Scenes and Characters of the Middle Ages

Chapter VI Mediæval Towns

Mediæval towns in England had one of four origins; some were those of ancient Roman foundation, which had lived through the Saxon invasion, like Lincoln, Chester, and Colchester. Others again grew up gradually in the neighbourhood of a monastery. The monastery was founded in a wilderness, but it had a number of artisans employed about it; travellers resorted to its hospitium as to an inn; it was perhaps a place of pilgrimage; the affairs of the Lord Abbot, and the business of the large estates of the convent, brought people constantly thither; and so gradually a town grew up, as at St. Alban’s, St. Edmundsbury, &c. In other cases it was not a religious house, but a castle of some powerful and wealthy lord, which drew a population together under the shelter of its walls—as at Norwich, where the lines of the old streets follow the line of the castle-moat; or Ludlow, on the other side of the kingdom, which gathered round the Norman Castle of Ludlow. But there is a third category of mediæval towns which did not descend from ancient times, or grow by accidental accretion in course of time, but were deliberately founded and built in the mediæval period for specific purposes; and in these we have a special interest from our present point of view.

There was a period, beginning in the latter part of the eleventh and extending to the close of the fourteenth century, when kings and feudal lords, from motives of high policy, fostered trade with anxious care; encouraged traders with countenance, protection, and grants of privileges; and founded commercial towns, and gave them charters which made them little independent, self-governing republics, in the midst of the feudal lords and ecclesiastical communities which surrounded them.

In England we do not find so many of these newly founded towns as on the Continent; here towns were already scattered abundantly over the land, and what was needed was to foster their growth; but our English kings founded such towns in their continental dominions. Edward I. planted numerous free towns, especially in Guienne and Aquitaine, in order to raise up a power in his own interest antagonistic to that of the feudal lords. Other continental sovereigns did the same, e.g. Alphonse of Poitiers, the brother of St. Louis, in his dominion of Toulouse. But in England we have a few such cases. The history of the foundation of Hull will afford us an example. When Edward I. was returning from Scotland after the battle of Dunbar, he visited Lord Wakes of Barnard Castle. While hunting one day, he was led by the chase to the hamlet of Wyke-upon-Hull, belonging to the convent of Meaux. The king perceived at once the capabilities of the site for a fortress for the security of the kingdom, and a port for the extension of commerce. He left the hunt to take its course, questioned the shepherds who were on the spot about the depth of the river, the height to which the tides rose, the owner of the place, and the like. He sent for the Abbot of Meaux, and exchanged with him other lands for Wyke. Then he issued a proclamation offering freedom and great commercial privileges to all merchants who would build and inhabit there. He erected there a manor-house for himself; incorporated the town as a free borough in 1299 A.D.; by 1312 the great church was built; by 1322 the town was fortified with a wall and towers; and the king visited it from time to time on his journeys to the north. The family of De la Pole, who settled there from the first, ably seconded the king’s intentions. Kingston-upon-Hull became one of the great commercial towns of the kingdom. The De la Poles rose rapidly to wealth and the highest rank. Michael de la Pole “builded a goodly-house of brick, against the west end of St. Mary’s Church, like a palace, with a goodly orchard and garden at large, enclosed with brick. He builded also three houses in the town besides, whereof every one hath a tower of brick.” Leland the antiquary, of the time of Queen Elizabeth, has left us a description and bird’s-eye plan of the town in his day, which is highly interesting. Of our English towns, those which are of Roman origin were laid out at first on a comprehensive plan, and they have the principal streets tolerably straight, and crossing at right angles. The great majority of the towns which grew as above described are exceedingly irregular; but this irregularity, so important an element in the picturesqueness of mediæval towns, is quite an accidental one. When the mediæval builders laid out a town de novo, they did it in the most methodical manner; laying out the streets wide, straight, at equal distances, and crossing rectangularly; appropriating proper sites for churches, town-halls, and other public purposes, and regulating the size and plan of the houses. It is to the continental towns we must especially look for examples; but we find when Edward I. was building his free towns there, he sent for Englishmen to lay them out for him. A similar opportunity occurred at Winchelsea, where the same plan was pursued. The old town of Winchelsea was destroyed by the sea in 1287, and the king determined to rebuild this cinque-port. The chief owners of the new site were a knight, Sir J. Tregoz, one Maurice, and the owners of Battle Abbey. The king compounded with them for their rights over seventy acres of land, and sent down the Bishop of Ely, who was Lord Treasurer, to lay out the new town. The monarch accorded the usual privileges to settlers, and gave help towards the fortifications. The town was laid out in streets which divided the area into rectangular blocks; two blocks were set apart for churches, and there were two colleges of friars within the town. Somehow the place did not flourish; it was harried by incursions of the French before the fortifications were completed, people were not attracted to it, the whole area was never taken up, and it continues to this day shrunk up into one corner of its walled area. Three of the old gates, and part of the walls, and portions of three or four houses, are all that remain of King Edward’s town.

View of Jerusalem.

The Canterbury Pilgrims.

The woodcut on the preceding page, from a MS. of Lydgate’s “Storie of Thebes” (Royal 18 D. II.), gives a general view of a town. The travellers in the foreground are a group of Canterbury pilgrims.

In these mediæval times the population of these towns was not so diverse as it afterwards became; the houses were of various classes, from that of the wealthy merchant, which was a palace—like that of Michael de la Pole at Hull, or that of Sir John Crosby in London—down to the cottage of the humble craftsman, but the mediæval town possessed no such squalid quarters as are to be found in most of our modern towns. The inhabitants were chiefly merchants, manufacturers, and craftsmen of the various guilds. Just as in the military order, all who were permanently attached to the service of a feudal lord were lodged in his castle or manor and its dependencies; as all who were attached to a religious community were lodged in and about the monastery; as in farm-houses, a century ago, the labouring men lived in the house; so in towns all the clerks, apprentices, and work-people lodged in the house of their master; the apprentices of every craftsman formed part of his family; there were no lodgings in the usual sense of the word. In the great towns, and especially in the suburbs, were hostelries which received travellers, adventurers, minstrels, and all the people who had no fixed establishment; and often in the outskirts of the town without the walls, houses of inferior kind sprang up like parasites, and harboured the poor and dangerous classes.

The bird’s-eye views of the county towns in the corners of Speed’s Maps of the most famous Places of the World, are well worth study. They give representations of the condition of many of our towns in the time of Elizabeth, while they were still for the most part in their ancient condition, with walls and gates, crosses, pillories, and maypoles still standing, and indicated in the engravings. Perhaps one of the most perfect examples we have left of a small mediæval town is Conway; it is true, no very old houses appear to be left in it, but the streets are probably on their old lines, and the walls and gates are perfect—the latter, especially, giving us some picturesque features which we do not find remaining in the gates of other towns. Taken in combination with the adjoining castle it is architecturally one of the most unchanged corners of England.

We have also a few old houses still left here and there, sufficient to form a series of examples of various dates, from the twelfth century downwards. We must refer the reader to Turner’s “Domestic Architecture” for notices of them. A much greater number of examples, and in much more perfect condition, exist in the towns of the Continent, for which reference should be made to Viollet le Duc’s “Dictionary of Architecture.” All that our plan requires, and our space admits, is to give a general notion of what a citizen’s house in a mediæval town was like. The houses of wealthy citizens were no doubt mansions comparable with the unembattled manor-houses of the country gentry. We have already quoted Leland’s description of that of Michael de la Pole at Hull, of the fourteenth century, and Crosby Hall in Bishopsgate Street. St. Mary’s Hall, at Coventry, is a very perfect example of the middle of the fifteenth century. Norwich also possesses one or more houses of this character. The house of an ordinary citizen had a narrow frontage, and usually presented its gable to the street; it had very frequently a basement story, groined, which formed a cellar, and elevated the first floor of the house three or four feet above the level of the street. At Winchelsea the vaulted basements of three or four of the old houses remain, and show that the entrance to the house was by a short stone stair alongside the wall; under these stairs was the entrance into the cellar, beside the steps a window to the cellar, and over that the window of the first floor. Here, as was usually the case, the upper part of the house was probably of wood, and it was roofed with tiles. On the first floor was the shop, and beside it an alley leading to the back of the house, and to a straight stair which gave access to the building over the shop, which was a hall or common living-room occupying the whole of the first floor. The kitchen was at the back, near the hall, or sometimes the cooking was done in the hall itself. A private stair mounted to the upper floor, which was the sleeping apartment, and probably was often left in one undivided garret; the great roof of the house was a wareroom or storeroom, goods being lifted to it by a crane which projected from a door in the gable. The town of Cluny possesses some examples, very little modernised, of houses of this description of the twelfth century. Others of the thirteenth century are at St. Antonin, and in the Rue St. Martin, Amiens. Others of subsequent date will be found in the Dictionary of Viollet le Duc, vol. vi., pp. 222-271, who gives plans, elevations, and perspective sketches which enable us thoroughly to understand and realise these picturesque old edifices. Our own country will supply us with abundance of examples of houses, both of timber and stone, of the fifteenth century. Nowhere, perhaps, are there better examples than at Shrewsbury, where they are so numerous, in some parts (e.g. in the High Street and in Butcher Row), as to give a very good notion of the picturesque effect of a whole street—of a whole town of them. But it must be admitted that the continental towns very far exceed ours in their antiquarian and artistic interest. In the first place, the period of great commercial prosperity occurred in these countries in the Middle Ages, and their mediæval towns were in consequence larger and handsomer than ours. In the second place, there has been no great outburst of prosperity in these countries since to encourage the pulling down the mediæval houses to make way for modern improvements; while in England our commercial growth, which came later, has had the result of clearing away nearly all of our old town-houses, except in a few old-fashioned places which were left outside the tide of commercial innovations. In consequence, a walk through some of the towns of Normandy will enable the student and the artist better to realise the picturesque effect of an old English town, than any amount of diligence in putting together the fragments of old towns which remain to us. In some of the German towns, also, we find the old houses still remaining, apparently untouched, and the ancient walls, mural towers, and gateways still surrounding them. The illuminations in MSS. show that English towns were equally picturesque, and that the mediæval artists appreciated them. The illustrations in our last chapter on pp. 519, 520, give an idea of the houses inhabited by citizens in such a town as St. Alban’s. In the “Roman d’Alexandre,” in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, a whole street of such houses is rudely represented, some with the gable to the street, some with the side, all with the door approached by an exterior stair, most of them with the windows apparently unglazed, and closed at will by a shutter. We might quote one MS. after another, and page after page. We will content ourselves with noting, for exterior views, the Royal MS. 18 E. V. (dated 1473 A.D.), at 3 E. V., f. 117 v., a town with bridge and barbican, and the same still better represented at f. 179; and we refer also to Hans Burgmaier’s “Der Weise Könige,” which abounds in picturesque bits of towns in the backgrounds of the pictures. For exteriors the view of Venice in the “Roman d’Alexandre” is full of interest, especially as we recognise that it gives some of the remaining features—the Doge’s Palace, the Cathedral, the columns in the Piazzeta—and it is therefore not merely a fancy picture, as many of the town-views in the MS. are, which are supposed to represent Jerusalem,418 Constantinople, and other cities mentioned in the text. This Venice view shows us that at that time the city was lighted by lanterns hung at the end of poles extended over the doors of the houses. It gives us a representation of a butcher’s shop and other interesting features.

A Mediæval Street and Town Hall.

