer Lytton’s novel, was feeling his way to lordship in Rome,—there was living somewhere in Shropshire, a country-born, boy poet—not yet ripened into utterance, but looking out with keen eyes and soreness of heart upon the sufferings ofpoor country folk, and upon the wantonness of the monks, and the extravagance of the rich, and the hatefulness of the proud—all which was set forth at a later day in the Vision of Piers Plowman.

This was William Langlande[35](or Langley, as others call him), reputed author of the poem I have named. It makes a little book—earliest, I think, of all books written in English—which you will be apt to find in a well-appointed private library of our day. I won’t say that it is bought to read, so much as to stand upon the shelves (so many books are) as a good and sufficient type of old respectabilities. Yet, for all this, it is reasonably readable; with crabbed alliterative rhythm;—some Latin intermixed, as if the writer had been a priest (as someallege); and such knowledge of life and of current shortcomings among all sorts of people as showed him to be a wide-awake and fearless observer. It is in the form of an Allegory, Christian in its motive; so that you might almost say that the author was an immature and crude and yet sharper kind of John Bunyan who would turnGreat-Heartinto aPlowman. The nomenclature also brings to mind the tinker of the Pilgrim’s Progress; there is a SirDo-Welland his daughterDo-Better: then there isSir In-witwith his sonsSee-wellandSay-wellandHear-well, and the doughtiest of them all—Sir Work-well. We may, I think, as reasonably believe that Bunyan hovered over this book, as that Milton took hints from the picture of Pandemonium attributed to Cædmon.

Langlande is a little mixed and raw oftentimes; but he is full of shrewdness and of touches of a rough and unwashed humor. There is little tenderness of poetic feeling in his verse; and scarcely ever does it rise to anything approaching stateliness; but it keeps a good dog-trot jog, as of one who knew what he was doing, and meant to do it. What he meant was—to whip the vices of the priests and toscourge the covetousness of the rich and of the men in power. It is English all over; English[36]in the homeliness of its language; he makes even Norman words sound homely; English in spirit too; full of good, hearty, grumbling humor—a sort of predated and poetic kind of Protestantism. Plums might be picked out of it for the decoration of a good radical or agrarian speech of to-day.

Of his larger religious and political drift no extracts will give one a proper idea; only a reading from beginning to end will do this. One or two snatches of his verse I give, to show his manner:

And thanne cam coveitise,Kan I hym naght discryve,So hungrily and holweSire Hervy hym loked.He was bitel-browed,And baber-lipped alsoWith two blered eighenAs a blynd hagge;And as a letheren pursLolled his chekes,Well sidder [wider] than his chynThei chyveled [shrivelled] for elde;And as a bonde-man of his baconHis berd was bi-draveled,With an hood on his heed.A lousy hat aboveAnd in a tawny tabardOf twelf wynter age.—2847Pass. V.

And thanne cam coveitise,

Kan I hym naght discryve,

So hungrily and holwe

Sire Hervy hym loked.

He was bitel-browed,

And baber-lipped also

With two blered eighen

As a blynd hagge;

And as a letheren purs

Lolled his chekes,

Well sidder [wider] than his chyn

Thei chyveled [shrivelled] for elde;

And as a bonde-man of his bacon

His berd was bi-draveled,

With an hood on his heed.

A lousy hat above

And in a tawny tabard

Of twelf wynter age.

—2847Pass. V.

And again, from the samePassus(he dividing thus his poem intostepsorpaces) I cite this self-drawn picture of Envy:

Betwene manye and manyeI make debate ofte,That bothe lif and lymeIs lost thorugh my speche.And when I mete hym in marketThat I moost hate,I hailse hym hendely [politely]As I his frend were;For he is doughtier than I,I dar do noon oother:Ac, hadde I maistrie and myght.God woot my wille!And whanne I come to the kirkAnd sholde kneel to the roode,And preye for the peple …Awey fro the auter thanneTurne I myne eighenAnd bi-holde EleyneHath a newe cote;I wisshe thanne it were myn,And al the web after.For who so hath moore than IThat angreth me soore,And thus I lyve love-lees,Like a luther [mad] dogge;That al my body bolneth [swelleth]For bitter of my galle.—vers.2667.

