The English in The Middle A^es ■^^■<^ ^J0^ !f^^- tPT V'' vi" 'Y ■■: THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE CLJjLt^j ( THE ENGLISH THE MIDDLE AGES. THE ENGLISH IN THE MIDDLE AGES; FROM THE NORMAN USURPATION TO THE DAYS OF THE STUARTS. '^Tfieir MoUt of Hife, Brtss, glrms, inoccupations, anij Amusements. AS ILLUSTRATED BY THE MEDIEVAL REMAINS IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM. BY J. FREDERICK HODGETTS, LaUExamimr to the University and District of Moscow, Professor in the Imperial College of Practical Science, and other Crown Establishments of Moscoiv. Member of the British Archaological Association, A iithor o/" Older England" etc., et*: LONDON : WHITING AND COMPANY, 30 and 32, SARDINIA STREET. 1885. TO THE RIGHT HON. SIR HAKRY VERNEY, Bakt., M.P. THIS COURSE OF LECTURES IS DEDICATED BY THE AUTHOR. PREFATORY LETTER. Dear Sir Harry Verney, Presuming on the cordial reception whicli you gave me on my return to England, after an absence of more than thirty years, and which I felt the more as I had no claim upon your consideration beyond being the step-son of an old friend, I now dedicate to you this very humble attempt to render the study of our own historic treasures more accessible to the English public by clothing it in a popular dress, from which the cobwebs of the Dryasdust School have, to some extent, been brushed away. I feel more than ordinary pleasure in seeing your name in connection with this work, for you are, perhaps, the only one remaining of a wide circle of friends of my beloved step-father who can appreciate the vast debt of gratitude I owe to him for careful training, and for the cultivation of any taste for investigation I may possess : at the same time it affords me an opportunity of publicly expressing my thanks to you for the kind words which have encouraged me to remain in England and devote myself to the arduous task I felt called upon to undertake. This task is no less than to try to interest my country- men in Old English things — especially in their Language and their History. In the following pages I wish to show that we have proofs in the National Museum of the exist- ence of a history and a literature in ancient times of which we have reason to be justly proud. viii I'rtjatory Litdr. Hut wo have been ret'crred, as 1 have already pointed out in other works, to foreif^m models in literature and art. to the nogU'ct of home-born excellence, which has remained hitherto uncared for. Our schoolmasters have taught us to write Litin, not English; while archteologists, antiquaries, and historians are too apt to underrate the importance of our early national records as compared with those of (ireecc and Rome. Well may we exclaim with the ( Icrman poet : •Warum in die Feme greifen, Wenn da.s Gate liegt so nah' ?'' I>eing neither Greek nor lioman, but a son of that race which hurled Imperial Eome from her seat, I want to see the study of our own ancient and medieval history en- ;^aged in with ardour. I want English people to be really intercsted in the early events of their own race ; and by publishing these Lectures I hope to show them that any- hody working conscientiously in his own sphere, whatever that may be, may do somctliing to throw a light on j>ortions of history which should not be allowed to remain in darkness. Believe me to remain. Very sincerely yours, J. FliEDEKICK HODGETTS. London, September, 1885. INTRODUCTION. Tins work is printed from the MS. of a course of Lectures delivered at the British Museum on the same principle and much in the same way as those which appeared under the title of Older England, of which, indeed, it may be regarded as a continuation. Those Lectures treat of the Anglo-Saxon remains in the British Museum, and the oljject in them was to build up from those remains a history of our remote forefathers as perfectly distinct from the nations of so-called classical antiquity, and to prove that we were not copyists " in that old iron time". I .showed how the forms of our swords and shields were widely different from classic models — in fact, as different as possible for objects answering the same purposes to be. I showed that we had an early language and a literature which, without any mixture of Eoman taint, were things to be proud of ; and I entered an urgent protest against the system which, in our schools, forces upon us the study of an alien language and literature as guides to our own, with which they have no kinship save the remote relationship proved by Max MilUer to exist among all members of the Aryan family. The following Lectures tend to show that even in later times than those taken cognizance of in Older England, the Latin element, introduced by the Norman usurpation, I lid not mingle with the English elements of which we were composed ; and, in fact, instead of our becoming ;/ Noriiiuu, the Nurmaus became English. X Introduction. Kiirtlicr oil Ml the- story di' our nice we certainly do find French and Italian names for pieces of armour, Vmt this wa.^ hccau.se those pieces of armour were of French or Italian origin, and never nourished on English soil, being smashed, as Rome had been, by the heavy hammer or fiercer gunpowder of the opposing Teuton. In the progress of this investigation I have had to refer, for customs, dress, habits, arms, and armour, to the priceless manuscripts of our noble collection at the British Museum. And here I must acknowledge the extreme courtesy and kindness of ^f r. E. j\I. Thompson, the Keeper of these precious relics. Every facility was afforded mc by Mr. Thompson, and the gentlemen in his department, for ])ointing out to my audience the actual places in the MSS. themselves on which my assertions are based. No audience ever yet had such treasures displayed before them, and no public lecturer was ever more cordially assisted in his labours than I have been in giving these Lectures. Besides the documentary evidence of the MSS., I was enabled, when speaking of the armour worn by our hardy sire.s, to refer to some excellent specimens preserved in the Media3val lioom ; and though the number of these pieces is not great, the lessons they teach are as genuine as though the Museum were crammed with armour. To Dr. Bond I have again to express my best thanks for the courtesy with which he has co-operated with me in this endeavour to utilise the resources of the Museum. Under his auspices a convenient lecture-room has been arranged in the building, which obviates the necessity of using the galleries for lecturing in, a custom attended with considerable inconvenience. There is now no reason why men who have made any particular branch of knowledge Introduction. xi their special study should uot make use of the public col- lection to illustrate their views, and take advantage of this new lecture-room to enunciate them. It may seem like ingratitude in me to take exception against a work to which I am so much indebted as Sir Samuel Eush Meyrick's Critical Encj_uiry into Anticnt Arms and Armour, but, in carefully considering the sub- ject of chain-mail armour, I have been reluctantly com- pelled to show that he has been carried away by theory in that part of his subject. Authority as he unquestionably is, on plate-armour, I am sorry to say that I do not find his assertions regarding chain-mail borne out by the evidence of the monuments and the manuscripts. With regard to the subject of non-metallic armour, I found it too large a subject to treat in one and the same Lecture with metallic armour, and to my great regret it was found to be beyond the scope of the series to devote another to the subject of armour. If the perusal of these pages should induce any scholar to throw aside his Xenophon or Cicero, and bring his trained skill to bear upon the equally " classic" lines of our forefathers, albeit of less remote antiquity, I shall indeed be repaid for the labour which I have expended on the subject. There is an immense field open to English- men, and the work in that field should be to them as it has been to me, a labour of love. J. FREDEEICK HODGETTS. TABLE OF CONTENTS. Lecture I. — The Normans. PAGE Considerations connected with the appearance of the Normans. Their origin, language, arms, armour, dress and habits. Their true value in English history. Norman efq)ee. com- pared with the Saxon >iweord. Remains of Norman skill preserved in the British Museum. Testimony of the manuscripts compared with the evidence of the archaeological remains. Independence of " EngUxh,'"' i.e., language, manners, and customs vindicated. Changes in English in this wide sense not due to Norman influence. ... 1 Lecture II.— The English. The peculiar nature of the English national charactei' asserted itself in spite of Norman oppression, which, in fact, caused it to flourish at a time when its extinction seemed at hand. The adventures and quarrels of our Norman tyi-ants not English history. Deeds of Hereward the Saxon and others who shielded England in the early Norman times. Manu- scripts in the British Museum referred to in proof of the independent nature of everything English. The Brnt shown to be more valuable to us than the Lives of the Norman Kings. From 1066 to 1272. more than two liundred years, our ordinary books on history give no history of England. How to learn it xvi Contettts. lif:-ice done to England by the Crusades in getting rid of the Normans. .... 71 Lecture IV.— Ak.M(»lk. The history of Armour dividing itself into three periods : — Chain Mail (Byriiir), Mixed Mail and Plate. Plate Armour. The development of these epochs rapidly con- sidered. Chain Mail Asiatic, and of immense antiquity in the north-west of India and Persia. Revival of Chivalry. Military Sports. Tournaments and Jousts. The Pel and the Quintain. The Plate Armour in the British Museum. 109 Lectcre v.— Civil Dress. Slight changes in English dress effected by the Norman influence. The Surcoat identical with the 'over-slop' of the Engli.sh. Other portions especially of female dress. nhown to have been, in the Norman times, the same things under new names, that had been used in the prc-Norman periods. Long skirts and flowing surcoats affected by the Normans. Continued into the fifteenth Contents. xv PAGE century. Multiplication of authorities of all kinds for our knowledge of the dress of the English from the thirteenth century downwards 14;") Lecture VI. — Sports and Pastimes. Athletic Sports, Hunting, Hawking, Pageants, Masks, Mummeries, Moralities, Mysteries, illustrated by MSS. in the British Museum. Origin of the theatre. Children's games. Balls and the various games played with them. ... 177 LIST OF WORKS REFERRED TO. • Aiiclo-Saxon Chronicle" \H6\. •' Ancient Laws and Institutes of England" (Thorpe) 1840. Anglo-Saxon Mannscrii)ts in British Museum (various). ItKi.F.—" Ecclesiastical History" 1840. Bi Kcn (Walter de Gray)— "Fasti Monastici JEv\ Saxonici' 1 872. Cif.DMoN— (Thorpe) J 832. •' Coerishing (like Norman-French in Kngland) hcside them. [,(•1 us rnmmeuce, as we did in tin' last course of leetures which I had the honour to deliver before you, with the sword. The .same weapon that converted Britain into England plaeed a Xorman duke on the English throne, and so securely placed him there, that in counting our kings we reckon from him, a foreigner, rather than from our own P^nglish line, excluding Alfred and other great men of whom we ought to l)e proud, while we con- tinue the practice through a line of aliens of some of whom we certainly ought to he a.shamed. The Normans, like ourselves, were descended from Scandina^^an ancestors ; but, unlike ourselves, they aban- doned their language and religion when accepting the 1 )uchy of Normandy at the hand of Charles the Simple. Their tastes remained Scandinavian and warlike to the last ; their acceptation of Christianity being in the first instance nothing but a stratagem. Eolf Ganger, the fomnler of the dynasty, certainly did his best to improve th(> land which came into his possession ; and very probably the exaggerated forms of arms, armour, and vestments which he introduced were the result of his design of retaining them at any cost, and forcing them upon his retainers, both Scandinavian and Frankish. IJnlf CJanger was the son of Yarl Kegnvald, and was banished from Norway by Harald Harfagra for under- taking a Viking expedition after it had been prohibited I.] The Normans. 7 by that king. Rolf was a famous Viking, and in every respect an accomplished warrior, so that when he came to govern his duchy, it is no wonder that he made the people of Normandy as warlike as himself and his followers. But, unlike Hengst and Horsa, he at last foreswore the faith and language of his fathers. What was the result ? A modification of everything which had previously marked him and his men. The sword, the most distinguishing feature of a nation, changed its form. Instead of the stout, stern Scandinavian weapon of former days, with its Oriental-loolf'//'', in flennnn Hpothi- or sprttken, all from llu" r<»ot ajia, wlience also our i^prni, meaning to spread out. From this foreign \vor\ whence the s has been elided. Tlie evidence is that the old Xormau name for the old blade is artificial, as the object itself, a mere modi- Heation or alterati»tn. It died off as a t^rm for the sword in England, where it had already flourished in the form of sixidu, a spade, long before the advent of the Xormans. The Imll at the end of the hilt, called by the Xormans the ^HunmeUc, or little apple, has survived in our own military nomenclature, l)ut almost all the other portions of the sword remain English. The two extremes, the l^mmelle and the point, are foreign, while hilt, i^uard I.] The Normans. 9 (from warian), tang, lilnde, and grij), are all ]Mire English. The Norwegians under Tiolf Ganger lieing nearly all men who had Ijeen lianished hy Harald from Norway, or who had quitted the land voluntarily, were colonists, nor can we helieve for a moment that they suddenly ceased to be Teutons, and became Eomance. No act of volition could ha^'e effected such a change. We have to remember also that the Frankish language which these f^candinavian Teutons determined to adopt was not a \mve descendant of Latin. The Franks were Teutons too, and in the course of years had acquired the debased Latin called French, referred to 1)y jNIax Midler as "a Romanic dialect, whose grammar is l)ut a blurred copy of the grammar of Cicero. But its dictionary is full of Teutonic words, mure or less Eomanised to suit the pronunciation of the IJoman inhabitants of Gaul." This " Germanised Latin", as ^lax Midler calls it, was the language which the Norwegians had to acquire, and they, in doing so, introduced into its vocabulary many Scandinavian words and phrases that deflected Norman French still farther from Latin than the German of the Franks had done. And this hotch-potch was to be thrust into the mouths of the English, who had preserved their mother tongue at least pure and uiicontaminated. What was the result ? It was as oil on water — the two forms of speech lived on independently of each other, and never coalesced. Norman French died for want of cono-enial soil wherein to grow ; and being very much akin to what we call " slang", has passed away entirely, existing in no spoken form, being only preserved in a sort of dried 10 The Nonnans. [lkct- iiminmitiiMl rf»n«litinii in some u\ nur le^'iil tenns, which takr Mill- hiwycrs so luiij,' to k-ani, ninl cost 7/.s so much wht'M tlicy know thcin. Tht' Ohl Kii^'linh sword was a more useful weapon than the Xorinan capee, especially f<>r troops accustomed to riL,'ht on foot. The Norman hlade was longer, the hilt Inr^'rr ; the hall, instead of heing an ol)late spheroid, was a glohular piece of iron; while the guard, instead of curving gently downwards on each side of the blade, originally to ])revent the weajtou fmrn slipping through the aperture in the armour tlirough which it was thrust, became a long straight piece of iron, forming a cross with the hilt and blade. I have in former lectures alluded to the veneration in which the sword was held by our forefathers. I have shown you how the oath on the sword was of more imivirtance to them than the oath on the bracelet, which was oidy l»inding in civil, not military, cases; and now we find that their Xorman cousins, though Christian warrioi-s, jiad as great, if not a greater, respect for this mystic weapon than their pagan sires. Doubtless tlie «tld feeling surviveil, and, like many other pagan observances, " sword-worship" passed into Christianity, and became accounted fm- by the form of the weapon being identical with the gi-acious symbol. Certain it is that Xorman knights knelt to their cross-swords in the Holy Land with ns nnjch devotion as a monk bowed to his crucifix, or a priest to the holy sign on tb.e high altar. Xotwithstanding this, the Norman warrior tmsted more in his lance than in his sword in the hour of battle, because he had become accustomed to act more on horseback than on foot, more I,] TJic Normans. II in firm line than in single combat. The snre and sturdy formation of the wedge he had abandoned, and had adopted the system of attack in line three or fonr deep. Had the English only retained their wedge at Hastings, or rather at Pevensey, many disasters to the nation would have been avoided, f(n- the Norman lance could not penetrate that solid mass, while the Norman knights went down before the English axes to an extent that gained the battle the name of Sanglac, or sea of blood, among the invaders. The ruse of i)retended flight drawing the English from their impenetrahle wedge lost them the victory, which, despite their inferiority in numbers, would have attended their efforts had tliey only retained their formation, for the Normans had lost such numbers that they were already in despair of success. William would never have hit u})on the ruse had he not seen the fatal eager- ness with which the Phiglish pursued the foot and cavalry of Bretagne and other allies in his left wing. The death of Harold was the real cause of the victory, for if he had not fallen, that victory, supposing he could liave gained it, would liave contributed but little to give William the sceptre. The force of England was unconquered — a small portion of it only had been exerted ; and if Harold had survived, or any other heir at all competent to the crisis, William would have gained no more by the victory than the privilege of fighting another battle with diminished strengtli. Tn this invasion the Norman Duke came to a crown wliieli liad been assured to him by its former possessor, and which h;id liccn assumed by a man wlio had sworn allegiance to William. The court [KUiy, so to say, was 12 The Normans. [lect. prepared to receive liim, and recognised him as the rightful claimant, regarding Harold more or less as a usurper. Many of the "upland thanes", or country gentlemen, as we should now call them, affected Xonuan manners, and William was crowned at Westminster with great rejoidngs as a rightfid successor. ( )n the utlier hand, the conquest of Britain by the English was the commencement of a war of extermination, perhaps the most cruel recorded in history. Like their favourite wedge formation, the tine edge was introduced in the fifth century, when certain Xorthern heroes came to assist the Britons. These were succeeded by more ; and the tide of conquest rolled in increasing waves of military occupation, with the deadly purpose of driving out and cutting down the dwellers in the land, until Scandina\'ia, or that part of it which furnished forth these fierce warrioi-s, was better represented here than in the land of tlieir birth, William brought at once his whole force of Gt>,000 men to assist liis claim, and had he been killed instead of Harold, there would have been an end to the Xormans in England. As it was, he lost more than half his army at Hastings, or rather Pevensey, and if there had been a strong feeling against him in England, he woidd never have reached Westminster to be crowned, ^^^len we take into consideration how many troops had deserted from Harold : how many were on board the English shijts sent to cut off William's retreat ; how many refused to take up arms in the quarrel ; and, tinally, how many were directly favouralde to William, we shall see at once that the small force of Normans were not conquerors of the nation, but of Harold. I.] TJie Normans. 13 Much has been said of the Xormauisint^ pUNver uf the invasion, the real fact of the matter being that the con- sequence of the assertion of absohite power by the N'ormaus was tlie'-f^^-Normanisation of the English, who had assumed certain Normanisms under the Confessor. We find very few remains of Xorman war in the shape of arms and armour, while we possess plenty of Anglo-Saxon swords, shields, spear-heads, arrow-heads, and so fortli. What do we find { Casth's — strong towers for the robber baron to hide in from the just fury of the oppressed — castles, unknown to the free, open-hearted Englishman, whose only defence was his shield. The conquest of liritain showed the weak British, imitation Eonian, sword in numbers lying in the beds of rivers, and the big Scandinavian weapon by the victor's side in his "rave. lUit, save a very few specimens scattered here and there in museums, there are no Norman swords in England, and the castles are all decayed ruins. A strange conquest, truly, where the conqueror had to huh from the conquered ! Contrast this with the conquest of Britain by the English, where open fields remained, and the warrior — farmer, soldier, sailor, and ploughman, all in one — lived on the land lie i'ought for, cheered by the tender ties of wife and child, wliich have come down to us undisturbed by fcmmc and enfant. When William saw that the time was come, he threw off the mask and showed his intention of making England a part of Xormandy. Tlion, for a time, by the fault of the English themselves, tlie history of England is taken up by Xorman chroniclers, who, to flatter the great Duke, wrote songs to his praise in the slang tliey loved. The 14 TJic .\'(>i iiiiiiis. [li;ct. Kn^'lish, ton Iat(\ siiw llicir eiror; Imt tlie .strongholds stiiiiding all over the country kept tiieni in check. Their Ixtw.s ami arrows were of slight avail against stone and mortar. Still, many brave outlaws, from Hereward down to hold IJiiliJii Hood, kept \\\i a guerilla warfare again.st the Norman rule, thereby immensely improving their knowledge of the bowman's craft. Where are we, then, to look for the history of our race t Not in the one-sided, vain-glorious boastings of the menials of the robber barons. Xo ; our history is written in the ballads of our race, in the quaint English of the Chronidc, in the more modern story of the Brut, and in the rich store of illuminated MSS. — to be found in the I'.iitish Museum. Look at the Norman .^aword in the Mediieval Ifooni. What does it tell us ? It tells us a story of pride and boast fulness. It is too long to wield with comfort, for the Normans fought with lances on horseback, trusting to the impetuous shock derived from the speed of their animals. For a cavalry charge, when the lance was shivered, or its point made blunt, the long Norman sword was useful, but was far from being the comfortable weapon (for the possessor, of course) that the true English blade had proved in many a ci»nd)at with the Kelt. And the Kelt knew which was best. He never copied the Norman csp^e and c&riu ; the English sword and shield were the prototypes of the claymore and target still to be found in the Highlands. As the sword was preposterously elongated, so were all the other articles of the warrior's equipment made longer than had been the custom in Scandinavia. While I.] TJie Normans. 15 we retained the short, light, useful rock, or tunic, of our remote Scandinavian home, the Norman lengthened his cote hardi until it became necessary to cut it back and front to enable him to ride. This gave the idea of fastening the inside of each portion of the garment round the inside of the leg ; and this form was imitated in the shirt of mail, which now became known by the German name of hau- hcrJc, from hals, the neck, and hergen, to protect, with its diminutive, habergeon. Tlie end of the centre half-hoop of iron protecting the top of the head became elongated until the Norman nasal helmet was formed. And, finally, the shield was carried to an extravagant length, assuming a sort of kite shape, the head of which was like the half of the old Scandinavian round target, while the lower portion ex- hibited the Frankish triangle joined on to the half circle the whole being greatly lengthened. The great autliority for these assertions is the wonder- ful piece of tapestry at Bayeux, in Normandy, worked by the hands of ^Matilda, wife of Duke William, representing the events preceding the battle of Hastings, and showing the Normans in their fantastic elongations of the ancient fashion, and the English in the dress of their ancestors. The English rather despised tlie custom of wearing armour at all. We tind tliem in stout leather wcks, tru.sting to their skill with axe and shield rather than to mail defences ; and this national garment (the name of which still continues to be used for a modern coat in Scandinavia and Germany) was as short at the time of Harold as it had been in the days of Hengst and Horsa. Some few Norman women, coming over after the coro- nation of the Duke as King of England, set the fasliion 1 6 The Noruiinis. [lixt. aiuoii^'st the Eiij^'lisli liulics y^K calliii;,' iirLiclo>i of dress by Xtiriuaii-Freucli namos: thus, the wiui])le came to be callfd the 'eoiivre-clitT', so(»Ji corrupted into kerchief, in wliich fnrni it is not iiuite dead yet. But the form of the wimple iiiiderweiit no change, as you may see by consult- ing almost any MSS. of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Slrutt, in his excellent wurk on the Brca^ and HahiU of ihr En'iUsh, alludes to the super-tunic or sur-coat as a Xorniaii invention, alUiough he has drawings of English wunicu in tlu' " over-slop", wliich is precisely the same thing, though much shorter. Here is an instance of Xormanising, though not a very important one ; besides, it seems to have been quite as much the fashion among.st English ladies to adopt Norman names for common articles before the Conquest as at the present day. Certainly the Xormaus did not, as a rule, bring their wives and families to England, as the English brought theirs to BriUiin, so that intermarriages were common between the English and Xormans ; and this had the result (tf swamping the latter, or Anglicising them, rather than Xormanising the English, as far as the actual population \\ as concerned. That the sceptre was in the hands of a foreigner necessarily rendered the language of the court that of the foreign king. The judges, as appointed by him, were almost of course his direct servants, because they would be powerfully instrumental in bringing aU cla.sses of the conmuiuity under the same rubric. But liis laws were not very numerous. Of the fifty-two laws, properly called the laws uf William the Conqueror, many are only translations of the laws of Alfi-ed into Xorman-French and Latin ; others are rather niodifications than translations r.] The Normans. 17 of the English laws. Thus, the thirty different cases of injury to the person, with the respective fine for each case, forming thirty different laws, are simplified into one, with seven small clauses covering the whole ground. The original laws, though few, are not very different in spirit from the old English laws amongst wliich they stand. Williamx retained the old weights and measures, and especially confirmed the laws of Edward the Con- fessor. It is worthy of remark that he does not call himself King of England, Eex Anglian, but Eex Anglorum, King of the English, which, according to heraldic ideas, is a very important difference. We might come to the conclusion, in carefully looking through the laws of the Conqueror and of Henry I, that the written code at least is nothing like so severe as we should have expected. But the apparent equity of William the Conqueror was, after all, a mere blind, for the greatest injustice ever done to a nation was perpetrated through the medium of this seeming fairness of conduct. He gave his word to govern according to English laws already existing, but he translated them into Norman- French, which to the mass of his subjects was unin- telligible; besides which, all the new laws promulgated by him were given either in French or Latin, or both. This does not strike one as being so very bad, after all, if the laws were only good and upright; l)ut the real hardsliip consisted in his expecting, or rather requiring, that all Englishmen should know and understand them, although presented in a language of wliich they were ignorant. On their failure, the punishment was swift and sharp. Ignorance of the laws could not be pleaded, and liy III. c 1 8 The Normans. [lixT. putting the enactments of the oM line of kings out of the reach of Iiis subjects, lie was enabled to commit a most refined and uni)rincipled act of tyranny, worthy a liomau emperor /s on the Litrrattirc, Superstition, ami nistorij of England in the MuldU Ages. J. R. Smith, 1846, vol. i, p. 45 et seq. I.] The Norinans. 29 the Norman aristocracy, there arose a new class, the ribalds and Idchcrs (ribaldi and leceatorcs). The latter word, signifying dish lickers, is easily nnderstood, but ribald is not so readily explained. The termination "aid " seems to point to a Teutonic origin, but there is no positive explanation to offer of the word itself beyond its signifying a low licentious person. And accordingly we find the ribalds, or ribands, to be persons who, as Wright says, " had so completely abandoned every sentiment of morality or shame, that, in return for the protection of the nobles, they were the ready instruments of any base work." " In the crowds which attended the feasts of the princes and nobles, the letchers were not content with waiting for what had been sent away from table, but seized upon the dishes as they were carried from the kitchen to the hall, and it became necessary to invent a new office, that of ushers of the hall, to repress the dis- order." " In those great courts", says the Ancreu liicivl, " they are called letchers who have so lost shame, that they are ashamed of nothing, but seek how they may work the greater villany. This class spread through society like a great sore, and from the terms used in speaking of them we derive a great part of the opprobrious words still used in England."* For these new expressions, and many more relating to vice and wickedness, we are indebted to the Normans. A vast benefit to a nation, truly ! It has been observed with great truth, that though the English were celebrated for their wool, with which indeed * A H'mtory of Domestic I'ifdnnn'it and Snithurvta hi Etxjland during the Middle Ayes. By Thomas Wright. Loudon, 1802, p. 104. ^0 The Normans. [liX'T. thoy supplied the rest of tlie i\w\\ known world, their use of silks was one of the results of the Conquest ; and the increase of luxury in the article of dress extended to other matters. The intercourse with the Flemings tended greatly to increase this state of things. But if the desire of finer clothing, and the vice of aping French manners, were benefits to our nation, as some writers think, we have a friglitful set-off against this questionable good in the unquestionable harm brought on us in the reign of the "worthy peer", King Stephen, in the following account, which I take from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle : — "Anno 1137. This year King Stephen went over sea to Normandy, and he was received there because it was expected that he would be altogether like his uncle, and because he had gotten possession of his treasure, but this he distributed and scattered foolishly. King Henry had gathered together much gold and silver, yet did he no good for his soul's sake with the same. Wlien King Stephen came to England, he held an assembly at Oxford; and there he seized Eoger, Bishop of Salisbury, and Alexander, Bishop of Lincoln, and Eoger, the Chancellor, his nephew, and he kept them all in prison till they gave up their castles. When the traitors perceived that he was a mild man, and a soft, and a good, and that he did not enforce justice, they did all wonder. They had done homage to him, and sworn oaths, but they no faith kept. All became forsworn, and broke their allegiance, for every rich man built his castles, and defended them against him, and thoy filled the land full of castles. They greatly oppressed the wretched people by making them work at l] The Normans. 