The illustration on the preceding page is also a very interesting street-view of the fifteenth century, from a plate in Le Croix and Seré’s “Moyen Age,” vol. Corporations et Metiers, Plate 8. Take first the right-hand side of the engraving, remove the forest of picturesque towers and turrets with their spirelets and vanes which appear over the roofs of the houses (in which the artist has probably indulged his imagination as to the effect of the other buildings of the town beyond), and we have left a sober representation of part of a mediæval street—a row of lofty timber houses with their gables turned to the street. We see indications of the usual way of arranging the timber frame-work in patterns; there are also indications of pargeting (e.g. raised plaster ornamentation) and of painting in some of the panels. On the ground-floor we have a row of shops protected by a projecting pent-house; the shop-fronts are open unglazed arches, with a bench across the lower part of the arch for a counter, while the goods are exposed above. In the first shop the tradesman is seen behind his counter ready to cry “what d’ye lack” to every likely purchaser; at the second shop is a customer in conversation with the shopkeeper; at the third the shopkeeper and his apprentice seem to be busy displaying their goods. Some of the old houses in Shrewsbury, as those in Butcher Row, are not unlike these, and especially their shops are exactly of this character. When we turn to the rest of the engraving we find apparently some fine building in which, perhaps, again the artist has drawn a little upon vague recollections of civic magnificence, and his perspective is not quite satisfactory. Perhaps it is some market-house or guildhall, or some such building, which is represented; with shops on the ground-floor, and halls and chambers above. The entrance-door is ornamented with sculpture, the panels of the building are filled with figures, which are either painted or executed in plaster, in relief. The upper part of the building is still unfinished, and we see the scaffolds, and the cranes conveying mortar and timber, and the masons yet at work. In the shop on the right of the building, we note the usual open shop-front with its counter, and the tradesman with a pair of scales; in the interior of the shop is an assistant who seems to be, with vigorous action, pounding something in a mortar, and so we conjecture the shop to be that of an apothecary. The costume of the man crossing the street, in long gown girded at the waist, may be compared with the merchants given in our last chapter, and with those in an engraving of a market-place at p. 499. The figure at a bench in the left-hand corner of the engraving may perhaps be one of the workmen engaged upon the building; not far off another will be seen hauling up a bucket of mortar, by means of a pulley, to the upper part of the building; the first mason seems to wear trousers, probably overalls to protect his ordinary dress from the dirt of his occupation. Of later date are the pair of views given opposite from the margin of one of the pictures in “The Alchemy Book” (Plut. 3,469) a MS. in the British Museum of early sixteenth-century date. The nearest house in the left-hand picture shows that the shops were still of the mediæval character; several of the houses have signs on projecting poles. There are other examples of shops in the nearest house of the right-hand picture, a public fountain opposite, and a town-gate at the end of the street. We see in the two pictures, a waggon, horsemen, and carts, a considerable number of people standing at the shops, at the doors of their houses, and passing along the street, which has no foot pavement.

Mediæval Streets.

The accompanying cut from Barclay’s “Shippe of Fools,” gives a view in the interior of a mediæval town. The lower story of the houses is of stone, the upper stories of timber, projecting. The lower stories have only small, apparently unglazed windows, while the living rooms with their oriels and glazed lattices are in the first floor. The next cut, from a MS. in the French National Library, gives the interior of the courtyard of a great house. We notice the portion of one of the towers on the left, the draw-well, the external stair to the principal rooms on the first floor, the covered unglazed gallery which formed the mode of communication from the different apartments of the first floor, and the dormer windows.

A Town, from Barclay’s Shippe of Fools.

A whole chapter might be written on the inns of mediæval England. We must content ourselves with giving references to pictures of the exterior of two country ale-houses—one in the Royal MS. 10 E. IV., at f. 114 v., which has a broom projecting over the door by way of sign; and another in the “Roman d’Alexandre” in the Bodleian—and with reproducing here two pictures of the interiors of hostelries from Mr. Wright’s “Domestic Manners and Customs of the Middle Ages.” They represent the sleeping accommodation of these ancient inns. In the first, from the “Quatre Fils d’Aymon,” a MS. romance of the latter part of the fourteenth century, in the French National Library, the beds are arranged at the side of the apartment in separate berths, like those of a ship’s cabin, or like the box beds of the Highlands of Scotland. It is necessary, perhaps, to explain that the artist has imagined one side of the room removed, so as to introduce into his illustration both the mounted traveller outside and the interior of the inn.

Courtyard of a House. (French National Library.)

In the next woodcut, from Royal MS. 18 D. II., the side of the hostelry next to the spectator is supposed to be removed, so as to bring under view both the party of travellers approaching through the corn-fields, and the same travellers tucked into their truckle beds and fast asleep. The sign of the inn will be noticed projecting over the door, with a brush hung from it. Many houses displayed signs in the Middle Ages; the brush was the general sign of a house of public entertainment. On the bench in the common dormitory will be seen the staves and scrips of the travellers, who are pilgrims.

An Inn. (French National Library.)

A fragment of a romance of “Floyre and Blanchefleur,” published by the Early English Text Society, illustrates the mediæval inn. We have a little modernised the very ancient original. Floris is travelling with a retinue of servants, in the hope of finding his Blanchefleur:—

“To a riche city they bothe ycome,
Whaire they have their inn ynome419
At a palais soothe riche;
The lord of their inn has non his liche,420
Him fell gold enough to honde,
Bothe in water and in lande,
He hadde yled his life ful wide.”

i.e. he had travelled much, had great experience of life, and had gained gold both by sea and land. Besides houses entirely devoted to the entertainment of travellers, it was usual for citizens to take travellers into their houses, and give them entertainment for profit; it would seem that Floris and his servants had “taken up their inn” at the house of a burgess; he is called subsequently, “a burgess that was wel kind and curteis:”—

“This Child he sette next his side,
Glad and blithe they weren alle
So many as were in the halle;
But Floris not ne drank naught,
Of Blanchefleur was all his thought.”

An Inn.

The lady of the inn perceiving his melancholy, speaks to her husband about him:—

“Sire takest thou no care
How this child mourning sit
Mete ne drink he nabit,
He net421 mete ne he ne drinketh
Nis422 he no marchaunt as me thinketh.”

From which we gather that their usual guests were merchants. The host afterwards tells Floris that Blanchefleur had been at his house a little time before, and that—

“Thus therein this other day
Sat Blanchefleur that faire may,
In halle, ne in bower, ne at board
Of her ne herde we never a word
But of Floris was her mone
He hadde in herte joie none.”

Floris was so rejoiced at the news, that he caused to be brought a cup of silver and a robe of minever, which he offered to his host for his news. In the morning—

“He took his leave and wende his way,
And for his nighte’s gesting
He gaf his host an hundred schillinge.”

One feature of a town which requires special mention is the town-hall. As soon as a town was incorporated, it needed a large hall in which to transact business and hold feasts. The wealth and magnificence of the corporation were shown partly in the size and magnificence of its hall. Trade-guilds similarly had their guildhalls; when there was one great guild in a town, its hall was often the town-hall; when there were several, the guilds vied with one another in the splendour of their halls, feasts, pageants, &c. The town-halls on the Continent exceed ours in size and architectural beauty. That at St. Antoine, in France, is an elegant little structure of the thirteenth century. The Belgian town-halls at Bruges, &c., are well known from engravings. We are not aware of the existence of any town-halls in England of a date earlier than the fifteenth century. That at Leicester is of the middle of the fifteenth century. The town-hall at Lincoln, over the south gate, is of the latter half of the century; that at Southampton, over the north gate, about the same date: it was not unusual for the town-hall to be over one of the gates. Of the early part of the sixteenth century we have many examples. They are all of the same type—a large oblong hall, of stone or timber, supported on pillars, the open colonnade beneath being the market-place. That at Salisbury is of stone; at Wenlock (which has been lately restored), of timber. There are others at Hereford, Ross, Leominster, Ashburton, Guildford, &c. The late Gothic Bourse at Antwerp is an early example of the cloistered, or covered courts, which, at the end of the fifteenth century, began to be built for the convenience of the merchants assembling at a certain hour to transact business. The covered bridge of the Rialto was used as the Exchange at Venice.

None of our towns have the same relative importance which belonged to them in the Middle Ages. In the latter part of the period of which we write it was very usual for the county families to have town-houses in the county town, or some other good neighbouring town, and there they came to live in the winter months. When the fashion began we hardly know. Some of the fine old timber houses remaining in Shrewsbury are said to have been built by Shropshire families for their town-houses. The gentry did not in those times go to London for “the season.” The great nobility only used to go to court, which was held three times a year; then parliament sat, the king’s courts of law were open, and the business of the nation was transacted. They had houses at the capital for their convenience on these occasions, which were called inns, as Lincoln’s Inn, &c. But it is only from a very recent period, since increased facilities of locomotion made it practicable, that it has been the fashion for all people in a certain class of society to spend “the season” in London. As a consequence the country gentry no longer have houses in the provincial towns; even the better classes of those whose occupation lies in them live in their suburbs, and the towns are rapidly changing their character, physically, socially, and morally, for the worse. London is becoming rapidly the one great town in England. The great manufacturers have agencies in London; if people are going to furnish a house or to buy a wedding outfit they come up to London; the very artisans and rustics in search of a day’s holiday are whirled up to London in an excursion train. While London in consequence is extending so widely as to threaten to convert all England into a mere suburb of the metropolis of the British empire.

Footnotes

1 We cannot put down all these supernatural tales as fables or impostures; similar tales abound in the lives of the religious people of the Middle Ages, and they are not unknown in modern days: e.g., Luther’s conflict with Satan in the Wartzburg, and Colonel Gardiner’s vision of the Saviour. Which of them (if any) are to be considered true supernatural visions, which may be put down as the natural results of spiritual excitement on the imagination, which are mere baseless legends, he would be a very self-confident critic who professed in all cases to decide.

2 Besides consulting the standard authorities on the archæology of the subject, the student will do well to read Mr. Kingsley’s charming book, “The Hermits of the Desert.”

3 Strutt’s “Dress and Habits of the People of England.”

4 This is the computation of Tanner in his “Notitia Monastica;” but the editors of the last edition of Dugdale’s “Monasticon,” adding the smaller houses or cells, swell the number of Benedictine establishments in England to a total of two hundred and fifty-seven.

5 If a child was to be received his hand was wrapped in the hanging of the altar, “and then,” says the rule of St. Benedict, “let them offer him.” The words are “Si quas forte de nobilibus offert filium suum Deo in monasterio, si ipse puer minore ætate est, parentes ejus faciant petitionem et manum pueri involvant in pallu altaris, et sic eum offerunt” (c. 59). The Abbot Herman tells us that in the year 1055 his mother took him and his brothers to the monastery of which he was afterwards abbot. “She went to St. Martin’s (at Tournay), and delivered over her sons to God, placing the little one in his cradle upon the altar, amidst the tears of many bystanders” (Maitland’s “Dark Ages,” p. 78). The precedents for such a dedication of an infant to an ascetic life are, of course, the case of Samuel dedicated by his mother from infancy, and of Samson and John Baptist, who were directed by God to be consecrated as Nazarites from birth. A law was made prohibiting the dedication of children at an earlier age than fourteen. At f. 209 of the MS. Nero D. vii., is a picture of St. Benedict, to whom a boy in monk’s habit is holding a book, and he is reading or preaching to a group of monks.

6 Engraved in Boutell’s “Monumental Brasses.”

7 Probably this means that he had “clocks”—little bell-shaped ornaments—sewn to the lower margin of his tippet or hood.

8 Mrs. Jameson, “Legends of the Monastic Orders,” p. 137.

9 Viollet le Duc’s “Dictionary of Architecture,” vol. vi. p. 104.

10 Ibid. vi. 107.

11 Ibid. vi. 112.

12 Ibid. vi. 112.

13 All its houses were called Temples, as all the Carthusian houses were called Chartereux (corrupted in England into Charterhouse).

14 Of the four round churches in England, popularly supposed to have been built by the Templars, the Temple Church in London was built by them; that of Maplestead, in Essex, by the Hospitallers; that of Northampton by Simon de St. Liz, first Norman Earl of Northampton, twice a pilgrim to the Holy Land; and that of Cambridge by some unknown individual.

15 The order was divided into nations—the English knights, the French knights, &c.—each nation having a separate house, situated at different points of the island, for its defence. These houses, large and fine buildings, still remain, and many unedited records of the order are said to be still preserved on the island.

16 An order, called our Lady of Mercy, was founded in Spain in 1258, by Peter Nolasco, for a similar object, including in its scope not only Christian captives to the infidel, but also all slaves, captives, and prisoners for debt.

17 Afternoons and mornings.

18 As an indication of their zeal in the pursuit of science it is only necessary to mention the names of Friar Roger Bacon, the Franciscan, and Friar Albert-le-Grand (Albertus Magnus), the Dominican. The Arts were cultivated with equal zeal—some of the finest paintings in the world were executed for the friars, and their own orders produced artists of the highest excellence. Fra Giacopo da Turrita, a celebrated artist in mosaic of the thirteenth century, was a Franciscan, as was Fra Antonio da Negroponti, the painter; Fra Fillippo Lippi, the painter, was a Carmelite; Fra Bartolomeo, and Fra Angelico da Fiesole—than whom no man ever conceived more heavenly visions of spiritual loveliness and purity—were Dominicans.

19 “By his (i.e. Satan’s) queyntise they comen in,
The curates to helpen,
But that harmed hem hard
And help them ful littel.”—Piers Ploughman’s Creed.

20 The extract from Chaucer on p. 46, lines 4, 5, 6, seem to indicate that an individual friar sometimes “farmed” the alms of a district, paying the convent a stipulated sum, and taking the surplus for himself.

