Chaucer and His England Part 15

They warsled up, they warsled down Till John fell to the ground; A dirk fell out of Willie's pouch, And gave him a deadly wound.

Or, as it is recorded in the business-like prose of an a.s.size-roll: "Richard of Horsley was playing and wrestling with John the Miller of Tutlington; and by mishap his knife fell from its sheath and wounded the aforesaid John without the aforesaid Richard's knowledge, so that he died.

And the aforesaid Richard fled and is not suspected of the death; let him therefore return if he will, but let his chattels be confiscated for his flight. (N.B. He has no chattels)."[264] In this same a.s.size-roll, out of forty-three accidental deaths, three were due to village games, and three more to sticks or stones aimed respectively at a c.o.c.k, a dog, and a pig, but finding their fatal billet in a human life. Ecclesiastical disciplinarians endeavoured frequently, but with indifferent success, to put down the practice of wrestling in churchyards, with the scarcely less turbulent miracle-plays or dances, and the markets which so frequently stained the holy ground with blood. Even the State interfered in the matter of churchyard fairs and markets "for the honour of Holy Church"; but they went on gaily as before. Dances, as I have already had occasion to note, were condemned with a violence which is only partially explained even by Chaucer's illuminating lines about the Parish Clerk--

In twenty manners could he skip and dance, (After the School of Oxenforde, though,) And with his legges casten to and fro.[265]

To quote here again from Dr. Rashdall, "William of Wykeham found it necessary for the protection of the sculpture in the Chapel reredos to make a Statute against dancing or jumping in the Chapel or adjoining Hall.

His language is suggestive of that untranslatable amus.e.m.e.nt now known as 'ragging,' which has no doubt formed a large part of the relaxation of students--at least of English students--in all ages. At the same College there is a comprehensive prohibition of all 'struggling, chorus-singing, dancing, leaping, singing, shouting, tumult and inordinate noise, pouring forth of water, beer, and all other liquids and tumultuous games' in the Hall, on the ground that they were likely to disturb the occupants of the Chaplain's chamber below. A moderate indulgence in some of the more harmless of these pastimes in other places seems to be permitted."[266]

In this, the good bishop was only following the very necessary precedent of many prelates before him. As early as 1223, when the reform of the friars had stimulated a great effort to put down old abuses throughout the Church, Bishop Poore of Salisbury and his diocesan council decreed "we forbid the holding of dances, or base and unhonest games which provoke to lasciviousness, in the churchyard.... We forbid the proclaiming of scot-ales in church by layfolk, or by priests or clerks either in or without the church." Similar prohibitions are repeated by later councils with an emphasis which only shows their inefficiency. The University of Oxford complained to Henry V. in 1414 that fairs and markets were held "more frequently than ever" on consecrated ground; and the Visitation of 1519 among churches appropriated to York Cathedral elicited the fact that football and similar games were carried on in two of the churchyards.

These holy places sometimes witnessed rougher sports still; especially cathedral cemeteries during the great processions of the ecclesiastical year. "Moreover," writes Bishop Grosseteste in a circular letter to all his archdeacons, "cause it to be proclaimed strictly in every church that, when the parishes come in procession for the yearly visitation and homage to the Cathedral church, no parish shall struggle to press before another parish with its banners; since from this source not only quarrels are wont to spring, but cruel bloodshed." Bishop Giffard of Worcester was compelled for the same reason to proclaim in every church of his diocese "that no one shall join in the Pentecostal processions with a sword or other kind of arms"; and a similar prohibition in the diocese of Ely (1364) is based on the complaint that "both fights and deaths are wont to result therefrom." Even more were the minds of the best clergy exercised by the corpse-wakes in churches, which "turned the house of mourning and prayer into a house of laughter and excess"; and again by "the execrable custom of keeping the 'Feast of Fools,' which obtains in some churches," and which "profanes the sacred anniversary of the Lord's Circ.u.mcision with the filth of l.u.s.tful pleasures"; yet here again the tenacity of popular custom baffled even the most vigorous prelates.[267]