3 1 these castles, and when the castles were finished they filled them with devils and evil men. Then they took those whom they suspected to have any goods, by night and by day, seizing both men and women, and they put them in prison for their gold and silver, and tortured them with pains unspeakable, for never were any martyrs tormented as these were. They hung some up by their feet, and smoked them with foul smoke ; some by their thumbs, or by the head, and they hung Ijurning things on their feet. They put a knotted cord about their heads, and twisted it tiU it went into the brain. They put them into dungeons, wherein were adders and snakes and toads, and thus wore them out. Some they put into a crucet- house, that is, into a chest tliat was short and narrow, and not deep, and they put sharp stones in it, and crushed the man therein, so that they broke all his limbs. " There were fearful and grim things called sachcntcgcs in many of the castles, and whicli two or three men had enough to do to carry. The sachentege was made thus : it was fastened to a beam, having a sharp iron to go round a man's throat and neck, so that he might no ways sit, nor lie, nor sleep, but that he must bear all the iron. Many thousands they exhausted with hunger. I cannot and I may not tell of all the wounds and all the tortures that they inflicted upon the wretched men of this land ; and this state of things lasted the nineteen years that Stephen was king, and ever gi-ew worse and worse. They were continually levying an exaction from the towns, which they called Tenseric; and when tlie miserable inliabitants had no more to give, they plundered and burnt all the towns, so that thou mightest well walk a whole day's 32 The Nor ma US. fi,i:cT. journey nor ever shouklst tliou find a man seated in a tuwn, or its lands tilled. " Then was corn dear, and llesh and clicese and butter, for there was none in the land. Wretched men starved with hunger; some lived on alms who had been erewhile rich ; some lied the country ; never was there more misery, and never acted heathens worse than these. At length they spared neither church nor churchyard, but they took all that was valuable therein, and then burned the church and all together. Neither did they spare the lauds of bishops nor of priests, but they robbed the monks and the clergy, and every man plundered his neighbour as much as he could. If two or three men came riding to a town, all the township fled before them, and thought that they were robbers. The bishops and clergy were ever cursing them, but this to them was nothing, for they were all accursed, and forsworn, and reprobate. " The earth bare no corn ; you might as well have tilled the sea, for the land was all ruined by such deeds, and it was said openly that Christ and his saints slept. These things, and more than we can say, did we suffer during nineteen years because of our sins." The conquest of Britain by the English contrasts favourably with the conquest of England by the Normans. The first was an open war of extermination, in which the inhabitants of the soil were beaten in successive battles, forced into the mountains of the West as the English came from the East, and no show of mercy was extended to them, for the English pagans had none to show. In the case of the Normans, there was a wily pretext for the invasion ; false promises were made of governing the I.] The Nor mans. 33 people by their own laws, and then for more than a centurj^ there was nothing but rapine, murder, and foul play throughout the length and breadth of the land. The language of the Ancjlo-Scuxon Chronicle tells the story but too well. The Norman influence succeeded in raising up a barrier of hatred between the two people that remained until the Normans ceased to be, and the English flourished over their graves. The few trumpery alterations in dress and manner, to which allusion has been made, were too superficial to be regarded as exponents of the national character, which triumphed over the Norman element more emphatically and more lastingly than any other conquest ever made. This part of English history has been \vrongly read, for it was the English conquest of the Normans that was achieved. ^' The reformation of the monasteries was the chief work of the Conqueror in the way of improvement. Anglo-Saxon proclivities are not favourable to monastic rule ; but there is nothing to be brought against the English which can be compared for a moment with the conduct of the Normans. Monastic institutions are always a source of trouble and of more disorder than they pretend to cure, so that the improvement of the monasteries was, after all, no good thing for England. They sucked the life's blood out of the people in succeed- ing ages, and though emphatically the seats of learning at the time, the learning they fostered, being for the most part Latin, was of no use to us as a nation, and was indeed only intended by monks for monks to read. Queer things they are, too, some of these monkish Latin works in prose and poetry ! From tlic specimens preserved to III. D ^4 The Norviaus. \\.V.v\'. us, we may have cause for rcjoiriiij^ that so many hav*- perished ; wliile the Saxon works, on the other hand, present us with a strength, a vi<,'our, a flavour, an aroma, that will, I trust, prove invaluable by showing us whence our English freshness, heartiness, and hatred of vice come. \/ We are told that the Normans invented the feudal system. This again is a mistake. The system by which a lord holds his land of his king, returning certain service for tlie tenure, is Scandinavian all through. In Scandi- navia the king was elected, being one of the royal family, and the yarl held his yarldom on condition of furnishing a certain number of armed men, horses, and arms for his king's wars. This custom was brought over by the Angles in tlie fifth century, and in the later "Anglo-Saxon" times we find the contributions to the king's wars kept up and very constantly referred to. " An eorl's heriot, or her-geatu, ■i.e., contribution to the army, was four horses saddled and four horses not saddled, four helms, four byrnies (coats of mail), eight spears and shields, four swords, and two hundred mancuses of gold, which was twice a thane's heriot. To be an eorl was a dignity to which a thane might arrive, and even a ceorl."* All through the so-called Anglo-Saxon period we discover nobility dependent on landed property, and the distinction in the laws between men as to their rank is given in language referring to their land. Thus, a twy hyud-man is equivalent to a ceorl (churl), while a twelf hyud-man is of the highest aristocracy. No thane could have less than five hides of land, and it is especially stated • Sharon Turners ffiston/ of the A nglo-Sajonn. vol. iii. book 8, chap. 0. I.] The Normans. 35 in the laws that "although a ceorl had a helm, a suit of armour, and a gold hilted-sword, if he had no land, the laws declare that he must still remain a ceorl." Besides this, there is some evidence to show that the title of Thane went with the land. It was, in fact, the same thing as the Norman baron, the Thane-land being equivalent to the Norman barony. Thus we see that some of the very customs ascribed to the Normans were well known to our forefathers before the Normans ever went to Neustria. Much has been said about the improvements in the arts under the Normans, but with the exception of their architecture, which was founded on that of the Saxons, I am at a loss to know what great improvements we owe to them. The drawings in their manuscripts are not better than those in the English MSS. of the time, and the finish is greatly inferior to that in the English MSS. Certainly there is more animation in the so-called Anglo-Saxon drawings than in those of the Normans. They tell the story better, and appeal to the imagination more vividly. I am heterodox, I know, but any Englishman may judge for himself. The British Museum unfolds its countless treasures to the English people, and when they would hold counnune witli the mighty dead, let them, by the aid of the mystic manuscripts, call up the spirits of their forefathers, who will tell them that the improvements commonly attributed to the Normans were nothing more than the results of ordinary progress, and that these were in fact retarded, rather than accelerated, by the advent of the usurpers. d2 Lecture II. THE ENGLISH. LECTURE II. THE ENGLISH. Philologists have started various schemes for denotinj? the periods in the history of our English tongue. Some call the first period, from 450 to 1100, Anglo-Saxon ; the second period, from 1100 to 1230, Semi-Saxon; from 1230 to 1330, Early English; from 1330 to 1500, Middle English; from 1500 to 1600, Later English; and from 1600 to the present day. Modern English. But besides being somewhat arbitrary, this system is unpleasant. "What can be more barbarous than tlie expression Semi- Saxon ? Again, what authority have we for calling the language of Alfred Anglo-Saxon ? He calls it English (as I have had the pleasure already of pointing out), and he must be admitted to have been a better judge of what the name of his language was than we are who live a thousand years later. Dr. Morris, in his excellent Historic Outlines of English Accidence (which ought to be in the possession of every English-speaking individual who can read), very properly classifies these forms of the language as English of the first, second, third, fourtli, and fiftli periods, sub- dividing the fifth into English from 1460 to 1520, and from 1520 to the present day. For whatever names be given to the dinVrcnt phages 40 'lite English. [Li:CT. of its growth, lliu lan^ua^c in ([uustiou is uud remains En,L,'lisli after all. Writers born in England of Norman strain tried hard to make an Anglo-Norman language, but they tried in vain. We cannot make a language. Language grows and develops, decays and is restored, just like any other phenomenon taken cognizance of by physical science, as the great master of the Science of Language, Max Miiller, has shown. Now although this is perfectly true as far as volition is concerned, although it is a fact that no monarch, not even our own beloved Queen, could change a word in the language by an effort of will ; yet it is equally a fact that language is an exponent of the state of the people speak- ing it. Thus the foul ribaldry that wells out from the lips of the London rough is an exponent of the state of his mind, albeit he never invented a word of it. In the same great town of London you may hear the very rustle of angels' wings in the sweet sounds expressing the still sweeter thoughts of England's brightest womanhood. The English heart could never be a Norman heart, so its pulsations became vocal in sympathetic tones as English as itself. " Out of the fulness of the heart the mouth speaketh" is a dictum the truth of which becomes vividly apparent when viewed by the light of linguistic science. That the Normans were more conquered by the Franks than we were by the Normans is evidenced in the unerring test of language. They became Frenchmen, while we never did; and although the French language and manners were imposed by force upon us, they did not thrive. The very act of trying to force a language on a nation was itself sutticient to make the indigenous form II.] The English. 41 of speech more hearty, more vigorous than ever. Imagine the consequence of such a proceeding nowadays. Suppose, after the siege of London, the successful Esquimaux should order us to resign the language of Shakespeare, and adopt their unctuous tongue. Should we, could we talk it ? I trow not ! The very children in the street would resist it ; and though in public they might prattle a few words of the detested speech, liow they would talk English in private. English people are very prone, even now, to copy foreigners as a matter of cliic (as I borrow this word) ; but try to force them to use such expressions, or adopt such manners, as they assume for fashion's sake to please themselves, and see how the attempt would work. Just so was the history of our Normanization. The weakness and the folly of Edward the Confessor turned the heads of many English who sought, as far as the outer man was concerned at least, to become Frenchmen. When once the screw was applied to force them to become Frenchmen, the old English stubbornness was roused, and the English language flourished all the more strongly for tlie attempted repression. In the same way the customs of the Normans were rejected, and those of the English kept up. How the feeling against these tyrants showed itself may be seen by the English books of the twelfth century that have come down to us. Look at the Brvi, a history of England, in pure English poetry, by a monk named Layamon. This poem is a very long one, extending over 32,233 lines in one of the texts, and 24,567 in the second, or more recent, text of the early part of the thirteenth century. And yet in these 56,800 lines Sir 42 rite l-.u,^lisll. fl.l ( T. Fn-duriuk Madden detects about 00 words of French oripin in the combined texts, those in the earlier MS. beiup 50, and those in tlie second 40, in number. This is a very small proportion to the number of words in so lonp u work, especially when we remember that the back bone of the poem is due more to Romance than to English originals. The author himself declares his poem to be compiled from three sources ; namely, a book in English by Saint Bede ; another in Latin by Saint Austin ; and a third made by a French clerk named Wacc. As he has adopted hardly anything from Bede's Ecclesiastical History, the only English book he refers to, we have the majority of his sources decidedly Eomance. Under these circumstances the number of Romance words is remarkably small, and many of these are such as had been already used in the Anglo- Saj:on Chronicle. Now, if, as some people think, the whole language of England had been Normanized, there would have been no occasion for an English version of the Brut in the twelfth century. It was not written for people who could not read, therefore there must have been a reading public suf- ficient to justify at least two "editions" of Layamon's Brut. The truth is that the Brut is not a translation of Wace, but an English poem founded upon him, and employing a few expressions of the Frenchman's text, which were readily understood at the time, and either happened to suit the versification better, or were allowed to remain from carelessness on account of their being so well understood. In either case it is a strong argimient against the Normanists, to find a poem so grandlv English as the Brvi. in tht.' vc-rv zenith nf the II.] The English. 43 " Norman" times. The celebrated Danish scholar, Grund- tvig, says of the Brut : " tliat, tolerably well read as he is in the rhyming chronicles of his own country and of others, he has found Layamon's beyond comparison the most lofty and animated in its style, at every moment remiiiding the reader of tlie splendid phraseology of Saxon verse."* Sir Frederic Madden very strongly points out the error, commonly indulged in, of supposing that the changes in the English in the twelfth century were due to Norman influence. He says, in his preface to his delightful edition of the Brut : — " It will readily be admitted by those who have investi- gated the history of the English language, that the most obscure, and yet in many respects the most interesting, period of its progress, is that during which the Anglo- Saxon language, already, from the time of Edward the Confessor, predisposed to change, was at length broken up, and clothed with those new characteristics in which the germs of our modern tongue are found. That this important change was occasioned solely, or even in a large proportion, by the influence of the Norman invaders, is a proposition specious indeed, but wholly intenable ; and it has been argued, with every appearance of probability, that the same effects would have been produced had Williaru and his followers remained on their native soil. " Assuming this to be true, it will necessarily follow that such an organic change in the structure of a language must have been very gradual,t and effected by certain and * Preface to Layamon's Brut, liy Sir Frederic Madden, pp. xxiii, xxiv. London 1847. f Preface to Brut, page I. 44 'i Jt<^ Eiiglisli. [lp:ct. detcriuiuatc laws." In confirmation of this assertion, Sir Frederic refers, in a note, to Price's preface to Warton's U'lstory of EnrjUsh Poetry, who brings forward tlie fact " that every branch of the low German stock, from whence the Anglo-Saxon sprang, displays the same simplification in its grammar." This view of the question is confirmed also by Professor Latham, who adds, " that compared with the Icelandic, the Danish and Swedish do the same."* My learned friend Dr. Morris, the eminent philologist, says : " Before the Norman Conquest the English language showed a tendency to substitute an analytical for a syn- thetical structure, and probably, had there been no Norman invasion, English would have arrived at the same simplification of its grammar as nearly every other nation of the low German stock has done."f So much for the language. The tliov.glit of Layamon (a thing of much greater consequence) is English, and not French. There is no delight in indelicate allusions, no gloating over stories which would make even a modern divorce court blush for shame, no diabolical attempt to lower that respect for women which is a legacy to us from our stout Anglo-Saxon forefathers. In this important matter the Brut stands far above the Norman-French poems wliich have come down to us, and whose ribaldry aflected our poetry, not only all through the Middle Ages, but down to a later time. The Genius of Scandinavia, or, more broadly speaking, the Teutonic Genius, is opposed to the Romance Genius in every possible way; but the most emphatic distinction * Preface to Bnd^ page 1. t JJistoric Outlines of English Accidence, p. 49. 11.] The English. 45 between North and South is to be found in the difference of treatment of woman in these two grand and opposing branches of the Aryan family. In Scandinavia, woman was regarded as possessing a power, wanting in man, of direct communication with the gods. A conviction of the inadvisability of a given expe- dition uttered by a woman, woukl often be allowed to weigh against the combined wisdom of a whole conclave met in " Ting" or parliament ; therefore women were, to the immense surprise of the Eoman Tacitus, admitted to the councils of state. In religious matters there were ten priestesses to one priest, and the vala or prophetess was looked up to with an amount of awe and veneration as simple as it was genuine. On the testimony of Tacitus, vice and immorality were almost unknown, and were regarded with disgust and loathing by the stalwart race that overthrew Eome. To the fact that marriage was entered into at a comparatively late period, after the full development of the frame had been attained, and the character, as well as the nerve and muscle of the warrior had been duly proved and found to be of the sterling kind, Tacitus ascribes the gigantic height and indomitable courage of the whole German race. In fact, no Teutonic lady would accept the addresses of an un- tried warrior. The young hero with the white shield and no eagle's wings in his helmet had no chance with the fair sex when compared with the tried warrior. Wlien a grand expedition was planned, and the warriors of a little kingdom marched out, ascended their dragons and put to sea, they were accompanied by their priestesses, by the wives of the elder leaders, and. ^6 The pjiglisli. ("l,l( T. ill some cases, by their dau^flitors. In colonisnif^ a uew country they were forbidden all inter-raarriages with the race subdued, which was, as a rule, exterminated. When such an expedition left the fiords and bays of the " Nurse of Heroes" — the North — it was sometimes impossible for all the women and children to accompany the army, especially when the object of the expedition was an attack on some neighbouring petty king or yarl, in which case they were left behind. To guard and shield these dear ones was a holy office, and no one could be selected for it who had not given proofs of his prowess and skill. Thus to be left in charge of the women was no disgrace, inasmuch as the office could only be entrusted to a warrior, to a champion whose valour and probity were beyond the reach of any suspicion. Mother and wife were holy words, while the name for the collection of sacred myths which has come down to us as the " Edda", signifies the " Grandmother", a term of endearment combined with veneration which in itself offers a striking proof of the purity and respect felt for woman by our ancestors. Contrast this with the ribaldry of Norman romances, with the impurity of the tales and gestes of the trouveres and minstrels. We may give the songs of the Edda to any English maiden to study, but not the foul immoral- ities of the Norman school, which, unfortunately for us, crept into our literature, and thence spread like the plague all round. We should be thankful that in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries few of the English portion of the population could read. The Norman barons had their 1 1 . 1 The Rus^lisli. 47 minstrels, who sang these foul songs to them, and the Norman priors insisted on Latin as the only tongue worth reading amongst the monks. Yet still the plague-spot spread, and affected all classes ; so that in the fourteenth century, when the English had thrown off the Norman yoke, the shameful taint remained. It was, however, a disease rather than a part of the frame, and our hearty English nature has, I hope, with other disorders, been able to fling this away. That the few Normans surround- ing the king spoke only Norman-French, and hated and despised us, was a blessing to the nation ; firstly, because the generality of the people understood nothing of their ribaldry ; and secondly, because many good men and true, already despising such thoughts, would learn to hate them all the more for being couched in the detested tongue. So that, although the literature of England was not so scrupulously pure in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, it was nothing like such a mass of corruption as that of the Romance people. (. Another great source of oppression and wrong was the monastic system, which, by making lawful wedlock a thing opposed to religion, opened a door for all kinds of impropriety of conduct, and, as it were, at a blow hurled woman from her throne. What resulted from this ? The monasteries and convents of England were the hot-beds of vice and profligacy. So far did this reach, that all kinds of domestic evils were traceable, not only to the monks, but to the clergy. Of this, proof enough is furnished by the stories of the fourteenth century, of which many are found in Chaucer. But all this was un-English, and brought forth a " Bitter Cry" in the vision of —not the priest, 4^ The Ejiglish. [lIvCT. not tlic jiope, but the " ploughman," who criecl out against Ivomance devilishness, as presented under the forms of Nor- man priest and scoundrel monk. The, Vision of Piers Ploufjh- inan is the grandest land-mark in the history of our race ; while the successes of Edward the Third in his French wars have nothing more to do with it than to give the English a fresh cause of dislike to Itomance feeling and Romance influence. It has been said that the English nation is a mixture of the Saxon, the Briton, and the Norman. But modern research has shown that the Scandinavian principles were opposed to intermarriage with non-Odinic people. The English cut down the Britons, but did not marry them. They viewed tlie alliance with Vortigern with contempt, finding that Eowena had made a misalliance. But the hatred to the Normans was fiercer and more settled than any national feeling that has existed in any other nation. From all the MSS. we find that the Normans were kept, not at arm's length, but at spear's length, by the people. Their number was quite insignificant compared to the bulk of the population, so that even if they had intermarried with the English, as a rule the influence would have been but as a pail of water to the North Sea. But their inter- marriages were the exception, and not the rule. Their own over-bearing self-assimiption, and the national hatred of the Norman name, effectually barred sufficient inter- mixture to afl'ect the national characteristics which emphatically stamp us as English people. There are eight MSS. of Piei's Ploughman s Vision in the British Museum. But the one selected by Wright for his text is at Trinity College, Cambridge (marked B. 15, II.] The English. 49 17). Professor Skeat has, in his most exhaustive and invaluable edition, given two texts and a delightful account of the various MSS. and their respective merits. Every man, woman, and child ought to possess the two volumes of the Early English Text Society's publications which embrace this interesting addition to our knowledge of the footsteps of our forefathers. Few books were ever so popular, and its popularity continued, for it " was printed by the reformers, and received with so much favour, that no less than three editions are said to have been sold in one year. Another edition was printed at the beginning of the reign of Queen Elizabeth ; and it appears to have been much read in the latter part of the sixteenth century, and even at the beginning of the seventeenth."* The book is sterling English, and the poetry allitera- tive, throwing off what the Rejected Addresses calls " the gewgaw fetters of rhyme invented by the monks to enslave the people ";t and certainly alliterative verse speaks directly to the Teutonic heart, while there is generally a stiffness in rhyme which, unless treated by a great master, renders poetry too much of a jingle to be pleasant. Alliteration appeals to us at once in many proverbs, and in a still greater number of customary phrases, such as " rough and ready," " good as gold," " frank and free," and * See Introduction to The Vision and Creed of Piers Ploughman, edited from a contemporary manuscript by Thomas Wright, M.A., F.S.A. London : John Russell Smith, 1856. f Rejected Addresses ; or the new Theatrum Poetarujn, by James and Horace Smith. See The Hampshire Farmer's Address (William Cobbett). m. s 50 The E)iij:Hsli. [li:ct. the like. Siuh a line as " And foremost fighting fell," has great music for an English ear. The grand features of this great work are its vigorous assertion of English feeling, the strong recognition of the value of religion, and the utter refusal to submit to the dictation of a vicious and corrupt priesthood. The cry uttered is piteous, and shows what sufferings were still being endured by the lower and middle classes from the abominable Romance invention of monasticism, and the result of the popular feeling throughout the land was an attack on the monasteries. Wright, in his introduction to his edition of the poem, says : " During the successive reigns of the three first Edwards, the public mind in England was in a state of constant fermentation. On the one hand the monks, supported by the Popish church, had become an incubus upon the country. Their corruptness and immorality were notorious: the descriptions of their vices given in the satirical writings of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries exceeds even the bitterest calumnies of the age of Kabelais, or the reports of the Commissioners of Henry the Eighth. The populace, held in awe by the imposing appearance of the Eoman church, and by the religious belief which had been instilled into them from their in- fancy, were opposed to the monks and clergy by a multi- tude of personal griefs and jealousies ; these frequently led to open hostility, and in the chronicles of those days we read of the slaughter of monks and the burning of abbeys by the insurgent townspeople or peasantry. At the same time, while the monks in revenge treated the commons with contempt, there were numerous people II.] Tiic Euglisli. 5 1 wlio, under tlie name of Lollards, and other such appella- tions — led sometimes Ijy the love of mischief and disorder, but more frequently by religious enthusiasm — went abroad among the people, preaching not only against the corrup- tions of the monks, but against the most vital doctrines of the churcli of Eome, and, as might be expected, they found abundance of listeners."* The English people had lost neither heart nor tongue in the interval between William and Wycliffe, a period of three hundred years. The strong corn was growing that liad been trodden down, while the load of Norman vice acted like manure on a field, for which the ripened grain throve all the better, bursting through at last uncontaminated, nor only so, but healthier for the treatment undergone. The language retains the en in the infinitive mood, and the plurals of the present and imper- fect indicative. The charming opening runs thus: — "In a Somer Seson, when Soft was the Sonne. I Shoop me into Shroudes. As I a Sheep were. In Habite as an Heremite : un-Holy of werkes. Went Wide in this World : Wonders to here. Ac on a May Morwening. On Mal- verne hilles. Me be-Fel a Ferly Of Fairy e methought. I Was Wery for-Wandred and Wente me to reste. Under a Broad Bank by a Bournes side. And as I Lay and Lened And Loked on the watres, I Slombred into Slepyng It Sweyed so murye." The same linguistic forms may be seen in Wycliffe. I take at random the fifth verse of the first chapter of the Gospel of Mark as an example : — " And alle men of Jerusalem wenten out to liini, and al the cuntree of * Wright's P\ev6 Plumnan, Introduction, vii. e2 52 The En_(:Iish. [lecT. •luilcc, and weroii hapti/t^d of him in iIh- llooil of .ImiliUi knowleching her synnes." The parallel passage in Anglo-Saxon of the end of the tenth century is : — " And to him ferde call Judeisce rice and ealle Hierosolima-ware ; end waeron fram him gefullodf (111 Jordenes flode, hyra synna and-detende." A glance will show that it is the same stout form of speech with the addition of two foreign words, country and baptize, which do not interfere with the progress and life of the language, but stand forth, as it were, independent of the change, thus forming a pretty illus- tration of the state of the English majority with the Norman foreigners standing amidst them, but evidently not being of them. L Having shown you how the English mind stubbornly resisted Norman influence by reference to these precious documents, I shall now call your attention to what may be more popularly regarded as history. To us as English people it is a matter of the most perfect indifference whether William I died in Normandy or Northampton, whether "William Kufus was shot by ^^'alter Tyrrel or drank himself to death. The quarrels in Henry the First's time between himself and his brother Kobert can only disgust us as being a disgraceful feud brought on by disgraceful conduct, but of no interest to us except in showing us the utter unworthiness of the ruling race. The wars between his daughter and Stephen taught the English to curse the very name of Norman, but had no other effect upon our history. Henry the Second was the first Norman who showed any feeling for the English, and he manifested his good will by causing all the castles I I.J The English. 