21 In France, Jacobins.

22 Wives of burgesses.

23 Stuffed.

24 Musical instrument so called.

25 Piers Ploughman (creed 3, line 434), describing a burly Dominican friar, describes his cloak or cope in the same terms, and describes the under gown, or kirtle, also:—
“His cope that beclypped him
Wel clean was it folden,
Of double worsted y-dyght
Down to the heel.
His kirtle of clean white,
Cleanly y-served,
It was good enough ground
Grain for to beren.”

26 A limitour, as has been explained above, was a friar whose functions were limited to a certain district of country; a lister might exercise his office wherever he listed.

27 Thirty masses for the repose of a deceased person.

28 Viz., in convents of friars, not in monasteries of monks and by the secular clergy.

29 He was forbidden to say more.

30 A convent of friars used to undertake masses for the dead, and each friar saying one the whole number of masses was speedily completed, whereas a single priest saying his one mass a day would be very long completing the number, and meantime the souls were supposed to be in torment.

31 The usual way of concluding a sermon, in those days as in these, was with an ascription of praise, “Who with the Father,” &c.

32 Cake.

33 Choose.

34 Slip or piece.

35 Hired man.

36 Trifles.

37 Requite.

38 Staff.

39 Closely.

40 Part.

41 Forbidden.

42 Would not.

43 The good man also said he had not seen the friar “this fourteen nights:”—Did a limitour go round once a fortnight?

44 The dormitory of the convent.

45 Infirmarer.

46 Aged monks and friars lived in the Infirmary, and had certain privileges.

47 Wert thou not.

48 Implying, whether truly or not, that he had been enrolled in the fraternity of the house, and was prayed for, with other benefactors, in chapter.

[49] Health and strength.

50 Doctor.

51 Little.

52 Preaching; he was probably a preaching friar—i.e., a Dominican.

53 Waxed nearly mad.

54 Lived.

55 “On the foundation,” as we say now of colleges and endowed schools.

56 “Maysters of divinite
Her matynes to leve,
And cherliche [richly] as a cheveteyn
His chaumbre to holden,
With chymene and chaple,
And chosen whom him list,
And served as a sovereyn,
And as a lord sytten.”
Piers Ploughman, l. 1,157.

57 Just as heads of colleges now have their Master’s, or Provost’s, or Principal’s Lodge. The constitution of our existing colleges will assist those who are acquainted with them in understanding many points of monastic economy.

58 Ellis’s “Early English Romances.”

59 Long and well proportioned.

60 She was of tall stature.

61 “And as touching the almesse that they (the monks) delt, and the hospitality that they kept, every man knoweth that many thousands were well received of them, and might have been better, if they had not so many great men’s horse to fede, and had not bin overcharged with such idle gentlemen as were never out of the abaies (abbeys).”—A complaint made to Parliament not long after the dissolution, quoted in Coke’s Institutes.

62 A person doing penance.

63 Hunting.

64 Without state.

65 A plan of the Chartreuse of Clermont is given by Viollet le Duc (Dict. of Architec., vol. i. pp. 308, 309), and the arrangements of a Carthusian monastery were nearly the same in all parts of Europe. It consists of a cloister-court surrounded by about twenty square enclosures. Each enclosure, technically called a “cell,” is in fact a little house and garden, the little house is in a corner of the enclosure, and consists of three apartments. In the middle of the west side of the cloister-court is the oratory, whose five-sided apsidal sanctuary projects into the court. In a small outer court on the west is the prior’s lodgings, which is a “cell” like the others, and a building for the entertainment of guests. See also a paper on the Carthusian priory of Mount Grace, near Thirsk, read by Archdeacon Churton before the Yorkshire Architectural Society, in the year 1850.

66 A bird’s-eye view of Citeaux, given in Viollet le Duc’s “Dictionary of Architecture,” vol. i. p. 271, will give a very good notion of a thirteenth-century monastery. Of the English monasteries Fountains was perhaps one of the finest, and its existing remains are the most extensive of any which are left in England. A plan of it will be found in Mr. Walbran’s “Guide to Ripon.” See also plan of Furness, Journal of the Archæological Association, vi. 309; of Newstead (an Augustinian house), ibid. ix. p. 30; and of Durham (Benedictine), ibid. xxii. 201.

67 A double choir of the fifteenth century is in King René’s Book of Hours (Egerton, 1,070), at folio 54. Another semi-choir of Religious of late fifteenth and early sixteenth century date, very well drawn, may be found in Egerton, 2,125, f. 117, v.

68 Lydgate’s Life of St. Edmund, a MS. executed in 1473 A.D., preserved in the British Museum (Harl. 2,278), gives several very good representations of the shrine of that saint at St. Edmund’s Bury, with the attendant monks, pilgrims worshipping, &c.

69 “Tombes upon tabernacles, tiled aloft,
******
Made of marble in many manner wise,
Knights in their conisantes clad for the nonce,
All it seemed saints y-sacred upon earth,
And lovely ladies y-wrought lyen by their sides
In many gay garments that were gold-beaten.”

Piers Ploughman’s Creed.

70 Henry VII. agreed with the Abbot and Convent of Westminster that there should be four tapers burning continually at his tomb—two at the sides, and two at the ends, each eleven feet long, and twelve pounds in weight; thirty tapers, &c., in the hearse; and four torches to be held about it at his weekly obit; and one hundred tapers nine feet long, and twenty-four torches of twice the weight, to be lighted at his anniversary.

71 “For though a man in their mynster a masse wolde heren,
His sight shal so be set on sundrye werkes,
The penons and the pornels and poyntes of sheldes
Withdrawen his devotion and dusken his heart.”
Piers Ploughman’s Vision.

72 The chapter-houses attached to the cathedrals of York, Salisbury, and Wells, are octagonal; those of Hereford and Lincoln, decagonal; Lichfield, polygonal; Worcester is circular. All these were built by secular canons.

73 There are only two exceptions hitherto observed: that of the Benedictine Abbey of Westminster, which is polygonal, and that of Thornton Abbey, of regular canons, which is octagonal.

74 And at Norwich it appears to have had an eastern apse. See ground-plan in Mr. Mackenzie E. C. Walcott’s “Church and Conventual Arrangement,” p. 85.

75 Piers Ploughman describes the chapter-house of a Benedictine convent:—
“There was the chapter-house, wrought as a great church,
Carved and covered and quaintly entayled [sculptured];
With seemly selure [ceiling] y-set aloft,
As a parliament house y-painted about.”

76 In the “Vision of Piers Ploughman” one of the characters complains that if he commits any fault—
“They do me fast fridays to bread and water,
And am challenged in the chapitel-house as I a child were;”

and he is punished in a childish way, which is too plainly spoken to bear quotation.

77 See note on p. 76.

78 The woodcut on a preceding page (23) is from another initial letter of the same book.

79 A room adjoining the hall, to which the fellows retire after dinner to take their wine and converse.

80 The ordinary fashion of the time was to sleep without any clothing whatever.

81 In the plan of the ninth-century Benedictine monastery of St. Gall, published in the Archæological Journal for June, 1848, the dormitory is on the east, with the calefactory under it; the refectory on the south, with the clothes-store above; the cellar on the west, with the larders above. In the plan of Canterbury Cathedral, a Benedictine house, as it existed in the latter half of the twelfth century, the church was on the south, the chapter-house and dormitory on the east, the refectory, parallel with the church, on the north, and the cellar on the west. At the Benedictine monastery at Durham, the church was on the north, the chapter-house and locutory on the east, the refectory on the south, and the dormitory on the west. At the Augustinian Regular Priory of Bridlington, the church was on the north, the fratry (refectory) on the south, the chapter-house on the east, the dortor also on the east, up a stair twenty steps high, and the west side was occupied by the prior’s lodgings.

At the Premonstratensian Abbey of Easby, the church is on the north, the transept, passage, chapter-house, and small apartments on the east, the refectory on the south, and on the west two large apartments, with a passage between them. The Rev. J. F. Turner, Chaplain of Bishop Cozin’s Hall, Durham, describes these as the common house and kitchen, and places the dormitory in a building west of them, at a very inconvenient distance from the church.

82 Maitland’s “Dark Ages.”

83 At Winchester School, until a comparatively recent period, the scholars in the summer time studied in the cloisters.

84 For much curious information about scriptoria and monastic libraries, see Maitland’s “Dark Ages,” quoted above.

85 The hall of the Royal Palace of Winchester, erected at the same period, was 111 feet by 55 feet 9 inches.

86 Its total length would perhaps be about twenty-four paces.

87 The above woodcut, from the Harleian MS. 1,527, represents, probably, the cellarer of a Dominican convent receiving a donation of a fish. It curiously suggests the scene depicted in Sir Edwin Landseer’s “Bolton Abbey in the Olden Time.”

88 See an account of this hall, with pen-and-ink sketches by Mr. Street, in the volume of the Worcester Architectural Society for 1854.

89 Quoted by Archdeacon Churton in a paper read before the Yorkshire Architectural Society in 1853.

90 Ground-plans of the Dominican Friary at Norwich, the Carmelite Friary at Hulne and the Franciscan Friary at Kilconnel, may be found in Walcott’s “Church and Conventual Arrangement.”

91 In the National Gallery is a painting by Fra Angelico, in which is a hermit clad in a dress woven of rushes or flags.

92 “The Wonderful and Godly History of the Holy Fathers Hermits,” is among Caxton’s earliest-printed books. Piers Ploughman (“Vision”) speaks of—
“Anthony and Egidius and other holy fathers
Woneden in wilderness amonge wilde bestes
In spekes and in spelonkes, seldom spoke together.
Ac nobler Antony ne Egedy ne hermit of that time
Of lions ne of leopards no livelihood ne took,
But of fowles that fly, thus find men in books.”

And again—

“In prayers and in penance putten them many,
All for love of our Lord liveden full strait,
In hope for to have heavenly blisse
As ancres and heremites that holden them in their cells
And coveten not in country to kairen [walk] about
For no likerous lifelihood, their liking to please.”

And yet again—

“Ac ancres and heremites that eaten not but at nones
And no more ere morrow, mine almesse shall they have,
And of my cattle to keep them with, that have cloisters and churches,
Ac Robert Run-about shall nought have of mine.”

Piers Ploughman’s Vision.

93 Piers Ploughman (“Vision”) describes himself at the beginning of the poem as assuming the habit of a hermit—
“In a summer season when soft was the sun
In habit as a hermit unholy of works,
Went wild in this world, wonders to hear,
All on a May morning on Malvern Hills,” &c.

And at the beginning of the eighth part he says—

“Thus robed in russet I roamed about
All a summer season.”

94 For the custom of admitting to the fraternity of a religious house, see p. 66.

95 “Officium induendi et benedicendi heremitam.”

96 We are indebted to Mr. M. H. Bloxam for a copy of it.

97 “Famulus tuus N.” It is noticable that the masculine gender is used all through, without any such note as we find in the Service for Inclosing (which we shall have to notice hereafter), that this service shall serve for both sexes.

98 The hermit who interposed between Sir Lionel and Sir Bors, and who was killed by Sir Lionel for his interference (Malory’s “Prince Arthur,” III, lxxix.), is called a “hermit-priest.” Also, in the Episcopal Registry of Lichfield, we find the bishop, date 10th February, 1409, giving to Brother Richard Goldeston, late Canon of Wombrugge, now recluse at Prior’s Lee, near Shiffenall, license to hear confessions.

99 “Great loobies and long, that loath were to swink [work],
Clothed them in copes to be known from others,
And shaped them hermits their ease to have.”

100 Wanderers.

101 Breakers out of their cells.

102 Kindred.

103 In “Piers Ploughman” we read that—
“Hermits with hoked staves
Wenden to Walsingham;”

These hooked staves may, however, have been pilgrim staves, not hermit staves. The pastoral staff on the official seal of Odo, Bishop of Bayeux, was of the same shape as the staff above represented. A staff of similar shape occurs on an early grave-stone at Welbeck Priory, engraved in the Rev. E. L. Cutts’s “Manual of Sepulchral Slabs and Crosses,” plate xxxv.

104 Blomfield, in his “History of Norfolk,” 1532, says, “It is to be observed that hermitages were erected, for the most part, near great bridges (see Mag. Brit., On Warwickshire, p. 597, Dugdale, &c., and Badwell’s ‘Description of Tottenham’) and high roads, as appears from this, and those at Brandon, Downham, Stow Bardolph, in Norfolk, and Erith, in the Isle of Ely, &c.”

