Elizabethan England Part 17

[49] Harrison wasn't the only man who felt thus. See Arthur Standish's two tracts: "The Commons Complaint. Wherein is contained two speciall Grievances: The first, the generall destruction and waste of Woods in this Kingdome.... The Second Grievance is, The extreame dearth of Victvals.

Fovre Remedies for the same, etc. London Printed by William Stansby, 1611." 4{o}. F 2 in fours. "New Directions of Experience to the Commons Complaint by the incouragement of the Kings most excellent Maiesty, as may appeare, for the planting of Timber and Fire-wood. With a neere Estimation what Millions of Acres the Kingdome doth containe, what Acres is waste ground, whereon little profit for this purpose will arise.... Inuentid by Arthur Standish. Anno Domini. MDCXIII. 4{o}. A--D in fours; E, 4 leaves, and a leaf of F."--_Hazlitt's Collections and Notes_, p. 401-2. Also Ma.s.singer's _Guardian_, II. iv--F.

[50] "If woods go so fast ... I have knowne a well burnished gentleman that hath borne threescore at once [weren't they trees?] in one paire of galigascons, to shew his strength and brauerie." Brick-burning also consumd much wood: compare Harrison, bk. 3, chap. 9, p. 234, col. 2, l.

46, ed. 1587:--"such is the curiositie of our countrimen, that notwithstanding almightie G.o.d hath so blessed our realme in most plentifull maner, with such and so manie quarries apt and meet for piles of longest continuance, yet we, as lothsome of this abundance, or not liking of the plentie, doo commonlie leaue these naturall gifts to mould and cinder in the ground, and take vp an artificiall bricke, _in burning whereof a great part of the wood of this land dailie consumed and spent_, to the no small decaie of that commoditie, and hinderance of the poore that perish off for cold." See, too, chap. 10, p. 236, col. 2, l. 44, "Of colemines we have such plentie in the north and westerne parts of our Iland, as may suffice for all the realme of England: and so must they doo hereafter in deed, if wood be not better cherrished than it is at this present."

[51] Of the 1876 reprint.--W.

[52] See Dr. Furnivall's "Forewords."--W.

[53] This apology for "faults escaped herein" was of course omitted in 1587.--W.

[54] See "The English Courtier" ... and "The Court and Country." Both reprinted in Mr. W. C. Hazlitt's "Roxburghe Library."--F.

[55] Here follow etymologies of the terms "Duke," "Marquess," and "Baron."--W.

[56] 1 Sam. ii. 15; 1 Kings i. 7.--H.

[57] Here follows a long paragraph on the character of the clergy which is more appropriate to the chapter on "The Church."--W.

[58] Every peer ceases to be a legislator the moment the Crown considers the advice and aid of such peer unnecessary. The historic meeting between Elizabeth Woodville and Edward Plantagenet (which incidentally has made the lady ancestress to nearly every royal house in Europe), when she declared herself

"too mean to be your queen, And yet too good to be your concubine,"

was occasioned by the mean estate left by her late husband, Sir John Grey, to his orphan children. Sir John was by right Lord Grey of Groby, but never sat at Westminster as such, being killed at Saint Albans. His children would have had small chance of writs of summons had not their beautiful mother ensnared the monarch who (much to his crook-backed brother's disgust, at least in the play) would "use women honourably." The heir of the Birminghams was not only evicted from the House of Peers, but from Dudley Castle, because he was poor. The heir of the Staffords had the old barony taken from him by Charles I. (simply because he, Roger Stafford, was poor), and saw it given to a court favourite, one of the honour-hooking Howards.--W.

[59] Here follows a learned disquisition upon "Valvasors."--W.

[60] Here follows a discourse upon _Equites Aurati_.--W.

[61] Here is a description of dubbing a knight.--W.

[62] Long details are given of Garter history, very inaccurate, both here and in the last omitted pa.s.sage.--W.

[63] Derivations of "Esquire" and "Gentleman" are given.--W.

[64] The proper spelling of what is now called _kersey_. It is really "causeway cloth," and causeway is still p.r.o.nounced (as it should be) _ka.r.s.ey_ by the homely people who are not tied to the tail of the dogmatic dictionary man, whose unnecessary ingenuity (in place of a small knowledge of "country matters") has in this case set up a phantom phalanx of busy looms in the harmless little village of Kersey in Suffolk. The Scotch have the full phrase still. The French _causie_ is nearer to carsie than to book-made _causeway_.--W.

[65] This etymology of a much-disputed word is doubtless accurate. Thus Piers Plowman's

"Thoruh ziftes haven _zemen_ to rennen and to ride."

The peculiar "z" stood the Saxon "ge." In fact Geo, old Mother Earth, stares us in the face. A yeoman is an "earth-man." We may literally say our modern English sabremen of the shires, at a periodical muster on caracoling steeds, are "racy of the soil."--W.

[66] Harrison was quick to catch a true idea of the authors he delights in, and his weakness for displaying his fund of cla.s.sical lore is therefore generally a pleasure instead of a bore. The phrase from the distinguished Roman youth, Aulus Persius Flaccus, occurs in the Prologue to his poems:

"Heliconidas pallidamque Pirenen Illis remitto quorum imagines lambunt Hederae sequaces: ipse _semipaga.n.u.s_ Ad sacra vatum carmen adfero nostrum;"

which may be thus Englished:

"Those Helicon-births and pallor-breeding Pirenes Must remit I to them o'er whose countenance traileth The ivy up-clinging: myself, _half-breed of the soil_, To the shrine of our prophets my song I deliver."