53 that had been built to be destroyed. That was a little bit of English history, and his conquest of Ireland was another, for which we have so many reasons to rejoice at the present day ! But the revolting quarrels between him and his sons, and their squabbles with one another, are matters of no consequence to us and our history. To me the greatest interest attaching to his reign is the political squib having reference to him, and describing him as an " old woman", thus — " There was an old woman, and she had three sons. Geoffry, Dicky, and John. Geoffry was hanged, and Johnny was drowned, While Dicky was lost and could never be found ; So there was an end of the old woman's sons, Geoffry, Dicky, and John." Historically, this squib gives an incorrect account of the fate of these worthies, but as a token of the respect paid to the reigning family it is invaluable. But if all these disgraceful "family rows" are not the History of England, what are we to do with Hume and Smollett, Keightly, Henry, and others ? Keep them as works of reference, by all means, but read the popular songs, even the Latin squibs of Walter jNIapes. Turn over the MSS. in the British Museum, and .study the manners and customs of our ancestors, portrayed there as ours have been by Leach in our day. And for the deeds of the English during this French usurpation, read the grand story of Hereward the Saxon and liis band of friends. As it may be new to many, I will give a short sketch nf thp life of this hero, taken from the arrnunt furnished 54 'f^l'c /'.iii^^/is/i. [I.ICCT. l>y Wrii^lit, to mIioiu wo are so niucli indebted for liopul.irisini,' iiicdiiivid iircliU'olo;,'y. "llereward was the son of Leofric, Karl of Chester and Mercia, and of that Lady Godiva whose touching act of self-negation will never be forgotten as long as the town of Coventry stands. His boyhood and youth were full of adventure and peril. He was dreaded by everybody for his strength and utter fearlessness. At last he became so turbulent that his father begged the Confessor to banish him the country. Willi the marvellous adventures of Hereward during his exile we have nothing to do at present, but many of them took place in the kingdom of Cornwall. He was mixed up with a most interesting love- story, relating to a princess of Cornwall and a prince of Ireland, in which Hereward performed wonders, and on the marriage of the lovers accompanied them to Ireland, whence he returned to England with certain other Englishmen, his companions in arms. It appears that in the midst of his successes he had heard of the foul chance that had befallen England. "He had married a beautiful and noble lady named Turfrida, whom he entrusted to the care of his tried friends, the two Siewards, and arriving one calm evening in 1068, he entered as a stranger the village of Brunne in Lincolnshire, the chief manor of the noble Earl Leofric. He was on foot, for the English preferred walking, as the Normans loved riding. He had one attendant with him, lightly armed like himself. He demanded hospitality of a Saxon knight, one of Leofric's retainers, who gave him a true English welcome. But the faces of the inmates of the house bore marks of sorrow and dejection, and, in II.] The English. 55 answer to his questions, they told him that their lord was dead, that a Norman liad been sent to usurp his pos- sessions, and that they were on the point of being delivered over to the rapacity of the invaders. In the course of conversation it came out that a younger brother of Hereward had been slain in defending his mother. The wretches had killed the boy, and fixed his head ignomini- ously above the doorway. " Hereward listened to all this in silence. No person had recognised him, and the family retired to rest, leaving the guest sleepless and thoughtful on his bed, until suddenly the distant sounds of music, and singing, and shouts of applause burst upon his ear. He sprang from his couch, roused a serving man of the house, and inquiring the meaning of the tumult, was informed that the Norman intruders were celebrating the entry of their lord into the patrimony of the youth whom they had murdered the previous day. " The stranger put on his arms, threw about him a large black cloak, which concealed him from observation, and with his companion, similarly dressed, proceeded tlirough the village to the place of boisterous revelry. There the first object which met his eyes was the ghastly head, which he took down, kissed, and wrapped in a cloth, and then the two adventurers placed themselves in the dark sliade within the doorway, whence they had a full view of the interior of the hall. "The Normans were scattered round a blazing fire most of them overcome with drunkenness, and lying down • with their heads in the laps of their women. In the midst of the hall a jonghv.r, or minstrel, was chaunting ribald 56 The English. [M.rT. Ron^s against llio Enf,'li.sli, ridiculiiif,' their inannors in coarse dances and ludicrous gestures. He was uttering some indecent jests against the youth whom they had slain, when one of the women, a native of Flanders, interrupted him, saying, ' Forget not that the boy has a brother named Hereward who is famed for his bravery throughout the country whence I come, if he were here, things would wear a different aspect to-morrow.' " The new lord of the house, indignant at this boldness of speech, raised his head, saying : — ' I know the man well, and his wicked deeds, which would have brought him to the gallows, had he not saved his neck by flight ; he dare not now appear anywhere this side of the Alps.' " The minstrel, or ribald, took the hint, and commenced a series of verses far from complimentary to Hereward, when his skill as an improvisatore was cut short, as indeed he was himself, by a sweeping blow from Hereward's sword, which took his head off. Now began a scene of slaughter in which the Normans, taken by surprise and almost unarmed, fell beneath the sword of Hereward, while his companion stood at the door and cut down all those who attempted to seek safety in flight. The heads of the Norman lord and fourteen of his knights were quickly raised over the doorway in place of that of the youth whom they had murdered. " When it became known that Hereward was back asaiu in arms, the Normans who had settled in that neighbour- hood fled in dismay, and the injured Saxons rose on every side, and hastened to join his banner. At first Hereward checked the zeal of his countrymen, but he selected a ."trong body of his kinsmen and faniilv adherents, and II.] The English. 57 with them he attacked and slew such of the Norman invaders as had been bold enough to remain on his paternal estates. "The Saxons always received knighthood from the clergy, and not from superior lords, so Hereward, who had not yet been knighted, went to his friend Brand, the Saxon Abbot of Peterborough, from whom he received the honour. He was attacked by a Norman baron who had been sent against him, but he killed the Norman, and completely routed his followers. He then dispersed his own, promising them to return at the end of a year, and acquainted them with a signal by which his arrival should be known. He then started for Flanders. "At the appointed time in 1069, Hereward returned, bringing with him his companions in arms, the two Sie wards and other Saxons who had joined him during his exile. Nor did he leave behind him his beautiful wife the Lady Turfrida. Finding that his paternal estates had, since his last visit, remained unoccupied by the Normans, who found it inconvenient to attempt the further Normanisation of the district, he proceeded direct to Brunne, where some of the bravest of his kinsmen and friends were on the look out for him. Then he made the signal which had been agreed on by setting fire to three villas on the highest part of Brunnes wold. He was soon at the head of a gallant band of Saxon outlaws, who crowded to him in the forest, to which he had retired to await the result of his signal. " The historian gives a long list of the English chiefs who joined the standard of the hero ; but they were not the only important people who took up arms against the 58 The Ew^lislt. [lkct. Normans, for many ecclesiastics were among the numbers of the i>atriots. Tlie monks of Ely, with their abbot Tlinrstan, fortified tliemselves in their almost inaccessible island among the wild fens, and were there joined by Arclibishop Stigand, Earls Morcar, Edwin, and Tosti, where they were besieged by the powerful Earl Warren, who was cleverly defeated by Hereward, with hardly any loss on his side, although the Normans were discomfited with great slaughter." At last King William himself was obliged to attempt the siege of Ely, and was twice defeated. On the last occasion, he had so narrow an escape that he fled with an arrow sticking into the rings of his chain mail, and that, too, in the hack of the armour. One Norman knight alone reached the Isle of Ely, and ho was immediately seized and carried to Hereward, who received him kindly, kept him a few days, showing him the resources of the place, and the mode of life of its defenders. He then gave him his liberty, on condition tliat he should give the king a faithful account of all he had seen. The knight strictly fulfilled his promise, and the Norman monarch was beginning to talk of offering terms to the English patriots. This he would have done but for tlie hatred borne by Earl Warren and another powerful baron, Ivo Taillebois, whose hatred of the F.nglish knew no bounds. To them the lengthened struggle was due, and the camp at Ely held out against William's armies for three years, when at last it was surprised through treachery. Hereward, however, escaped, and was soon at the head of another band of patriots, teaching the king that II.] The English. 59 the loss of Ely had not subdued the English spirit, and the war Avas continued until Hereward was induced to make peace with William and actually to go to court, where he was received with distinction. After this things went wrong with him, for he never could keep peace with the Norman barons, by whose treachery he was at last slain. Geoffrey Gaimar, wlio tells the story of his death observes : — " It was commonly supposed that had there been only four sucli men, the Normans would have been long ago driven out of the land." The succeeding Norman reigns, as given in our books of liistory, are rather histories of Normandy than of England, save where time is given to long accounts of the Crusades. But the Anglo-Norman writers, excepting the historians who wrote in Latin and not in Norman-French, and from whose works most of our histories of these evil days have been compiled, are forgotten and uncared for, while the Chronicle, the Brut, the English Lives of Saints, the numerous works existing in the English of the twelfth and thirteentli centuries, are more and more sought after as time wears on. In studying the literary remains of the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries, we are struck with the vigour and manliness of the style as well as with the interesting nature of tlie information conveyed. The songs and jiolitical Ijallads all througli tell a similar story to tJiat told by Hereward tlie Saxon, and our old frienc] lioliin Hood stands forward in the same light. Tlie English people, as a race, are remarkably amenable to law and order. At the present day one policeman, unarmed save with tlie authority given liini by the law, can do more in a crowd of English people than a Mhole troop 6o J lie /injr/is/i. [LLCT. of mounted and armed ^'endarmes in other countries, because vr love law and order — the v^c includin;^ the great unwashed. Therefore the great popularity of Kobin Hood does not arise from his being an outlaw, in the sense of a modern ticket-uf-leave man, but from his having stood up against Norman oppression, boldly breasting the usurpers, and doing wonders for the Jlnglish party. Ivoljin Hood had a special grudge against the abbots and the wealthy barons of his time. He was celebrated for taking from the rich and giving to the poor. Certainly, a dangerous principle to recognise now-a-days, when the Normans have passed away, and we are all English. But then, in the time of Eichard the First, when the English were smarting under the Norman lash, the conduct of such a man becomes heroic. A popular defender of the nation's rights, resigning the comforts of home to assert the manliness of the English race, despite its folly in admitting the Norman, is a figure in history that stands higher than any usurper of the whole fell brood. But our friend Dr. Dryasdust tells us that Robin Hood was a myth, that he never lived; that Little John. Scarlett, Friar Tuck, and the gentle Marian were inven- tions of the poet's brain at that time. I will accept the learned doctor's objection, admit the weak place in my argument, and grant (only for the sake of argument, how- ever) that my favourite heroes never were men of thewes and sinews. What were they then ? They were the voice of the English people crystallised into form as of living men. The wrongs were there to redress, and the ideal champion arose. T firmly believe in Robin Hood and his exercise with II.] The Eng-Iish. 6i the bow and arrow, which had not been so much culti- vated by the English as by the Normans. And that is the reason why the weapon retained its English name, while the bowman practised until he became an archer. If the bow had not been English, or not of English origin, we should have been talking of arcs and fietches, instead of bows and arrows. We became archers because at one time the Norman archers were better than our bowmen, and we worked hard until we excelled them ; and at Cressy and Poictiers beat the French with their own weapons. The Norman wasted villages for his pleasure. The New Forest in Hampshire was the work of the first Norman tyrant, and there his son fell. " Where his father bade the wild stag hide, By Tyrrel's arrow the Rufus died !" And every cloth yard shaft that whizzed through merry Sherwood was a Tyrrel's arrow against the Norman. The debt we owe to the Eobin Hood thought (whether he ever lived or not) is immense, and his history, whether poetic fiction or Dryasdust fact, is more the history of England than all the splendid little bits of fighting executed by Kichard the First in the Huly Land. When a man becomes a nation's darling, and Iiis name lives through ages as a bright and shining star, we may be sure that there is something in him that makes him a representative man ; that is to say, a formula that repre- sents some element in the people ; and the element repre- sented by Eobin Hood is a great fact, a greater fact than any Norman king. A king should be, and must be, the exponent of his C? The lifi^i^lis/i. [hV.c'V. people. He is not a simph; " [ myself, I," but lie is We. In other words, he is the people. Now the Norman kin^s were not the people, they were foes to keep them down ; therefore their history is not our history, while the tales of Hereward and Robin Hood are. Then arises the question, what is the history of our race, and where are we to learn it ? The answer is, that the history of our race is the tale told in successive ages of the struggle for the freedom of thought, combined with a love of order; and where we are to learn it is in such storehouses of the learning of past ages as the manuscript libraries in tlie British Museum, at the Bodleian at Oxford, at Corpus Christi at Cambridge, and others. In the British Museum we have manuscripts from the grand old Beowulf parchment, telling of tlie myths of our remote ancestors, down to the folio volume of Bishop Percy, containing his charming collection of songs and ballads. From these glorious sources you may draw the true history of the English race, in spite of the Norman historian who wrote a feudal roll to please his lord. In these interesting relics we trace the footsteps of our fore- fathers with inerring safety through the tangled maze that was spread for them. After mastering Beoivulf, the first thing to be done is to read the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, of which there are no less than four different manuscripts in the British Museum. Then refer to the exquisite photographs of the Bayeux tapestry, which are to be seen in the same depart- ment. By this means you will be able to trace the various events in the true history of the people until their slimiber under the sleepy Confessor. While this is done, other II.] TJie liiiglish. Gi documents may be consulted, in wliicli the representations of various articles of dress, furniture, arms, armour, eccle- siastical and other ornaments abound, which will enable you to fill in the outline of tlie Chronicle with the colours of nature. Take Beowulf for the description of an early English house, then study tlie relics in the Anglo-Saxon room, till, following the footsteps of your forefathers, you hear the clang of their chain mail on the gay pavement, and see them rise from the tomb in their habits as they lived. When you have exhausted the tapestry and its teach- ings, turn to Alfric's version of Genesis in the Cotton MS. marked Claudius B. iv, where you will see, as a representa- tion of Abraham's feast on the birth of his child, one of the best pictures of an early English table that can well be imagined. There you learn that they had spotless table-cloths, dainty knives and spoons, wonderful bread baskets of silver, and various drinking vessels. You will see .how the cooks present the roasted meat on the spit, and how the utensils in the Anglo-Saxon Eoom of the British Museum were used. These English things are not done away with and abrogated by the visit of the Normans, and the manuscripts will teach us that the fashions which they introduced were, after all, only modi- fications of the originals on which the English dress and fashions were founded, and passed away with them like an ugly dream. The older forms returned in greater vigour, like the language ; and we find our ancestors emerging from the Norman mist with their ancient vigour, and preserving even their dress and customs. In a manuscript of the fourteenth century in the British Museum (Additional 64 The F.ui^lish. [LECT. MS. No. 12,228), we have a dinner table very like that of the geniune early English times. Only one side of the table is occupied by the guests, so that the officiating domestics may have room to act. There is another MS. (Reg. 2, P). vii), where some ladies are represented with the wimple and over-slop of the eighth century, though the MS. is of the fourteenth. There are other ladies in the same MS. similarly dressed ; in fact, at first sight, we might take them all for very early Anglo-Saxons. The evidence of the manuscripts in the national treasury, the British Museum, tends to show that the Norman occupation of the English throne did not Normanise the English, that the change in the language has been independent of Norman influence, that our manners and customs remained English, although the Normans, being more addicted to ^vriting and drawing than we, represented Normans rather than English persons in their pictures and lays, so that the history of the English people is not to be sought for in their limnings or verse. The two nations never mixed, but lived on in parallel lines until the Normans died out, or were swamped by the majority of the inhabitants of England being English. I have shown in other places that the observances of certain customs, the Yuletide festival, Easter, the Ember week. Ash Wednesday, the names of our days, the peculiar and interesting use made of the mistletoe, the veneration paid to the holly, and more such usages generally referred to Christian influences, are all pagan English, and are as strong in us now as they were two thousand years ago, although tliey have been baptized with Christian names ir.] The English. 65 and so received into the church. The manuscripts and other valuable traces of the lives of our forefathers will establish the fact that other things more essential to the English character were preserved, like the creatures in the ark, in spite of the flood which threatened extinction to us as a nation. We have been from the beginning bitter foes to the Eomance element in the world. We and our kindred Goths became the apostles of freedom, and hurled Imperial Kome to the dust. When she sent missionaries to England she made converts not conquests. We were the first of her converts not previously subdued by the sword. And we took her dicta cmii grano sails ; we refused to admit tlie doctrine of transubstantiation, even in the earliest times. The celebrated Homily of iElfric insists upon the symbolic, rather than the material, value of the sacrament, and here joins issue with Eome at once. This very homily was reproduced, and twice issued from the press between 1566 and 1570, with a view to prove that the doctrine then established was not an innovation but a revival of the doctrine maintained by the Church in England Ijcfore the time of tlie Norman Conquest. Thus the very Iveformatiou itself was as English a piece of history as any event recorded in Sharon 'I'urui'r. The hatred of nioiiasticisni lasted as long as there were any monks to hate, and descriptions of their vices fill our literature. Skelton indulges his vigorous satire on the subject, and his rattling verses are as bitter against the mal-practices of churchmen as tlie alliterative lines of the Plowman. For the Englishman loves to think fur himself III. F 66 Tlif Euglish. [lect. on ;ill matters, wlictlior i)olilic!il or leli^'iou.s ; he is unwilling' to lu' iliclated to, tliou^h he is ready to be tau<;ht ; and as the coercive measures of the Normans led his mind to Hy back, like a strong spring released, to his more ancient manners and customs, so the attempt to coerce his religious belief sent him at a leap l^ack to tlie tenth century for support of his own opinion. He was as much an Englishman in tlie sixteenth century as he had been in the sixth. But, unhappily, the vices of the Normans were not so easily got rid of, and they certainly have done us harm, tliouLjh they liave not made Normans of us. It is not so bad as that. And as for the remark tliat the number of Latin and Frencli words in English prove that the language is mixed, IMax Miiller has shown that the mere addition in any given form of speech, of some words to its vocabulary, does not change either tlie structure or tlie genius of the language at all. The greater number of Latin words which we use have crept in since the beginning of the sixteenth century, when it was a fad among the learned to write in Latin, a custom still perceptible in our medical prescriptions. As we know more we shall get wiser, and throw these technical terms away; for people are finding out that 'the English language is something to be proud of, and something to know, and suits but ill with the borrowed trumpery of the south, which has hidden us as it were in a fog, without actually destroying us. " In lo40 boys ceased to learn their Latin through the metlium of French, and in 1362 (the 3(3th year of Edward III) it was directed by Act of Parliament that all plead- n.] The English. Gy iiigs in the law courts should hencefurtli l)e conducted in English, because, it is stated in the preamble to the Act, French was become much unknown in the realm."* A colleague of mine at Moscow pointed out to me a passage in Chaucer, who, writing a little later on, expresses his regret at being unable to write in French, " because he was an Englishman". The same delightful poet tells us, when speaking of the Prioress, " And Frenche she spake f ul fayer and fetisly, After the scole of Stratford atte Bowe. For French of Paris was to her unknowe." I do not think that the best London boarding-school of the nineteenth century could have done better than that 1 His knight is a perfect Englishman, and all his characters in that most refreshing pilgrimage are as English as though they had been sketched by Alfred himself or Thackeray. So the boasted Norman inliuence dwindles down to the effect produced on the minds of a certain corrupt clique that supported a foreign court, whose progi-ess towards decay was no part of the history of England. So early as the fourteenth century we find it passed awa}". Although the models and sources of the tales, both of Chaucer and Cower, are of the liomance stock, the treat- ment and the sentiment are perfectly English. The fifteenth century cleared away whatever might have lingered as un-English in the social atmosphere ; the French wars nuide us more anti-Gallican than ever ; while the Wars of the Ifoses, though forming a sharp remedy to a * Morris's JJisiuiic Outlines oj' English Accaleno.,, p. 31. F 2 68 The English. [lect. j^reat evil, brought iiit'ii's minds to the consideration of their own national wants, and led to tiie downfall of the incongruous system of the great baronial houses. After this storm we find the English mind as strong as ever. We get a Skelton, a More, a Wyatt, and a Surrey, all sterling English writers ; and when the Reformation comes, the English authorities of the church in the ninth century are made to support the new Church of England in the sixteenth. English throughout, from the far back home in Angeln to the pleasant homes of England of to-day, we read the nation's history in its love of simple, trusting faith, quiet strong sense, a solemn honour for the holy name of woman, and a deference to the abstract power of the law. Our mythology has been suppressed by the learned Latinists, and the impure systems of Greece and Eome substituted for it. liut have they crushed it ? The names of our week days, of most of our festivals — Yule, Eostra, Ash Wednesday, the Ember week. Lent, the cock- worship on Shrove Tuesday — are answers to this question. Even the very paganism of our English sires lives on in half-Christian dress. Our jury is Scandinavian English, and neither lioman nor Erench. Our so-called Saxon laws live on in many legal practices ; our representative assembly of the estates of the realm is almost without change, the same thing that it was even before the advent of Christianity, consisting now, as it did then, of king, lords, and freemen. We, of all the nations of Europe, retain the Scandinanan Yarl in our Earl ; and finally, we alone have maintained the old Scandinavian riglit for each man to speak his II.] The Englisli. 69 mind openly and freely, whether the assembly be called parliament or tincj. We may see by the very faint sketch thus crudely given, that the history of England, like all history, like individual life, is, as the Swedish poet Tegndr says, " from the very first a conflict — the fiercest battle is its youth." V Our battle has been that of the most pure of the Teutonic stock against the vicious tendencies of the Eomance school. We have never been conquered, but we have swallowed up and thoroughly got rid of the supposed conquerors of the race ; and now that we are at last beginning to learn English, we shall discover by its means thaf we are as uncompromisingly English now as we were in A.D. 450. i/ \ Lecture III. THE MONK. LECTURE III. THE MONK. Few -works on the history of our race devote sufficient space to the consideration of the influence for good or ill that has been exercised by the clergy, including under that term both the actual priesthood and the less prominent, though not less active, recluses known to us as monks. But, notwithstanding the neglect with which they have been treated by historians, they have been important agents in producing most of the chief events of history, especially in what are called the dark ages, when the power of the Church of Rome was paramount in Europe. The influence of the Church, however, was gradual, althougli mighty. There was no sudden rupture, no breaking down of firmly established barriers in the life and heart of the people. The course of the Church was far more sure anil certain. In England her doctrines were received with extreme caution, and after mature deliberation. The early fathers were at first scared from their mission. St. Augustine actually turned back, and demanded of Pope Gregory " that they should not ho compelled to undertake so dangerous, toilsome, and un- certain a journey. The Pope, in reply, sent them a hortatory epistle, persuading them to proceed in the work 74 The Monk. [lkct. of the T^iviiic word, uiid rely on the assistance of the Aliiii-lity."* Anioiif];st the superstitions of the Scandinavian and, more broadly speakinf^, Teutonic paganism, was the belief that the spells of witchcraft were dissolved by water; hence the practice of fighting duels on islands, so that should either coniliatant be supernaturally protected by amulet or spell, the charm should be broken by the surrounding water. This belief was prevalent in the North of England even in our own day. Burns, in Tarn d Shanter, apostrophising " Meg", the spirited mare bestrode by the hero, says : — " Now do thy speedy utmost, Meg, And gain the key-stane o' the brigg ! There at them thou thy tail may toss, A running stream they dare-na cross !" They being the witches from whom Tam is flying. This feeling is genuinely pagan, and was the cause for which the pagan king of Kent, Ethelbert, received the fathers in the island of Thanet, where they were com- manded to remain until he should have decided what to do with them. It has been supposed, on excellent grounds, that Bertha, the wife of this king of Kent, had already softened his heart and prepared him to receive this mission kindly, for she was a Frank and a Christian. The fathers were treated with great humanity, and Bede says : " When he (Augustine") had sat down, pursuant to the king's commands, and preached to him and his attendants tliere present the word of life, the king answered thus: 'Your words and promises are very fair, but as * Bede's Ecclesiastical Hisionj. chap, xxiii. III.] The Monk. 75 they are new to us, and of uncertain import, I cannot approve of them so far as to forsake that which I have followed with the whole English nation. But because you are come from far into my kingdom, and, as I con- ceive, are desirous to impart to us those things which ye believe to be true, and most beneficial, we will not molest you, but give you favourable entertainment, and take care to supply you with your necessary sustenance ; nor do we forbid you to preach and gain as many as ye can to your religion.' Accordingly, he permitted them to reside in his city of Canterbury, which was the metropolis of all his dominions, and, pursuant to his promise, besides allowing them sustenance, did not refuse them liberty to preach." Canterbury thus became the centre of Christian learn- ing, as it was ofticially the centre of English government, for the pagan king Ethelbert was Bretwalder, or supreme king of the English. Augustine was not consecrated as Archbishop of London or of Canterbury, but by the general title of the Bishop of the English {Anglorum Episcoipiis), that he might be at liberty to fix his seat in whatever part of the country he pleased. Bede informs us, that " there was, on the east side of the city, a church dedicated to the honour of St. Martin, built whilst the Romans were still in tlic island, wlierein the Queen Bertha who, as has been said before, was a Christian, used to pray. In this they first began to meet, to sing, to pray, to say mass, to preach, and to baptise, till the king, being converted to tlie faith, allowed tliem to preach openly, and build or repair churches in all places."