105 In the settlement of the vicarage of Kelvedon, Essex, when the rectory was impropriated to the abbot and convent of Westminster, in the fourteenth century, it was expressly ordered that the convent, besides providing the vicar a suitable house, should also provide a hall for receiving guests. See subsequent chapter on the Secular Clergy.

106 From the “Officium et Legenda de Vita Ricardi Rolle.”

107 When is not stated; he died in 1349.

108 Afterwards it is described as a cell at a distance from the family, where he was accustomed to sit solitary and to pass his time in contemplation. In doing this Sir John Dalton and his wife were, according to the sentiment of the time, following the example of the Shunammite and her husband, who made for Elisha a little chamber on the wall, and set for him there a bed, and a table, and a stool, and a candlestick (2 Kings iv. 10). The Knight of La Tour Landry illustrates this when in one of his tales (ch. xcv.) he describes the Shunammite’s act in the language of mediæval custom: “This good woman had gret devocion unto this holy man, and required and praied hym for to come to her burghe and loged in her hous, and her husbonde and she made a chambre solitaire for this holy man, where as he might use his devocions and serve God.”

109 Either the little window through which she communicated with the outer world, or perhaps (as suggested further on) a window between her cell and a guest-chamber in which she received visitors.

110 A hermitage, partly of stone, partly of timber, may be seen in the beautiful MS. Egerton 1,147, f. 218 v.

111 A very good representation of a cave hermitage may be found in the late MS. Egerton, 2,125, f. 206 v. Also in the Harl. MS. 1,527, at f. 14 v., is a hermit in a cave; and in Royal 10 E IV. f. 130, here a man is bringing the hermit food and drink.

112 Eugene Aram’s famous murder was perpetrated within it. See Sir E. L. Bulwer’s description of the scene in his “Eugene Aram.”

113 See view in Stukeley’s “Itin. Curios.,” pl. 14.

114 Suggesting the room so often found over a church porch.

115 In the year 1490, a dispute having arisen between the abbot and convent of Easby and the Grey Friars of Richmond, on the one part, and the burgesses of Richmond, on the other part, respecting the disposition of the goods of Margaret Richmond, late anchoress of the same town, it was at length settled that the goods should remain with the warden and brethren of the friars, after that her debts and the repair of the anchorage were defrayed, “because the said anchoress took her habit of the said friars,” and that the abbot and convent should have the disposition of the then anchoress, Alison Comeston, after her decease; and so to continue for evermore between the said abbot and warden, as it happens that the anchoress took her habit of religion. And that the burgesses shall have the nomination and free election of the said anchoress for evermore from time to time when it happens to be void, as they have had without time of mind. (Test. Ebor. ii. 115.)

116 In June 5, 1356, Edward III. granted to brother Regnier, hermit of the Chapel of St. Mary Magdalen, without Salop, a certain plot of waste called Shelcrosse, contiguous to the chapel, containing one acre, to hold the same to him and his successors, hermits there, for their habitation, and to find a chaplain to pray in the chapel for the king’s soul, &c. (Owen and Blakeway’s “History of Shrewsbury,” vol. ii. p. 165). “Perhaps,” say our authors, “this was the eremitical habitation in the wood of Suttona (Sutton being a village just without Salop), which is recorded elsewhere to have been given by Richard, the Dapifer of Chester, to the monks of Salop.”

117 “Vita S. Godrici,” published by the Surtees Society.

118 Simple.

119 Meddle.

120 Since the above was written, the writer has had an opportunity of visiting a hermitage very like those at Warkworth, Wetheral, Bewdley, and Lenton, still in use and habitation. It is in the parish of Limay, near Mantes, a pretty little town on the railway between Rouen and Paris. Nearly at the top of a vine-clad hill, on the north of the valley of the Seine, in which Mantes is situated, a low face of rock crops out. In this rock have been excavated a chapel, a sacristy, and a living-room for the hermit; and the present hermit has had a long refectory added to his establishment, in which to give his annual dinner to the people who come here, one day in the year, in considerable numbers, on pilgrimage. The chapel differs from those which we have described in the text in being larger and ruder; it is so wide that its rocky roof is supported by two rows of rude pillars, left standing for that purpose by the excavators. There is an altar at the east end. At the west end is a representation of the Entombment; the figure of our Lord, lying as if it had become rigid in the midst of the writhing of his agony, is not without a rude force of expression. One of the group of figures standing about the tomb has a late thirteenth-century head of a saint placed upon the body of a Roman soldier of the Renaissance period. There is a grave-stone with an incised cross and inscription beside the tomb; and in the niche on the north side is a recumbent monumental effigy of stone, with the head and hands in white glazed pottery. But whether these things were originally placed in the hermitage, or whether they are waifs and strays from neighbouring churches, brought here as to an ecclesiastical peep-show, it is hard to determine; the profusion of other incongruous odds and ends of ecclesiastical relics and fineries, with which the whole place is furnished, inclines one to the latter conjecture. There is a bell-turret built on the rock over the chapel, and a chimney peeps through the hill-side, over the sacristy fireplace. The platform in front of the hermitage is walled in, and there is a little garden on the hill above. The curé of Limay performs service here on certain days in the year. The hermit will disappoint those who desire to see a modern example of

“An aged sire, in long black weedes yclad,
His feet all bare, his beard all hoarie gray.”

He is an aged sire, seventy-four years old; but for the rest, he is simply a little, withered, old French peasant, in a blue blouse and wooden sabots. He passes his days here in solitude, unless when a rare party of visitors ring at his little bell, and, after due inspection through his grille, are admitted to peep about his chapel and his grotto, and to share his fine view of the valley shut in by vine-clad hills, and the Seine winding through the flat meadows, and the clean, pretty town of Mantes le jolie in the middle, with its long bridge and its cathedral-like church. Whether he spends his time

“Bidding his beades all day for his trespas,”

we did not inquire; but he finds the hours lonely. The good curé of Limay wishes him to sleep in his hermitage, but, like the hermit-priest of Warkworth, he prefers sleeping in the village at the foot of the hill.

121 One of the little hermitages represented in the Campo Santo series of paintings of the old Egyptian hermit-saints (engraved in Mrs. Jameson’s “Legends of the Monastic Orders”) has a little grated window, through which the hermit within (probably this John) is talking with another outside.

122 That recluses did, however, sometimes quit their cells on a great emergency, we learn from the Legenda of Richard of Hampole already quoted, where we are told that at his death Dame Margaret Kyrkley, the recluse of Anderby, on hearing of the saint’s death, hastened to Hampole to be present at his funeral.

123 Wilkins’s “Concilia,” i. 693.

124 Several MSS. of this rule are known under different names. Fosbroke quotes one as the rule of Simon de Gandavo (or Simon of Ghent), in Cott. MS. Nero A xiv.; another in Bennet College, Cambridge; and another under the name of Alfred Reevesley. See Fosbroke’s “British Monachism,” pp. 374-5. The various copies, indeed, seem to differ considerably, but to be all derived from the work ascribed to Bishop Poore. All these books are addressed to female recluses, which is a confirmation of the opinion which we have before expressed, that the majority of the recluses were women.

125 Thus the player-queen in Hamlet, iii. 2:—
“Nor earth to me give food, nor heaven light!
Sport and repose lock from me, day, and night!
To desperation turn my trust and hope!
An anchor’s cheer in prison be my scope!
Each opposite, that blanks the face of joy,
Meet what I would have well, and it destroy,” &c.

126 A cell in the north-west angle of Edington Abbey Church, Wilts, seems to be of this kind.

127 The wearing a cuirass, or hauberk of chain mail, next the skin became a noted form of self-torture; those who undertook it were called Loricati.

128 The cell of a Carthusian monk, as we have stated, consisted of a little house of three apartments and a little garden within an inclosure wall.

129 This very same picture is given also in another MS. of about the same date, marked Add. 10,294, at folio 14.

130 As was probably the case at Warkworth, the hermit living in the hermitage, while the chantry priest lived in the house at the foot of the hill.

131 “Eremites that inhabiten
By the highways,
And in boroughs among brewers.”

Piers Ploughman’s Vision.

132 Probably “anchoret” means male, and “recluse” female recluse.

133 Test. Vetust., ii. 25.

134 Ibid. ii. 47.

135 Ibid. ii. 56.

136 Ibid. ii. 271.

137 Note p. 87 to “Instructions for Parish Priests,” Early English Text Society.

138 Test. Vetust., ii. 131.

139 Ibid. 178.

140 Ibid. ii. 98.

141 Ibid. 356.

142 Other bequests to recluses occur in the will of Henry II., to the recluses (incluses) of Jerusalem, England, and Normandy.

143 Sussex Archæol. Coll., i. p. 174.

144 Blomfield’s “Norfolk,” ii. pp. 347-8. See also the bequests to the Norwich recluses, infra.

145 Stow’s Chronicle, p. 559.

146 In the “Ancren Riewle,” p. 129, we read, “Who can with more facility commit sin than the false recluse?”

147 Owen and Blakeway’s “History of Shrewsbury.”

148 “Rogerus, &c., delecto in Christo filio Roberto de Worthin, cap. salutem, &c. Precipue devotionis affectum, quem ad serviendum Deo in reclusorio juxta capellam Sancti Joh. Babtiste in civitate Coventriensi constructo, et spretis mundi deliciis et ipsius vagis discurribus contemptis, habere te asseres, propensius intuentes, ac volentes te, consideratione nobilis domine, domine Isabelle Regine Anglie nobis pro te supplicante in hujus laudabili proposito confovere, ut in prefato reclusorio morari possis, et recludi et vitam tuam in eodam ducere in tui laudibus Redemptoris, licentiam tibi quantum in nobis est concedi per presentes, quibus sigillum nostrum duximus apponendum. Dat apud Heywood, 5 Kal. Dec. M.D. A.D. MCCCLXII, et consecrationis nostræ tricessimo sexto.”—Dugdale’s Warwickshire, 2nd Edit., p. 193.

149 Fosbroke’s “British Monachism,” p. 372.

150 Engraved in the Archæological Journal, iv. p. 320.

151 Reports of the Lincoln Diocesan Archæological Society for 1853, pp. 359-60.

152 Peter, Abbot of Clugny, tells us of a monk and priest of that abbey who had for a cell an oratory in a very high and remote steeple-tower, consecrated to the honour of St. Michael the archangel. “Here, devoting himself to divine meditation night and day, he mounted high above mortal things, and seemed with the angels to be present at the nearer vision of his Maker.”

153 In the Lichfield Registers we find that, on February 10, 1409, the bishop granted to Brother Richard Goldestone, late canon of Wombrugge, now recluse at Prior’s Lee, near Shiffenale, license to hear confessions. (History of Whalley, p. 55.)

154 Paper by J. J. Rogers, Archæological Journal, xi. 33.

155 Twysden’s “Henry de Knighton,” vol. ii. p. 2665.

156 The translator of this book for the Camden Society’s edition of it, says “therein,” but the word in the original Saxon English is “ther thurgh.” It refers to the window looking into the church, through which the recluse looked down daily upon the celebration of the mass.

157 “Caput suum decidit ad fenestram ad quam se reclinabit sanctus Dei Ricardus.”

158 In one of the stories of Reginald of Durham we learn that a school, according to a custom then “common enough,” was kept in the church of Norham on Tweed, the parish priest being the teacher. (Wright’s “Domestic Manners of the Middle Ages,” p. 117.)

159 These two expressions seem to imply that recluses sometimes went out of their cell, not only into the church, but also into the churchyard. We have already noticed that the technical word “cell” seems to have included everything within the enclosure wall of the whole establishment. Is it possible that in the case of anchorages adjoining churches, the churchyard wall represented this enclosure, and the “cell” included both church and churchyard?

160 A commission given by William of Wykham, Bishop of Winchester, for enclosing Lucy de Newchurch as an anchoritess in the hermitage of St. Brendun, at Bristol, is given in Burnett’s “History and Antiquities of Bristol,” p. 61.

161 “In monasterio inclusorio suo vicino;” it seems as if the writer of the rubric were specially thinking of the inclusoria within monasteries.

162 The Ordo Romanus. The Pontifical of Egbert. The Pontifical of Bishop Lacey.

163 Guardian newspaper, Feb. 7, 1870.

164 Surrey Society’s Transactions, vol. iii. p. 218.

165 The same collect, with a few variations, was used also in the consecration of nuns. Virgin chastity was held to bring forth fruit a hundred fold; widowed chastity, sixty fold; married chastity, thirty fold.