We must not pa.s.s away from popular amus.e.m.e.nts without one glance at these above-mentioned scot-ales, which were probably relics of the Anglo-Saxon semi-religious drinking-bouts. In the later Middle Ages they appear as forerunners of the modern bazaar or religious tea; a highly successful device for raising money contributions by an appeal to the convivial instincts of a whole parish or district. In the early 13th century we find them denounced among the methods employed by sheriffs for illegal extortion; and about the same time they were very frequently condemned from the religious point of view. The clergy were not only forbidden to be present at such functions, but also directed to warn their parishioners diligently against them, "for the health of their souls and bodies," since all who took part at such feasts were excommunicated. But the custom died hard; or rather, it was probably rebaptized, like so many other relics of paganism; and the change seems to have taken place during Chaucer's lifetime. In 1364 Bishop Langham of Ely was still fulminating against scot-ales; in 1419, if not before, we find an authorized system of "church-ales" in aid of the fabric. These were held sometimes in the sacred edifice itself; more often in the Church Houses, the rapid multiplication of which during the 15th century is probably due to the equally rapid growth of church-ales. The puritanism of the 13th century was by this time somewhat out of fashion; parish finances had come far more under the parishioners' own control; and it was obviously convenient to make the best of these time-honoured compotations, as of the equally rough-and-ready hock-day customs, in order to meet expenses for which the parish was legally responsible. Earnest Churchmen had, all through this century, more important abuses to combat than these quasi-religious convivialities; and we find no voice raised against church-ales until the new puritanism of the Reformation. The Canons of 1603 forbade, among other abuses, "church ale drinkings ... in the church, chapel, or churchyard."

While Bishop Piers of Bath and Wells testified that he saw no harm in them, the puritan Stubbes accused the partic.i.p.ants of becoming "as drunk as rats, and as blockish as brute beasts." No doubt the truth lies between these extremes; but church-ales must not be altogether forgotten when we read the numerous medieval testimonies to the intimate connection between holy days and crime.[268]

Perhaps the most widespread and most natural of all country sports was that of poaching. As Dr. Rashdall has pointed out, it was especially popular at the two Universities, where the paucity of authorized amus.e.m.e.nts drove the students into wilder extremes. We have also abundant records of clerical poachers; and in 1389 Richard II. enacted at the pet.i.tion of the Commons "that no priest or clerk with less than ten pounds of yearly income should keep greyhounds, 'leetes' or other hunting dogs, nor ferrets, nets, or snares." The same pet.i.tion complained that "artificers and labourers--that is to say, butchers, cobblers, tailors, and other working-folk, keep greyhounds and other dogs; and at the time when good Christians are at church on holy-days, hearing their divine services, these go hunting in the parks, coney-covers, and warrens pertaining to lords and other folk, and destroy them utterly." It was therefore enacted that no man with an income of less than forty shillings should presume to keep hunting dogs or implements.

But in spite of squires and church synods, the working-man did all he could to escape, in his own untutored fashion, from the dullness of his working days. Every turn of life, from the cradle to the grave, was seized upon as an excuse for rough-and-ready sports. When a witness wishes to give a reason for remembering a christening on a certain day, he testifies to having broken his leg in the baptismal football match. Bishops struggled against the practice of celebrating marriages in taverns, lest the intending bride and bridegroom should plight their troth in liquor; and weddings in general were so uproarious as to be sometimes ruled out as too improper not only for a monk's attendance but even for that of serious and pious layfolk. Similar survivals of barbaric sports clung to the funeral ceremonies--the _wake-pleyes_ of Chaucer's Knight's Tale; and Archbishop Th.o.r.esby's const.i.tutions of 1367 seem to speak of wrestling matches held even in the church by the side of the dead man's bier. Such things could scarcely have happened without some clerical connivance; and in fact, the sporting parson was as common in Chaucer's as in Fielding's day. The hunting Monk of his "Prologue" is abundantly vouched for by the despairing complaints of ecclesiastical disciplinarians; and the parish parson, so often a peasant by birth, constantly set at naught the prohibitions of his superiors, to join with tenfold zest in the least decorous pastimes of his village flock. While archbishops in council legislated repeatedly and vainly against the hunting and tavern-haunting priest, swaggering about with a sword at his side or the least decent of lay doublets and hosen on his limbs, the homely Lollard satirist vented his scorn on this Parson Trulliber, who contrasted so startlingly with Chaucer's Parson Adams--

For the t.i.thing of a duck Or of an apple, or of an ey [egg They make man swear upon a book; Thus they foulen Christes fay. [faith Such bearen evilly heaven's key; They may a.s.soil, and they may shrive, With mennes wives strongly play, With true tillers sturt and strive [struggle

At the wrestling, and at the wake, And chiefe chanters at the ale; Market-beaters, and meddling-make, Hopping and hooting with heave and hale.