Betwene manye and manye

I make debate ofte,

That bothe lif and lyme

Is lost thorugh my speche.

And when I mete hym in market

That I moost hate,

I hailse hym hendely [politely]

As I his frend were;

For he is doughtier than I,

I dar do noon oother:

Ac, hadde I maistrie and myght.

God woot my wille!

And whanne I come to the kirk

And sholde kneel to the roode,

And preye for the peple …

Awey fro the auter thanne

Turne I myne eighen

And bi-holde Eleyne

Hath a newe cote;

I wisshe thanne it were myn,

And al the web after.

For who so hath moore than I

That angreth me soore,

And thus I lyve love-lees,

Like a luther [mad] dogge;

That al my body bolneth [swelleth]

For bitter of my galle.

—vers.2667.

It is a savage picture; and as savagely true as was ever drawn of Envy. Those who cultivated the elegancies of letters, and delighted in the pretty rhyming-balance of Romance verse, would hardly have relished him; but the average thinker and worker would and did. It is specially noteworthy that the existing MSS. of this poem, of which there are very many, are without expensive ornamentation by illuminated initial letters, or otherwise, indicating that its circulation was among those who did not buy a book for its luxuries of “make-up,” but for its pith. A new popularity came to the book after printing was begun, and made it known to those who sympathized with its protesting spirit;—most of all when the monasteries went down and readers saw how this old grumbler had prophesied truly—insaying “the Abbot of Abingdon and all his people should get a knock from a king”—as they did; and a hard one it was.

Langlande was born in the West, and had wandered over the beautiful Malvern hills of Worcestershire in his day but he went afterward to live in London, which he knew from top to bottom; had a wife there, “Kytte,” and a daughter, “Calote;”[37]shaved his head like a priest; was tall—so tall he came to be called “Long Will.” He showed little respect for fine dresses, though he saw them all; he was in London when Chaucer was there and when the greater poet was writing, and had higher-placed friends than himself; but he never met him,—from anything that appears; never met Wyclif either, with whom he must have had very much thinkingin common, and who also must have been in London many a time when tall Will Langlande sidled along Fenchurch Street, or Cornhill. Yet he is worthy to be named with him as representing a popular seam in that great drift of independent and critical thought, which was to ripen into the Reformation.

In the year when gunpowder was first burned in battle, and when Rienzi was trying to poise himself with a good balance on the rocking shoulders of the Roman people, John Wyclif, the great English reformer and the first translator of the Bible, was just turned of twenty and poring over his books, not improbably in that Balliol College, Oxford—of which in the ripeness of his age he was to become Master.

We know little of his early personal history, save that he came from a beautiful Yorkshire valley in the North of England, where the Tees, forming the border line of the County of Durham, sweeps past the little parish of Wyclif, and where a manor-house of the same name—traditionally the birthplaceof the Reformer—stands upon a lift of the river hank. Its grounds stretch away to those “Rokeby” woods, whose murmurs and shadows relieve the dullest of the poems of Scott.

But there is no record of him thereabout: if indeed he were born upon that lift of the Tees bank, the proprietors thereof—who through many generations were stanch Romanists—would have shown no honor to the arch-heretic; and it is noteworthy that within a chapel attached to the Wyclif manor-house, mass was said and the Pope reverenced, down to a very recent time. John Wyclif, in the great crowd of his writings, whether English or Latin, told no story of himself or of his young days. We have only clear sight of him when he has reached full manhood—when he has come to the mastership of Balliol Hall, and to eloquent advocacy of the rights and dignities of England, as against the Papal demand for tribute. On this service he goes up to London, and is heard there—maybe in Parliament; certainly is heard with such approval that he is, only a few years thereafter—sent with a commission, to treat with ambassadors from the Pope, at the old city of Bruges.