166 Hair-cloth garment worn next the skin for mortification.

167 King Henry IV., Pt. I., Act i. Sc. 1.

168 There have come down to us a series of narratives of pilgrimages to the Holy Land. One of a Christian of Bordeaux as early as 333 A.D.; that of S. Paula and her daughter, about 386 A.D., given by St. Jerome; of Bishop Arculf, 700 A.D.; of Willebald, 725 A.D.; of Sæwulf, 1102 A.D.; of Sigurd the Crusader, 1107 A.D.; of Sir John de Mandeville, 1322-1356.—Early Travels in Palestine (Bohn’s Antiq. Lib.).

169 At the present day, the Hospital of the Pellegrini at Rome is capable of entertaining seven thousand guests, women as well as men; to be entitled to the hospitality of the institution, they must have walked at least sixty miles, and be provided with a certificate from a bishop or priest to the effect that they are bonâ-fide pilgrims. (Wild’s “Last Winter in Rome.” Longmans: 1865.)

170 In the latter part of the Saxon period of our history there was a great rage for foreign pilgrimage; thousands of persons were continually coming and going between England and the principal shrines of Europe, especially the threshold of the Apostles at Rome. They were the subject of a letter from Charlemagne to King Offa:—“Concerning the strangers who, for the love of God and the salvation of their souls, wish to repair to the thresholds of the blessed Apostles, let them travel in peace without any trouble.” Again, in the year 1031 A.D., King Canute made a pilgrimage to Rome (as other Saxon kings had done before him) and met the Emperor Conrad and other princes, from whom he obtained for all his subjects, whether merchants or pilgrims, exemptions from the heavy tolls usually exacted on the journey to Rome.

171 At the marriage of our Edward I., in 1254, with Leonora, sister of Alonzo of Castile, a protection to English pilgrims was stipulated for; but they came in such numbers as to alarm the French, and difficulties were thrown in the way. In the fifteenth century, Rymer mentions 916 licences to make the pilgrimage to Santiago granted in 1428, and 2,460 in 1434.

172 King Horn, having taken the disguise of a palmer—“Horn took bourden and scrip”—went to the palace of Athulf and into the hall, and took his place among the beggars “in beggar’s row,” and sat on the ground.—Thirteenth Century Romance of King Horn (Early English Text Society). That beggars and such persons did usually sit on the ground in the hall and wait for a share of the food, we learn also from the “Vision of Piers Ploughman,” xii. 198—
“Right as sum man gave me meat, and set me amid the floor,
I have meat more than enough, and not so much worship
As they that sit at side table, or with the sovereigns of the hall,
But sit as a beggar boardless by myself on the ground.”

173 In the romance of King Horn, the hero meets a palmer and asks his news—
“A palmere he there met
And fair him grette [greeted]:
Palmer, thou shalt me tell
All of thine spell.”

174 Wallet.

175 Pillow covering.

176 Called or took.

177 i.e. Latten (a kind of bronze) set with (mock) precious stones.

178 Pretending them to be relics of some saint.

179 See “Archæological Journal,” vol. iii. p. 149.

180 Mr. Taylor, in his edition of “Blomfield’s Norfolk,” enumerates no less than seventy places of pilgrimage in Norfolk alone.

181 A man might not go without his wife’s consent, nor a wife without her husband’s:—
“To preche them also thou might not wonde [fear, hesitate],
Both to wyf and eke husbande,
That nowther of hem no penance take,
Ny non a vow to chastity make,
Ny no pylgrimage take to do
But if bothe assente thereto.
*****
Save the vow to Jherusalem,
That is lawful to ether of them.”

Instructions for Parish Priests. (Early English Text Society.)

182 Marked 3,395 d. 4to. The footnote on a previous page (p. 158) leads us to conjecture that in ancient as in modern times the pilgrim may have received a certificate of his having been blessed as a pilgrim, as now we give certificates of baptism, marriage, and holy orders.

183 See woodcut on p. 90.

184 “History of Music.”

185 “Conscience then with Patience passed, Pilgrims as it were,
Then had Patience, as pilgrims have, in his poke vittailes.”
Piers Ploughman’s Vision, xiii. 215.

186 Grose’s “Gloucestershire,” pl. lvii.

187 Girdle.

188 One of the two pilgrims in our first cut, p. 158, carries a palm branch in his hand; they represent the two disciples at Emmaus, who were returning from Jerusalem.

189 The existence of several accounts of the stations of Rome in English prose and poetry as early as the thirteenth century (published by the Early English Text Society), indicates the popularity of this pilgrimage.

190 Innocente III., Epist. 536, lib. i., t. c., p. 305, ed. Baluzio. (Dr. Rock’s “Church of our Fathers.”)

191 “Church of our Fathers,” vol. iii. p. 438, note.

192 It is seen on the scrip of Lydgate’s Pilgrim in the woodcut on p. 163. See a paper on the Pilgrim’s Shell, by Mr. J. E. Tennant, in the St. James’s Magazine, No. 10, for Jan., 1862.

193 “Anales de Galicia,” vol. i. p. 95. Southey’s “Pilgrim to Compostella.”

194 “Anales de Galicia,” vol. i. p. 96, quoted by Southey, “Pilgrim to Compostella.”

195 Dr. Rock’s “Church of our Fathers,” iii. 424.

196 “Vita S. Thomæ apud Willebald,” folio Stephani, ed. Giles, i. 312.

197 The lily of the valley was another Canterbury flower. It is still plentiful in the gardens in the precincts of the cathedral.

198 The veneration of the times was concentrated upon the blessed head which suffered the stroke of martyrdom; it was exhibited at the shrine and kissed by the pilgrims; there was an abbey in Derbyshire dedicated to the Beauchef (beautiful head), and still called Beauchief Abbey.

199 The late T. Caldecot, Esq., of Dartford, possessed one of these.

200 A very beautiful little pilgrim sign of lead found at Winchester is engraved in the “Journal of the British Archæological Association,” No. 32, p. 363.

201 Dr. Rock’s “Church of our Fathers,” vol. iii. p. 430.

202 Fosbroke has fallen into the error of calling this a burden bound to the pilgrim’s back with a list: it is the bourdon, the pilgrim’s staff, round which a list, a long narrow strip of cloth, was wound cross-wise. We do not elsewhere meet with this list round the staff, and it does not appear what was its use or meaning. We may call to mind the list wound cross-wise round a barber’s pole, and imagine that this list was attached to the pilgrim’s staff for use, or we may remember that a vexillum, or banner, is attached to a bishop’s staff, and that a long, narrow riband is often affixed to the cross-headed staff which is placed in our Saviour’s hand in mediæval representations of the Resurrection. The staff in our cut, p. 163, looks as if it might have such a list wound round it.

203 Fosbrooke, and Wright, and Dr. Rock, all understand this to be a bowl. Was it a bottle to carry drink, shaped something like a gourd, such as we not unfrequently find hung on the hook of a shepherd’s staff in pictures of the annunciation to the shepherds, and such as the pilgrim from Erasmus’s “Praise of Folly,” bears on his back?

204 Sinai.

205 Galice—Compostella in Galicia.

206 Cross.

207 Asked: people ask him first of all from whence he is come.

208 Armenia.

209 Holy body, object of pilgrimage.

210 Tell us.

211 The Knight of La Tour Landry, in one of his stories, tells us: “There was a young lady that had her herte moche on the worlde. And there was a squier that loved her and she hym. And for because that she might have better leiser to speke with hym, she made her husbande to understande that she had vowed in diverse pilgrimages; and her husband, as he that thought none evelle and wolde not displese her, suffered and held hym content that she should go wherin her lust.... Alle thei that gone on pilgrimage to a place for foul plesaunce more than devocion of the place that thei go to, and covereth thaire goinge with service of God, fowlethe and scornethe God and our Ladie, and the place that thei goo to.”—Book of La Tour Landry, chap. xxxiv.

212 “I was a poor pilgrim,” says one (“History of the Troubadours,” p. 300), “when I came to your court; and have lived honestly and respectably in it on the wages you have given me; restore to me my mule, my wallet, and my staff, and I will return in the same manner as I came.”

213 “Church of our Fathers,” vol. iii. p. 442.

214 Thus Pope Calixtus tells us (“Sermones Bib. Pat.,” ed. Bignio, xv. 330) that the pilgrims to Santiago were accustomed before dawn, at the top of each town, to cry with a loud voice, “Deus Adjuva!” “Sancte Jacobe!” “God Help!” “Santiago!”

215 Surely he should have excepted St. Thomas’s shrine?

216 In the Guardian newspaper of Sept. 5, 1860, a visitor to Rome gives a description of the exhibition of relics there, which forms an interesting parallel with the account in the text: “Shortly before Ash-Wednesday a public notice (‘Invito Sagro’) is issued by authority, setting forth that inasmuch as certain of the principal relics and ‘sacra immagini’ are to be exposed during the ensuing season of Lent, in certain churches specified, the confraternities of Rome are exhorted by the pope to resort in procession to those churches.... The ceremony is soon described. The procession entered slowly at the west door, moved up towards the altar, and when the foremost were within a few yards of it, all knelt down for a few minutes on the pavement of the church to worship. At a signal given by one of the party, they rose, and slowly defiled off in the direction of the chapel wherein is preserved the column of the flagellation (?). By the way, no one of the other sex may ever enter that chapel, except on one day in the year—the very day of which I am speaking; and on that day men are as rigorously excluded. Well, all knelt again for a few minutes, then rose, and moved slowly towards the door, departing as they came, and making way for another procession to enter. It was altogether a most interesting and agreeable spectacle. Utterly alien to our English tastes and habits certainly; but the institution evidently suited the tastes of the people exactly, and I dare say may be conducive to piety, and recommend itself to their religious instincts. Coming from their several parishes, and returning, they chant psalms.

“It follows naturally to speak a little more particularly about the adoration of relics, for this is just another of those many definite religious acts which make up the sum of popular devotion, and supply the void occasioned by the entire discontinuance of the old breviary offices. In the ‘Diario Romano’ (a little book describing what is publicly transacted, of a religious character, during every day in the year), daily throughout Lent, and indeed on every occasion of unusual solemnity (of which, I think, there are eighty-five in all), you read ‘Stazione’ at such a church. This (whatever it may imply beside) denotes that relics are displayed for adoration in that church on the day indicated. The pavement is accordingly strewed with box, lights burn on the altar, and there is a constant influx of visitors to that church throughout the day. For example, at St. Prisca’s, a little church on the Aventine, there was a ‘Stazione,’ 3rd April. In the Romish Missal you will perceive that on the Feria tertia Majoris hebdomadæ (this year April 3), there is Statio ad S. Priscam. A very interesting church, by the way, it proved, being evidently built on a site of immense antiquity—traditionally said to be the house of Prisca. You descend by thirty-one steps into the subterranean edifice. At this little out-of-the-way church, there were strangers arriving all the time we were there. Thirty young Dominicans from S. Sabina, hard by, streamed down into the crypt, knelt for a time, and then repaired to perform a similar act of worship above, at the altar. The friend who conducted me to the spot, showed me, in the vineyard immediately opposite, some extraordinary remains of the wall of Servius Tullius. On our return we observed fresh parties straggling towards the church, bent on performing their ‘visits.’ It should, perhaps, be mentioned that prayers have been put forth by authority, to be used on such occasions.

“I must not pass by this subject of relics so slightly, for it evidently occupies a considerable place in the public devotions of a Roman Catholic. Thus the ‘Invito Sagro,’ already adverted to, specifies which relics will be displayed in each of the six churches enumerated—(e.g. the heads of SS. Peter and Paul, their chains, some wood of the cross, &c.)—granting seven years of indulgence for every visit, by whomsoever paid; and promising plenary indulgence to every person who, after confessing and communicating, shall thrice visit each of the aforesaid churches, and pray for awhile on behalf of holy church. There are besides, on nine chief festivals, as many great displays of relics at Rome, the particulars of which may be seen in the ‘Année Liturgique,’ pp. 189-206. I witnessed one, somewhat leisurely, at the Church of the Twelve Apostles, on the afternoon of the 1st of May. There was a congregation of about two or three hundred in church, while somebody in a lofty gallery displayed the relics, his companion proclaiming with a loud voice what each was: ‘Questo e il braccio,’ &c., &c., which such an one gave to this ’alma basilica,’—the formula being in every instance very sonorously intoned. There was part of the arm of S. Bartholomew and of S. James the Less; part of S. Andrew’s leg, arm, and cross; part of one of S. Paul’s fingers; one of the nails with which S. Peter was crucified; S. Philip’s right foot; liquid blood of S. James; some of the remains of S. John the Evangelist, of the Baptist, of Joseph, and of the Blessed Virgin; together with part of the manger, cradle, cross, and tomb of our Lord, &c., &c.... I have dwelt somewhat disproportionally on relics, but they play so conspicuous a part in the religious system of the country, that in enumerating the several substitutes which have been invented for the old breviary services, it would not be nearly enough to have discussed the subject in a few lines. A visit paid to a church where such objects are exposed, is a distinct as well as popular religious exercise; and it always seemed to me to be performed with great reverence and devotion.”

