In twelve ‘mery gestys' this
ingenious
personage imposes on all
i See vol.
i See vol.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v03
Ibid.
pp.
x ff.
, lxxi ff.
## p. 79 (#101) #############################################
Characteristics of Skelton
79
To wryte or to indyte,
Eyther for delyte
Or elles for despyte;
Or bokes to compyle
Of dyvers maner style,
Vyce to revyle
And synne to exyle;
To teche or to preche,
Aş reason wyll reche?
Lack of constructive power often spoils the impression of
Skelton's poems; but this deficiency is made up for in many cases
by an immense vivacity and by the originality of the ideas. His
satires against the clergy in general, and, particularly, those
against Wolsey, are remarkable for their boldness. Of all the poetical
successors of Chaucer in England Skelton is by far the most original.
a
Compared with The Ship of Fools, most of the other contribu-
tions of German to English literature in the beginning of the
sixteenth century seem insignificant'. That German influence
should be felt in England at the time was only natural. In
Germany, the reformation had its chief seat, many publications of
a reformatory character were printed there or in Holland, and it
became a second home to many refugees, who became acquainted
with German literature and adopted what they found useful
for their purpose. But, as most of these men were not great
writers, and, as Germany was very soon left behind by Elizabethan
England, this influence, in most cases, was not lasting.
Of German popular poetry, next to nothing became known in
England, and it is not before 1593 that we find the titles of a few
stray German ballads mentioned in the Stationers' Register. Miles
Coverdale tried to introduce the protestant hymn into England
about 1540. His Goosily Psalmes and Spiritual Songes are a fair
selection of the first period of protestant hymnology (1527—31),
and might have been effective under more favourable conditions.
But the translation was too poor; moreover, Italian influence was
so strong just at that time that the attempt proved a failure.
From Germany, the English reformers learned how to use the
dialogue as a weapon in the religious struggle. A great many
polemical dialogues were written in Germany by advocates of
either side, with a decided balance in favour of the protestant,
in number as well as in literary value. The most distinguished
1 Fuller information concerning the subjects treated in the remaining paragraphs
of this chapter will be found in Herford's Studies, and Brie's Eulenspiegel in England.
See also the chapter that follows this.
## p. 80 (#102) #############################################
80
Early German Influences
6
>
9
>
names in the beginning of the movement were those of Erasmus
and Hutten, who were followed by a host of more or less capable
men. The strain of these discussions' varies very much, accord-
ing to the individuality of the authors. Learned and popular
elements were blended in various ways; and sometimes we have
miniature dramas, especially when the writers, to illustrate their
point, used the background of contemporary life.
In England, the number of controversial dialogues is com-
paratively small; and there is no such continuous tradition as in
Germany. One of the first is Rede me and be not wrothe, com-
posed by two converted Greenwich friars, William Roy and Jerome
Barlow, in Strassburg, in 1528. The framework is suggested by
Niclas Manuel's famous Krankheit der Messe-, of which the dialogue
is simply a continuation; the contents are English- a violent
attack on the English clergy and its highest representative,
cardinal Wolsey. Numerous striking parallels to Skelton's satires
occur; but the tone of the whole is emphatically protestant.
Compared with Manuel's spirited production, the English imitation
seems dull, and it is far too long to be impressive. Wolsey's
agents bought up all copies obtainable almost instantly, and, in
1531, it was proscribed and soon forgotten. According to Tindale,
Roy had translated another reformatory work, Dialogus inter
patrem christianum et filium contumacem; but the translation,
as well as the original, are lost. Barlow recanted in 1533 and
wrote, probably very soon after, a somewhat feeble Dialogue upon
the origin of the protestant fashions. Purely English in spirit is
the Proper Dyalogue betwene a Gentillman and a Husbandman,
complaining of the oppression of the lay people by the clergy after
a fashion which would have been impossible in Germany.
The Catholic side is represented at that time by no writer of
distinction. Skelton, who, apparently, had written the interlude,
Negromansir, alluded to above, in the favourite form of a trial,
was dead, and More's somewhat lifeless dialogue against Tindale's
book on the mass is of an entirely different type.
Under Edward VI, protestant dialogue flourished with the
official sanction of the government, dealing particularly with the
mass, which was ridiculed under various names as 'Round Robin,'
Jack in the Box,'Jack of Lent' and so on. Among the transla-
tions of German dialogues we find Hans Sachs's Goodly disputa-
cion between a christian shoemaker and a Popysshe Parson,
printed by one Anthony Skoloker, in 1547. In 1548, Day
i See post, p. 86.