At faire fresh, and at wine stale; Dine, and drink, and make debate; The seven sacraments set a-sale; How keep such the keys of heaven gate?

("Political Poems" (R.S.), i., 330).

CHAPTER XXII

THE KING'S PEACE

"Accident plays a greater part in the fourteenth century than perhaps at any other epoch.... At bottom society was neither quite calm nor quite settled, and many of its members were still half savage."--JUSSERAND, "English Wayfaring Life."

The key to these contrasts, and much else that we are slow to imagine in medieval life, lies in the comparative simplicity of that earlier civilization. We must indeed beware of exaggerating this simplicity; there were already many complex threads of social development; again, the subtle tyranny of custom and opinion has in all primitive societies a power which we find it hard to realize. But certainly work and play were far less specialized in Chaucer's day than in ours; far less definitely sorted into different pigeon-holes of life. The drinking-bouts and rough games which scandalized the reformers of the 13th century had once been religious ceremonies themselves; and the two ideas were still confused in the popular mind. If, again, Justice was so anxious to forbid popular sports, this was partly because some of her own proceedings still smacked strongly of the primeval sporting instinct for which her growing dignity now began to blush. The scenic penances of the pillory and cucking-stool were among the most popular spectacles in every town; and a trial by battle "till the stars began to appear" must often have been a better show than a tournament, even without such further excitement as would be afforded by the match between a woman and a one-armed friar, or the searching of a bishop's champion for the contraband prayers and incantations sewn under his clothes, or the miracle by which a defeated combatant, who was supposed to have been blinded and emasculated in due course of justice, was found afterwards to be perfectly whole again by saintly intercession.

Still more exciting were the hue and cry after a felon, his escape to some sanctuary, and his final race for life or "abjuration of the realm." What vivid recollections there must have been in Chaucer's family, for instance, of his great-uncle's death under circ.u.mstances which are thus drily recorded by the coroner (November 12, 1336): "The Jurors say that Simon Chaucer and one Robert de Upton, skinner, ... after dinner, quarrelled with one another in the high street opposite to the shop of the said Robert, in the said parish, by reason of rancour previously had between them, whereupon Simon wounded Robert on the upper lip; which John de Upton, son of Robert, perceiving, he took up a 'dorbarre,' without the consent of his father, and struck Simon on the left hand and side, and on the head, and then fled into the church of St. Mary of Aldermari-chirche; and in the night following he secretly escaped from the same. He had no chattels. Simon lived, languishing, till the said Tuesday, when he died of the blows, early in the morning.... The Sheriffs are ordered to attach the said John when he can be found in their bailiwick, ..." There was an evident sporting element in this race for sanctuary, and the subsequent secret escape; and we cannot help feeling some sympathy with the son whose dorbarre had intervened so unwisely, yet so well. But this affair, except for its Chaucerian interest, is commonplace; to realize the true humours of criminal justice one needs to read through a few pages of the records published by the Surtees Society, Professors Maitland and Thorold Rogers, Dr. Gross, and Mr. Walter Rye. We may there find how Seman the hermit was robbed, beaten, and left for dead by Gilbert of Niddesdale; how Gilbert unluckily fell next day into the hands of the King's serjeant, and the hermit had still strength enough to behead his adversary in due form of law, the Northumberland custom being that a victim could redeem his stolen goods only by doing the executioner's dirty work; how, again, Thomas the Reeve wished to chastise his concubine with a cudgel, but casually struck and killed the child in her arms, and the jury brought it in a mere accident; how an unknown woman came and bewitched John of Kerneslaw in his own house one evening, so that the said John used to make the sign of the cross over his loins when any man said _Benedicite_; how in a fit of fury he thrust the witch through with a spear, and her corpse was solemnly burned, while he was held to have done the deed "in self-defence, as against the Devil;" or, again, how Hugh Maidenlove escaped from Norwich Castle with his fellow sheep-stealer William the Clerk, and carried him stealthily on his back to the sanctuary of St. John in Berstreet, by reason that the said William's feet were so putrefied by the duress of the prison that he could not walk.[269] Let us take in full, as throwing a more intimate light on law and police, another case with a different beginning and a different ending to Simon Chaucer's (November 6, 1311).