217 From Mr. Wright’s “Archæological Album,” p. 19.

218 This slip of lead had probably been put into his coffin. He is sometimes called Thomas of Acre.

219 Of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath we read:—
“Thrice had she been at Jerusalem,
And haddé passed many a strangé stream;
At Rome she haddé been, and at Boloyne,
In Galice, at St. James, and at Coloyne.”

220 Dugdale’s “Monasticon.”

221 “Crudities,” p. 18.

222 In Lydgate’s “Life of St. Edmund” (Harl. 2,278) is a picture of King Alkmund on his pilgrimage, at Rome, receiving the Pope’s blessing, in which the treatment of the subject is very like that of the illumination in the text.

223 The shells indicate a pilgrimage accomplished, but the rod may not have been intended to represent the pilgrim’s bourdon. In the Harl. MS. 5,102, fol. 68, a MS. of the beginning of the thirteenth century, is a bishop holding a slender rod (not a pastoral staff), and at fol. 17 of the same MS. one is putting a similar rod into a bishop’s coffin. The priors of small cathedrals bore a staff without crook, and had the privilege of being arrayed in pontificals for mass; choir-rulers often bore staves. Dr. Rock, in the “Church of our Fathers,” vol. iii., pt. II, p. 224, gives a cut from a late Flemish Book of Hours, in which a priest, sitting at confession, bears a long rod.

224 It is engraved in Mr. Boutell’s “Christian Monuments in England and Wales,” p. 79.

225 Engraved in Nichols’s “Leicestershire,” vol. iii., pl. ii., p. 623.

226 Engraved in the “Manual of Sepulchral Slabs and Crosses,” by the Rev. E. L. Cutts, pl. lxxiii.

227 It will be shown hereafter that secular priests ordinarily wore dresses of these gay colours, all the ecclesiastical canons to the contrary notwithstanding.

228 Here is a good example from Baker’s “Northamptonshire:”—“Broughton Rectory: Richard Meyreul, sub-deacon, presented in 1243. Peter de Vieleston, deacon, presented in 1346-7. Though still only a deacon, he had previously been rector of Cottisbrook from 1342 to 1345.”

Matthew Paris tells us that, in 1252, the beneficed clergy in the diocese of Lincoln were urgently persuaded and admonished by their bishop to allow themselves to be promoted to the grade of priesthood, but many of them refused.

The thirteenth Constitution of the second General Council of Lyons, held in 1274, ordered curates to reside and to take priests’ orders within a year of their promotion; the lists above quoted show how inoperative was this attempt to remedy the practice against which it was directed.

229 A writer in the Christian Remembrancer for July, 1856, says:—“During the fourteenth century it would seem that half the number of rectories throughout England were held by acolytes unable to administer the sacrament of the altar, to hear confessions, or even to baptise. Presented to a benefice often before of age to be ordained, the rector preferred to marry and to remain a layman, or at best a clerk in minor orders.... In short, during the time to which we refer, rectories were looked upon and treated as lay fees.”

230 See Chaucer’s poor scholar, hereinafter quoted, who—
“busily gan for the soulis pray
Of them that gave him wherewith to scholaie.”

231 “Dialogue on Heresies,” book iii. c. 12.

232 “Norwich Corporation Records.” Sessions Book of 12th Henry VII. Memorand.—That on Thursday, Holyrood Eve, in the xijth of King Henry the VIIJ., Sir William Grene, being accused of being a spy, was examined before the mayor’s deputy and others, and gave the following account of himself:—“The same Sir William saieth that he was borne in Boston, in the countie of Lincoln, and about xviij yeres nowe paste or there about, he dwellyd with Stephen at Grene, his father at Wantlet, in the saide countie of Lincolne, and lerned gramer by the space of ij yeres; after that by v or vj yeres used labour with his said father, sometyme in husbandrie and other wiles with the longe sawe; and after that dwelling in Boston at one Genet a Grene, his aunte, used labour and other wiles goyng to scole by the space of ij years, and in that time receyved benet and accolet [the first tonsure and acolytate] in the freres Austens in Boston of one frere Graunt, then beying suffragan of the diocese of Lincoln [“Frere Graunt” was William Grant, titular Bishop of Pavada, in the province of Constantinople. He was Vicar of Redgewell, in Essex, and Suffragan of Ely, from 1516 to 1525.—Stubbs’s Registrum Sacrum Anglicanum]; after that dwelling within Boston wt. one Mr. Williamson, merchaunt, half a yere, and after that dwellinge in Cambridge by the space of half a yere, used labour by the day beryng of ale and pekynge of saffron, and sometyme going to the colleges, and gate his mete and drynke of almes; and aft that the same Sir William, with ij monks of Whitby Abbey, and one Edward Prentis, went to Rome, to thentent for to have ben made p’st, to which order he could not be admitted; and after abiding in Larkington, in the countie of Essex, used labour for his levyng wt. one Thom. Grene his broder; and after that the same Sr. Will. cam to Cambridge, and ther teried iiij or v wekes, and gate his levynge of almes; and after, dwelling in Boston, agen laboured with dyvs persones by vij or viij wekes; and after that dwelling in London, in Holborn, with one Rickerby, a fustian dyer, about iij wekes, and after that the same William resorted to Cambridge, and ther met agen wt. the said Edward Prentise; and at instance and labour of one Mr. Cony, of Cambridge, the same Will. Grene and Edward Prentise obteyned a licence for one year of Mr. Cappes, than being deputee to the Chancellor of the said univ’sitie, under his seal of office, wherby the same Will. and Edward gathered toguether in Cambridgeshire releaff toward their exhibicon to scole by the space of viij weks, and after that the said Edward departed from the company of the same William. And shortly after that, one Robert Draper, scoler, borne at Feltham, in the countee of Lincoln, accompanyed wt. the same Willm., and they forged and made a newe licence, and putte therin ther bothe names, and the same sealed wt. the seale of the other licence granted to the same Will. and Edward as is aforeseid, by which forged licence the same Will. and Robt. gathered in Cambridgeshire and other shires. At Coventre the same Will. and Robt. caused one Knolles, a tynker, dwelling in Coventre, to make for them a case of tynne mete for a seale of a title which the same Robt. Draper holdde of Makby Abbey. And after that the same Willm. and Robt. cam to Cambridge, and ther met wt. one Sr. John Manthorp, the which hadde ben lately before at Rome, and ther was made a prest; and the same Robert Draper copied out the bulle of orders of deken, subdeken, and p’stehod for the same Willm.; and the same Willm. toke waxe, and leyed and p’st it to the prynte of the seale of the title that the said Robert had a Makby aforeseid, and led the same forged seale in the casse of tynne aforeseid, and with labels fastned ye same to his said forged bull. And sithen the same Willm. hath gathered in dyvers shires, as Northampton, Cambridge, Suffolk, and Norfolk, alway shewyng and feyning hymself that he hadde ben at Rome, and ther was made preste, by means whereof he hath receyved almes of dyvers and many persones.”—Norfolk Archæology, vol. iv. p. 342.

233 Cobbler.

234 Grease.

235 York Fabric Rolls, p. 87, note.

236 “Church of our Fathers,” ii. 441.

237 Richmond Wills.

238 “Church of our Fathers,” ii. 408, note.

239 Newcourt’s “Repertorium.”

240 Johnson’s “Canons,” ii. 421. Ang. Cath. Lib. Edition.

241 Johnson’s “Canons,” ii. 421.

242 One who sang annual or yearly masses for the dead.

243 Enough.

244 Chapel of Earl of Northumberland, from the Household Book of Henry Algernon, fifth Earl of Northumberland, born 1477, and died 1527. (“Antiq. Repertory,” iv. 242.);

First, a preist, a doctour of divinity, a doctor of law, or a bachelor of divinitie, to be dean of my lord’s chapell.

It. A preist for to be surveyour of my lorde’s landes.

It. A preist for to be secretary to my lorde.

It. A preist for to be amner to my lorde.

It. A preist for to be sub-dean for ordering and keaping the queir in my lorde’s chappell daily.

It. A preist for a riding chaplein for my lorde.

It. A preist for a chaplein for my lorde’s eldest son, to waite uppon him daily.

It. A preist for my lorde’s clark of the closet.

It. A preist for a maister of gramer in my lorde’s hous.

It. A preist for reading the Gospell in the chapel daily.

It. A preist for singing of our Ladies’ mass in the chapell daily.

The number of these persons as chapleins and preists in houshould are xi.

The gentlemen and children of my lorde’s chappell which be not appointed to attend at no time, but only in exercising of Godde’s service in the chapell daily at matteins, Lady-mass, hyhe-mass, evensong, and compeynge:—

First, a bass.
It. A second bass.
Third bass.
A maister of the childer, or counter-tenor.
Second and third counter-tenor.
A standing tenour.
A second, third, and fourth standing tenor.

The number of theis persons, as gentlemen of my lorde’s chapell, xi.

Children of my lorde’s chappell:—

Three trebles and three second trebles.

In all six.

A table of what the Earl and Lady were accustomed to offer at mass on all holydays “if he keep chappell,” of offering and annual lights paid for at Holy Blood of Haillis (Hales, in Gloucestershire), our Lady of Walsingham, St. Margaret in Lincolnshire, our Lady in the Whitefriars, Doncaster, of my lord’s foundation:—

Presents at Xmas to Barne, Bishop of Beverley and York, when he comes, as he is accustomed, yearly.

Rewards to the children of his chapell when they do sing the responde called Exaudivi at the mattynstime for xi. in vespers upon Allhallow Day, 6s. 8d.

On St. Nicholas Eve, 6s. 8d.

To them of his lordshipe’s chappell if they doe play the play of the Nativitie upon Xmas Day in the mornynge in my lorde’s chapell before his lordship, xxs.

For singing “Gloria in Excelsis” at the mattens time upon Xmas Day in the mg. To the Abbot of Miserewle (Misrule) on Xmas.

To the yeoman or groom of the vestry for bringing him the hallowed taper on Candlemas Day.

To his lordship’s chaplains and other servts. that play the Play before his lordship on Shrofetewsday at night, xxs.

That play the Play of Resurrection upon Estur Daye in the mg. in my lorde’s chapell before his lordship.

To the yeoman or groom of the vestry on Allhallows Day for syngynge for all Cristynne soles the saide nyhte to it be past mydnyght, 3s. 4d.

The Earl and Lady were brother and sister of St. Christopher Gilde of Yorke, and pd. 6s. 8d. each yearly, and when the Master of the Gild brought my lord and my lady for their lyverays a yard of narrow violette cloth and a yard of narrow rayed cloth, 13s. 4d. (i.e., a yard of each to each).

And to Procter of St. Robert’s of Knasbrughe, when my lord and lady were brother and sister, 6s. 8d. each.

At pp. 272-278, is an elaborate programme of the ordering of my lord’s chapel for the various services, from which it appears that there were organs, and several of the singing men played them in turn.

At p. 292 is an order about the washing of the linen for the chapel for a year. Surplices washed sixteen times a year against the great feasts—eighteen surplices for men, and six for children—and seven albs to be washed sixteen times a year, and “five aulter-cloths for covering of the alters” to be washed sixteen times a year.

Page 285 ordered that the vestry stuff shall have at every removal (from house to house) one cart for the carrying the nine antiphoners, the four grailles, the hangings of the three altars in the chapel, the surplices, the altar-cloths in my lord’s closet and my ladie’s, and the sort (suit) of vestments and single vestments and copes “accopeed” daily, and all other my lord’s chapell stuff to be sent afore my lord’s chariot before his lordship remove.

[Cardinal Wolsey, after the Earl’s death, intimated his wish to have the books of the Earl’s chapel, which a note speaks of as fine service books.—P. 314.]

245 Edited by Mr. Gough Nichols for the Camden Society.

246 Richard Burré, a wealthy yeoman and “ffarmer of the parsonage of Sowntyng, called the Temple, which I holde of the howse of St. Jonys,” in 19 Henry VIII. wills that Sir Robert Bechton, “my chaplen, syng ffor my soule by the span of ix. yers;” and further requires an obit for his soul for eleven years in Sompting Church.—(“Notes on Wills,” by M. A. Lower, “Sussex Archæological Collections,” iii. p. 112.)

