Selections from Erasmus: Principally from his Epistles Part 19

XXIX

[This extract from a letter written to Fisher in 1524 contributes something to the description of English houses given in XXVIII. Erasmus had sent one of his servants to England, earlier in the summer, with letters announcing that he was composing a book against Luther--as his friends had frequently urged him to do.]

6. MARE] Erasmus had visited Fisher at Rochester in 1516 and clearly had vivid recollections of the mud-flats of the Medway.

9. PARIETIBUS VITREIS] i.e. with continuous windows, as in the stern galleries of old sailing ships.

ADDITIONAL NOTES.

P. 23. IV. 13. EST PRAETEREA MOS] The reality of this practice in England may be ill.u.s.trated from Erasmus' _Christiani matrimonii Inst.i.tutio_, 1526, where he describes unseemly wedding festivities. 'Mox a prandio lascivae saltationes usque ad cenam, in quibus tenera puella non potest cuiquam recusare, sed patet domus civitati. Cogitur ibi misera virgo c.u.m ebriis, c.u.m scelerosis ... iungere dextram, apud Britannos etiam oscula'.

The Lady of Crequi, between Amiens and Montdidier, welcoming Wolsey's gentleman, George Cavendish, in July 1527, said: 'Forasmuch as ye be an Englishman, whose custom is in your country to kiss all ladies and gentlewomen without offence, and although it be not so here in this realm, yet will I be so bold to kiss you, and so shall all my maidens'.

So, too, Cavendish writes of Wolsey's meeting with the Countess of Shrewsbury at Sheffield Park, after his fall: 'Whom my lord kissed bareheaded, and all her gentlewomen.'

P. 85, XXII. 48, A CENIS] Cf. XXIII. 34-5, XXIV. 342. It was a recognized form of abstinence, to take no food after the midday _prandium_. In the colloquy _Ichthyophagia_, first printed in Feb. 1526, Erasmus states that in England supper was prohibited by custom on alternate days in Lent and on Fridays throughout the year (cf. IX. 96). Of the Emperor Ferdinand, when he visited Nuremberg in 1540, an observer wrote, 'Sobrius rex cena abstinuit'; and Busbecq records that it was his master's practice to work in the afternoon, 'donec cenae tempus sit--cenae, dico, non suae sed consiliariorum; nam ipse perpetuo cena abstinet, neque amplius quam semel die cib.u.m sumit, et quidem parce'.