* * Ecclesiastirol H'n'tnr}/. Pook I, chap. xxvi. "J^ The Monk. [lkct. Ill cliaptcr xxxiii of the first book of Bede's Ecclesias- tical Jhsfori/, the venerable historian speaks as follows : — " Augustine, having his episcopal see granted him in the royal city, as has been said, and being supported by the king, recovered therein a church, which he was informed had been built by the ancient Roman Christians, and consecrated it in the name of our holy Saviour, God and Lord, Jesus Christ, and there established a residence for himself and his successors. He also built a monaster)' not far from the city to the eastward, in which, by his advice, Ethelbei-t erected from the foundation the church of the blessed apostles, Peter and Paul, and enriched it with several donations ; wherein the bodies of the same Augustine and of all the Bisliops of Canterbury, and of the Kings of Kent, might be buried. However, Augustine himself did not consecrate that church, but Laurentius, his successor. " The first abbot of that monastery was the priest Peter, who, being sent ambassador to France, was drowned in a bay of the sea which is called Amfleat, and privately buried by the inhabitants of the place ; but Almighty God, to show how deserving a man he was, caused a light to be seen over his grave every night, till the neighbours who saw it, perceiving that he had been a holy man that was buried there, inquiring who and from whence he was, carried away the body and interred it in the church in the city of Boulogne, with the honour due to so great a pei*son." The church built by Augustine is now the Cathedral Cliuroh at ("anterburv; hut the present structure, altliougli ancient, is of a date long subsequent to the age of St. III.] TJie Monk. yy Augustiue. The monastery, not far from tlie city, was subsequently called St. Augustine's Abbey. Such is the first account which I am able to give you of the erection of monasteries in England. As such, I quote it, because it notices that the first abbot was a priest, from which doubtless the custom descended that the abbots were priests, the monks being regarded as laymen, although under vows of holy life. For as soon as the love of Christianity spread, men were found who, for the sake of tlie faith, were willing to renounce their worldly position and retire to some spot where they could devote themselves entirely to the con- templation of spiritual matters. Of these many collected into societies cut off from the world, to pass their lives in devotion ; others lived alone, serving God, as they tliought, by holding no communion with His creatures. These persons, not having the regular education fitting them for the priestly office, and merely retiring from this world's worry to gain some idea of the peace of the next, were called monks, from the Low Latin hionachus, derived from the Greek monacJios, from monos, alone. Of these there were three special classes, whicli may be ranged in the following order: — Ccnohitcs, those wlio lived in common in a monastery under a single ruler ; secondly, Anchorets, or Eremites, or such as lived in solitude ; and thirdly, Sardbaitce, or monks living under a relaxed rule, and wandering about in different places, supporting them- selves on alms bestowed on them for their sanctity. The state of society in pagan England at the tinu' of the advent of the good fatlier Augustine was such as \.o make it very difficult for men not endowed with great woakh to 78 The Monk. [m/t. sliuly ill all. 'I'lic knnwlcdL;!', of Lin- Ijiiiifs and tlifir teiicliin^ had Ix'coinc alreudy, since the older time, less and less spread, and was indeed confined to the priesthood, the military chiefs, and the kings. For them it wa.s necessary to decipher the messages conveyed by heralds on the rune-staff, to carve runes on the breast at the approach of death in peace, and to be able to read the inscriptions on the Hauta-stones or monuments erected to the dead chiefs of their race. The country was rich in cause of discord ; for although the octarchy was merging more and more into monarchy, there were yet remains of the old clan feel- inji in each of the kingdoms. There was a Bretwalder who was a sort of emperor, but there were still kings below him. There was no king of England in our modern sense of the term, and the only occupation for a gentleman was war. Under such circumstances it was a wholesome institu- tion that enabled a man, endowed with the capability of using his brain more than his fist, to think rather than to act. And to the institution of such orders of jNIonks we owe in fact all that we possess of the mighty Hterature of the past, and of the history of our own forefathers. Strange stories are told us of the experiences of the early recluses, who were for the most part of the order of St. Benedict. They claimed to have been tempted by the arch-fiend himself, to have wrestled with him, and over- come the most terrible temptations. And these brave solitaries, who, alone and single-handed, dared contests, in the reality of which they in many eases certainly believed themselves, became the worthy successoi's, in a new cause, of the champions of Odin, who fought with and subdued III.] The Monk. 79 the weird monsters that in the nhl time threatened supernatural dangers from flood and tiekl and fell. As a very fair example of this class of literature, and one highly illustrative of the thought of the early Chris- tian period with us, and the ideas inspiring a hermit, I shall give you a very brief account (jf the doings of the hermit of Crowland, St. Guthlac. The account of this man's life was originally written in Latin, but there are two Anglo-Saxon versions of the story. The Latin text is by a man named Felix, and this is all we know of him. Of the English or Anglo-Saxon versions, one, the elder, is in prose, and the other, probably founded upon it, is in verse. The Latin text could not have been written later than 749, because in that year the king to whom it was dedicated died. Felix was never acquainted with (nithlac personally ; he drew his materials for the biography from others who had known him ; and this tlirows the age of the actual hermit himself still farther back. The coming of St. Augustine was in r)97, so that between the advent of Christianity and the latest possible date for the work of Felix there would be an interval of 152 years; and as it was some time after the first appearance of Augustine, and some time before 749, we may not be far wrong in ascribing the events of the story to the end of the se\'enth century. The poetic narrative is very vigorous, and reminds one of the old Beowulf style of spirited verse. It is to be found in the Codcf Eroninms, of which the late eminent Saxonist, Benjamin Thorpe, has I'unii.shed us with nn ex- cellent edition, at the expense of the Society of Anliiiuaries. The prose text which I quote forms part of the Cottonian 8o The Monk. \\Ari. I^ilii-iii V iHiw ill lliu I'.iilish Musciuii. It will be Imiiul in tin; voluuie iiiiivkcd " Vespasian \). xxi." It was probably written abont the time of the Conquest. The narrative commences with an extraordinary account of the birth of the hero, and then notices that the name (hithlac, coming to him iVom the family to which he be- longed, seems no less miraculous than the almost Oriental wonders attending his birth, signifying one who acts as a sacrihce in (or for) war. The writer insists specially on this, giving the Latin translation of the name {belli munus), as if to make it more evident. When arrived at man's estate he suddenly burned to distinguish himself after the manner of the heroes of old, collecting a numerous fol- lowing, and commencing a regular raid on such as were his enemies — burning, slaying, destroying, and so forth, with I'xtreme vigour. " Then was he on a sudden inwardly admonished of Ciod, and taught that he should thus give command : Of all things which he had so taken he bade give back the third part to those from whom he had taken it. It was about nine years that he was thus engaged in hostile raids, the bles.sed Guthlac, and he thus wandered amidst the tumult of this present world. It happened one night, when he had come from an expedition, and he rested his weary limbs, and thought over many things in his mind, that he was suddenly inspired with divine awe, and his heart within was filled with spiritual love ; and when he awoke he thought on the old kings who were of yore, who, thinking on miserable ileath and the wretched end of sinful life, forsook this world and the gi'eat wealth which they once possessed, he saw all of a sudden vanish ; and he saw his own lite daily hasten and hurry to an end, III.] The Monk. 8i Tlieii was he suddenly so excited inwardly with godly fear that he vowed to God, if He would spare him till the mor- row, that he would be his servant. When the darkness of the night was gone, and it was day, he arose and signed himself with the mark of Christ's rood. Then bade he his companions that they should find them another captain and leader of their company, and he confessed to them and said that he would be Christ's servant. When his com- panions heard these words, they were greatly astonished, and much alarmed for the words which they had heard/' They tried in vain to persuade him to alter his determi- nation. He received the mystical tonsure, and lived two years in preparation for the holy warfare, devoting himself to letters and to the acquirement of the habit of singing the Canticles, etc. Hearing of the lives of the learned anchorites of yore, his heart was inwardly inspired with the love of God to long for the M'ilderness, and he begged leave to depart thither. " Now there is in Britain a fen of immense size which begins from the river Granta, not far from the city Gran- chester. There are immense marshes, now a black pool of water, now foul running streams, and also many islands, and reeds, and hillocks, and thickets, and with manifold windings, wide and long, it continues up to the North Sea." Guthlac, hearing that this place was the abode of devils, and was so full of every kind of supernatural horror that no man could endure it, resolved to go thither. He em- barked with a guide in a vessel, and went througli the fens till they came to a spot which is called Crowlaud, situated in the waste of the aforesaid fen, very obscure, and very 111. a, 82 The Monk. [lect. few iiKMi knew of it except the one wlio showed it him ; as no man could inhabit it before the holy man Guthlac came thither, on account of the dwelling of the accursed spirits there. Then the mode of life adopted by this hermit is very minutely dwelt upon. It is said that in this island there was a great mound raised upon the earth . " On the other side of this mound a place was dug, as it were a great water-cistern. Over this cistern the blessed man Guthlac built himself a house at the beginning, as soon as he settled in tlie hermit station." He decided on wearing neither woollen nor linen garments, but to use a clothing of skins. The first manifestation that he appeared to have had was a visit from the arch-fiend himself, who infused certain horrid doubts into the hermit's mind. But here he was relieved by the personal intervention of St. Bartholomew, who removed the doubts and the tormentor at the same time. " Then two devils came to see him, sliding down from the air, and they spoke plainly to him," the aim of their talk being to show that man has no right to fast longer than seven days. Of course, the saint knew better, and sent these spirits about their business very soon. "But some days after this he was assailed by great hosts of the accursed spirits, and they filled all the house with their coming ; and they poured in on every side, from above and from beneath, and everywhere. They were in countenance horrible, and they had great heads, and long necks, and lean visages ; they were filthy and squalid in their beards ; and they had rough ears, and distorted faces, and fierce eyes and foul mouths ; and their teeth were like horses' tusks ; and their throats were filled with fiame, and they III.] The Monk. 83 were grating in their voice : tliey had crooked shanks, and knees big and great behind, and distorted toes, and shrieked hoarsely with their voices ; and tliey came with such im- moderate noises and immense horror, that it seemed to him that all between heaven and earth resounded with their dreadful cries. Without delay, when they were come into the house, they soon bound the holy man in all his limbs, and they pulled and led him out of the cottage, and brought him to the black fen, and threw and sunk him in the muddy waters. After this they brought him into tlie wild places of the wilderness, among the dense thickets of brambles, that all his body was torn. After that, the cursed spirits took him and beat him with iron whips, and after that they brought him on their creaking wings amidst the cold regions of the air. AVheii he was at tliis height in the air he saw all tlie north part of heaven as it were sur- rounded by the blackest clouds of intense darkness. Then he saw suddenly an immense host of cursed spirits come towards him ; and they soon gathered together, and forth- with all led the holy man to the black places of torment and brought him t(,) hell's door. When he saw tlie foul- ness of the smoke and the burning liames, and the horror of the black abyss, he quickly forgot all the torments and the punishments which he had before suffered and endured from tlie accursed spirits. Then the accursed spirits rushed in and tumbled among tlie horrible flames, and there they tormented with manifold punishments the souls of unrighteous men. When the blessed CJuthlac saw the greatness of the punishments, he was much terriiied for dread of them. Then cried the accursed .spirits witli a great voice, and thus spake: Power is given unto us to g2 84 The Monk. [lecT. tlirust thee into the torments of this abyss, and here is the fire which thou thyself didst kindle within thee, and for thy sins and crimes liell's door openeth before thee." They then motioned as though they would thrust him in, when again St. Bartholomew descends as a dcus ex machind, and gets him out of the hobble. He is then led back to his liovel again. Here he observes two devils weeping and wailing because their power is all broken through the saint. But certainly the queerest part in this narrative is the sixth chapter. The others, of which I have given an abstract, tell us something of the ways, manners, and customs of the inhabitants, of the dwellers in the region of evil spirits, but in the sixth chapter we learn what their language is. The heading of the chapter is "How the Devils spoke British." We are informed that the saint was awakened from his sleep at cock-crow by a great host of the accursed spirits talking together, and as he had been a prisoner among that people, he knew the British language in which the devils conversed. They entered his house, hung him up on the points of their spears, and so forth. But he overcame them by singing a psalm in Latin, which seemed too much for them, for they departed like smoke at the first verse. After this he is attacked by demons, in the form of herds of wild beasts of all kinds. Of course he puts them to flight, and becomes celebrated for having driven away the devils from Crowland, — at all events, I am told, in confirmation of this part of the story, that none have been seen there since. The death of the saint in the odour of sanctity, the visits paid to him by English kings, abbots, bishops, and other important people, together with his wonderful III.] The Monk. 85 prescience and insight into other people's affairs, fill up the rest of the little volume. There is a series of remarkable medallions in the British Museum illustrating the legend, Thorpe's edition of the prose text is still occasionally to be met with. It is fur- nished with a translation into modern English on the opposite page. This may be taken as a fair example of a hermit's life, or, rather, of what was believed concerning these " holy men". The lives of the saints form an interesting portion of the literature of the middle ages, and it does not require any very great amount of research to show the student that the hermit-monk of the Christian times was nothing more than the pagan hero, with surroundings very slightly differing from those of his prototype. His combats with supernatural enemies are the same in both cases ; and as the pagan element may be traced back from jNIilton through Csedmon to tlie remote Scandinavian past, so do we find the spirit of Beowulf in many a monkish legend that would fain be Christian if it could ; and in the mystic symbolisation so loved by the mediaeval fathers, we have the same spirit that prompted the Scandina-sdan Vala to unfold the hidden mysteries conveyed, and at the same time concealed, in tlie weird stories of the Edda. As long as the hermit kept to his cell, and amused the country people with the stories of his fights, no great luirm was done. It was indeed far better that the unlettered classes should have an irrational belief in tlie existence of anotlier world, than that tliev shouM 86 The Monk. [lect. absolutely deny the existence of anything beyond this world of mud and stone. Better the blind belief in something superior to self, than the overweening rejection of everything which we cannot understand. Better the blind confidence in such a monk as our friend of Crowland, than in the agnosticism of the present day. Unfortunately, however, this was not the order of history. Monasteries were founded, and the superior rulers of these institutions were priests of high rank. The abbot was a man of distinction, ex officio holding military rank in many cases, and actually bound, notwithstanding his priestly office, to serve in his king's wars. Thus, in the struggles of the English against the Conqueror, we read of certain abbots who lent their aid, coming in person, armed, to assist Hereward at Ely. Later on tliis becomes still more remarkable. But the beneficent influence of abbot, priest, or monk has always been that which has been exercised in the sphere of life to which they more particularly belong. To afford men of quiet and studious habits an opportunity of pursuing their studies and of cultivating religious thoughts, in times when the sword was better understood than the pen, was decidedly a good thing, and we are indebted to such institutions for the records of what are called the Dark Ages. In everything which the early English took up they were thoroughly in earnest, and they " went in" for Christianity with immense force of will, although tlie strong spirit of conservatism led them still to preserve the festivals of the older time, which indeed are observed by us at the present day. They built monasteries, and III.] The Monk. 87 there was a large proportion of the population at the time of the Norman usurpation rendered non-combatant by monastic vows. Among those to whom we owe a vast debt of gratitude for good work quietly and well done, the name of the venerable Bede stands proudly foremost ; and as he was an Englishman, you will very likely know very little about him. Bede was born in the year of our Lord 673, at Wearmouth, in the very year when the most famous of all our Church councils was held at Hertford, for the purpose of enforcing certain general regulations of the Church. At Wearmouth were two monasteries, and another near them at the village of Jarrow. In liis own short autobiography he tells us that he was placed, at the age of seven years, under the care of Abbot Benedict, in the abbey of Wearmouth, that of Jarrow not being then built ; but, when this second establishment was founded, Bede appears to have gone thitlier under Ceolfrid, its first abbot, and to have resided there for the remainder of his life. The founder of this abbey, a certain Benedict Biscop, was a man of extraordinary piety and singular learning. He was a nol)leman by birtli, and yet he was unwearied in the pursuit of knowledge, and in ameliorating the con- dition of his country. It was he who first brouglit masons and glaziers with liim to serve in the noble buildings which he caused to be erected. He went to Rome, and became iuliinatc with Bope Agatl k 1 : and hearing tlici-e llie Boniau iiiL'tliod of dianting, introduced the Koman liturgy, for l)efore liis time the Ciallican liturgy had bt'cn used in this island. He brought with him also the most valuable 88 The Monk. [llct. collection of l)ooks, relics, and works of art that could be procured for money. Thus, Bede was extremely fortunate in having the means of gratifying his taste and thirst for learning. He was well looked after, and was evidently popular with the monks; and although the rule of the order gave little time for any special or separate study out of the ordinary course, he seems to have found time to get through an immense amount of work. His own words on this interesting subject are : " All my life I spent in that same monastery, giving my whole attention to the study of the Holy Scriptures, and in the intervals between the hours of regular discipline and the duties of singing in the church, I always took pleasure in learning, or teaching, or writing something." He was admitted to Holy Orders at the early age of nineteen, which was perfectly exceptional at that time, when the earliest age for admission was twenty-five. In his thirtieth year he was made a priest, and then his duties, of course, prevented him from engaging as mucli as he would desire in his literary work. He died on Ascension Day, the 26th May 735. His works are very numerous. They were first printed in a collected form at Paris, in 1544 and 1545, and reprinted in 1554 in six volumes folio. These editions are now extremely rare. The first three volumes of the former, containing the theological writings, are in the British Museum. Another edition was printed at Basle in 1563, in eight volumes. This is much more common. Xo writer has been so much beloved and appreciated. His works were, for the most part, written in Latin ; but the £cchsias(ical History was translated into English by III.] The Afonk. 89 Alfred, and his treatise, Dc Natural Bemm, also exists in an English form. Writers at the present day are largely indeljted to the Ecclesiastical History, wliich, indeed, is the chief text-book for the events of the period through which Bede lived. As a specimen of the clearness of his grasp of the subject, I select at haphazard a passage from the eighth chapter of the third book of this interesting work. " In the year of our Lord 640, King Eadbald, King of Kent, departed this life, and left his kingdom to his son Earconbert, which he most nobly governed twenty-four years and some months. He was the first of the English kings that of his supreme authority commanded the idols throughout his whole kingdom to be forsaken and destroyed, and the fast of forty days before Easter to be observed ; and that the same might not be neglected, he appointed proper and condign punishments for the offenders. His daughter, Earcongota, as became the offspring of such a parent, was a most virtuous virgin, always serving God in a monastery in France, built by a most noble abbess called Fara, at a place called Brie ; for at that time but few monasteries being built in the country of the Angles, many were wont, for the sake of monastic conversation, to repair to the monasteries of the Franks or the Gauls, and they also sent their daughters there to be instructed and delivered to their heavenly bridegroom, especially in the monasteries of Brie, of Chelles, and Audelys ; among whom were also Sethfrid, daughter of tlie wife of Anna, king of the East Angles, and Ethelberga, natural tUiugliter of the same king, both of whom, though strangers, were for their virtue made abbesses of the monastery of Brie." 90 The Monk. [lfxt. This is a valuable little piece of information ; nor is it possible to open the Ecclesiastical History without coming upon interesting matter, whether actually valuable as descriptive of facts, or as picturing forth the mode of thought of the time. The belief that a monastic life, if properly followed up, was the very gate and entrance into heaven, was held by most people of that time ; and the extraordinary tales recounted of the translation of saints, their miracles, and the wonderful efficacy of their bones and dust, were gravely accepted as facts by the innocent and pure-minded Bede. And even t hese are instructive in their way. I will now give you an account of tlie responsible functions belonging to the priest's office. " Priests ! You ought to be well provided with books and apparel as suits your condition. The mass-priest should at least have his missal, his singing-book, his read- ing-book, his psalter, his handbook, his penitential and his numeral one. He ought to have his officiating gar- ments, and to sing from sunrise, with the nine intervals and nine readings. His sacramental cup should be of gold or silver, glass or tin, and not of earth, at least not of wood. The altar should be always clean, well clothed, and not defiled with dirt. There should be no mass without wine. " Take care that ye be better and wiser in your spiritual craft than worldly men are in theirs, that you may be fit teacliers of true wisdom. The priest should preach rightly the true belief ; read fit discourses ; visit the sick ; and baptise infants, and give the unction when desired. Xo one should be a covetous trader, nor a plunderer, nor be III.] The Monk. 91 drunk often in wine-houses, nor be proud or boastful, nor wear ostentatious girdles, nor be adorned with gold, but to do honour to himself by his good morals. " They should not be litigious nor quarrelsome, nor seditious, but should pacify the contending; nor carry arms, nor go to any fight, though some say that priests should carry weapons when necessity requires ; yet the servant of God ought not to go to any war or military exercise. Neither a wife nor a battle becomes them, if they will rightly obey God and keep His laws as becomes their state." Their duties are also described by the canons of Edgar in the following terms : — " They are forbidden to carry controversy among themselves to a lay tribunal. Their own companions were to settle it, or the bishop was to determine it. " No priest was to forsake the church to which he was consecrated, nor to intermeddle with the rights of others, nor to take the scholar of another. He was to learn sedulously his own handicraft, and not put another to shame for his ignorance, but to teach him better. The high-born were not to despise the less born, nor any to be unrighteous or covetous dealers. He was to baptise whenever required, and to abolish all heathenism and witchcraft. They were to take care of their churches, and apply exclusively to their sacred duties, and not to indulge in idle speech, or idle deeds, or excessive drinking ; nor to let dogs come witliin their church- inclosure, nor more swine than a man might govern. " Tliey were to celebrate mass only in churches, and on the altar, unless in cases ul' extreme .sickness. Tliey 92 The Monk. [lect. were to have at mass tlieir corporalis garments, and the subucula under their alba ; and all their officiating garments were to l)e woven. Each was to have a good and right book. No one was to celebrate mass unless fasting, and unless he had one to make responses ; nor more than three times a day ; nor unless he had for the Eucharist, pure bread, wine and water. The cup was to be of something molten, not of wood. No woman was to come near the altar during mass. The bell was to be rung at the proper time. "They were to preach every Sunday to the people, and always to give good examples. They were ordered to teach youth with care, and to draw them to some craft. They were to distribute alms, and urge the people to give them, and to sing the psalms during the distribution, and to exhort the poor to intercede for the donors. They were forbidden to swear, and were to avoid ordeals. They were to recommend confession, penitence, and compensa- tion ; to administer the sacrament to the sick, and to anoint him if he desired it, and the priest was always to keep oil ready for the purpose of baptism. He was neither to hunt, hawk, nor dice ; but to play with his book as became his condition."