"It came to pa.s.s at Yelvertoft ... that a certain William of Wellington, parish chaplain of Yelvertoft, sent John his parish clerk to John Cobbler's house to buy candles, namely a pennyworth. But the same John would not send them without the money; wherefore the aforesaid William waxed wroth, took a stick, and went to the house of the said John and broke in the door upon him and smote this John on the fore part of the head with the same stick, so that his brains gushed forth and he died forthwith. And [William] fled hastily to the Church of Yelvertoft....

Inquest was made before J. of Buckingham by four neighbouring townships, to wit, Yelverton, Crick, Winwick and Lilbourne. They say on their oath as aforesaid, that they know no man guilty of John's death save the said William of Wellington. He therefore came before the aforesaid coroner and confessed that he had slain the said John; wherefore he abjured the realm of England in the presence of the said four townships brought together [for this purpose]. And the port of Dover was a.s.signed to him."[270]

This "abjuration of the realm," a custom of English growth, which our kings transplanted also into Normandy, was one of the most picturesque scenes of medieval life. It was designed to obviate some of the abuses of that privilege of sanctuary which had no doubt its real uses in those days of club-law. What happened in fact to William of Wellington, we may gather not only from legal theorists of the Middle Ages, but from the number of actual cases collected by Reville.[271] The criminal remained at bay in the church; and no man might as yet hinder John his clerk from bringing him food, drink, or any other necessary. The coroner came as soon as he could, generally within three or four days at longest; but he might possibly be detained for ten days or more, and meanwhile (to quote from an actual case in 1348) "the parish kept watch over him ... and the coroner found the aforesaid William in the said church, and asked him wherefore he was there, and whether or not he would yield himself to the King's peace."

The matter was too plain for William to deny; his confession was duly registered, and he took his oath to quit the realm within forty days.[272]

Coming to the gate of the church or churchyard, he swore solemnly before the a.s.sembled crowd: "Oyez, oyez, oyez! Coroner and other good folk: I, William de Wellington, for the crime of manslaughter which I have committed, will quit this land of England nevermore to return, except by leave of the kings of England or their heirs: so help me G.o.d and His saints!" The coroner then a.s.signed him a port, and a reasonable time for the journey; from Yelverton it would have been about a week. His bearing during this week was minutely prescribed: never to stray from the high-road, or spend two nights in the same place; to make straight for his port, and to embark without delay. If at Dover he found no vessel ready to sail, then he was bound daily to walk into the sea up to his knees--or, according to stricter authorities, up to his neck--and to take his rest only on the sh.o.r.e, in proof that he was ready in spirit to leave the land which by his crimes he had forfeited. His dress meanwhile was that of a felon condemned to death--a long, loose white tunic, bare feet, and a wooden cross in his hand to mark that he was under protection of Holy Church.

Such abjurations were matters of common occurrence; yet Dover beach was not crowded with these unwilling pilgrims. A few, of course, were overtaken and slain on the way, in spite of their sacred character, by the friends of the murdered man. But many more must have reflected that, since they would find neither friends nor welcome abroad, there was less risk in taking their chance as runaways at home. If caught, they were liable to be strung up out of hand; but how many chances there must have been in the fugitive's favour! and, even in the last resort, some plausible excuse might possibly soften the captors' hearts. One criminal, who might possibly even have rubbed shoulders with Chaucer in London, pleaded that he had taken sanctuary and been torn from the altar. This was disproved, and he took refuge in a convenient dumbness. For such afflictions the Middle Ages knew a sovereign remedy, and he was led forthwith to the gallows. Here he found his tongue again, and pleaded clergy; but he failed to read his neck-verse, and was hanged. Often the miserable homesick wanderers came back and tried to save their lives by turning approvers against fellow-criminals. In 1330 Parliament had to interfere, and ruled that John English [_Lengleyse_], who three years before had slain the Mayor of Lynn, taken sanctuary, and abjured the realm, could not now be suffered to purchase his own pardon by accusing others.

What happened, it may be asked, if William refused either to acknowledge his guilt or to stand his trial, and simply clung to the sanctuary? At least half the criminals thus refused; and here even theory was uncertain.

If, at the end of his forty days of grace, the lay authorities tore him from the altar, then they were pretty sure of excommunication from the bishop. The lawyers held, therefore, that it was for the Ordinary, the Archdeacon, the Parson, to expel this man who had outstayed even the ecclesiastical welcome; but we all know the risk of dragging even a good-tempered dog from under a chair where he has taken refuge; and how could the poor bishop be expected to deal with this desperado? The matter was thus, like so many others, left very much to chance. The village did its best to starve the man out, and meanwhile to watch him night and day.