This was a rich city—called the Venice of the North—and princes and nobles from all Europe were to be met there; its great town-house even then lifted high into the air that Belfry of Bruges which has become in our day the nestling-place of song. But Wyclif was not overawed by any splendors of scene or association. He insisted doggedly upon the rights of Englishmen as against Papal pretensions. John of Gaunt, a son of the king, stood by Wyclif; not only befriending him there, but afterward when Papish bulls were thundered against him, and when he was summoned up to London—as befell in due time—to answer for his misdeeds; and when the populace, who had caught a liking for the stalwart independence of the man, crowded through the streets (tall Will Langlande very probably among them), to stand between the Reformer and the judges of the Church. He did not believe in Ecclesiastic hierarchies; and it is quite certain that he was as little liked by the abbots and the bishops and the fat vicars, as by the Pope.

I have said he was befriended by John of Gaunt: and this is a name which it is worth while for students of English history to remember; not only becausehe was a brother of the famous Black Prince (and a better man than he, though he did not fight so many battles), but because he was also a good friend of the poet Chaucer—as we shall find. It will perhaps help one to keep him in mind, if I refer to that glimpse we get of him in the early scenes of Shakespeare’s tragedy of Richard II., where he makes a play upon his name:

O, how that name befits my composition!Old Gaunt, indeed! and gaunt in being old.Within me grief hath kept a tedious fastAnd who abstains from meat, that is not gaunt?

O, how that name befits my composition!

Old Gaunt, indeed! and gaunt in being old.

Within me grief hath kept a tedious fast

And who abstains from meat, that is not gaunt?

A good effigy of this John, in his robes, is on the glass of a window in All-Souls’ College, Oxford.

But such great friends, and Wyclif numbered the widow of the Black Prince among them, could not shield him entirely from Romish wrath, when he began to call the Pope a “cut-purse;” and his arguments were as scathing as his epithets, and had more reason in them. He was compelled to forego his teachings at Oxford, and came to new trials,[38]atwhich—as traditions run—he wore an air of great dignity; and old portraits show us a thin, tall figure—a little bent with over-study; his features sharp-cut, with lips full of firmness, a flowing white beard and piercing eyes—glowing with the faith that was in him. This was he who blocked out the path along which England stumbled through Lollardry quagmires, and where Huss, the Bohemian, walked in after days with a clumsy, forward tread, and which Luther in his later time put all alight with his torch of flame.

The King—and it was one of the last good deedsof Edward III.—gave to the old man who was railed at by Popes and bishops, a church living at Lutterworth, a pleasant village in Leicestershire, upon a branch of that Avon, which flows by Stratford Church; and here the white-haired old man—some five hundred years ago (1384) finished his life; and here the sexton of the church will show one to-day the gown in which he preached, and the pulpit in which he stood.

Even now I have not spoken of those facts about this early Reformer, which are best kept in memory, and which make his name memorable in connection with the literature of England. In the quiet of Lutterworth he translated the Latin Bible (probably not knowing well either Greek or Hebrew, as very few did in that day); not doing all this work himself, but specially looking after the Gospels, and perhaps all of the New Testament.

The reader will, I think, be interested in a little fragment of this work of his (from Matthew viii.).

“Sothely [verily] Jhesus seeynge many cumpanyes about hym, badhis disciplisgo ouer the watir. And oo [one] scribe ora man of lawe, commynge to, saide to hym—Maistre, I shall sue [follow] thee whidir euer thou shalt go. AndJhesus said to hym, Foxis han dichisor borrowis[holes] and briddes of the eir han nestis; but mannes sone hath nat wher he reste his heued. Sotheli an other of his disciplis saide to hym—Lord, suffre me go first and birye my fadir. Forsothe Jhesus saide to hym, Sue thou me, and late dede men birye her dead men.”

It is surely not very hard reading;—still less so in the form as revised by Purvey,[39]an old assistant of his in the Parish of Lutterworth; and it made the groundwork of an English sacred dialect, which with itsTheesandThousandSpeakethandHearethandPrayethhas given its flavor to all succeeding translations, and to all utterances of praise and thanksgiving in every English pulpit.