* " In the tenth century" , says the historian of tlie Anglo-Saxons, Sharon Turner, " a new religious discipline was spreading in Europe, which occasioned the misfortunes in the reign of Edwin (usually called Edwy). Tliis was the Benedictine Order of Monks, an order which, in * Preface to Bede's Ecclesiastical History, by Dr. Giles. London, 1880, III.] The Monk. 93 the course of time, l)ecaine celebrated in Europe beyond every other." The founder of this order was an Italian named Benedict, who sought to mortify the fiesli by living quite alone in a cave in a desert place into which he was lowered by a friend. His mortification consisted in rolling his unj)rotected ])ody among thorns, so as to produce very copious bleeding. He was considered one of the most genuine aspirants to saintly fame that ever laid claim to saintship. His admirers were so numerous that he was enabled to found many monasteries. He afterwards went to Naples, destroyed some heathen temples, started a monastery there, and laid down a new set of rules for its governance. Of these rules there are Anglo-Saxon translations in the British Museum, and I must direct your attention to the MS. Eeg. 10a, 13, Mdiich contains an exposition of it by Dunstan, witli liis picture. The order was introduced at Fleury, to which place the body of Benedict was transferred from Mount Cassin, where he had died. Fleury was plundered by the Normans, and the monks had become irregular, when Odo, a staunch suj^porter of the order, succeeded in reducing them to rule, and the inlluence of the monastery spread westward. Odo was a Dano-Englishman, a descendant of one of those Scandinavians who, under Hingvar and Hubba, came to England to revenge the fate of liagnar Lodbrok. He had been a soldier before he assumed the ecclesiastical career, and was with Athelstan in tlie battle of Brunnan- burg. He became Archbishop of Canterbury, and to liis 94 The Monk. [LECT. teaching much of Dunstan's lioliness has been attributed. He was the man wlio introduced the rule into England, and his strict observance of it may have had much to do with Dunstan's career, and thus he influenced a part of the poHtical history of the country. Dunstan was born in 925. His parents were Heorstan and Cynethryth, who seem to have lived near Glastonbury. He frequently visited the old British church there. It is said that he had there a vision of his future greatness, and that a venerable phantom pointed out the place where he was to build a superb monastery. His parents encouraged him to study, and he soon excelled his companions and ran rapidly through the course of study marked out for him. Being attacked by fever, he, in a sudden access of delirium, jumped out of bed, upset his nurse, and seizing a stick which was near him, was off over the hills and neighbouring plains, under the delusion that a whole pack of wild dogs was after him. His wanderings led him towards night to a church. This church had been undergoing repair. Workmen had been busy mending the roof. The scaftblding was left, of course, and Dunstan, rushing wildly up a ladder, gained the roof, and somehow or other, thanks to the wonderful provision of the Creator, by which sleep-walkers and delirious persons seem preserved from frightful accidents, he reached the floorinc; of the interior uuliurt. As the church doors had not been opened, the attendants who came to perform their usual duties in the morning were very much astonished at finding him there. Nor was his surprise less than theirs, for, of course, he knew nothing about his mode of getting there, and returned to his III.] The Monk. 95 ordinary sane condition of mind to wonder at his strange position. Admission was obtained for him to the monastery at Glastonbury. He worked hard, lived soberly and morally, and made himself master of everything that the monks could teach. What mathematics were then taught he learnt ; he acquired an excellent knowledge of music, and the arts of painting and engraving. He became skilful in working gold and silver. His ambition at first was to be a courtier, and a relative introduced him to the king, who was delighted with his powers as a musician. His other accomplish- ments won him great distinction, and of course many enemies, who, to ruin him, ascribed his proficiency in these various arts to magic. They were successful, and Dunstan was driven from court. History repeated herself in "Wolsey. After his banishment from court, he formed an attachment to a maiden whom he wished to marry, but his relation. Bishop ^Ifheag, opposed the match, and conjured Dunstan to become a monk. But Dunstan liad no inclination for the cloister, and resisted the impor- tunities of the bishop. The conflict between ambition and the emotions called forth by the eloquence of ^Elflieag unhinged poor Dunstan's mind, and a long and dangerous illness was the result of the mental turmoil. On his recovery he decided for the cowl, and became a monk. But he did not lay aside either his ambition or his energy when assuming the monastic garb. Determined on pre-eminence, under whatever circumstances he might be placed, Dunstan now souglit to reiidcr himself the g6 The Monk. [LECT. most famous of monks. Accordingly, he made with his own hands a cave or cell so singularly constructed, tliat his biographer Osborne,* who had seen it, did not know what to call it. It was more like a grave than a human habitation. Cells were usually excavated in a rising ground or raised upon such, but this was dug into the earth. It was five feet long, and two and a half wide. Its height was the stature of a man standing in the excavation. Tlie whole was covered by a door, in which was a small aperture to admit light and air. It was in this retreat that the well-known temptation took place. The recluse had with him all the tools necessary for his work as a smith, and one night, while he was supposed to be engaged in such occupation, the whole neighbourhood was startled by the most terrific bowlings that could be imagined. So fearful was the din, that a neighbouring hill was rent into three pieces by the mere sound. In the morning the people flocked round the window of the saint to inquire into the cause of the unearthly clamour. He informed them that Satan, having thrust his head through the window, or rather aperture in the door, to tempt him while he was at work, Dunstan made his tongs red-hot and therewith seized the arch-fiend by the nose. After this, the respect and veneration of the country people became immense, but was still further increased by a certain wealthy noble lady, Etheltieda, of royal descent, leaving him all her property, which he distributed to the poor. This lady, some time before her death, had spoken in Dunstan's favour to the king, and again he was recalled to court, whither he gladly hastened, for ambition was his ♦ Clfojmt. B. 13. III.] The Monk. 97 ruling passion. Still he had to contemplate court-life from a very different standpoint. His disappointment in the love affair just referred to seems greatly to have em- bittered his life, without extinguishing the burning desire of shining above others. Naturally he met with many enemies, but he defied them all, supported as he was by the chancellor Thurketul and the primate Odo. The first step to his future greatness was his appointment as abbot to the Abbey of Glastonbury. The Benedictine order being now, from its real merits, so popular in Europe, Dunstan introduced it into his mon- astery, and made himself its most active patron. There is a MS, in the British Museum containing Dunstan's ex- position of the rule of St. Benedict, with his portrait.* The power of this extraordinary man increased with extreme rapidity. He was chosen by the king for his confidential friend and counsellor. To him the king sent all his choicest treasures, and those amassed by the preceding sovereigns, to be kept in the monastery under his inspection. The see of Winchester was now offered to him, but he was too clever to accept it, having higher aims in view. The king urged, and entreated; his mother invited him to dinner and added her persuasions ; but Dunstan still re- fused, declaring that he could not leave the king un- attended, and in fact he would not leave him even to accept the metropolitan see. He went home. In the morning he returned to the king and told him that he had seen a vision, in which St. Peter struck him, and said, '" This is tliy punishment for thy re- * MSS. R. 10, A. 13. III. H 98 The Monk. [lect. fusal, 1111(1 a token to tliee not to decline hereafter the Primacy of En^dand." The king couhl not have been a very briglit specimen of a royal personage, as he never saw through the trick, but intei'preted the vision to mean that Dunstan was to be Archbishop of Canterbury. Odo, who governed the see, was very old, and Dunstan was nominated as his successor as soon as Odo should die. The king liad been ailing all his reign, and feeling his end approaching, sent Dunstan to fetch the royal treasures which were in his charge, but before the monk could re- turn the king had breathed his last. Of course this was too good a chance for Dunstan to neglect, and he at once asserted that he had been fully prepared for the sad event by a supernatural communication. The Anglo-Saxons were kind enough to accept tliis on the strength of Dunstan's assertion, and his fame was duly increased. Edwin was a very young man indeed, and in ascending the throne had everything against him. Dunstan sought to make of him a mere tool to carry out his own schemes of ambition, and his meddling produced such catastrophes as the undue interference of the clergy in mundane matters always brings about. The disappointment in Dunstan's matrimonial plans has been referred to, and I am inclined to attribute his behaviour to the young king more directly to this source. The story of his conduct is not generally known, and as it is very instructive as a lesson on the manners of the time, I will tell it. On the very day of the coronation, a feast was spread in the great hall (which was the same thing to all intents III.] TJic Monk. 99 as that described by me in a former lecture, when speaking of the Saxon hall in the pagan times*), and the king was on the high bank, or dais of later times, while around the hall his lords and ohicers of state were seated, just in the same manner as had been usual with tlicir forefathers five hundred years before Edwin's time. The rude mirth, coarse jests, and furious drinking which set in after the withdrawal of the ladies to the Bower (the ut the Normans were soldiers, and knew the value of discipline, which became introduced into their monasteries as sternly as into their camps. , ^ Licentious, haughty, cold, unprincipled, the Norman monk resembled the Norman baron in his grand capacity for hatred, and in the readiness with which he submitted to any discipline which should ensure strength ; while the English monk, under the Danish rule, had subsided into either a studious recluse, amusing himself with drawing pictures or writing books, or (much more frequently) a good-for-nothing, ale-swilling, idle loon, accepting the tonsure as a safeguard against work. Durnig his exile among the Normans, Edward, sur- named the Confessor, conceived an exalted opinion of their merits, when contrasted with the relaxed rule of the Eng- lish monks. The nobles who had shared his exile formed III.] The Monk. 105 their opinions upon his, and an ahnost monastic court was the result. Imbued with the feeling that Norman boast- fulness was chivalry, Norman pride refinement, and Nor- man asceticism religion, it is no wonder that Edward was disconcerted at the state of things which he found in England. Still, there is no excuse for his desiring to see his country rather Normandy than England, which all his measures tended to make it. These measures prepared the way for the so-called Conquest, and we owe that national disgrace to the fact of the king having been more than half a monk. As soon as William sat upon the throne he sought to bring the monasteries under Norman abbots, thinking that by their influence he could appeal to all classes of the people ; and while he crushed their bodies with the mailed hand of his robber baron, he could drive them to utter despair by placing the awful powers of the Church in the hands of his monks. The number, however, of these Norman abbots is very much loss than we should have expected to find, especially as the Anglo-Saxon Church, during the whole of this century, had been more or less obnoxious to the Papal court, and the Pope consi- dered the conquest as a victory of what may be specifically termed Eomanism. Few as these abbots were in number, their influence was immense, and I may more especially instance the work done by Lanfranc, who was consecrated Archbishop of Canterbury in 1070, after William had de- posed Stigand and several Anglo-Saxon prelates. At first, Lanfranc, wlio had refused tlie Archbishopric of Rouen, declined the honours offered him in England, but linally accepted them. One of his first acts was to eject the secular io6 The Monk. [LIXT. clerks, who had recovered their position in the Church since the time of Dunstan, and to supply their place with monks. He even treated with contempt the memory of the old Englisli saints, and abolished every part of the English service wliicli differed from that of Rome. It is true that his reforms were mostly judicious, but they were much resented by the Anj:,do-Saxon monks, who culti- vated their own beloved English all the more for its suppression. Tlius, while the people, separated from the government by race and language, lived a separate exist- ence independent of their Norman rulers, and spoke the colloquial English without any taint of foreign infusion, the only learned men amongst them, the monks, found the tendency to drift into Latinity checked by the very acts /which were intended to urge them further into it. The grievous fad of celibacy was not confined to the sterner sex. There were monasteries for women, who were called Ancren, or nuns. A curious work of the end of the twelfth century, thus quite in the Norman times, and entitled the Ancren Riwl, gives us a series of maxims for the conduct of these female recluses ; but although rich in very quaint and curious advice, it is rather a disappointing book on the whole. AVe should have expected to find more actual points of observance laid down and insisted on than we do. The MSS. in the British Museum, marked respectively Nero, A. xiv, Cleopatra, C. vi, Titus, D. xviii, will repay attention. I will present a small fragment to your notice, taken from Morton's edition of this work, published by the Camden Society, page 210. " Summe iuglurs beoth thet ne kunnen serven of non other gleo, buteu makieu cheres and wrenchen mis hore III.] The Monk. 107 ninth and schulen mid hore eien. Of this mestere servetli theo imiselie ontfule ithe deofles kurt, to bringen leihtre hore outfule loverd. Vor gif ei seith wel other deth wel nonesweis ne muwen heo loken thiderward mid riht eie of 2fode heorte auh wincketh othere half and biholdeth luft and asquint." The whole course of advice given is equally grotesque. Among the great helps to modern research into ancient documents, I must call your attention to a work by my friend, Mr. Walter de Gray Birch, of the MS. Depart- ment. It is a thin book in 8vo., giving a chronological list of all the religious houses in England and Wales prior to the Norman disgrace. According to his statement, there were nearly three hundred religious houses esta- blished in England and Wales before the year 1066. The list of establishments is in chronological order, and is fol- lowed by an alphabetical list of the names of the Saxon abbots and abbesses, with the date and authority affixed. I gave you a picture of the robber Baron in his castle, leading rather a dismal life there, having nobody to fight with but his brother Normans, who frequently gratified his pugnacious propensities by commencing a deadly feud; still, that was a rare gratification, too wasteful on the whole of Norman life to be frequent, although in Stephen's time we have seen that there was rather too much fiditinff. To combine their love of bloodshed with the Christian creed seems to have been a happy thought, and this resulted in the institution of military orders of monks, who, instead of cowl and gown, wore arms and armour. Fortunately there was a demand for as well as a supply of these gentry, and the Holy Wars (Heaven save the mark !) turning up I08 The Monk. before it was quite too late, tlic most turbulent and objec- tioiialile of these military tyrants marched olf on crusading expeditions, to the great relief of the country in one respect, although the contributions levied on the towns pressed rather rouglily on the mercantile class. Still, to get rid of them was cheap at almost any price ; and if the Crusades did that amount of service to us, and diminished the number of non-English dwellers in England, we are bound as true English people to be thankful for this means of their removal. Norman-French was forgotten, though some traces of Norman rule remain. We must be just, and in admitting our debt to the Crusades, own that they were the invention of a monk. Lecture IV, A R M O U R. LECTURE IV. ARMOUR. The study of the history of defensive armour divides the subject naturally into three classes, which may he desig- nated respectively chain mail, mixed armour, and plate. Of course, this nomenclature has reference to metallic armour alone, for there must be a further classification of our subject into metallic and non-metallic armour. As the consideration of the specimens in the British Museum must chiefly engage our attention at present, and as they are, as we should be led to expect, of the metallic order, our inquiry will be directed to the study of that order in the first instance, leaving the consideration of non-metallic armour for future occasions. Philology, mythology, history, and legendary lore, all unite in furnishing evidence that man, like the sun, rose in the East and then began a glorious march \vestM\ird. This seems to have been the order of human progression from times long anterior to all historic periods. Wave after wave of population has surged westwards, each over- whelming and eflacing the traces of its predecessors. Strange discoveries have been made in far-off Peru, con- nectmg the almost mythical "Children of the Sun" with certain Aryan people in India. And tlie Aryans them- selves have actually overwhelmed and destroyed in their 112 Armour. [lect. westerly Hood of population portions of their own race. The Kelts autl Kyniri have Ijceu, as it were, run over by the rush of the Teutonic whirlwind even in historic times, just as those Kelts and Kymri, in their progress to the West, Hooded and swamped the aborigines of Western Europe. It sounds vague to talk of " the East". To most people it means India, China — anywhere in Asia. In Eussia, it means more specially Turkestan, Afghanistan, and the Punjaub. In Kensington it means White- chapel ; so that when I use the term I must beg you to understand me to confine the idea to some district in the North-Western part of India, more central than Afghan- istan. The dwellers in Afghanistan and the Punjaub are highly conservative, like most Asiatics. The dress that would be historically correct for Eunjeet Singh would be equally so for Badjazet. So the language of the learned Brahmins of Central and iSouthern India, albeit only a written language now, and employed in teaching the sacred myths of the faith, is the Sanskrit of six thousand years ago ! With this tenacity, it is not wonderful that the Aryans should have brought their language, dress, and arms with them ; and on carefully investigating the remains of our own race, as discovered in England, in Scandinavia, and in parts of Germany, we find swords, shields, and arms reminding us of Oriental types. A great and distinguishing feature of Indian armour is that which has obtained the name of "chain mail". This seems to have existed from time immemorial, and to have teen copied by the Semitic races from the Aryans ; and in IV.] Arviofir. 113 the earliest Teutonic account of armour with which I am acquainted — in fact, the earliest and best Teutonic epos, our glorious English poem of Beoiuulf, we are introduced to this kind of armour. We read of the " war-net", the war sark or shirt, the garment woven of linked rings, hard hand-locked, woven by the smith, but not as women weave. We are told how this good armour served the hero in his combats againt the Nickars and monsters of the deep, who could not pierce the woven rings. The dagger of the female fiend, the mother of the grizzly Grendel, whom he seeks in a weird cavern at the bottom of a lake, cannot penetrate the breast rings of the iron shirt. There are specimens of such chain mail in the British Museum that will at once show how useful it must have been as a defence. The artists of the Middle Ages represented external objects rather according to their own conception of them than the actual appearance to the eye, while some drew from the ordinary appearance, and others adopted a con- ventional type as a useful form. These methods of drawing have produced in the minds of archaeologists three or four different kinds of mail, whereas only one was intended by all three. Matilda, wife of William the Norman, in re- presenting the armour of the warriors of her time, covered them all over with little rings, and, with the conscientious truthfulness of a w^oman, she gives the rings entire. Others, especially those who drew the illuminations in our MSS,, have drawn rings overlapping each other, because one ring covering part of another produced such an effect to the eye. Others adopted dots, little marks and lines, according to a conventional standard. These various modes III. I I 14 Ar»wur. [lfXT. of representing chain mail have been supposed to indicate respectively a kind of armour in which the rings were sewn on cloth or elk-skin, in such a manner as to lie flat on the cloth-surface, just touching each other and no more. The next form gives us armour where one ring is sewn on the cloth or elk- skin in such a manner as to protect the threads of the one next it, thus only allowing edges of rings to be seen. Another kind, supposed to be represented by the crossed lines, has been called mascled armour. The names for these three kinds of armour are due to the theory of the late learned antiquary, Sir Samuel Eush Meyrick. The armour of the Scandinavian Teutons, including the Angles and the Saxons, consisted of a shirt of mail, called by the Swedes, Danes, and Germans ^awsar, and by the Eng- lish hyrnic. This was nothing but a sort of frock made of . interlaced rings like those of the modern steel purse, only instead of having split rings, as w'e do in making the purse, each ring was closed by a little rivet. The labour of pro- ducing such a garment must have been immense ; and we can understand w^hy the smith should have been so honoured an artificer in that old time when Hengest and Horsa walked about in the Isle of Thanet, where they planted the first seeds of English colonisation. The very name for this artificer is the most usual amongst us to this very day. The poet was often called the verse-smith, and connected with that idea is Milton's " ZwiA;^c?-sweetness, long drawn out". Even among the gods of Valhalla there was a smith named Yolund, who made the swords, shields, and mail of the ^sir, as "Vulcan forged the bolts of Jove"; but our man was a much more estimable deity. IV.] Armour. 115 That no remains of early English chain mail have come down to us is not to be wondered at. The time consumed in weaving such shirts was considerable, therefore they were expensive, and the representations in our earlier MSS., etc., show only kings and very distinguished warriors so protected. Besides which, the activity of the Teuton led him rather to despise all kinds of defence save his shield. The shield was of the wood of the linden tree, and made convex to the foe, so as to look something like a rather shallow umbrella. It was covered on the outside with the skin of some animal. It was white in the case of the young, untried warrior ; but the champion who had distinguished himself by the slaughter of a bear or wild bull, was entitled to wear the skin of such creature as covering to his shield. The centre was a boss, covering the aperture for the hand, across which aperture a grip or handle of iron was securely fixed, by which the shield was held. The boss was of bronze, silver-gilt, and even of gold. The circumference, or rand, or rim of the shield was of the same metal as the boss, which differed according to the rank of the wearer. The helmet was a leathern cap, encircled at the base by a broad metal ring, which again was covered with a thinner plating of gold, differing in breadth according to the rank of the warrior. This lower ring was made to support two half-hoops, which crossed each other at the crown of the head ; and in later times one of these was elongated so as to protect the nose, and thus formed the Norman nasal helmet of the tapestry, and of so many illustrations of that which I have designated as the King Period in history,* * Older England, First Series, p. 132. I 2 ii6 Ahnour. [lect. exteiulin*; from the second century before the Christian era to the beginning of tlie fifteenth century a.d. The arms of the early Ii)nglish were the broadsword with the delicate Oriental-looking hilt, and its powerful blade for cutting, a weapon which would well justify the honour paid to it by Scandinavian-English warriors. Besides the sword, the terrible seax,or short, curved dagger, formed an important part of tlie outfit. Then came the spear and the javelin, a short bow, and rather formidable arrows. The battle-axe was, however, perhaps the most distinctive part of the warrior's fighting outfit, and, wielded by skilful hands, it proved to be a most useful one. Although there is little trace of the war-hammer in English poetry of the early period before the Norman usurpation, there is abundant evidence of its use by the Scandinavians ; and " Thor's Hammer" is as fixed in our mythology as the club of Hercules is in that of Greece and Rome. The English were not fond of lighting on horseback. They preferred hand-to-hand combats on foot, in the good old style. They were celebrated for their splendid "wedge" formation, a much better form in attack and in defence than the square of modern times, which has taken its place as a specially English feature in warfare. The structure of the ring helmet was eminently adapted to guard the head from the downright blow of the axe or sword. The hoops, or rather half-hoops, crossing each other at the crown, could be made of metal quite stout enough to resist the cut, while a complete helmet of such thickness would have been far too heavy to wear. But it was not proof against the descending arrow shot up in the air, as the Indians in Peru shoot, and which was a mode of shoot- IV.] A rmonr. 1 1 7 ing resorted to by William at Hastings with such signal success, — the story of Harold's looking up to receive the arrow in his eye, having been invented long after, to account for the accident, at a time wlien the original form and structure of the Northern helmet had been forgotten. The pictures of the helmet in the Bayeux Tapestry will at once confirm my statement. The form of this helmet lives in the closed crown still worn as a badge of rank at the present day in England. As the English were distinguished for their skill as infantry troops, it is natural that their equipment should have been as light as possible. Hence the byrnie, when worn, seldom came below the knee, while the legs were only defended by a stout trellis-work of leather, a sort of cross-gartering that still lives in the pattern of the High- lander's stocking, and is seen in the bandages w^orn by the Norwegian and Eussian peasantry. The knees were either bare, or the coloured linen trousers were drawn over them, and were kept in their place by the leathern cross-garter- ing alluded to. On foot, the first requisite is agility, therefore the English rather disdained the use of armour, as impeding the motions of the limbs ; and we find a king armed in chain, wielding a sword in his hand, defended by an armour-bearer whose lower limbs are quite bare, and whose covering for the body is only a leathern tunic called the rock, or coat. Besides which, the majority of warriors given in the illuminations show the pre- ference for lightness in dress over greater security pur- chased at the price of too great weight. The warriors are rarely in mail, and seldom provided with any other defence for the head than the combed leathern cap, to Ii8 Ar)nimr. [LliCT. which the name " Champion" is due, being derived from kcemh, or kamh, a comb. The Normans, on the other hand, after their settle- ment in Neustria, were referred to their horses in their attack ; consequently, all their equipment partook more and more of a cavalry character. Their knight was called chevalier ; their swords were long and more pointed than those of the English, to enable the wearer to use them on horseback, when the lance, in which he put the greatest faith, should have been broken or lost. The inferior people only fought on foot, and were armed with axes and bows. These circumstances also induced a great amount of elongation in the dress, which was made to fall over the legs on horseback. The lower part of the leg became clothed in leggings of chain mail called chausses. The byrnie was furnished with chain-mail sleeves, terminating in mufflers for the hand, and armour in general was called by the French word mail. The nasal of the helmet was so much prolonged as to be connected with the mail, now constructed to protect the neck, and called the hauberk, being a corruption of the German hals-herger — neck protector. Finally, the whole head was protected by a chain-mail hood called the capuchin. Such inventions being the work of Normans, it is no matter of surprise that they were known by Norman - French names. The customs of the Normans were always opposed to those of the English, and it would be very strange if we were to find any other than Norman names for anything invented by them. But still, English inven- tions, or such things as the English brought with them from IV.] Armour. 119 Scandinavia, retained their English names, in spite of any Norman modifications to which they might be subject. Thus helm, helmet, shield, sword, rock (for coat), bow, arrow, axe, hammer, ring, and many other words remained in the language, and could not be beaten off the field by Norman-French ; while the subsequent innovations in military dress introduced by the Eoraance race retained their French or Italian names, until they themselves died out and were forgotten. Philology comes in very often to the assistance of history, and explains apparent differences in names, accounting for them by the laws that regulate the repre- sentation of a sound in one language as a different sound in another. It is not generally known why the lu in old English and old High German words should be replaced by giL in French. The reason is that many such words beginning in modern English with iv commence wilh an aspirate in Anglo-Saxon. In many of these we write the aspirate nowadays after the lo, as ivlio, when, lohcrc. The French form of Latin, like the parent, has no aspirate, and when h occurs it is reproduced by g ; hence the name " German", from Heer-man, i.e., man of the Heer or army. Some words in w being preceded by h, gave rise to the custom of writing all such as if the aspirate were used with them. Hence loarian, to guard, defend oneself, be- came fjiicrrian ; war became giccrrc, and warrior, gucrrier. The lower part of the body is called u-amh in German ; a waistcoat in some parts of Germany is called thence a warns; and in tlie twelfth century there was a garment worn under the chain mail called the wamhcis, or body- piece, being nearer the body than the mail. This became I20 Annoiir. [lect. tortured by tlie Normans into (jaiiibein, by the process which I have just indicated, and was further Norraanised into gamheson. It was worn under the armour, to keep tlic rings from rubbinp; against the body, and also to pre- vent their being pushed in with the lance-head thrust against tliem with all the force borrowed from the rush of the horse : for in Norman w^arfare all the momentum of the attack was obtained from the animals which the warriors bestrode. This circumstance, too, rendered the mail of less value than it would have been for mere foot- fighting, because, although the wambeis or gamheson (sometimes also called acton, hacqueton, or alcoton, from being stuffed with cotton) would prevent the chain from bemg carried into the body, the head could not well be padded all round, so as to resist the terrible charge and the penetrating lance-head. The small ring-bound leather helm was insufficient, and the lance-head coming in under the crossed hoops would do much more harm to the warrior than if he had had no helmet at all. The idea of beating sheet iron or steel into a skull-cap does not seem to have struck the Normans, although a small concave plate does appear occasionally to have been affixed to the upper portion of the chain-mail hood. This little shallow cap is sometimes rather poiuted, forming a very obtuse cone, and this Meyrick calls a "chapelle de fcr". Such strengthen- ing of the head-guard seems to have been common, but nothing like what we should call a regular helmet appears. The lower ring of the leathern cap became incorporated with the nasal, and then added to a chapeUe defer. Then this seems to have been enlarged, so as to form something more like a helmet ; though it is difficult to say, in the iV.] A rmour. 1 2 1 first Norman periods, whether this improved form were really all of metal or of cuir houilli, made into a form somewhat similar to the helmet of our Life Guards, only with a nasal instead of a projecting peak. Much is only conjecture : the probability is that this kind of helmet was not produced until the appearance of tlie bascinet early in the fourteenth century. The earliest helmets were somewhat of the shape of a tin saucepan, cylindrical in general form, but cut out in that part where the face was situated. On the seal of Eichard the First we find him with such saucepan-like helmet, with a face-guard attached, which Meyrick calls the " aventaijle". This is also part of a cylinder, and is cut so as to have two openings in it, leaving the rest of the metal to form, as it were, horizontal bars. The two upper corners of this aventayle are furnished with rivets, to per- mit of the visor being raised while the helmet is put on. Such protection for the face appears occasionally to have been added to the chain of the capuchin, or hood of mail. The next step seems to have been to make such a helmet as the cylindrical one just referred to, only large enough to slip on over the head, without involving the necessity of raising any part of the helmet itself. The top then became conical, or at all events convex, in- stead of being flat ; and the sides, and especially that to which the face was addressed, lost something of the rigidly cylindrical form, tapering and curving towards the summit, following, though very slightly, the curve of the head. In the front part of this helmet holes were pierced for the admission of the air, and to permit the cliampion to see his adversary. 