One offending William, whose forty days had expired on August 12, 1374, held out against this blockade until September 9, when he fled. Then there was a hue and cry of the whole village; he might indeed run the gauntlet and make good his escape, leaving his quondam neighbours to prove before the justices that they had done all they could, or to pay a fine for their negligence. Often, however, a stick or stone would bring him down at close quarters, or an arrow from afar; then in a moment he was overpowered and beheaded, and that chase was remembered for years as the greatest event in Yelvertoft.

There was indeed one gross irregularity in the case of Sir William de Wellington, but an irregularity which modern readers will readily pardon.

Becket had given his life for the freedom of the Church as he conceived it, and especially for the principle that no cleric should be punished by the lay courts for any offence, however heinous. The death of "the holy blissful martyr" did indeed establish this principle in theory; and, with the most powerful corporation in the world to protect it, it was, in fact, kept far more strictly than most legal theories. William, therefore, after dashing John the Cobbler's brains upon the floor, might well have found it necessary to take refuge in the church from the blind fury of summary and illegal vengeance; but he need not have abjured the realm. In theory he had simply to confess his offence, or to stand his trial and suffer conviction from the King's judges; then the bishop's commissary stepped forward and claimed the condemned clerk in the name of the Church. The bishop, disregarding the verdict of the jury, would try him again by the primitive process of compurgation; that is, would bid him present himself with a specified number of fellow-clergy or persons of repute, who would join William in swearing on the Bible to his innocence. In this particular case William would probably have failed to find proper compurgators, and the bishop might, if he had chosen, have imprisoned him for life. But this involved very considerable expense and responsibility; it was a more invidious and costly matter than to prosecute nowadays for alleged illegal practices, and the doc.u.ments show us very clearly that only the smallest fraction of these criminous clerks were imprisoned for any length of time.

Indeed, for any such strict system, the episcopal prisons would have needed to be ten times their actual size. Equally seldom do we find notices of the next drastic punishment in the bishop's power--the total degradation of the offender from his Orders, after which the lay judges might punish him unchallenged for his second crime. Many of the guilty parties did, in fact, "purge" themselves successfully, and were thus let loose on society as before; this we have on the unimpeachable testimony of the Oxford Chancellor Gascoigne, even if it were not sufficiently evident from the records themselves. The notoriously guilty received more or less inadequate punishments, and were sometimes simply shunted on to another diocese, a shifting of responsibility which was practised even by the strictest of reforming prelates. The curious reader may trace for himself, in the English summaries from Bishop Giffard's register, the practical working of these clerical privileges.[273] First, there are frequent records of criminous clerks handed over to the bishop, in the ordinary routine, by the lay justices. Sometimes the bishop had to interfere in a more summary fashion, as when he commissioned four rural deans "to cause Robert, rector of the Church of the Blessed Mary in the market of Bristol, to be released, he being suspected of homicide having fled to the church, and having been besieged here; and to excommunicate all who should oppose them" (49). Robert had not yet gone through any formal trial; the bishop apparently rescued him merely from the fury of the people; but, even if he had been tried and condemned by the King's courts, he had still a liberal chance of escape. A few pages further in the register (79) we find a declaration "that whereas William de Capella, an acolyte, was accused and condemned for the death of John Gogun of Persh.o.r.e, before the justices itinerant at Worcester, and was on demand of the bishop's commissary delivered up by the same justices, the same William being afterwards examined before the sub-prior of Worcester and Geoffrey de Cubberlay, clerk, solemnly declared that he was in nowise guilty; and at length upon proclamations, no one opposing, with four priests, two sub-deacons, and six acolytes, his compurgators, he was admitted to purgation and declared innocent of the said crime; and after giving security to answer any accusers if required, he was permitted to depart freely. And it is forbidden under pain of anathema to any one to lay such homicide to the charge of the said William." Sometimes, however, the scandal was too notorious; and, though no mere layman had the least legal right to interfere with the bishop's own private justice, the King would apply pressure in the name of common sense. So on page 408 we find a "letter from King Edward I. to John Peckham, Archbishop of Canterbury, desiring him to refuse purgation to Robert de Lawarre, a clerk accused of theft and homicide and in the gaol of Worcester;" and a few months later the same strenuous champion of justice sent a more general warning to the Bishop of Worcester, "forbidding him to take the purgation of clerks detained in his prison, whose crimes are notorious; but with regard to others he may take such purgation" (410). The system was, indeed, notoriously faulty, and did much to encourage that venality in the clerical courts which moved Chaucer's laughter and the indignation of his contemporaries. The clergy, says Gower, are judges in their own cause, and each shields the other: "My turn to-day; to-morrow thou shalt do the like for me." In vain did councils decree year after year that they should bear no arms; rectors (as we have seen in Chapter VIII.) imperturbably bequeathed their formidable daggers by will, and duly registered the bequest in the Bishop's court. "O Priest, answer to my call; wherefore hast thou so long a knife dangling at thy belt? art thou armed to fight in G.o.d's quarrel or the devil's?... The wild beast in rutting-season becomes fiercer and more wanton; if ever he be thwarted, forthwith he will fight and strike; and that is the same cause why the priests fight when they turn to lechery like beasts; they wander idly everywhere seeking and hunting for women, with whom they corrupt the country."[274] A century later the Commons pressed the King for fresh and more stringent laws to remedy the notorious fact that "upon trust of the privilege of the Church, divers persons have been the more bold to commit murder, rape, robbery, theft, and other mischievous deeds, because they have been continually admitted to the benefit of the clergy as often as they did offend in any of the [aforesaid]."

