No. 2 On the Decay of the Order
Once (it was in days of yore)
This our order flourished;
Popes, whom Cardinals adore,
It with honours nourished;
Licences desirable
They gave, nought desiring;
While our prayers, the beads we tell,
Served us for our hiring.
Now this order (so time runs)
Is made tributary;
With the ruck of Adam’s sons
We must draw and carry;
Ground by common serfdom down,
By our debts confounded,
Debts to market-place and town
With the Jews compounded.
Once (’twas when the simple state
Of our order lasted)
All men praised us, no man’s hate
Harried us or wasted;
Rates and taxes on our crew
There was none to levy;
But the sect, douce men and true,
Served God in a bevy.
Now some envious folks, who spy
Sumptuous equipages,
Horses, litters passing by,
And a host of pages,
Say, “Unless their purses were
Quite with wealth o’erflowing,
They could never thus, I swear,
Round about be going!”
Such men do not think nor own
How with toil we bend us,
Not to feed ourselves alone,
But the folk who tend us:
On all comers, all who come,
We our substance lavish,
Therefore ’tis a trifling sum
For ourselves we ravish.
On this subject, at this time,
What we’ve said suffices:
Let us leave it, lead the rhyme
Back to our devices:
We the miseries of this life
Bear with cheerful spirit,
That Heaven’s bounty after strife
We may duly merit.
’Tis a sign that God the Lord
Will not let us perish,
Since with scourge and rod and sword
He our souls doth cherish;
He amid this vale of woes
Makes us bear the burden,
That true joys in heaven’s repose
May be ours for guerdon.
Next in order to these poems, which display the Wandering Students as a class, I will produce two that exhibit their mode of life in detail. The first is a begging petition, addressed by a scholar on the tramp to the great man of the place where he is staying. The name of the place, as I have already noticed, is only indicated by an N. The nasal whine of a suppliant for alms, begging, as Erasmus begged, not in the name of charity, but of learning, makes itself heard both in the rhyme and rhythm of the original Latin. I have tried to follow the sing-song doggerel.