122 Arnionr. [LIXT. This kind of helmet continued in use till the end of the fifteenth century. A beautiful example of this, once the property of the Black I'rince, is to be seen at Canterbury. It was extremely heavy, being made of wrought steel, large enough to descend to tlie shoulders, where it rested, so that they should bear the greater part of the weight. But besides its own weight, there were superimposed upon it the cap of maintenance, the mant- lings, and the crest, often itself an object in metal of some kind, gilt. Even before the time of the Black Prince, as early as the end of the thirteenth century, these helmets were made to taper ; and there are examples in many of the MSS. of their approaching the form of a curved cone, with the sides descending to the shoulders. The shields, after the advent of the Normans, became kite-shaped, or had rather the form of the section of a long pear. This extravagant Normanism was very shortly re- duced, and a flat shield, almost in the shape of the smooth part of a flat-iron, succeeded. This was afterwards bent longitudinally, so as to curve round the body slightly, a form which was greatly affected by Eichard the First. It became longer for a short time under John, but soon grew smaller and more convenient again. Eichard the First wore chain mail in which the lower limbs were encased. The upper part of the body was protected by a short frock of chain mail, with sleeves and hood, over which tlie cylindrical helmet was placed. On the top of this helmet was the broom plant from which the Plantagenets took their name, and on the shield were the three leopards of England. IV.] Ari)io2ir. 123 The arms in the mail period were chiefly the sword, spear, lance, javelin, arrow, battle-axe, bill or axe on a pole, glaive or long-bladed axe — nearly a cutlass on a pole ; the gisarme, a weapon with a cutting edge on one side and a long, bayonet-like arrangement on the other, also mounted on a pole. The Saxon seax gave place to the dagger, which, however, performed the same office equally well. The great changes in history have never been effected by sudden jumps. There has generally been a succession of slight stages of transition before marked differences between any two eras, however distinguished from each other, have stood forth as specifically marking a period. Thus, calling early English Anglo-Saxon, it is quite impossible to say wlicn that Anglo-Saxon became what some denominate semi-Saxon, and when this became modern English. It is quite impossible to draw a line, and say, " In this year men agreed to drop the en of the infinitives of verbs and plurals of nouns, and to form all plurals by the addition of s." We can trace the gradual process, but we can never say when the change really took place, because it was gradual : so in the history of armour. Chain-mail never became plate, nor was it ever suddenly dropped and plate substituted for it. Small bits of steel were added here and there ; while some parts of the body were protected by cuir houilli, and the breast and back were covered with chain. During the thirteenth century we find small plates added to the armour and worn on the shoulders. These were often distinguished by heraldic devices. They were oblong plates about six or seven inches long by three and 124 Annour. [lECT. a lialf or four inches wide. These were called aikttes. Caps for the knees were made of boiled leather, pressed into a convex form and covered witli gaily-coloured cloth, or more frequently gilt. These were called f/cnonill^res. At tlie same time with them we find the elbows covered with elbow-pieces or coucles, made of the same material ; but these were directly copied in steel in the thirteenth century, and may be said to have been the commencement of plate armour. Next we find little plates, called rondels or roulettes, fastened to protect the armpits, the outside of the knee- joint, and the elbows. About the middle of the fourteenth century the thighs were protected by pieces of armour, originally of stout leather, called cuisscs ; these were covered with pourpoint or silk, prettily quilted with gold threads, but they very soon gave way to steel plate. The lower leg was, quite early in tlie fourteenth century, encased in armour of cuir bouilli, moulded, while soft, to the shape of the leg, and then allowed to harden. This part of armour was called the jamhe, and was very quickly copied in steel ; then the sollerets, or jointed armour for the feet, furnished with overlapping plates like those in a lobster's shell, were added. In the early part of the fourteenth century one of the difficulties about the helmet and its shape appears to have been overcome. A light covering for the head, called a hascinct, from its resemblance to a basin, was invented. It had no covering for the face, and the chain-mail armour for the neck was attached to it by a cord which passed all rounil, traversing the brows, and which was pushed through rings made to project through holes in the steel. This IV.] Armour. 125 chain-mail neck-giiard was called the camail. The great helmet, witli the crest and other appendages, was put on over the bascinet, so that the weight was something enormous. The arms were encased in steel armour, called rere-hrace on the upper arm and vam-brace on the fore arm ; while the shoulders were covered by overlapping plates very similar in construction to the laminse of a lobster's tail, and these were called ^paulUres. They were fastened over the hau- berk on to the shoulders by laces, called points. During the fantastic reign of Edward the Second, the length of garments worn by civilians was copied by the military, and we find flowing robes projecting from under the armour and sumptuous dresses over it. For some time the custom of emblazoning the arms of a man's family on his surcoat, or garment worn over his armour, originally to protect it from the w^et and from the sun, had been grow- ing to an excessive extent. The custom of adopting some favourite animal, or other object in the outer world, whether animate or not, as a distinctive mark emblematical of a man's name, or commemorative of some anecdote connected with his family, had been familiar to our Scandinavian forefathers. Personal peculiarities had procured them nicknames, and these nicknames became recognised as family designations. Thus Harold lUue Tooth, Harold Harfagra, and similar appellations, became the usual mode of speaking of such men. When it became difficult to recognise leaders in battle on account of the face being hidden by the nasal helmet and the chin by the lower part of the chain-mail hood, confusion often arose from the ignorance of a chieftain's followers as to whether he were 126 Armour. [lect. still living or not. William the First, at Hastings, was thought hy the Norman army, at one period of the battle, to be slain, and a sort of panic was the result, which nearly gave its the day. If he had worn some dis- tinguishing badge inseparably connected with him, as the broom plant or plantagenista was with Henry the Second and his descendants, this danger would have been avoided. As soon as the system of heraldic distinctions was fairly started, a fresh impetus to the noljle art of war seemed given. There was something captivating in the idea of knowing the arms and insignia of all the families bearing them, as well as in possessing the means of making such brilliant and elegant display, and not only was the crest worn on the helmet and the cognizance on tlie shield, but the surcoat became covered with the devices forming the arms, fairly embroidered on silk or fine woollen cloth, with gold and silver threads, and in all the colours of the rainbow. This circumstance causes the actual armour for tlie body to be invisible, being covered by the emblazoned sur- coats, thus converted into " coats of arms". Meyrick is of opinion that a breastplate was worn under the hauberk, which piece of armour he calls a plastron de fcr. But there seem grounds for believing that this piece of armour was also called hauberk as well as the frock made of little rings to which we have already seen the word applied. Chaucer, in enumerating the pieces of armour worn by Sir Thopas uses these expressions in such a way as to justify this assumption. The verses are the following : — IV.] Armour. 127 " He dede next his white lere Of cloth of lake, white and clere, A brech and eek a schert ; And next his schert an aketoun, And over that a haberjaun, For persyng of his hert ; And over that a fine hauberk Was all i- wrought of Jewes werk, Ful strong it was of plate ; And over that his cote armour, As white as is a lily flour, In which he wold debate. His sheld was all of gold no red, And thereinne was a bores bed, A chanbocle by his side. And ther he swor on ale and bred How that the geaunt schall be deed, Betyde what betyde. His jambeux were of quirboily, His swerdes schethe of yvory. His helm of latoun bright ; His sadel was of rowel boon, His bridel as the sonne schon, Or as the moone light ; His spere was of fine cipres, That bodeth werre and no thing pees, The heed ful scharp i-ground." The habergeon is, according to all authorities, a diminu- tive of hauberk, having no sleeves, and coming to the waist. The hauberk, on the other hand, was the larger garment, capable of protecting even the neck, breast, and thighs, descending below the knee. All tliese various kinds of armour were composed of little rings. Chaucer describes the dressing of the hero all clearly and intelligibly enough. The aketon is the under-garment Worn to keep the rings from fraying the linen or irritating 128 Armour. [li:ct. the: l)i)(ly. He speaks of the " habcrjaiin" as guarding against llie |)iercing of his heart, — "And over that a fine hauberk . . . i-wrought of Jewes work, Ful strong it was of plate", which would lead us to suppose that in Chaucer's time the words had changed their signification from their original meaning, and that habergeon is meant by him to ap])ly to a hauberk of rings worn under a breastplate of plate-armour called hauberk, " full strong of plate". I think it very likely that, as armour meant heraldic emblazonment in Chaucer's day, hauberk meant what we call armour in general and the breastplate in particular. The cote armour, or surcoat tabard, conceals this from the view, so that we have nothing to guide us but conjec- ture on consulting the MSS. And here, again, philology helps us, by showing how very improbable it would be for the expression " coat armour" to be applied to the blazoned surcoat and to the steel beneath it. I am therefore in- clined to think that the hauberk was really that piece of plate -arm our called by Meyrick the plastron clc fer. This view of the question is further warranted by the appearance of the knights in the time of Edward III, when the extravagant garments and flowing robes of the last reign give place to short, well-fitting tabards or sur- coats, emblazoned with the arms of the warrior. The round, accurate fit of the portion guarding the breast gives token of the rigidity of plate-armour, while from under this shortened surcoat, reaching now but little below the hips, the skirt of chain mail is visible. During this period, especially before the shortening of the exuberant garments worn during the reign of Edward r\'.] Aniwiir. • (20 II, the weight of the full war-panoply must have been something frightful. The acton, or hacqueton, was in itself no mean load to carry, and very often was used without the additional chain-mail, being considered in many cases quite defence enough ; but generally over this came the habergeon or breastplate, then the heavy shirt of iron rings, upon which were fixed the various pieces of heavy steel referred to ; in the reign of Edward II, a strange, dressing-gown-looking sort of garment, called a cydas, was added ; and finally the surcoat covered the whole. The head was defended with the visorless bascinet, over which the heavy helmet was dropped like an extin- guisher ; and the man was armed. No wonder that knights fainted away on all sides in warm weather ! No wonder that when the horses stumbled and fell at Ban- nockburn by reason of the pit-falls, caltraps, and other comforts prepared for them by the canny Scots, their riders became an easy prey to the active, light-armed enemy, who could dissect his fallen foe as easily as an Engli-sh sailor can dispose of a turtle wjien once turned over on its heavily armed back. So the appearance of a warrior in 1315 was very different from that of one in 1340, although the actual armour worn might have been the very same. Edward III was a soldier, and soon rejected every portion of the military dress that might encumber the warrior or impede his free motions in fight. The thickly-quilted hacqueton gave way to a simple leathern jerkin, still called the acton ; and in the beginning of the next century, the advantage of a light helmet having been recognised, a visor was added to the l)ascinet. This visor has made its mark III. K 130 • Ariiionr. [M-XT. on history fVdin the grotesqueness of its form. It Imd the slm])e of a swine's snout, and the bascinet to which it was aflixcd was known as the pij,'-faced basfinet. There is a MS. representing two women figliting, and wearing this strange head-dress ; and it hns l)een sugge.sted tliat the queer legend of the "pig-faced lady" may liave arisen out of such a representation. The arms in the fourteenth century were the lance, the battle-axe, the mace, the sword, and dagger for knights ; and ])ows, arrows, spears, bills, glaives, gisarmes, military flails, and slings, for the inferior soldiers. The " morning star " was revived at this time. There were two forms of this pretty toy, one consisting of a stout staff, to which, by means of a long socket, a ball of iron three or four inches in diameter was fixed ; this ball, being furnished with sharp spikes, projecting, like the "quills upon the fretful porcupine", in all directions, was admirably adapted to defeat the uses of plate armour. The second form shows us the same staff, with the same socket ; the latter, however, was connected with the spiked ball by a chain, thus forming as tremendous a whip as could well be conceived. The spikes of the ball suggested the poetic name of the " morning star". It was a grim old German weapon of the seventh century, revived in the classic age when Chaucer and Gower were morning stars in our literature, and so German as to have been known in England by its German name, as the margenstern, quite as well as by its English equivalent. The sword of a knight was carried in a sword-belt partly hidden by the splendid baldric which marked the knightly rank as much as the gilt spurs. The plain IV.] Armour. 131 leathern belt l)eing concealed from sight, the appearance was as though the baldric supported the sword. The dag- ger worn on the right side seemed to balance the sword ; and from the compact and neat appearance of the man in his armour, the hilts of the two weapons looked almost like the handles on each side of a symmetrical vase. The fanciful folly of the reign of Eichard II — of which he, poor fellow, was ratlier the exponent than the creator — produced nothing new in the way of defensive armour, although we might have expected some change on account of the introduction of gunpowder and the use of firearms ; the only innovation being the conical visor added to the bascinet, to which allusion has just been made as the " pig-faced bascinet". The convenience of wearing chain mail was too apparent, and it seems to have held its own against further innova- tions, until in the beginning of the fifteenth century we find an addition to the armour of overlapping plates descending nearly to the hips. These, like the breast and back plates, were now worn over the chain. The knight in armour appears to have worn complete plate quite early in the century, the skirt of mail being covered with these overlapping plates, for which Meyrick informs us the name was tace. The taccs did not come down quite so low as the chain-mail skirt, which is shown projecting beneath. The cuisses were made of steel, while the jambc and the soUeret, or armour for the foot, as well as the gauntlets, were all of ])late. The collar formed by the back and breast plates was made high, to protect the throat ; and the back of tho liasciuct was iiiado longer, so as to protect K -J. 132 Armour. [lKCT- the hiirk f)f tlio neck in rasn tlio knight should feel inclined to fight without the heavy helmet, — which, however, was rarely done. The camail was discarded, and there is every reason to believe that, the hreastplate being worn outside, the chain-mail hauberk was discarded too; a skirt of chain being appended to the breast and backplates. The incon- venience and weight of the faces induced warriors to dis- continue the lower plates altogether, and a curious contrivance succeeded. Smaller pieces of armour, shaped somewhat like pointed tiles, and hence called tuilettes, being attached by straps and buckles, depended from the lower tacc, and, by means of the straps, permitted the knight to sit on horseback or stand erect, without having any portion of his person undefended. The aperture in the breastplate, made to admit of the play of the arm in action, was defended by a small, lozenge-shaped piece of chain-mail called a gussd, attached to the inside edge of the plate. This was further protected by the palettes, or roulettes, of the thirteenth century. The demand for these gussets of chain-mail was con- siderable during the wars of Henry V, and to this circum- stance we must ascribe the great dearth of chain-mail remains. All the old hauberks were cut up for these little " stop-gaps", and no new suits of chain were made. The very few that escaped this fate were those used by our own kings together with the plate-armour, as being more secure in the whole piece than in such gusset form. There is a striking example of this in the Tower. The fifteenth century may be described emphatically as the era of plate-armour. Chain-mail was not done away IV.] Aniiuitr. 133 with suddenly, nor was plate adopted at once. The growth of the one defence was the cause of the decline of the other ; and in the latter part of the fifteenth century, in the reigns of Henry VI, Richard III, and Henry VII, plate-armour reached its culminating point. When the inconvenience of the caiaail, or chain-mail gorget, became palpable, and a desire was shown to arm the man completely in ]3late, it was a natural step, in the history of our subject, for a gorget of plate to appear ; and we find it occurring in the Hrst half of the century, worn together with an extraordinar} kiml of helmet called a sallet, derived by Aleyrick from salad-bowl. He was most likely led to this derivation from the punning allusion made by Shakespeare to sallet as salad. It is far more probable that the name came through the Italian celata, from the Latin cuelata, " carved or cut out", in allusion to the many curves and cuts presented by this new form of head-guard. It was remarkable for the projecting back and abruptly sharp descent in front, where the aperture for the face was protected by a visor provided with a horizontal slit for the admission of light and air. If you take a modern felt-hat or wide-awake, turn down the brim, cut it quite off at the face and shape it into a peak behind, you will have some idea of a salld. This very curious helmet was fastened on by means or attachments inside, which connected it with the gorget, and the union of tliese separate pieces of armour gave the first hint for the manufacture of the helmet of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Sometimes the visor was not used, and the sallet descended somewhat lower, and was furnished with the slit lor light and aii- made in the piece itself. 1^4 Annoiir. [LliCT. The t'xtruviigances of the ci\il tliess were copied in the armour witliout the actual garments of every-day life being added to the military dress, as was the case in Edward the Second's reign. In the early part of the fifteenth century the follies done in leather and cloth were perpetuated in steel. The long toes of the civil shoes were reproduced in long-toed soUcrds, — so long, indeed, that walking in them was out of the t^uestion. About this time, too, the dpauliercs were supplemented with a piece of steel coming over the breastplate and rendering the ^;«/f^ies or roulettes useless by shielding the weak part in the armour, formerly protected by the gussets. Tlie new shoulder-pieces were called pauldrons (from the French epaul). They continued to be worn to the end of the seventeenth century. The wars of the Eoses taking place on English ground, .among English people and betw^een English leaders, very naturally brought the armourer's trade to high perfection in England ; and the sumptuous extravagance of Edward tlie Fourth was soon seen in the grand restoration of military games called " tournaments", which had been so much in vogue in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. At this period a curious addition was made to the armour for the fiice^ in the form of a chin-guard called the me ntoimih-c,w\\\Q\\, with the salletwQW depressed, etlectually shielded the knight from blows aimed directly at his face. This was chiefly used at tournaments, for which the armour was much stronger than for w ar. Justs, or jousts, were greatly liked at this time. They were fought between two combatants, whereas the tournament was fought by many on each side. The gradual ap[)roach to perfection in the IV.] Annoiir. 135 helmet now culminated in the- beautiful pi'uducLious of whicli specimens are preserved in the Mediicval lioom at the British Museum, and in still greater number at the Tower. The armourer's art had advanced, and his skill in beating plates of steel into globular forms enabled him to produce a helmet uniting the gorget, bascinet, visor, and mentonniere in one. The curve at the back of the head, commenced in the sallet, was continued with greater skill in the new piece of armour, whicli was contrived so as to open below upon two pivots, one on each side. The neck part being thus opened, the helmet was lowered by the attendant squire, or lady, and then iirmly secured by small cabin-hooks, as we should call them. The lower part of the face was protected by the beaver and tlie upper part by the visor. Instead of the little tiiUcttes, two large ^^ieces of armour, formed by horizontal plates and called tassets, were hung from the taces just below the breastplate, and each of these was thus made to protect part of the abdomen and the thigh, which was further protected by a cuisse of steel. The physical deformities attributed to Eichard III have been referred to as being the cause of the inordinate puffing, padding, and fantastic trimmings of the civil dress in his time ; this was copied in the armour of the fashionable warrior, as usual, and we find the panldrons especially scalloped and elaborated into enonnous fan- shaped appendages, very strange to behold. The armour of Sir Thomas Beauchamp is a remarkable instance of this. The best representation of it is given in Meyrick's Critical Inquiry into Ancient Anns and Annour. The ijciwuiUhrcs and elbow-pieces are oriianK'utcd witli similar additions to \ ](') /\ rino/ir. [LKCT. their strciigLli and weight. Thuy were not infrequently wruui'ht into the form of j^rillin's win^s. The si)lenduur of the plate-armour of tiiis period is .something lor a painter to dwell on ; and although for fight- ing on foot there was little use for such a suit, yet, on a well-equipped war-horse, the figure of such a warrior must have been, next to the Anglo-.Saxou warrior in his gold helm and eagle's wings, the most imposing that can be imagined. 1 give the preference to the early English or Saxon warrior, because he vxis English, and disdained the use of much armour, just as he despised walls as a means of defence. The armour of the fifteenth and six- teenth centuries, enclosing the warrior in a tow' er of steel, was more or less an Italian in\entiou ; and, true to his text, the Teuton attacked and destroyed the Eoman wall by the invention of gunpow^der, which, as it became more and more used in war, rendered armour useless ; for as at the pre- sent day there is a constant struggle going on between the inventors of armour and the contrivers of big guns, so even then we find it true that no armour could be invented with- out some big gun being nuinufactured to smash it. Among the queer fancies indulged in by the dandies of the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth centuries, we find a very droll one of pleating the jerkin or tunic down the back in such a manner as to make the back of a gentleman resemble an open fan, with the handle at the small of the said back, the pleats becoming less thickly folded towards the shoulders, where the garment was smooth and fiat. At the waist the skirt opened out in a similar fan-like manner, only downwards. This fashion was actually copied in the rigid steel. Xor was l\'. Arino/ir 3/ this all : the cuisses, or armour for the thighs, the tassets, or armour connecting the taccs below the breastplate with the legs — all these, nay sometimes even the rere-brace and vam-brace of the arms, were fluted so as to represent the puckering of the cloth in the civil dress. This is a peculiarity of the reign of Henry VII. When armour had thus reached its zenith of perfection nothing was to be done to improve it save adding to the ornamentation, and here begins a very curious part of our subject, namely, the engraving and gilding of plate-armour. As might have been expected, this was an Italian custom, for the Italians showed themselves very ready to adopt the idea of armour and very able in decorating it. "VVe find ext|uisite engravings representing scenes from classical history, or from the mythology of Greece and Home. We find these scenes over-running the armour like the pattern in a lady's dress, or the decorations of our walls and fire- places. Sometimes beautiful lines are traced from which other lines branch off, and at the junction of two or more of these, little medallions arc introduced, representing various scenes in a story or myth which the whole suit is made to tell. Often the lines made by the graving-tool are filled in with gold, which wlien polished with the steel has a very curious effect. A wonderful s[»ecinien of en- graved armour is preserved in the Tower armoury, which was presented by Maximilian of Clermany to Henry VIII on his nuirriage with Catherine of Aragon. The rose and the pomegranate entwine througli the whole of the suit, which is perhaps the most beautiful specimen of plate- armour extant, while little couip;iituients for the pictures 138 Arij/uiir. [LIXT. arc iiiiirkcd oil' all over the iiKdal, and well repay the student an hour's study. I have told you that the armour for the tournament was stronger than that for actual war, by the addition of certain extra pieces. These pieces, at the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the seventeenth centuries, were : — («) The fjrandc fjarde, which was a thicker breastplate, screwed by three stout screws and nuts to the breastplate itself. Through this came the rest, a piece of iron on a hinge, fixed firmly to the breastplate, though frequently attached to the grande garde. This fitted into a hole at the bottom of the lance, which, by means of the hinge, could be raised or depressed, but remained in its place on the knight's breast all the same. {h) The mentonniere, or chin defence, was sometimes united to the grande garde, and the complex piece was called the grande garde ct la mentonniere. (r) The garde de hras. The lance was supplied with a guard just above the grip, and this guard was considered sufficient to protect the right side of the champion. But as the combatants rushed at each other the left side was without such a protection. To meet this want a piece of ai-mour was screwed on to the left arm, called the garde de hras. {d) As the object of each warrior was either to throw his opponent off his horse or to strike his helmet so as to disable him by stunning him, an extra piece was screwed on to the breastplate to protect the chin and beaver of the helmet. This was called the volante piece. {c) Occasionally large pieces of armour called "sockets" IV.] Annoiir. 1 39 were fixed to the saddle on each side, as extra protection for the thighs at a tournament, but their use does not seem to have been general. At this time also, the horse began to be provided with defensive armour, but this became more and more the fashion in the time of Henry VIII, whose armour presented to him by Maximilian was accompanied by similar panoply, engraved to match his own, for the horse. To see this suit of armour alone is quite enough to repay anybody for a visit to the Tower. The warlike, extravagant, pleasure-loving Henry VIII was a OTeat encoura^er of the armourer. He was himself fond of tilting, was a good swordsman, and a good soldier all round. He invented breech-loaders and a kind of re- volver. Many of the guns of his time are preserved in the Tower. The "hafrbut", or "un fired from a rest, became known at this period. It came from Germany, and the name is a corruption of hahen-biichse, from hakcn, a hook, the stand or rest from which it was fired, and hilchse, a gun. The word is also found as harquebuse, and people not acquainted with the history of the weapon have sought to trace it in some way or other from the French ere, a bow, inasmuch as it superseded the true English weapon. Henry amused himself by inventing complicated weapons, as, for example, a battle-axe, tlie handle of wdiich was a gun ; a linstock for discharging cannon, but which was at the same time a spear. Being a great lover of state, he copied the halberds of the Pope's guards, which are also of (Jernum origin, and bear a German name meaning "the axe for the hall" — hai'd being an axe, hallc, a hall. The " parti- san", a form of spear with two small [)rojections, one on each 140 A rill our. [LKCT. side of the chief point or blade, was introduced at this time, and also a somewhat similar weapon, called a " spetum". The putting and slashing of the civil dress, a custom of CJerman origin, was, as usual, transferred from cloth to metal, and the taces with the tassets were succeeded by a gorgeous imitation of the pleated skirt, descending like a kilt from the waist to the knee. The weight of such an iron skirt was enormous, and it could only be worn on horse- back. This portion of armour was called the " lamboys". The suit presented by Maximilian to Henry is furnished with this curious addition, which I do not think ever be- came common in England. At this period there was an addition made to the armour in the form of two perpendicular ridges, fixed on the puuldruns so as to assist in the protection of the neck, which was liable to injury from a sword-blow gliding ofi' from the smooth surface of the pauldron and cutting in at the part where the helmet joined the gorget, or where it reached the shoulders. These pieces stood up on each side from the pauldrons, and formed a sort of outwork to the fortification of the neck. They were called " pass-guards". They continued all through the reigu of Henry YlII, and were not finally disused until the time of Charles 1. The names of the pieces of armour for the horse were : 1. The chamfron, for the face. 2. The mancfaire, for the neck. 3. The tcsterc, two small plates connecting the chamfron with the manefaire. 