This pet.i.tion of the Commons and the Act which resulted from it, had already often been antic.i.p.ated by the rough-and-ready justice of the people themselves. In 1382, the citizens of London took these matters into their own hands, and Chaucer had probably seen more than one unchaste priest marched with his guilty partner to the common lock-up in Cornhill, to the accompaniment of derisive music, and amid the jeers of the populace. Eight years after his death, the city authorities began to keep a regular record of such cases, and "Letter-Book," I, "contains some dozens of similar charges, mostly against chaplains celebrating in the city, temp. Henry IV. to Henry VI."[275] This lynch-law is abundantly explained by the very disproportionate numbers of criminous clerks whom we often find recorded in coroners' or a.s.size rolls, and who were frequently no mere shavelings, but priests and substantial inc.u.mbents.[276] In 1200 these men were almost above the law; in 1600 they were amenable to justice as though they had not been anointed with oil; in 1400 it depended (as in London and in this Yelvertoft case) whether the popular indignation was strong enough to beat down the clerical privilege.

"Accident plays a more important part in the 14th century than in any other age," and in many ways England was no doubt the merrier for this.

Prosaic and uniform modern Justice, bewigged as well as blindfolded, could no more have been foreseen by Chaucer than railways or life insurance. First of all, there was the chance of bribing the judge in the regular and acknowledged way of business.[277] Then, the prospect of a Royal pardon; Edward III. more than once proclaimed such a general amnesty; and a pet.i.tion of the Commons in 1389, forthwith embodied in an Act of Parliament, is eloquent on the "outrageous mischiefs and damages which have befallen the Realm because treasons, murders, and rapes of women are too commonly perpetrated; and all the more so because charters of pardon have been too lightly granted in such cases." The terms of the pet.i.tion and bill, and the heroic measures of remedy, are sufficiently significant of the state of things with which the reformers had to contend.[278]

Moreover, justice offered at every point a series of splendid uncertainties, and a thousand giddy turns of fortune's wheel. Apart from the practical impunity of the powerful, even the poorest felon had more chances in his favour than the modern plutocrat; for there is no higher prize than a man's own life, and no American millionaire enjoys facilities for homicide equal to those of our 14th-century villagers. Such regrettable incidents, as reckoned from the coroners' rolls, were from five to forty times more frequent then than in our days--it depends whether we count them as mere manslaughters or, according to the stricter idea of modern justice, as downright murders. No doubt stabbing was never so frequent or so systematic in England as at Naples; but thousands of worthy Englishmen might have cried with Chaucer's Host, "for I am perilous with knife in hand!" Many readers have doubtless noted how, in this very pa.s.sage, Harry Bailey reckons as probable punishment for homicide not the gallows, but only outlawry--

I wot well she will do me slay some day Some neighebour, and thenne go my way....