247 “Dialogue of Heresies,” iii. c. 12.

248 See note on previous page, “the altar-cloths in my lord’s closet and my ladie’s.”

249 Of the inventories to be found in wills, we will give only two, of the chapels of country gentlemen. Rudulph Adirlay, Esq. of Colwick (“Testamenta Eboracensia,” p. 30), Nottinghamshire, A.D. 1429, leaves to Alan de Cranwill, his chaplain, a little missal and another book, and to Elizabeth his wife “the chalice, vestment, with two candelabra of laton, and the little missal, with all other ornaments belonging to my chapel.” In the inventories of the will of John Smith, Esq., of Blackmore, Essex, A.D. 1543, occur: “In the chappell chamber—Item a long setle yoyned. In the chappell—Item one aulter of yoyner’s worke. Item a table with two leaves of the passion gilt. Item a long setle of waynscott. Item a bell hanging over the chapel. Chappell stuff: Copes and vestments thre. Aulter fronts foure. Corporall case one; and dyvers peces of silk necessary for cusshyons v. Thomas Smith (to have) as moche as wyll serve his chappell, the resydue to be solde by myn executours.” The plate and candlesticks of the chapel are not specially mentioned; they are probably included among the plate which is otherwise disposed of, and “the xiiiij latyn candlestyckes of dyvers sorts,” elsewhere mentioned.—Essex Archæological Society’s Transactions, vol. iii. p. 60.

250 See the Rev. W. Stubbs’s learned and laborious “Registrum Sacrum Anglicanum,” which gives lists of the suffragan (as well as the diocesan) bishops of the Church of England.

251 “Richmondshire Wills,” p. 34.

252 “Test. Ebor.,” 220.

253 Ibid., p. 39.

254 In a pontifical of the middle of the fifteenth century, in the British Museum, (Egerton, 1067) at f. 19, is an illumination at the beginning of the service for ordering an ostiary, in which the act is represented. The bishop, habited in a green chasuble and white mitre, is delivering the keys to the clerk, who is habited in a surplice over a black cassock, and is tonsured. At f. 35 of the same MS. is a pretty little picture, showing the ordination of priests; and at f. 44 v., of the consecration of bishops. Other episcopal acts are illustrated in the same MS.: confirmation at f. 12; dedication of a church, f. 100; consecration of an altar, f. 120; benediction of a cemetery, f. 149 v.; consecration of chalice and paten, f. 163; reconciling penitents, f. 182 and f. 186 v.; the “feet-washing,” f. 186.

255 Outer short cloak.

256 Was not sufficiently a man of the world to be fit for a secular occupation.

257 Obtain.

258 To pursue his studies.

259 For another good illustration of a clerk of time of Richard II. see the illumination of that king’s coronation in the frontispiece of the MS. Royal, 14, E iv., where he seems to be in attendance on one of the bishops. He is habited in blue cassock, red liripipe, black purse, with penner and inkhorn.

260 “Test. Ebor.,” vol. ii. p. 98.

261 Ibid., vol. ii. p. 38.

262 “Test. Ebor.,” vol. ii. p. 143.

263 Ibid., vol. ii. p. 149.

264 Archdeacon Hale’s “Precedents in Criminal Causes,” p. 113.

265 From the duty of carrying holy water, mentioned here and in other extracts, the clerk derived the name of aqua bajulus, by which he is often called, e.g., in many of the places in Archdeacon Hale’s “Precedents in Criminal Causes.”

266 Ibid., p. 122.

267 York Fabric Rolls, p. 257.

268 Ibid., p. 248.

269 York Fabric Rolls, p. 265.

270 Ibid., p. 266.

271 Ibid., p. 248.

272 Bohn’s Edition, ii. 388.

273 Hair.

274 Complexion.

275 Neatly.

276 Watchet, a kind of cloth.

277 Small twigs or trees.

278 Musical instruments.

279 As the parish clerk of St. Mary, York, used to go to the people’s houses with holy water on Sundays.

280 Grafted lies.

281 As debtors flee to sanctuary at Westminster, and live on what they have borrowed, and set their creditors at defiance.

282 Them.

283 Their.

284 Know.

285 Great and little.

286 Gave.

287 Angry.

288 Difficult nor proud.

289 Smite, rebuke.

290 Scrupulous.

291 Cardinal Otho, the Papal legate in England in the time of Henry III., was a deacon (Matthew Paris, Sub. Ann. 1237); Cardinal Pandulph, in King John’s time, was a sub-deacon (R. Wendover, Sub. Ann. 1212).

292 There is a very fine drawing of an archbishop in pontificalibus of the latter part of the thirteenth century in the MS. Royal, 2 A. f. 219 v.

293 “Church of our Fathers,” i. 319.

294 In a Spanish Book of Hours (Add. 1819-3), at f. 86 v., is a representation of an ecclesiastic in a similar robe of dark purple with a hood, he wears a cardinal’s hat and holds a papal tiara in his hand.

295 Engraved by Dr. Rock, ii. 97.

296 Engraved in the Archæological Journal, vii. 17 and 19.

297 A plain straight staff is sometimes seen in illuminations being put into a bishop’s grave; such staves have been actually found in the coffins of bishops.

298 The alb was often of coloured materials. We find coloured albs in the mediæval inventories. In Louandre’s “Arts Somptuaires,” vol. i. xi. siecle, is a picture of the canons of St. Martin of Tours in blue albs. Their costume is altogether worth notice.

299 For another ecclesiastical procession which shows very clearly the costume of the various orders of clergy, see Achille Jubinal’s “Anciennes Tapisseries,” plate ii.

300 Incisis, cut and slashed so as to show the lining.

301 Monumenta Franciscana, lxxxix. Master of the Rolls’ publications.

302 York Fabric Rolls, p. 243.

303 This word, which will frequently occur, means a kind of ornamental dagger, which was worn hanging at the girdle in front by civilians, and knights when out of armour. The instructions to parish priests, already quoted, says—
In honeste clothes thow muste gon
Baselard ny bawdryke were thou non.

304 The honorary title of Sir was given to priests down to a late period. A law of Canute declared a priest to rank with the second order of thanes—i.e., with the landed gentry. “By the laws, armorial, civil, and of arms, a priest in his place in civil conversation is always before any esquire, as being a knight’s fellow by his holy orders, and the third of the three Sirs which only were in request of old (no baron, viscount, earl, nor marquis being then in use), to wit, Sir King, Sir Knight, and Sir Priest.... But afterwards Sir in English was restrained to these four,—Sir Knight, Sir Priest, and Sir Graduate, and, in common speech, Sir Esquire; so always, since distinction of titles were, Sir Priest was ever the second.”—A Decacordon of Quodlibetical Questions concerning Religion and State, quoted in Knight’s Shakespeare, Vol. I. of Comedies, note to Sc. I, Act i. of “Merry Wives of Windsor.” In Shakespeare’s characters we have Sir Hugh Evans and Sir Oliver Martext, and, at a later period still, “Sir John” was the popular name for a priest. Piers Ploughman (Vision XI. 304) calls them “God’s knights,”
And also in the Psalter says David to overskippers,
Psallite Deo nostro, psallite; quoniam rex terre
Deus Israel; psallite sapienter.
The Bishop shall be blamed before God, as I leve [believe]
That crowneth such goddes knightes that conneth nought sapienter
Synge ne psalmes rede ne segge a masse of the day.
Ac never neyther is blameless the bisshop ne the chapleyne,
For her either is endited; and that of ignorancia
Non excusat episcopos, nec idiotes prestes.

305 York Fabric Rolls, p. 268.

306 Described and engraved in the Sussex Archæological Collections, vii. f. 13.

307 Described and engraved in Mr. Parker’s “Domestic Architecture.”

308 Parker’s “Domestic Architecture,” ii. p. 87.

309 There are numerous curious examples of fifteenth-century timber window-tracery in the Essex churches.

310 The deed of settlement of the vicarage of Bulmer, in the year 1425, gives us the description of a parsonage house of similar character. It consisted of one hall with two chambers annexed, the bakehouse, kitchen, and larder-house, one chamber for the vicar’s servant, a stable, and a hay-soller (Soler, loft), with a competent garden. Ingrave rectory house was a similar house; it is described, in a terrier of 1610, as “a house containing a hall, a parlour, a buttery, two lofts, and a study, also a kitchen, a milk-house, and a house for poultry, a barn, a stable and a hay-house.”—Newcourt, ii. p. 281.

Ingatestone rectory, in the terrier of 1610, was “a dwelling-house with a hall, a parlour, and a chamber within it; a study newly built by the then parson; a chamber over the parlour, and another within that with a closet; without the dwelling-house a kitchen and two little rooms adjoining to it, and a chamber over them; two little butteries over against the hall, and next them a chamber, and one other chamber over the same; without the kitchen there is a dove-house, and another house built by the then parson; a barn and a stable very ruinous.”—Newcourt, ii. 348. Here, too, we seem to have an old house with hall in the middle, parlour and chamber at one end and two butteries at the other, in the midst of successive additions.

There is also a description of the rectory house of West Haningfield, Essex, in Newcourt, ii. 309, and of North Bemfleet, ii. 46.

311 Newcourt’s “Repertorum,” ii. 97.

312 Newcourt, ii. 49.

313 George Darell, A.D. 1432, leaves one book of statutes, containing the statutes of Kings Edward III., Richard II., and Henry IV.; one book of law, called “Natura Brevium;” one Portus, and one Par Statutorum Veterum.—Testamenta Eboracensia, ii. p. 27.

314 There are other inventories of the goods of clerics, which will help to throw light upon their domestic economy at different periods, e.g., of the vicar of Waghen, A.D. 1462, in the York Wills, ii. 261, and of a chantry priest, A.D. 1542, in the Sussex Archæological Collections, iii. p. 115.

315 Bohn’s Edition, vol. ii. p. 278.

316 Matthew Paris, vol. i. p. 285 (Bohn’s edition).

317 Ibid., vol. ii. p. 193.

318 Ibid., vol iii. p. 48.

319 Numb. x. 9.

320 Exod. xv. 21.

321 1 Sam. xviii. 7.

322 Jer. xxxi. 4.

323 Is. v. 12.

324 1 Sam. x. 5.

325 2 Sam. vi. 5.

326 Psalm lxviii.

327 Also a paper read before the London and Middlesex Architectural Society in June, 1871.

328 The king’s minstrel of the last Saxon king is mentioned in Domesday Book as holding lands in Gloucestershire.

329 In the reign of Henry I., Rayer was the King’s Minstrel. Temp. Henry II., it was Galfrid, or Jeffrey. Temp. Richard I., Blondel, of romantic memory. Temp. Henry III., Master Ricard. It was the Harper of Prince Edward (afterwards King Edward I.) who brained the assassin who attempted the Prince’s life, when his noble wife Eleanor risked hers to extract the poison from the wound. In Edward I.’s reign we have mention of a King Robert, who may be the impetuous minstrel of the Prince. Temp. Edward II., there occur two: a grant of houses was made to William de Morley, the King’s Minstrel, which had been held by his predecessor, John de Boteler. At St. Bride’s, Glamorganshire, is the insculpt effigy of a knightly figure, of the date of Edward I., with an inscription to John le Boteler; but there is nothing to identify him with the king of the minstrels. Temp. Richard II., John Camuz was the king of his minstrels. When Henry V. went to France, he took his fifteen minstrels, and Walter Haliday, their Marshal, with him. After this time the chief of the royal minstrels seems to have been styled Marshal instead of King; and in the next reign but one we find a Sergeant of the Minstrels. Temp. Henry VI., Walter Haliday was still Marshal of the Minstrels; and this king issued a commission for impressing boys to supply vacancies in their number. King Edward IV. granted to the said long-lived Walter Haliday, Marshal, and to seven others, a charter for the restoration of a Fraternity or Gild, to be governed by a marshal and two wardens, to regulate the minstrels throughout the realm (except those of Chester). The minstrels of the royal chapel establishment of this king were thirteen in number; some trumpets, some shalms, some small pipes, and other singers. The charter of Edward IV. was renewed by Henry VIII. in 1520, to John Gilman, his then marshal, on whose death Hugh Wodehouse was promoted to the office.