4. The croiipihw Besides these, Meyrick refers to ediva/s for the horse's legs, and Jlaiichtres for the sides. IV.] Armour. I41 In the time of Elizabeth we find soldiers armed with breastplate, backplate, and very wide tassets just coming half-way down the thigh, or not even so low as that. The head is protected by a morion, a new style of helmet some- thing like those now made of pith or cork for Indian use, but of very heavy iron, and surmounted by a ridge or comb, higher in the centre than at the back and front. The pike begins to play an important part, and the pikemen, armed as I have described, were made to stand a very severe drill. This kind of half-armour was much affected by all classes, though whole suits were worn ; but in that case long tassets were used, coming from the breastplate to the knee. The breastplate was made with a tapul, that is, a sort of edge in front, as our Life Guards wear them, whereas in the times of Henry VII and Eichard they had been globular. The gradual increase in the use of the matchlock, wheel-lock, and other kinds of fire-arms, especially of the dag and the petronel, both something between a carbine and a pistol, and yet like neither, threatened destruc- tion to the armourer's trade. But at the accession of James I, armour seemed to be looking up again. He affected the tournament, and, to look big, had a hollow tilting lance made, called a hurclen, which was a very light one after all. The long tassets coming to the knee re- mained all through this period. They were worn by Charles I and Charles II. There is in the Tower of Lou- don a beautiful suit of armour presented by the Gold- smiths' Company to Charles I. It is very richly engraved and highly gilt. In the r-i\il wars the pot helmet, of which there are innumerable specimens in the Tower, superseded 142 /Iffnour. [lFXT, the inori(jn ; the i»ikcman still wore the breastplate, back- plate, and wide tasscts that had been in vogue when Elizabeth was ([iieen, tliou;,di tlun' were somewhat niodi- ticd. AiiiKiur tni- the lower leg gave way to the heavy boot, which developed into the jack-boot of James the Second's time, when, save the cuirass, as the breast and back-plates together were now called, armour was dead. In the civil wars the Cavaliers affected a new kind of helmet called tlie casque, having a movable set of plates at the nape of the neck ; ear-guards, called oreillcttes ; and from a peak in front there descended a guard for the face, consisting of a thin bar of iron about the size of the face, having two other bars parallel to each other fixed within, gridiron fashion. The Cavaliers indulged in plumes affixed to these casques, which being of various colours, gave in-eat offence to the Eoundheads. Thev also wore the long tassets to which I have referred when speaking of the time of James I, but the jaiiibc gave way entirely to the cavalry boot. In the narrow space of one Lecture it is impossible to do more than attempt a very crude sketch of my subject. The lessons it teaches are : — Firstly, that the war between the Romance and Teutonic races is exemplified in arms and armour, the former, fr(~tm the big sword down to gunpowder, being mostly of Germanic origin, while, save the hauberk, helm, and shield, all parts of defensive armour were, broadly speaking, Romance ; secondly, that England has hitherto not been behind the world in her means of defence, whether active or passive. The passive phase, that of armour, is dead as far as men are con- cerned; but active defence is another thing, and I trust IV.] Armour. 143 we shall find that undying within us. In the good old plate-armour days of Queen Elizabeth she rode down to Tilbury to give us courage to resist the Spaniard on our coasts, and we now have a queen ten times more deeply set in our hearts than any that ever breathed. T do not think she would need say much to arm us in the defence of the far greater Britain over which she rules. But if she should utter the words tliat must set all hearts bounding with zeal in her cause, she would see her subjects themselves forming an impenetrable panoply through which no enemy should ever be able to wound her or mar the glorious empire of which she is the fitting exponent. Lecture V. THE CIVIL DRESS OF THE ENGLISH. III. LECTURE V. THE CIVIL DRESS OF THE ENGLISH. In the grand marcli of tlie Aryans westward from their distant aborij^inal home in the reahns of the rising sun, they brought with them the hmguage, arts, and thoughts of the Land of their birth. As they spread, or, rather, as one wave of Aryan life surged on after another, the original orientalism became modified more and more, partly by the influence of climate, partly by the circum- stance of removal from the fountain-head of all such life, and consequent subjection of the norm to decay and destruction from various causes, external as well as internal. Whoever has been in Bombay will remember the long, flowing robes of certain castes of Brahmins ; the curious custom of never exposing the hair to public view, strictly adhered to by the Parsee women at the present day. He will remember the short tunic of the warrior, reaching to the knee, and worn together with his flowing robes and other dandifications, but not employed in every-day life. In these apparently trifling matters he \vill see the pro- totype of our own Eock and ^lantle, and of the Eomance Tunic and Robe. The tunic of the classical schools was originally an under-garment of line linen worn by both sexes under l2 1 48 The Civil Dress of the English. [LECT. tliL' niovo distinguishing toga and palla ; and because the word is of Latin origin we adopt it instead of using our own indigenous terms. The tunic, or rather rock, of the Scandinavian English was a garment descending to the knee, and generally supplied with sleeves coming down to the w-rists. It was made of the finest linen, and the name is probably derived from the term applied to the spinning-wheel in general, though properly meaning only the distaff for the reception of the tiax. Thus, instead of saying a " flax", the garment was called a rock, or distaff", quasi the production of distaff labour. The verb " to rock" is from the same root, the backward and forward motion it describes being connected with the action of using the rock. In Scotland, a party of young women met to spin together is called a ''rochin". Another garment worn under the rock, and in some cases over it, was called the " pad", hence the expression, salo- pdd, dark-coated. From this word our own " padding" is derived, on account of the pad being worn under the byrnie, as the acton was under the hauberk in later times. Certainly it was not of such general use as the rock, which lives to-day in the name for a man's coat and a woman's gown all over Germany and Scandinavia, as it formerly lived in England when we spoke English without any base alloy of the Latin element. We wore the rock or tunic when we came to Britain, and we continued to call it by that name for seven hundred years, while the Scandinavians and Germans, more national than we, retain the word to the present day. The garments of the ladies were, in the early English or Anglo-jSaxon times, more simple than those of the men. v.] Tlie Civil Dress of the English. 149 They wore extremely fine underclothing of linen, shoes and stockings ; then we have records of the gunna or gown, the rock, and the over-slop. The general term for clothing was hrierjl, which lived on into the last century in the word " night-rail". As a curious monument of the tenth century, having special reference to ladies' dress, I give you an extract from the Will of an English lady named Wynflsed. This document is remarkable as showing the various articles of highest estimation in the eyes of the ladies of England a thousand years ago. " And slie bequeaths to ^thelfia^d her daughter her graven neck-ring and her mantle, preon (brooch), and the land at Ebbesborne. ... To Eadwold she bequeaths two boxes, and therein one bed furniture, all that belongs to a bed. And she bequeaths to /Ethelfla'd, Etlihelm's daughter, ^Iphere's younger daughter (as a slave), and her double lamb's-wool kirtle, and another of linen or linen- web. And to Eadgifa two boxes, and therein her best bed wall-hanging, and a linen rug, and all the bedclothes which thereto belong, and her best dun tunic, and her better mantle, and her two wooden spotted cups, and her old v/ire brooch, and one wall-hanging and another short one, and three seat coverings. And she gives to Ceoldryth whichever she likes best of her black tunics, and her best holy veil and her best binder. And to ^EthelHied her open walking kirtle and cuffs and binders ; and let -^theltlaed afterwards find one of her nun's habits, the best she can, for Wulltleed." I cull only those parts of this long and exhaustive Will which have reference to the subject of dress, omitting ISO The Civil Dress of the English. [iJ:cT. the mention of the various individuals, cooks and others, whom she bequeaths, and of others to whom she gives their freedom. These items, although highly interesting and instructive to the student of the manners and customs of our forefathers and our foremothers, not bearing directly on dress, do not fall within the scope of this Lecture ; but I would strongly recommend to such as desire to know more of these subjects, to obtain the excellent collection of such documents now publishing by my friend, Mr. Walter de Gray Birch, of the British Museum, in the form of a book entitled Oartularium Saxonicum. The dyes made use of by the Anglo-Saxons seem to have been of the brightest. Certainly, to judge from the MSS., they must have been gay and varied in the extreme. Purple, blue, red, brown, yellow, green, and violet vied with each other in forming the living parterre. Nor do we find much change resulting from the intro- duction of Christianity. The pagan cross as a brooch was, of course, discontinued, and some forms of necklace were abandoned as savouring too much of pagan taste. To the pagan preon succeeded the s])diiyc, of which there are magnificent specimens, richly adorned with precious gems, in the British Museum. In our pagan days the ladies wore very beautiful necklaces made of brilliantly coloured beads, among which amber beads were introduced as special remedies against the attacks of the black elves and other supernatural foes. It is a curious circumstance that a necklace of beads, also supplied with amber, should have been used by nuns in the early Christian phase of English life, as a .safL'guard against the attacks of the demons bv whdm the v.] The Civil Dress of the English.. i 3 1 " Swart Alvar" were succeeded. Beads of baked clay, gorgeously coloured, are to be seen in the Anglo-Saxon room of the British Museum ; and, what is very curious, the chatelaine of some thirty years back was worn by our foremothers before the Norman usurpation. Finger- rings were more affected by the ladies than the men, but the bracelets of the women were nothing like so massive or so magnificent as those of the men. Gold fringe of exquisite workmanship, as well made as it is possible for it to be now by any military accoutrement maker, has been found in Saxon graves, looking as fresh as if made yesterday. Sometimes, instead of fringe, broad borders of strongly gilt leather were added to the edges of the garment, giving a splendid finish to a magnificent dress. As I have mentioned in other places, a distinguishing mark of the dress of early Englishwomen w.as the unaffected modesty of the whole costume. The entire figure is scrupulously draped, and even the hair concealed by the envious wimple. Where we find representations of English women without this national head-dress, the hair is shown carefully plaited in two tails, something like those worn by the Germans now. The wimple was a kind of shawl, made of cloth or silk, ^y^ and worn over the head or shoulders, covering the throat and very often the chin. It was worn out of doors by ladies, and, in fact, by women of all classes of the commu- nity. It is a purely Teutonic word, living in Swedisli, Danish, Icelandic, Dutch, English, and German. It denoted originally a Hag or pennon, still called, in modern German a wivvpel. To arrange it properly was evidently a great art, for we find it folded in all ])nssilile fa«]iir>n<5 and 152 The Civil Dress of the Jiiijr/ish. [lect. ways. Christianity could not keep it out of the convent, any more than it could the necklace, nor could there be any plea against its admission, for it served in fact as a nun's veil. An early English lady in her gown and super-tunic (as the over-slop was called later on), both of rich but different colours, and with a tastefully folded wimple, the edges of both gown and tunic richly gilt, the wimple of yet another colour, white or yellow, edged with brilliant gold fringe, as glittering as the epaulettes of our day, would present to her daughters of the Victorian age a model of neatness with splendour, modesty and taste, forming perfection in female dress. Before the Norman usurpation there had been no scrunching the ribs to torture a poor girl into that invention of the devil — a waist. And here I speak ad- visedly and by the book, for the only pictiu-e in any MS. earlier than the twelfth century bearing witness to the constriction barbarously produced by stays, is in an iQumi- nation of the eleventh century, representing the devil in this machine, or at all events in a female dress with a low, pointed body laced up the front. I think, if our ladies were to know to whom they were indebted for this fashion, they would return to the more elegant style of their own foremothers. Much has been said, and more has been written, about the wonderful changes introduced by the Normans, our historians seeming rather proud of the humiliation which the Norman usurpation of the English crown undoubtedly was. But as Sir Frederick Madden, Max Mliller, Dr. Morriss, and other eminent philologists have shown with respect to the language, so it may be shown in a similar way v.] The Civil Dress of the English. 1 5 3 that there v/ere no important changes in English dress produced by these invaders. It is true they called English things by Norman names, and those whose interest it was to flatter the rulers adopted such words ; but the articles remained the same. The wimple was not rudely torn from the heads of the ladies. On the contrary, Norman women adopted it under the new name of the couvre-clief, chef being Norman slang for the head. Couvre- clief exists in a maltreated form (as if the English had taken it between their teeth and worried it) in our " ker- chief", and still more wonderful word, having no sense whatever, of "hand-ker-chief," something intended to cover the head used for the band. The further elaboration of "pocket-hand-ker-chief " is something quite unique in the history of hybrids. The Normans called the wimple a couvre-chef; the over- slop, a super-tunic; the gunna, a robe, and so forth ; but a mere change in nomenclature surely gives no claim to in- vention. They adopted the wimple from the Anglo-Saxons, but they effected no change in that article of dress by gi\^ng it another name ; while the slight modifications which took place in its form and mode of arrangement gave the innovators no claim as inventors. The coif, also, was a head-covering ascribed to the Normans, but this was a German invention, called in German a luffc. It must therefore not be confounded with the Norman form of the wimple, although the word became Gallicised into coiffure, coiffcttc, and other expressions similarlv com- pounded. Now, all this tends to establish what I have already, on perfectly different grounds, asserted to be true, namely. 154 f'lii-' Civil Pirss of the lini^lisli. [l,i;cT. tliiit the actual iiiaiuicrs, cii.sLoris and Pastimes. [lect. witliout (loinrj any damage, or falling harmlessly down from his beloved form, leaving it quite unscatlicd. Now there was, amongst the twelv^e gods of Valhalla, one wlio was a traitor. This was the Utgard Loki, the enemy of Goodness and Truth, and lie knew tliat when Nanna, tlie Inide of Baldnr, had obtained this universal promise, the mistletoe had been overlooked, because he himself had sat upon the branch of the oak on which it grew, in the shape of a white crow (afterwards black for punishment), and hid the parasite from view. So he contrived to get an arrow made of the wood of the mistletoe put into the hand of Hoder, the blind brother of the sun-god. Standing behind him, Loki directs the shaft, which flies on to the breast of the beaming one. The cock, since then sacred to Baldur, flies up to inter- cept the arrow, wliich first pierces his breast, and finally sinks into the heart of Baldur. The death of Baldur and his subsequent re-admission to Valhalla for half the year, while during the other half he remains w^ith the pale goddess of the lower regions ; the opening of the rosy portals by Eostra, goddess of the Dawn, to receive him ; as well as the other circumstances of this beautiful myth, have been dwelt upon in another place,* and I only refer to it now to show you where to look for the origin of the early English or Anglo-Saxon archery games, their casting the bar and ja^■elin at a figure armed as a warrior, and the custom of shooting at the cock at Easter. The attack on the armed warrior was afterwards con- sidered a variety of the quintain, though in all probability * Older EiHflinuh First Series, p. 73 et seq. VI.] sports and Pastimes. 183 the quintain was itself derived from an older game, fore- shadowed by the attack of the gods on Baldur ; and many other customs of far later times are due to the teachings of this charming piece of mythology. To shoot at an armed warrior, protected only by his shield, is here seen to be a game instituted by the gods themselves, so that we need not be surprised at finding it among the observances of those who claimed descent from them. The word " quentain", or " quemtain", has a very suspicious look about it, and I suspect it was derived from some such exjDression as haoen tan, keen-tooth — a capital name for a warrior. However, I must observe tliat this is mere hypothesis. The English branch of the Scandinavian tree allowed the practice of archery to fall into abeyance until, after the sharp lesson at Hastings, they began to pay greater attention than ever to the bow, and we find all sorts of xy precautions taken to make Englishmen good bowmen. Yew trees were grown in churchyards ; laws were passed enforcing the use of the weapon ; and the archery games thus instituted became national. In Finsbury there were butts set up for practice with the bow and arrow : these were mounds of earth artificially thrown up, having targets fixed upon them wliereat the archers shot. The existence of this practice is preserved in the name of Newington Butts; while the ground belonging to the Artillery Com- pany, near Finsbury Square, was originally devoted to the archers of the City of London, formerly celebrated as marksmen. The bow has yielded to the ritle, but the ground is still devoted to the same purpose in the new phase. Nobler sport cannot be desired than that wliich 184 Sports and Pastimes. [lfxt. the iiiarksnmn enjoys ; while the true eye, elastic tread, and shoulder-to-shoulder feeling engendered 1)y the game have done much to render the English riflemen of Tel-el- Kehir worthy descendants of the archers of Cressy and Poictiers. The early P'nglish in their pagan state were accustomed to a khid of sword-dance round the altar of Odin, which continued for a whole week previous to one of the great festivals in his honour. This was called the ymhirrnen, or ymhirren, the round running ; and this is preserved in our Christian culte under the name of the Ember week, which name has nothing Avhatever to do with embers, being only a corruption of ynib irrnen. Military games at the time when the days begin to lengthen (hence Lent, from lencten) were the forerunners of the volunteer manoeuvres of the Victorian age ; and it is a good sign when so large a proportion of the population of the island shows that not- withstanding the disadvantages of these times, the old mar- tial spirit has not been quite stamped out among us. There is hardly an English man, or woman either, who has never heard of Eobin Hood and his merry archers in Sherwood Forest, but there may be many to whom the equally exciting and equally English adventures of Adam Bell, Clym of the Clough, and William of Cloudesley are unknown. And yet there is much in the spirited old histories of these M-orthies, preserved by Bishop Percy, in his Beliques of Ancient Enr/lish Poetry, that would delight the youth and maidens of the present day, as much as they did their ancestors. The grand military dance performed by the Saxon youth in the time of Tacitus would prepare us to expect military VI.] sports and Pastimes. 185 amusements as the chief relaxation of their immediate successors, and accordingly we find the word "play" — a pure, ancient Teutonic word — applied to all sorts of war- like exercises. Thus we have such expressions as 'pUijo gdres, play of the javelins ; sssc-plega, play of spears ; lirulen plega, play of the shields ; siveardu plega, sword play ; hand plcga, the play of hands, and many others of a similar kind, all English ; ancient in form, but quite intelligible to modern students without translation. When the Anglo- Saxon (as I am compelled to call the early English- man) had to translate Latin themes for school, we find the Roman gladiator called pJcgcrc, a player ; or plegc man, a play man ; while the theatre and amphitheatre are called a p)lcga hus and j^^cga stow, a play house or place, respectivel3\ A picture in the Harleian MS. No. 603 exhibits a jjJega stoio according to early English ideas. A number of spectators are gathered together to witness the performances of a trained bear. The animal is lying down, pretending to be dead. A minstrel, or glcc-man, a man who produces mirth or glee, is playing upon a kind of double pipe, the recorders of later times, and a dancer is perform- ing to the music. One of the audience is clapping his hands in delight, while others are engaged in earnest con- versation upon the merits of the performance. P2ach village had its green or play-ground, and outside each town similar spaces were reserved for play and gamen, i.e., amusement, pleasure, or delight. There was, as is still found in the north of Germany, Scandinavia, and Russia, to this day — as in the old time before we were Christians — a running brook and a well near to the village green or play-ground. Bearing in mind that the games 1 86 Sports and Pastimes. [lect. W('i(i instituted in honour of one of the gods of the Odinic series, we shall at once l)e led to connect this custom with the locll-iDortha, or well-worship, so firmly adhered to hy our forefathers and foremothers, that, long after Alfred's time, nay, after the Norman u.surpati(jn, laws were enacted against it. " To wake the well" was to appeal to the divinity invoked through the inferior spirit of the well, who was supposed to be more come-at-able than the deity himself. These religious festivals were the origin of our village toal'cs. The gleeman, the hoppestere, or dancing girl, the bear-leader, were welcome at such gatherings ; and in them we see the origin of our fairs, with their subsequent declensions into mere resorts of riotous amusement. That these half-religious, half-warlike, and wholly Teutonic gatherings should have attracted the wandering merchants of those times is very natural, and the process is very clearly put in one of the ]\ISS. of the Harleian collection (No. 3601, fol. 12, v), wliich speaks of the celebrated fair at Barnwell, near Cambridge. " It was a large open place between the town and the banks of the river, well suited for such festivities as those of which we are speaking. A spring in the middle of this plain, we are told in the early chartulary of Barnwell Abbey, was called Beornawyl (the well of the youths), because every year on the eve of the nativity of St. John the Baptist the boys and youths of the neighbourhood assembled there, and, after the manner of the English, practised wrestling and other boyish games, and mutually applauded one anotlier with songs and musical instruments ; whence, on account of the multitude of bovs and ^irls who VI.] sports and Pastimes. 187 gathered there, it grew a custom for a crowd of sellers and buyers to assemble there on tlie same day for the purpose of commerce."* The day of the nativity of St. John was, in our pre- Christian period, the anniversary of Baldur's descent to the lower regions. The sun-god mounts his funeral-pyre, which on that occasion blazes through the night ; in other words, the sun does not set on that night, but remains tlu'ough midnight glowing in the blue vault, which is tlie floor of Vallialla. The funeral-pyre is called Baldur's Bal (or Bal) in the North; and in England we called tlie fires lighted on St. John's eve Bale fires, long after the myth liad died. Who would liave thought of connecting John tlie Baptist with Baldur ? Nobody ever did so; but, like other pagan feasts and solemn occasions, it was not swept away by the innovating hand of tlie Christian priest ; like Christmas, it was christened, and not destroyed. The good fathers cared little about the minor details if they only got their proselytes to believe in St. John and forget Baldur, to adore Christ and forget Odin. The Bale fire has as little to do with St. John as the holly, mistletoe, ivy, and plum-pudding have to with our Blessed Lord. But they remain, and prove that the old priests were right : they do not now remind us of Baldur and of Odin, but of a much higher order of teaching. Of course the early English could not bring the sun with them (however much we may regret their inability to do so) ; consequently artificial fires had to take the place of "the sky's shi])" on the anniversary of Baldur's * Wright's Jlinlory of the J)oiiii'slic Munnfrs and Sfntii)U^nfs in Euijlaml during the Middle Agex, p. G7. Loiieloii. ISlc'. 1 88 Sports and Pastimes. [l?:ct. fate. Hence the " Bale fires", as they used to be called, or St. John's fires, as they were termed until very recently in Cornwall. ^ These festivals, with their dances and games, are all Teutonic. We find nothing Roman amongst them save the names bestowed on them by the Christian fathers in converting them, so to say, to Christianity ; but there is one sport, or rather a collection of sports, which remains as pagan as ever, and has become more barbarous than in the pagan times of old. I meau hunting. To the early immigrants from Scandinavia the hunt was the only means of obtaining certain kinds of food. The wild boar, the still more terrible orochs, the elk, the bear, were all hunted for food ; and as the pursuit of these animals was always attended with considerable personal risk, it would naturally be popular with such danger- loving adventurers as our remote ancestors were. Next to war, the chase was the occupation nearest their hearts, and the most natural to indulge in, as being " mimicry of glorious war". Besides, there was a very warlike side to hunting, for the bear was not always attacked only to obtain hams. He was as often slain in self-defence ; while the wolf and the fox were only followed for the sake of destroying dangerous foes, without any ultimate thought connected with the larder. In both these phases hunting was a noble and laudable occupation ; the only slur that a poet could cast upon it being its necessity, a slur which to most minds would be the highest praise. But when the condition of society has changed so much, that to indulge a passion for the chase a party of men send over to France to buy a fox. that they / VI.] sports and Pastimes. 189 may run the poor wretch down and torture him for fun, the noble side of our civilised notions of Cliristian hunting does not seem brilliant. When our forests swarmed with dangerous wild boars, when wolves devoured our children, and foxes were every- where, to disappoint our dearest Michaelmas expectations, then hunting was, indeed, a necessary and laudable occu- pation. So when we find our ancestors getting up very early, armed with boar-spear and seax, subsequently with the hunting-knife, riding out to meet formidable game, and "bagging" bears, elks, wolves, and foxes for fun, or boars and wild oxen for food, we feel that it was a right noble thing to do; and the same feeling descending from those noble sires — (who also hunted the Picts and Scots and Lritons away from their broad fields) — now sends our youngsters off to India to shoot "Stripes" in the jungle (as they call hunting the tiger), and to oppose Teuton steel to the bear's claws farther north ! Yes, those are sports and pastimes indeed that those brave sires would appreciate, and we may almost fancy we hear the ring of their battle blades beaten against their bucklers, sending a hearty burst of applause to us from the tomb ! The bow and arrows seem, with the boar-spear, to have constituted the chief weapons used in the chase from the earliest times until long after the employment of gun- powder ; but there is one curious and most interesting mode v of pursuing birds which has long been lost to us, and that is the noble art of falconry. That gentle bird, the falcon, is only known to the naturalist as one of the liaptorcs : that is all. There is nothing left us of the ]iO('try of the 190 sports ami Pastimes. [li;ct, bells, the hood, the lure, and all the pretty things that surruuiul him as with a halo of mediseval romance. The falcon, or falk, is dead to us, despite the assurance of the naturalist, and we shall never more see the English noble- man or woman ride out with the Ijrave bird on his or her wrist. From the earliest MSS., from the Bayeux Tapestry itself, down to the more recent days of Good Queen Bess, we have been taught to connect the falcon with gentle blood. Who does not know the charming poem by Skelton, in which he apostrophises Dame Margaret as " Of ladies the flower, Gentle as falcon, Or hawk of the tower '? " Stephen, King of England, is represented as bearing the hawk on his hand as a proof of being of noble, if not of royal blood ; and in Germany, Sebastian Brandt, in his Narcnscliiff, or Ship of Fools, published towards the end of the fifteenth century, accuses his countrymen of the dis- graceful custom of carrying their hawks to church with them. Ladies not only accompanied the sterner sex in ^ pursuit of this pleasure, but they very often practised it alone. A writer of the thirteenth century endeavoured to bring discredit on the practice because ladies often excel gentlemen in it, proving the pastime to be effeminate and frivolous." I take this from Strutt's Sports arid Fas- times, but purposely refrain from mentioning the author's name, lea^^ng him to the oblivion which his want of gal- lantry merits. Hawking was prohibited to the clergy, but, Like many other prohibitions, this does not seem to have been of any use, for the higher dignitaries in the Church carried their VI.] Sporfs and Pastimes. 191 falcons as bravely as the lay nobility. On tliis account they were severely lashed by the poets and ruoralists, who inveighed against them bitterly for hawking and hunting too — one practice seems generally connected with the other. The perfection of the musket caused the decline of hawking ; for the method of bringing down a bird with a shot from a fowling-piece is so much more sure and cer- tain than that of sending another bird after him, whose expensive keep and numerous wants rendered game a very costly luxury. Hentzner, in his Itinerary, written in 1598, assures us that " hawking was the general sport of the v/ English nobility ; at the same time, most of the best trea- tises upon this subject were written. At the commencement of the seventeenth century, it seems to have been in the zenith of its glory. At the close of the same century the sport was rarely practised, and a few years afterwards hardly known.''