The fact is that judicial statistics of the Middle Ages show the murderer to have had many more chances of survival than a convicted thief. The Northumberland Roll of 1279 (to choose a typical instance) gives 72 homicides to only 43 accidental deaths. These 72 deaths were brought home to 83 culprits, of whom only 3 are recorded to have been hanged. Of the remainder, 69 escaped altogether, 6 took sanctuary, 2 were never identified, 1 pleaded his clergy, 1 was imprisoned, and 1 was fined. To a mind of any imagination, such bare facts will often open wider vistas than a great deal of so-called poetry. There can be no truer commentary on the "Tale of Gamelyn" or the "Geste of Robin Hood" than these formal a.s.size rolls. The justice's clerk drones on, with d.a.m.nable iteration, paragraph after paragraph, "Alan Fuller ... and he fled, and therefore let him be outlawed; chattels he hath none"; "Patrick Scot ... fled ... outlawed"; "William Slater ... fled ... outlawed"; but all the while we see the broad sunshine outside the windows, and hear the rustle of the forest leaves, and voices whisper in our ear--

He must needes walk in wood that may not walk in town.

In summer, when the shaws be sheen, And leaves be large and long, It is full merry in fair forest To hear the fowles' song.

CHAPTER XXIII

PRIESTS AND PEOPLE

"Charity is a childlike thing, as Holy Church witnesseth; As proud of a penny as of a pound of gold, And all so glad of a gown of grey russet As of a coat of damask or of clean scarlet.

He is glad with all glad, as girls that laughen all, And sorry when he seeth men sorry; as thou seest children ...

Laugh when men laughen, and lower where men low'ren....

And in a friar's frock he was found once, But that is far and many years, in Francis' time; In that suit since too seldom hath he been found."

"Piers Plowman," B., xvii., 296, 352

When the greatest Pope of the 13th century saw in his dream a vision of St. Francis propping the tottering church, both he and the saint augured from this happy omen a reformation more sudden and complete than was actually possible. Church historians of all schools have often seemed to imply that if St. Francis had come back to earth on the first or second centenary of his death, he would have found the Church rather worse than better; and certainly Chaucer's contemporaries thought so. It is probable that in this they were mistaken; that the higher life was in fact unfolding no less surely in religion than in the State, but that men's impatience of evils which were only too obvious, and a restlessness bred by the rapid growth of new ideas, tempted them to despair too easily of their own age. The failure of the friars became a theme of common talk, as soon as enough time had gone by for the world to realize that Francis and Dominic had but done what man can do, and that there was as yet no visibly new heaven or new earth. Wycliffe himself scarcely inveighed more strongly against many of the worst abuses in the Church than Bonaventura a century before him--Bonaventura, the canonized saint and Minister General of the Franciscans, who as a boy had actually seen the Founder face to face. The current of thought during those hundred years is typified by Dante and the author of "Piers Plowman." Dante, bitterly as he rebuked the corruptions of the age, still dreamed of reform on conservative lines. In "Piers Plowman" it is frankly recognized that things must be still worse before they can be better. The Church is there described as already succ.u.mbing to the a.s.saults of Antichrist, aided by "proud priests more than a thousand"--

'By Mary!' quoth a cursed priest of the March of Ireland, 'I count no more conscience, if only I catch silver, Than I do to drink a draught of good ale!'

And so said sixty of the same country, And shotten again with shot, many a sheaf of oaths, And broad hooked arrows, '_G.o.d's heart!_' and '_G.o.d's nails!_'

And had almost Unity and Holy Church adown.

Conscience cried 'Help, clergy,[279] or else I fall Through imperfect priests and prelates of Holy Church.'

Friars heard him cry, and camen him to help; But, for they knew not their craft, Conscience forsook them.

One friar, however, is admitted, Brother "Creep-into-Houses," but he turns out the worst traitor of all, benumbing Contrition by his false absolutions--

Sloth saw that, and so did Pride, And came with a keen will Conscience to a.s.sail.

Conscience cried oft, and bade Clergy help him, And also Contrition, for to keep the gate.

'He lieth and dreameth,' said Peace, 'and so do many other; The friar with his physic this folk hath enchanted, And plastered them so easily, they dread no sin.'

'By Christ!' quoth Conscience then, 'I will become a pilgrim, And walken as wide as all the world lasteth To seek Piers the Plowman;[280] that Pride may be destroyed, And that friars have a finding,[281] that for need flatteren, And counterplead me, Conscience. Now, Kind me avenge And send me hap and heal, till I have Piers the Plowman.'