Not only this, but Wyclif by his translation opened an easy English pathway into the arcana of sacred mysteries, which in all previous time—save for exceptional parts, such as the paraphrase of Cædmon, or the Ormulum, or the Psalter of Aldhelm and other fragmentary Anglo-Saxon versions of Scripture—had been veiled from the common people in the dimness of an unknown tongue. Butfrom the date of Wyclif’s translation—forward, forever—whatever man, rich or poor, could read an English ordinance of the King, or a bye-law of a British parish, could also—though he might be driven to stealthy reading—spell his way back, through the old aisles of Sacred History, where Moses and the prophets held their place, and into the valleys of Palestine, where Bethlehem lay, and where Christ was hung upon the tree.

Now we come to a Poet of these times; not a poet by courtesy, not a small poet, but a real and a great one. His name is Chaucer. You may not read him; you may find his speech too old-fashioned to please you; you may not easily get through its meaning; but if you do, and come to study him with any warmth, the more you study him the more you will like him. And this—not because there are curious and wonderful tales in his verse to interest you; not because your passion will be kindled by any extraordinary show of dramatic power; but because his humor, and gentleness,and grace of touch, and exquisite harmonies of language will win upon you page by page, and story by story.

He was born—probably in London—some time during the second quarter of the fourteenth century;[40]and there is reason to believe that an early home of his was in or near Thames Street, which runs parallel with the river,—a region now built up and overshadowed with close lines of tall and grimy warehouses. But the boy Chaucer, living there five hundred and more years ago, might have caught between the timber houses glimpses of cultivated fields lying on the Southwark shores; and if he had wandered along Wallbrook to Cheapside, and thence westerly by Newgate to Smithfield Common—wherehe may have watched tournaments that Froissart watched, and Philippa, queen of Edward III., had watched—he would have found open country; and on quiet days would have heard the birds singing there, and have seen green meadows lying on either side the river Fleet—which river is now lost in sewers, and is planted over with houses.

On Ludgate Hill, in that far-off time, rose the tall and graceful spire of old St. Paul’s, and underneath its roof was a vista of Gothic arches seven hundred feet in length. The great monastery of the Templars—and of the Knights of St. John—where we go now to see that remnant of it, called the Temple Church,—had, only shortly before, passed into the keeping of the Lawyers; the Strand was like a country road, with great country-houses and gardens looking upon the water; Charing Cross was a hamlet midway between the Temple and a parish called Westminster, where a huge Abbey Church stood by the river bank.

Some biographers have labored to show that Chaucer was of high family—with titles in it. But I think we care very little about this; one story, now fully accredited, makes his father a vintner,or wine-dealer, with a coat-of-arms, showing upon one half a red bar upon white, and upon the other white on red; as if—hints old Thomas Fuller—’twas dashed with red wine and white. This escutcheon with its parti-colored bars may be seen in the upper left corner of the portrait of Chaucer, which hangs now in the picture-gallery at Oxford. And—for that matter—it was not a bad thing to be a vintner in that day; for we have record of one of them who, in the year after the battle of Poitiers, entertained at his house in the Vintry, Edward King of England, John King of France, David King of Scotland, and the King of Cyprus. And he not only dined them, but won their money at play; and afterward, in a very unking-like fashion—paid back the money he had won.

Chaucer was a student in his young days; but never—as old stories ran—at either Cambridge or Oxford; indeed, there is no need that we place him at one or the other. There were schools in London in those times—at St. Paul’s and at Westminster—in either of which he could have come by all the scholarly epithets or allusions that appear in his earlier poems; and for the culture that declares itself inhis riper days, we know that he was more or less a student all his life—loving books, and proud of his fondness for them, and showing all up and down his poems traces of his careful reading and of an observation as close and as quick.

It is the poet’s very self, who, borne away in the eagle’s clutch amongst the stars, gets this comment from approving Jove[41]:

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