Almost every annotator of Persius has handled this pa.s.sage as though the poet simply prosaically alluded to his being half of _rustic_ birth. As a fact, he was of the bluest blood of the Augustine age. Harrison makes a happy hit in understanding the pa.s.sage as alluding to a semi-connection with the territory of the Muses, as I have treated it.--W.

[67] Capite censi, or Proletarii.--H.

[68] The Ceylonese. The Greek name for the island of Ceylon was Taprobane, which Harrison used merely as a cla.s.sical scholar.--W.

[69] The wise and learned Secretary of State in the dangerous days of Edward VI., who under Elizabeth had the task of furnishing Burleigh with brains (thus heaping "coals of fire" on the man who had stolen his place when Reform was triumphant and danger past), was himself born within a gunshot of Harrison's Radwinter rectory, at Saffron Walden. Though Sir Thomas Smith's own seat was a dozen miles to the south, at Theydon, Harrison was evidently very intimate with the Secretary. Some of the foregoing chapter (and much more which has been omitted) are literal transcripts from Smith's _De Republica Anglorum_. This work was still in ma.n.u.script in 1577 (the year of the first "Holinshed"), and late in the summer of that year Sir Thomas himself committed suicide. In 1583, before the second "Holinshed," the first edition of _De Republica_ was issued, probably edited by our Harrison. The very t.i.tle breathed the spirit of Elizabethan politics. Secretaries of State do not now talk about the "English Republic." The Hampdens were closely connected with Sir Thomas Smith, and _De Republica_ was a text-book of John Hampden. In 1589 the t.i.tle for Smith's work was first Englished (without doubt Harrison's own handiwork), and that t.i.tle has been made immortal in English history by Hampden's disciples: THE COMMONWEALTH OF ENGLAND.--W.

[70] If Harrison means to give us the impression that a city has any direct connection with episcopal affairs, he is quite in error. Cities are distinctly royal and imperial inst.i.tutions. The accident of the number of cities and sees being the same comes from the natural tendency of the two inst.i.tutions to drift together, though of distinct origin.--W.

[71] Here follows a long and learned disquisition upon the Roman and other early towns, especially about St. Albans, a portion of which will be found in the Appendix.--W.

[72] The regalia which denoted sovereign right within the city limits, even to excluding kings at the head of their armies as the "scroyles of Angiers" do in _King John_, much to the b.a.s.t.a.r.d's disgust.--W.

[73] The cutters have not been heard from for the three centuries intervening. These would have been the most valuable set of Elizabethan maps ever known had they been executed as Harrison expected.--W.

[74] Here follows an allusion to the decay of Eastern cities.--W.

[75] See on this my _Ballads from MSS._, i.; Mr. Cowper's edition of _Life in Tudor England_; _Four Supplications_; and Crowley's _Select Works_ for the Early English Text Society; More's _Utopia_, etc.--F.

[76] The old and proper form of the modern pumpkin.--W.

[77] The historic seat of the De Veres is thus a by-word even before the line had risen to its most glorious achievements and gone out in a blaze of military honour.--W.

[78] Harrison must have been given access to Leland's ma.n.u.scripts, as the "Commentarii" were not published until 1709, or one hundred and fifty-seven years after the author died in the madhouse.--W.

[79] The first is a variant on a Keltic, the second on a Saxon, word, both relating to matters sufficiently indicated in the text.--W.

[80] Harrison may refer to Camden, then a young man starting out on the life-mission which has made him immortal. The chief works of Abraham Ortelius were not as yet published, 1577; but Harrison seems to have had early information on various forthcoming publications.--W.

[81] This chapter (misnumbered 19) does not appear anywhere in the edition of 1577.--F.

[82] In a chapter on "Vineyards," for an extract from which see Appendix.--W.

[83] No vegetables are mentioned by John Russell in his different bills of fare for dinners in his "Boke of Nurture," ab. 1440 A.D., _Babees Book_, pp. 164-175.--F.

[84] _Skirret_ is in my book, p. 214, 1. I, _Sium Sisarum_, an umbelliferous plant with a small root like a little carrot, no longer cultivated in England, or very rarely.--R. C. A. PRIOR.

[85] _Navew_, Bra.s.sica Napus, is probably only a variety of the turnip, from which it differs in the smaller and less...o...b..cular root, and the leaves being glabrous and not rough. It is that which is cultivated for making Colza oil, and for sheep-feed. The differences between _Bra.s.sica Napus_, _B. campestris_, and _B. Rapa_ (the turnip) are really very slight, as you will see in any botanical work on British plants.--R. C. A.

PRIOR.

[86] See John Russell's list of those for the bath of Humfrey, Duke of Gloucester, in _The Babees Book_, pp. 183-185.--F.

[87] Harrison makes a distinction between "dunghill" and "laistowe" (or laystowe, laystall, etc.), again upsetting the theories of the dictionary men.--W.

[88] This was about the epoch when Captain Price, the "salt sea dog," was smoking the first pipe ever seen on London streets. Harrison seems to know of tobacco only as a medicine.--W.