330 Ellis’s “Early English Metrical Romances” (Bohn’s edition), p. 287.

331 From Mr. T. Wright’s “Domestic Manners of the English.”

332 Among his nobles.

333 Their.

334 Great chamber, answering to our modern drawing-room.

335 Couches.

336 For other illustrations of musical instruments see a good representation of Venus playing a rote, with a plectrum in the right hand, pressing the strings with the left, in the Sloane MS. 3,985, f. 44 v. Also a band, consisting of violin, organistrum (like the modern hurdy-gurdy), harp, and dulcimer, in the Harl. MS. 1,527; it represents the feast on the return of the prodigal son. In the Arundel MS. 83, f. 155, is David with a band of instruments of early fourteenth-century date, and other instruments at f. 630. In the early fourteenth-century MS. 28,162, at f. 6 v., David is tuning his harp with a key; at f. 10 v. is Dives faring sumptuously, with carver and cup-bearer, and musicians with lute and pipe.

337 Mallory’s “History of Prince Arthur,” vol. i. p. 44.

338 Viz., by making the sign of the cross upon them.

339 Edward VI.’s commissioners return a pair of organs in the church of St. Peter Mancroft, Norwich, which they value at 40s., and in the church of St. Peter, Parmentergate, in the same city, a pair of organs which they value at £10 (which would be equal to about £70 or £80 in these days), and soon after we find that 8d. were “paied to a carpenter for makyng of a plaunche (a platform of planks) to sette the organs on.”

340 Another, with kettle-drums and trumpets, in the MS. Add. 27,675, f. 13.

341 A harp with its case about the lower part is in the Add. MS. 18,854, f. 91.

342 There are casts of these in the Mediæval Court of the Crystal Palace.

343 “Annales Archæologiques,” vol. vi. p. 315.

344 Ibid., vol. ix. p. 329.

345 Kettle-drums.

346 In the account of the minstrel at Kenilworth, subsequently given, he is described as “a squiere minstrel of Middlesex, that travelled the country this summer time.”

347 “Miri it is in somer’s tide
Swainés gin on justing ride.”

348 “Whanne that April with his shourés sote,” &c.
“Than longen folk to gon on pilgrimages.”

349 Tedious, irksome.

350 Lose their.

351 Renders tedious.

352 Fontenelle (“Histoire du Théâtre,” quoted by Percy) tells us that in France, men, who by the division of the family property had only the half or the fourth part of an old seignorial castle, sometimes went rhyming about the world, and returned to acquire the remainder of their ancestral castle.

353 In the MS. illuminations of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the messenger is denoted by peculiarities of equipment. He generally bears a spear, and has a very small, round target (or, perhaps, a badge of his lord’s arms) at his girdle—e.g., in the MS. Add. 11,639 of the close of the thirteenth century, folio 203 v. In the fifteenth century we see messengers carrying letters openly, fastened in the cleft of a split wand, in the MS. of about the same date, Harl. 1,527, folio 1,080, and in the fourteenth century MS. Add. 10,293, folio 25; and in Hans Burgmaier’s Der Weise Könige.

354 It is right to state that one MS. of this statute gives Mareschans instead of Menestrals; but the reading in the text is that preferred by the Record Commission, who have published the whole of the interesting document.

355 In the romance of Richard Cœur de Lion we read that, after the capture of Acre, he distributed among the “heralds, disours, tabourers, and trompours,” who accompanied him, the greater part of the money, jewels, horses, and fine robes which had fallen to his share. We have many accounts of the lavish generosity with which chivalrous lords propitiated the favourable report of the heralds and minstrels, whose good report was fame.

356 May we infer from the exemption of the jurisdiction of the Duttons, and not of that of the court of Tutbury and the guild of Beverley, that the jurisdiction of the King of the Minstrels over the whole realm was established after the former, and before the latter? The French minstrels were incorporated by charter, and had a king in the year 1330, forty-seven years before Tutbury. In the ordonnance of Edward II., 1315, there is no allusion to such a general jurisdiction.

357 One of the minstrels of King Edward the Fourth’s household (there were thirteen others) was called the wayte; it was his duty to “pipe watch.” In the romance of “Richard Cœur de Lion,” when Richard, with his fleet, has come silently in the night under the walls of Jaffa, which was besieged on the land side by the Saracen army:—
“They looked up to the castel,
They heard no pipe, ne flagel,[A]
They drew em nigh to land,
If they mighten understand,
And they could ne nought espie,
Ne by no voice of minstralcie,
That quick man in the castle were.”

And so they continued in uncertainty until the spring of the day, then

“A wait there came, in a kernel,[B]
And piped a nott in a flagel.”

And when he recognised King Richard’s galleys,

“Then a merrier note he blew,
And piped, ‘Seigneurs or sus! or sus!
King Richard is comen to us!’”

[A] Flageolet.

[B] Battlement.

358 Was offended.

359 Repent.

360 Give.

361 Travel.

362 Praise.

363 Introduction to his “Reliques of Early English Poetry.”

364 The close-fitting outer garment worn in the fourteenth century, shown in the engravings on p. 350.

365 Which Percy supposes to mean “tonsure-wise,” like priests and monks.

366 Percy supposes from this expression that there were inferior orders, as yeomen-minstrels. May we not also infer that there were superior orders, as knight-minstrels, over whom was the king-minstrel? for we are told “he was but a batchelor (whose chivalric signification has no reference to matrimony) yet.” We are disposed to believe that this was a real minstrel. Langham tells us that he was dressed “partly as he would himself:” probably, the only things which were not according to his wont, were that my Lord of Leicester may have given him a new coat; that he had a little more capon’s grease than usual in his hair; and that he was set to sing “a solemn song, warranted for story, out of King Arthur’s Acts,” instead of more modern minstrel ware.

367 Heralds in the fourteenth century bore the arms of their lord on a small scutcheon fastened at the side of their girdle.

368 “Annales Archæologiques,” vii. p. 323.

369 “Eoten,” a giant; “Eotenish,” made by or descended from the giants.

370 The Harl. MS. 603, of the close of the eleventh century, contains a number of military subjects rudely drawn, but conveying suggestions which the artist will be able to interpret and profit by. In the Add. MS. 28,107, of date A.D. 1096, at f. 25 v., is a Goliath; and at f. 1,630 v., a group of soldiers.

371 Didde—did on next his white skin.

372 Debate—contend.

373 Cuirbouly—stamped leather.

374 Latoun—brass.

375 Compare Tennyson’s description of Sir Lancelot, in the “Lady of Shalot.”

“His gemmy bridle glittered free,
Like to some branch of stars we see;
Hung in the golden galaxy,
As he rode down to Camelot.”

376 In the MS. Royal, 1,699, is a picture in which are represented a sword and hunting-horn hung over a tomb. The helmet, sword, and shield of Edward the Black Prince still hang over his tomb in Canterbury Cathedral; Henry IV.’s saddle and helmet over his tomb in Westminster Abbey; and in hundreds of parish churches helmets, swords, gauntlets, spurs, &c., still hang over the tombs of mediæval knights.

377 Probably a bridge with a tower to defend the approach to it.

378 Couch.

379 Hewitt’s “Ancient Armour,” i. p. 349.

380 The album of Villars de Honnecourt, of the thirteenth century, contains directions for constructing the trebuchet.

381 Hewitt’s “Ancient Armour,” i. 361.

382 For much curious detail on this subject see “The Babee’s Book,” published by the Early English Text Society.

383 A cover for a bench.

384 In illustration of the way in which actual warfare was sometimes treated as if it were a chivalrous trial of skill, take the following anecdote from Froissart; on the occasion when the French had bribed Amery de Puy, the governor, to betray Calais, and fell into the ambush which Edward III. set for them, and the king himself fought under the banner of Sir Walter Murray:—“The Kyng lyht on the Lord Eustace of Rybemount, who was a strong and a hardy knyht; there was a long fyht bytwene hym and the kyng that it was joy to beholde them.... The knight strake the kyng the same day two tymes on his knees; but finally the kynge himself toke hym prisoner, and so he yelded his sword to the kyng and sayd, Sir Knyght, I yeled me as your prisoner, he knewe not as then that it was the kyng.” In the evening the king gave a supper in the castle, at which the French prisoners sat as guests; and, “when supper was done and the tables take away, the kyng taryed styll in the hall with his knyghtes and with the Frenchmen, and he was bare-heeded, savyng a chapelet of fyne perles that he ware on his heed. Than the kyng went fro one to another of the Frenchmen.... Than the kyng come to Sir Eustace of Rybamont, and joyously to hym he said, ‘Sir Eustace, ye are the knyht in the worlde that I have sene moost valyant assayle his ennemyes and defende hymselfe, nor I never founde knyght that ever gave me so moche ado, body to body, as ye have done this day; wherefore I give you the price above all the knyghtes of my court by ryht sentence.’ Then the kyng took the chapelet that was upon his heed, beying bothe faire, goodly, and ryche, and sayd, ‘Sir Eustace, I gyve you this chapelet for the best doar in armes in this journey past of either party, and I desire you to bere it this yere for the love of me; say whersover ye come that I dyd give it you; and I quyte you your prison and ransom, and ye shall depart to-morowe if it please you.’”

385 2 Samuel ii.

386 Such as that which took place at Windsor Park in the sixth year of Edward I., for which, according to a document in the Record Office at the Tower (printed in the “Archælogia,” vol. xvii. p. 297), it appears that the knights were armed in a tunic and surcoat, a helmet of leather gilt or silvered, with crests of parchment, a wooden shield, and a sword of parchment, silvered and strengthened with whalebone, with gilded hilts.

387 i.e., of the strangers. The challengers are afterwards called the gentlemen within.

388 For other forms of challenge, and some very romantic challenges at full length, see the Lansdowne MS. 285.

389 Probably the tilt-house (the shed or tent which they have in the field at one end of the lists).

390 The Lansdowne MS. says “gentlewomen,” an obvious error; it is correctly given as above in the Hastings MS.

391 Dugdale, in his “History of Warwickshire,” gives a curious series of pictures of the famous combat between John Astle and Piers de Massie in the year 1438, showing the various incidents of the combat.

392 The Harleian MS. No. 69, is a book of certain triumphs, containing proclamations of tournaments, statutes of arms for their regulation, and numerous other documents relating to the subject. From folio 20 and onwards are given pictures of combats; folio 22 v. represents spear-play at the barriers; folio 23, sword-play at the barriers, &c.

393 In the picture given by Dugdale of the combat between John Astle and Piers de Massie, the combatants are represented each sitting in his chair—a great carvad chair, something like the coronation chair in Westminster Abbey.

394 Tremouille.

395 “Oyez!” or perhaps “Ho!”

396 From Mr. Wright’s “Domestic Manners and Customs of the Middle Ages.”

397 “Ancient Cannon in Europe,” by Lieut. Brackenbury.

398 See also Viollet le Duc’s “Dictionary of Architecture.”

399 The British Museum does not possess this fine work, but a copy of it is accessible to the public in the Library of the South Kensington Museum.

400 Afterwards cardinal.

401 Dun Cow.

402 “He is so hung round,” says Truewit, in Ben Jonson’s Epicœne, “with pikes, halberds, petronels, calivers, and muskets, that he looks like a justice of peace’s hall.” Clement Sysley, of Eastbury House, near Barking, bequeathed in his will the “gonnes, pikes, cross-bows, and other weapons, to Thomas Sysley, to go with the house, and remain as standards for ever in Eastbury Hall.”

403 A sketch illustrating their construction may be found in Witsen’s “Sheeps Bouw.” Appendix, Plate 10.

404 “History of Commerce.”

405 Sir Harris Nicholas’ “History of the British Navy,” vol. i. p. 21.

406 In our own day we see the scorn of trade being rapidly softened down. Many of our commercial houses are almost as important as a department of State, and are conducted in much the same way. The principals of these houses are often considerable landholders besides, have been educated at the public schools and universities, and are frankly received as equals in all societies. On the other hand, the nobility are putting their younger sons into trade. At this moment, we believe, the brother-in-law of a princess of England is in a mercantile house.

407 Avarice, in “Piers Ploughman’s Vision,” v. 255, says:—
“I have ymade many a knyht both mercer and draper
That payed nevere for his prentishode not a paire of gloves.”

408 Neatly, properly.

409 Shields, i.e. écus, French crowns.

410 Agreement for borrowing money.

411 Know not his name.

412 From Mr. Wright’s “Domestic Manners and Customs of the Middle Ages.”

413 If.

414 Boxes.

415 Sweet ointments.

416 To give relief.

417 Engraved in Fisher’s Bedfordshire Collections, and in the London and Middlesex Archæological Society’s Proceedings for 1870, p. 66.

418 Take the woodcut on p. 531, from MS. Royal, 15 E. I., f. 436.

419 Taken.

420 Like.

421 N’et, i.e. does not eat.

422 N’is, i.e. is not.