* "When the hawk was not flying at her game, she was usually hood-winked, with a cap or hood provided for that purpose and fitted to her head ; and this hood was worn abroad as well as at home. All hawks taken upon ' the list' (the term used for carrying them upon the hand) liad straps of leather, called 'Jessies', put about their legs. The Jessies were made sufficiently long for the knots to appear between the middle and the little fingers of the liand that held them, so that the lunes, or small thongs of leather, might be fastened to them with two tyrrits, or rings ; and the lunes were loosely wound round the little finger. It appears that sometimes the Jessies were of silk. Lastly, * Strutt's S2)orts and PastiineK, Book I, chap. ii. 192 sports and Pastimes. [lixt. llicir legs were adonicd with Ijells, fastened with rings of leather, each leg having one ; and tlie leathers to which the bells were attached were denominated ' bewits* ; and to the bewit was added the creance, or long thread by which the bird, in tutoring, was drawn back, after she had been permitted to tly, and this was called tlie reclaiming of the hawk." " Under the Norman government no persons but such as were of the highest rank were permitted to keep hawks, as appears from a clause inserted in the Forest Charter ; this charter King John was compelled to sign ; and by it the privilege was given to every free man to have aeries of hawks, sparrow-hawks, falcons, eagles, and herons in his own woods. In the thirty-fourth year of the reign of Edward III, a statute was made by which a person finding a falcon, tercelet, laner, laneret, or any other species of hawk, that had been lost by its owner, was commanded to carry the same to the sheriff of the county wherein it was found ; the duty of the sheriff was to cause a proclamation to be made in all the principal towns of the county, that he had such a hawk in his custody, and that the nobleman to whom it belonged, or his falconer, might ascertain the same to be his property and have it restored to him, he first paying the costs that had been incurred by the sheriff ; and if in the space of four months no claimant appeared, it became the property of the finder, if he was a person of rank, upon his paying the costs to the sheriff; on the con- trary, if he was an unqualified man, the hawk belonged to the sherifi": but the person who found it was to be re- warded for his trouble.'^* * Strutt's S/Jorts (oid Padiiues, Book I, chap. ii. VI.] sports and Pastimes. 193 The laws against injuring these valuable birds or de- stroying their eggs were, down to the time of Henry the Seventh, most severe, — a year's imprisonment being con- sidered as a fair set-off against these offences. The value of the bird is dwelt upon by Strutt as something very w extraordinary. " At the commencement of the seven- teenth century, we find (he says) that a gos-hawk and a tassel-hawk were sold for one hundred marks, which was a large sum in those days, and the price is by no means mentioned as singular or extravagant ; for, on the contrary, an author, Edmund Best, who published a treatise upon hawks and hawking, printed at London in 1619, and who himself trained and sold them, insinuates that the parting from the birds was considered as a favour : and no doubt it was so, if the hawks in training required such incredible pains and watchfulness, both by day and night, as he declares are absolutely necessary. And upon this account such as were properly trained and exercised were esteemed presents worthy the acceptance of a king, or an emperor. In the eighth year of the reign of Edward III, the King of Scotland sent him a falcon-gentle as a present, which he not only most graciously received, but rewarded the falconer who brought it with the donation of forty shillings, — a proof how highly the bird was valued. It is further said, that, in the reign of James I, Sir Thomas Monson gave one thousand pounds for a cast of hawks. 'A cast of hawks ofj toure,' says an old book on hawking, ' signifies two, and a lese three.' " The books of hawking assign to the different ranks of persons the sort of hawks proper to be used by them, and ^ they are placed in the following order : — III. o 194 Sports and Pastimes. [lecT. "The eagle, the vuhuru, uuu the iac'iiuun,tur uu emperor; the, ^er-faulcou and the tercel of the ger-faulcon, for a king ; tlie faulcou gentle and the tercel gentle, for a prince ; the faulcon of the rock, for a duke ; the faulcon peregrine, for an earl ; the bastard, for a baron ; the sacre and the sacret, for a knight ; the lanere and tlie laneret, for an esquire; the marly on, for a lady ; the hobby, for a young man. These ben hawkes of toure, and ben both illured and re- claymed. The gos-hawk, for a yeoman ; the tercel, for a poor man ; the sparrow-hawk for a priest ; the musket, for a holy water clerk ; the kestrel^ for a knave or servant." The tercel, or tiercel, is the male of the hawk. The hawk was kept in the mew during the time of moulting, whence at Charing Cross we have the Mews, where the king's hawks were kept as early as the time of Pdchard II ; but in 1537 this place was converted into stables for the horses of Henry VIII, and since that time this hawking term has changed its meaning to stables. Horse-racing, amongst our earliest ancestors, was con- lined entirely, or almost entirely, to persons of high rank. It was necessary for them to understand the points of a horse, and their racing was generally to find out the qualities of the animal, rather than to win stakes. It was also practised for mere amusement. Fitz Stephen, who lived in the reign of Henry II, teUs us that horses were usually exposed for sale in West Smithtield ; and in order to test the excellence of the most valuable hackneys and charging steeds, they were matched against each other. His words are to this effect : " AVhen a race is to be run by this sort of horses, and perhaps by others, which also in their kind are strong and fleet, a shout VI.] sports and PastintfS. 195 is immediately raised, and the common horses are ordered to witlidraw out of the way. Three jockeys, or sometimes only two, as the match is made, prepare themselves for the contest ; such as, being used to ride, know how to manage their horses with judgment : the grand point is to prevent a competitor from getting before them. The horses on their part are not without enmlation ; they tremble and are impatient, and are constantly in motion. At last, the signal once given, they strike, devour the course, hurrying along with unremitting velocity. The jockeys, inspired with the thoughts of applause and the hopes of victory, clap spurs to their willing horses, brandish their whips, and cheer them with their cries.'' The Easter and Whitsuntide holidays were the principal times when the nobility indulged themselves in running their horses, and there is plenty of evidence to show that the so-called running horses of P]dward the Third and other of our sovereigns were extremely valuable ; but there is no ground for supposing that anything like betting on the turf was practised until what may be called comparatively modern times. Horse - racing was advantageously contrasted with card-playing, dicing, and stage-plays by an old puritanical writer of Elizabeth's time. But towards the end of the seventeenth century there are indications of the evil practice of betting. Burton says: "Horse-races are desports of great men, and good in themselves, though many gentlemen by such means gallop quite out of their fortunes." We may consider, therefore, the vicious part of horse-racing to be about two centuries old, while the health- ful emulation between accomplished riders is ancient. 2 196 sports and Pastimes. [lecT. A Chester antiquary says that it had been customary, time out of mind, lor tlie Company of the Sadlers to present to the Drapers a wooden ball, embellished with flowers, on Shrove Tuesday. In the thirty-first year of the reign of Henry VIII this was exchanged for a hell of silver, of the value of three shillings and sixpence or more — " to be given to him who shall run the best and the farthest on horseback, before them upon the same day." Herein we trace the origin of the saying, " to bear away the bell." " In the reign of James I public races were esta- blished in many parts of the kingdom, and the prize was a silver bell. " At the latter end of the reign of Charles I races were held in Hyde Park and at New Market. After the Eestoration, horse-racing was revived by Charles II, who frequently honoured the pastime with his presence, and for his own amusement, when he resided at Windsor, appointed races to be made in Datchet-mead. At New Market, where it is said he entered horses and ran them in his name, he established a house for his better accommodation. " At this time the beUs seem to have been converted into cups or bowls, or some other pieces of plate, which were usually valued at one hundred guineas each ; and upon these trophies of ^'ictory the pedigrees of the successful horses were engraved. William III was a patroniser of this pastime. George I, instead of a piece of plate, gave a hundred guineas, to be paid in money."* Of the athletic sports of the Middle Ages the most gorgeous, the most popular, and the best known to us are ° Strutt, Sports and Pastimes, Book I, chap. iii. VI.] sports and Pastimes. 197 the jousts and tournaments, established for the purpose of giving military men opportunities of exercising their skill in arms and improving it by practice. The tournament was a military game, in which many " players" took part ; while the jousts were arranged for two, in a sort of friendly duel. Tournaments have been so often described, and are so familiar to all readers of history, that any lengthy account of them here would be out of place. The weapons, chiefly lances specially made for these encounters, were made without the barbed, or spear-head ; sometimes, how- ever, they were provided with what is called the " coronal", which consisted of three points of iron, not sharp, but each provided with a sort of Ijutton or rebate, to prevent its doing any serious damage. But the general practice was to have no head at all to the tilting-lance, the object being on the one side to push the adversary out of tlie saddle, and on the other to sit firmly and to cause the lance to shiver to pieces in the shock. Hence the lances were not so deadly as those used in war, and the armour was much stronger. In the far-back pagan'times,when appeal was constantly made to the trial by battle, there was a not unnatural be- lief that the gods of Valhalla actually presided over trials of the kind. To insure their presence sacrifices were made, and to keep off the influence of evil spirits an island was resorted to, on account of the idea that running water, or indeed water of any kind, would dissolve spells and pre- vent the entrance of black elves or witches. "NVhon an island was not to be had, the same effect was produced by surrounding a portion of ground with white cords stretched between hazel-wands, and these were called, in High- ]gR S/>or/s nnd Pasfii>ii:<;. [r.KCT. ( I (Minn n, .sr/irftn/cc/i, or enclosed places. A schrank means MOW a box. In the poem of Sj/r Trijstrrm the expression " a Tournament tliey chest", twice repeated, bearing the sense (from the context) of enclosing, not choosing, first led me to recognise in our Chester the same idea of something enclosed, and hence applied to walled towns without refer- ence whatever to the Latin castrum. These temporary en- clo-sures were, however, called " the lists" in England. The brutal boxing-match of the so-called " fancy", with its " ring" for tlie lists, is the degraded, degenerated, and dis- graceful progeny of the brilliant joust, at which the very flower of beauty and female delicacy did not (in the good old days gone by) disdain to preside. But military display was not the only end and design of the sports of our forefathers. There were many games instituted, with the view of rendering the frame robust, which were in themselves unconnected with serious danger. There was throwing the bar, slinging stones of different weight with extreme precision to great distances ; and farther back we meet with the practice of rolling immense blocks of granite, resorted to by the Scandinavian youth of the third and fourth centuries. Nicety of judg- ment was cultivated in the custom of throwing quoits and running at the ring, while swimming, foot-racing, climbing, and similar exercises tended to impart vigour and freshness to the body and confidence to the mind. (^f the games tlnis arising few have exercised such intluence over the mind of English people, at least, as those with balls. The ball seems to have had a special fascination for us. The word is ancient and Scandinavian in its cliaracter. "We find it in two forms, holl); or hallar, VI.] Sports and Pastimes. 199 meaning a globe. It does not appear in German save as a borrowed expression of comparatively recent date. Xor liave I met with it in any of the early English vocabularies in the sense of a modern ball, for playing at certain games. The earliest notice which I find of the word approximately thus spelled is in the Brut of Layamon where one MS. reads thus : "■^ cleoped he Vthaer Vther com swi^e and alle Hne enihtes mid )>e and winne'S J^as stanes alle. ne scullen ze Igeven naenne for nu ze mazen heom habben swulche ve'Serne balles." The other MS. reads as follows : " >o cleopede he Vther Vther com to me and all t>ine enihtes mid J>e and nimej> \>&o% stones alle ne solle ze bi-leave nanne for non ze mawe heom hebbe ase fe^erbeddes." There the sense is rather hales than balls, as is evident from the context ; but as it is the earliest use of au}thing like this expression that I have found, I give it. The word which we pronounce bale, as bale of cotton or cloth, is the same which in Germany appears as ball ; and com- paring the heavy masses of granite to bales of feathers would be apt enough, especially as the latter text has beds of feathers. <• The earliest mention of ball-play in England that I have been able to meet with is by Fitz Stephen, who wrote in tlie thirteenth century, and he says that " annually upon 200 Sports and Pastimes. [lect. Slirove Tuesday the London school-boys go into the fields immediately after dinner and play at the celebrated game of ball : every party of boys carrying their own ball." Stowe, because goff was played in his time, thinks that the game here meant must have been gofif ; and as Strutt says, " without the least sanction from the Latin, he (Stowe) has added the word bastion, meaning a bat cudgel." I quite agree with Strutt's view, namely, that ^ the game played was " hand-ball", as there is no authority to show that a bat was used, or that the ball was driven by the foot. Certainly hand-ball preceded games with sticks and bats, and was much practised on the Continent. The first authority for games with a bat, or stick, and balls, refers us to the thirteenth century, of which date there is an illumination in the Eoyal Library representing a man in a hood holding a large ball in his left hand and a bat in his right. Another individual is anxiously on the look- out, either having just thrown the ball, which has been caught by the batsman, or waiting until it shall be despatched in his direction by a blow from the bat. The scene is of the early part of the reign of Henry III. Strutt gives a group from a MS. in the Bodleian, in which a man is represented with a bat, and a woman is about to deliver the ball to him. My friend Mr. Compton read a paper on the antiquity of goff or bandy ball before the Congress of the British Archa-^ological Association, at Great Malvern, in August 1881, in which he suggests that the curved bat used in golf was very probably the origin of the term handy, as applied to the game. Golf, with the dropping of the / before /, becomes goff, and the older word explains its origin as VI,] sports and Pastimes. 201 purely Teutonic. We have it in the German kolbc, the butt-end of a musket, and it is doubtless the same word as hetde, a club. I have been able to trace tlie word up into the oldest form of Scandinavian speech, Icelandic, and there we find liolfr used for a javelin or arrow, and subsequently for the clapper of a liell, and cognate with the expression liylfo, a club, or the butt-end of a weapon. In Danish we get Icolv, for an arrow or the bolt of a cross-bow. The later ideas are all connected with a rounded end or butt-end of some weapon, and this is remarkably applicable to the bandy used in golf. The term is ancient, is sturdily Teutonic, without the faintest taint of Rome to sully its pure English (Scandinavian) nature, and accordingly we find golf, or what was very like it, the most ancient game of all those played with ball, excepting hand-ball, which seems to have preceded it. Balloon balls of leather filled with air were known in the fourteenth century, and must have been rather good fun, to judge from the illuminations. Trap, bat, and ball is another ancient game, or at least comparatively so. A manuscript formerly in the possession of Mr. Douce, and undoubtedly of the fourteenth century, represents this game with a very queer trap certainly, but the principle is the same as in that of our day. Cricket is quite a modern invention, dating no further back than the last century, but it has become a greater favourite than any game, excepting the tournament, ever invented, although it remains understood and practised by English people only (including, of course, the English in America, Australia, and everywhere). Foreigners, even 202 Sports and Pastimes. [lect. iiuludiiif,' ilic kindred Germans and Scandinavians, are at a loss to understand the enthusiasm which Englishmen manifest regarding this, to them, childish way of spending time. Doubtless, the custom of playing games with bats and balls is new among adults, or at least comparatively so, and the representations in the MSS. may be generally taken to be those of children rather than of men at play. To this cause I am inclined to attribute the silence of the chronicles on the subject of such games, while military sports, and even dicing and horse-racing, are constantly referred to. There is no word precisely equivalent to our " ball" in the older English or Anglo-Saxon, and the Icelandic hollr, to which I have referred, means rather a globe, as a technical word in physics, than in sport. We have seen the term ;play applied rather to the mili- tary exercises of the early English than to their mere amuse- ments, but the expression games {gamen), and glee (gliew, (jlierj), also living words among us to-day, have different significations from that of play, and point more to amuse- ments than to the stern necessities of life. The sleeman was the harper, the glee- wood or glee-beom, the harp, while the female vocalists and dancers who accompanied the glee- man on his rounds, were called the glee-maidens. The word has come down to us without its compounds as an equivalent for mirth ; while "game" is as living a word as ever it was, denoting quieter and more mental enjoyment than either " play" or "sport". The gleeman enlivened the hall during meals, and in the time of winter he was indispensable. But the gleeman at first was not merely a minstrel, as he afterwards came to be called, who dehghted the family of his patron with his .>^kill as a harper, but he also performed VI.] sports and Pastivics. 203 feats of dexterity' as a juggler, wlio is erroneously believed to have been a Norman invention. The term gleeman covered all the ground which was covered by minstrel and jonrjleur of later times, just as the term minstrel originally did. The minstrel Taillefer is said to have chanted the " Song of Eoland" at the commencement of the battle of Hastings, and at the same time to have flung his lance up into the air, catching it again with such dexterity, and so repeatedly, that both sides thought it must have been the work of magic. He tossed his sword also into the air in the same kind of way, and was regarded with awe by the English as a sorcerer. The earlier Norman word, however, seems originally to have had the same fulness of meaning as gleeman, jongleur being a more modern refinement or sub-division of the chief thought : for, as the duties of tlie minstrel became more varied, they were confided to different individuals bearing different titles, as rimours, clianteurs, contcic-rs, jongleours, or jongleurs, jcstours, and trouba- dours or trouvh-cs. These names are specific appellations of indivi(hiiil branches of the grand profession of which minstrel was the generic title. Of these, the trouvh'cs and contcours themselves composed the songs wliicli tliey sang, while the jongleurs and the chantcnrs used the compositions of otliers. An old French author says that the trouvlres embellished their productions with rhyme, while the conteurs related their histories in ]irose; the ji(g<- /owrs, who in the Middle Ages were famous for playing on the viellc (our viol), accompanied the songs of tlie trouvercs. The vielle was a stringed instrument sounded by the turn- ing of a wheel, resembling, in fact, the modern hurdy-gurd>-. 204 sports and Pastimes. [lect. Til tlio British Museum there is a MS. in which King David is represented playing the Anglo-Saxon harp, while four figures are grouped about him so as to frame the pic- ture of the king, as it were. These four persons are named as those selected by the monarch to make psalms — Asaph, /Eman, yEthan, and Idithun. Of these, Idithun is playing upon an instrument almost identical with our modern violin, while iEthan is tossing up three Anglo-Saxon knives and three balls, at the same time, showing how the gleeman or minstrel performed his part ; and further, which is of greater interest to us, as it shows that the somewhat silly trick of tossing balls and knives, now confined to itinerant practitioners in the liOndon streets, was then not considered unworthy the attention of such exalted poets as those who could aid the Eoyal Psalmist in the most sublime poetry ever yet breathed in mortal language. This MS. shows us what one part of the gleeman's duty was, and how the Norman appellation of jonglcours has become debased in our day, together with the art they practised, the professors becoming jugglers and their art juggling, a term also used to denote any mean, under- hand trickery. The conteurs seem to have been called by various names, as seggcrs, or saycrs, dissours, jestours, and, in the barbarous Latin of the time, also fabulatorcs. All these terms seem to have vanished, save jcstour, from the neo- Latinism of ^csfc5, in which ther/, softening into y, has pro- duced our jester. The descent from the somewhat im- portant function of an official whose duty was to instruct and amuse by tales of the deeds of heroes of ancient days, to that of the crack-brained fool whose highest VI.] Sports and Pastimes. 205 ambition is to raise a laugh, was sudden but natural ; for, being summoned to amuse his patrons on occasions of con- viviality and festivity, this official found it pay better to raise a laugh than to awaken serious thoughts. To turn everything said by others into a "jest" (in the modern sense of the word) is an occupation eminently adapted to persons of mean understanding, and the relaters of the grave gestes of old became the frivolous jester of the later ages, called also the court fool. The parti-coloured dress, the motley of Shakespeare, was not originally a token of servitude and a label of half-wittedness. In earlier times we find important functionaries — as the sheriff — dressed in parti-coloured garments as an honourable distinction ; and because the man who told instructive stories held an important position in a household, it was natural that he should be distinguished above the rest. When he descended to the low level of a maker of jokes, he still retained his parti-coloured dress; but as others had discontinued it, the distinction became one of folly rather than of wisdom. Still the jesters always remained familiar persons, and we can see by the glimpses we get at them through Shake- speare, how important they were in being able to give ex officio opinions on matters which less privileged persons dared not approach. Our own word " fool" simply means a stupid, ignorant person, whose actions and words are not under the control of sound reason, but it has not the fearful meaning of tlie racca of tlie Hebrews, and yet it is used in very nearly the same sense in our translation of the Bible. In a Psalter in the British Museum, formerly the property of Henry VIII, there is a portrait of that king playing on a harp to bis jester, Will Somers, who is looking uneasy as 2o6 sports and Pastiince. [lkcT. till! .strains niecl his ear. He is struck with remorse and sliaiiie. This wonderful picture illustrates the passaf,'e, " the fool hath said in his heart, there is no God." Here we see that fool had acquired the less grave signification, allowing of its application to the jester without losing the more terrible sense which is, in this instance, employed almost punningly. An inferior class of jesters was called the "japers", whose office was still meaner and more productive of harm. They produced mirth by performing all kinds of antics and saying all kinds of things, setting decorum entirely at defi- ance. Some of these were so well rewarded that all kinds of people assumed to be minstrels of this order, in the hope of excessive pay. This increased so much that, in the reign of Edward II, laws were enacted providing that no person not duly qualified should pass himself off as a minstrel, and prohibiting a professed minstrel from going to the house of a person below the dignity of a baron, imless invited by the master, and then he was to be contented with what the housekeeper willingly offered him, without presuming to demand anything. For the first offence he was punished by losing the reward of his minstrelsy, and for the second he w^as compelled to forswear minstrelsy altogether. Minstrels fell lower and low^r, until in the reign of Elizabeth they were included among the rogues, vagabonds, and sturdy beggars, and subject to a like punishment ; and in 1589 we find, in Putenham's Arte of English Poesie, " tavern minstrels" spoken of with other itinerant vaga- bonds. Thus we may sum in a very brief way a curious history of a most important functionary. First he appeal's as the VI.] sports and Pastimes. 207 skald of Northern history, full of the religious poems, mythological stories, and heroic adventures of his race ; singing also the praises of his master and of his master's ancestors, away back to the very gods themselves. Christi- anity modifies, without absolutely destroying, these stories, and the pagan skalci becomes the Christian liarper and gleeman. Then come the Normans, translating him into a minstrel, with the various branches of the minstrel art, until he dies out as a disgraced vagabond ' The presence of so many persons, all in the category of household servants, whose special duty it was to amuse, would naturally give rise to the custom of mumming or masking, where these people disguised themselves originally in the skins of animals, and subsequently with pasteboard visors and heads of grotesque form. These more ancient disguisements seem to have led to the wildest disorders and most extraordinary malpractices. From their being performed by domestics, it became the fashion to call actors " servants", because originally they were such. The improprieties and revolting coarseness of these extemporary diversions soon called down the wrath of the Church. Monks and priests took up arms against these plays, but as early as the twelfth century began to repre- sent scenes from Scripture, to attract people to religious matters by appealing to their taste for scenic representation. According to Warton, tlie historian of English poetry, the first of these religious performances was composed early in the twelfth century. It was founded on the life of St. Catherine, and was performed at Dunstable by the scholars of the Norman school there. "William Fitz Stephen, a writer of the twelfth century, in his description 2o8 sports and Pastimes. [lkct. of London, relates that " London, for its theatrical exhibi- tions, had holy plays, on the representation of miracles wrought by confessors, and of the sufferings of martyrs." These pieces must have been in high vogue, for Matthew Paris, who wrote about 1240, says that they were such as were commonly called miracles.* We know that this name continued to be given to these performances until they at last died out. Curious plays they must have been for our forefathers and foremothers to delight in. There would be difficulties in the way of some of the scenes that might stagger our modern ballet managers. But courage and determination were prominent features in those early days, and the story of the creation and fall of man was given with a faithfulness to the letter truly aston- ishing. After the appropriation of the forbidden fruit the serpent is directed to " exit Jiissing". The profession of an actor, as opposed to the clerical exhibitor of scenes from sacred history, seems to have been regarded with very great contempt even so early as the middle of the twelfth century, for John of Salisbury, who wrote about 1160. says, "Actors and maskers cannot receive the holy communion." This is almost enough to convince us that their art must have been very popular, and it cost the monks and other good members of the Church a hard fight to render their pieces more attractive to the general public. This opened a door to the wildest profanity. Sacred subjects were treated not only familiarly, but the coarsest buflbonery was mixed up with the representations of sub- jects which should only be handled with reverence and *W;u-ton, Ilht. EnrjUsh Poetry, vol. ii, p. IP. IS-iO. VI.] sports and Pastimes. 209 awe. The custom of performing these plays in churches was perhaps, under the circumstances of the times, and in view of the movement being a clerical one, nothing more than we might have expected ; but it paved the way to the use of the church as a mere play-house, and at last this practice grew to such an enormity that, as late as the reign of Henry VIII, we find Bishop Bonner issuing a proclama- tion to the clergy of his diocese, dated 1542, prohibiting "all manner of common plays, games, or interludes to be played, set forth, or declared, within their churches, chapels, etc." From this ecclesiastical source of the modern drama, plays continued to be acted on Sundays so late as the reign of Elizabeth, and even till that of Charles the First, by the singing boys of S. Paul's Cathedral and of the royal chapel. "It is certain that miracle-plays were the first of our dramatic exhibitions. But as these pieces required the introduction of allegorical characters, such as Charity, Sin, Death, Hope, Faith, or the like, and the common poetry of the times, especially among the French, began to deal much in allegory, at length plays were formed entirely consisting of such personifications. These were called Moralities. The miracle-plays, or Mysteries, were totally destitute of invention or plan ; they tamely represented stories according to the letter of Scripture, or the respective legend. lUit the Moralities indicate dawnings of the dramatic art : they contain some rudi- ments of a plot, and even attempt to delineate characters and to paint manners. From hence, the transition to real historical characters was natural and obvious, wliile the intruduction of the buffoon, or Viee, was a feature that added greatly to the popularity of the exhibitions."* * VVarton, IlUt. Eikj. Poetry., vol. ii, pp. 23, 24. III. P 210 Sports and Pastimes. [lect. VI. Amongst the games descending from the tmfd, or dice of the early Scandinavians, is our own backgammon itself, an Anglo-Saxon game, as its name denotes, being the ho'j-