(
## p. 81 (#103) #############################################
81
3
English Protestant Dialogues
printed John Bon and Mast Parson, a disputation on Corpus
Christi by L Shepherd. Robin Conscience is a good English
example of the well known “son against father' type, showing
strong influence of the morality play. The excellent transla-
tions of two of Erasmus's dialogues, published about 1550, are
absolutely un-English,
The more elaborate form of the trial, used largely in Germany
already in the Fastnachtsspiele, was adopted in England par-
ticularly by William Turner, a Northumbrian man of science and
theologian and a disciple of Latimer, who travelled in Germany
between 1530 and 1540. His Hunting of the Fox (Basel, 1573),
answered by Gardiner's Contra Turneri vulpem, was followed by
the much better Hunting of the Wolf and, in 1547, by the
Examination of the Mass. Still more elaborate than this
specimen of the drama of debate' is the Endightment against
Mother Messe. The last dialogue of Edward's reign, a dialogus
duarum sororum, mentioned by Bale, is a translation of one
of Wolfgang Resch's dialogues, by Walter Lynne, of very little
literary value. Under Mary, only very few protestant dialogues
were written ; under Elizabeth, German influence was dead, and
the form was applied to all sorts of secular subjects. Six dialogues
by Wingfield, printed 1566, Contra Expugnatores Missae, taking
the Catholic side, are rather weak and tame'.
Towards the end of the century, translations of sensational
German news sheets occur sporadically in the Stationers' register.
These details of strange occurrences, explained by protestant
pessimists as signs of doom, became extremely popular in England,
as is seen, for instance, in Ben Jonson's The Staple of News. A
ballad of bishop Hatto was entered in the Stationers' register in
1586, and the story of the greedy ecclesiastic occurs again in The
Costlie Whore, while The Piper of Hamelin is mentioned in
Verstegen’s Restitution of Decayed Intelligence in 1605. Of the
numerous German collections of amusing stories, compiled by
learned and unlearned authors in the sixteenth century, sometimes
without method, sometimes attached to certain personalities, and
illustrating with coarse humour the low life of the time without
much pretension to literary distinction, only a very few became
known in England. Strange to say, of the most interesting figure
of all, Markolf, we have only a few traces? The Pfaffe Amis, in
1 German influence is also to be seen in the English draina at the time of the
reformation; but of this some acoount is given in a later volume of this History.
* Cf. Herford, pp. 267 ff. ; Brie, Eulenspiegel, p. 72.
CII. IV.
6
E. L. III.
## p. 82 (#104) #############################################
82
Early German Influences
spite of his being called a native of England, seems quite unknown.
In The Parson of Kalenborowe (Der Pfarrer von Kalenberg),
c. 1510 (? ), we have a very free prose version of a South German
original, but taken, probably, from a more copious Dutch prose
narrative. Of Howleglass, something is said in the chapter
which follows this. Copland's versions of the feats of Eulen-
spiegel, the best known representative of German low life of
the time, printed between 1559 and 1563, were thought the
oldest ones, until, a few years ago, there was found a short
fragment of a much older one, printed by John of Doesborch
1516–20. It is a very clumsy translation, full of misunder-
standings, taken not from one of the High German versions but
from a lost Low German original".
Exposing the coarseness of his time, Brant, in Das Narren-
schiff, created a new saint, Grobianus, who soon became the typical
representative of rude and indecent behaviour, particularly at
table. He must have been a very popular figure when, in 1549, a
young student of Wittenberg, F. Dedekind, wrote his Latin
Grobianus, which was translated (1551) by Caspar Scheidt into
German with considerable additions. A new version by Dedekind,
Grobianus et Grobiana, in which the hero has a female companion,
followed in 1552. The book enjoyed a vast popularity, not only
in Germany, but also in France and England. In 1605, Grobianus
was translated into English as The Schoole of Slovenrie. Traces
of grobianism can be found in Dekker’s Gul's Hornbooke
(1609). The figure of Grobianus appears utterly transformed in
the interlude Grobiana's Nuptials, where it has become the
type of the Oxford man of Jacobean time with his affectation of
simplicity. Dedekind's book was appreciated in England even
so late as the eighteenth century, and it was certainly not by
chance that a new translation of it, which appeared in 1739, was
dedicated to Swift.
1 Cp. Brie, 'Eulenspiegel in England,' Palaestra, XXVIL
## p. 83 (#105) #############################################
CHAPTER V
THE PROGRESS OF SOCIAL LITERATURE IN
TUDOR TIMES
The popular literature of each nation does not begin or end :
it evolves. One generation hands down to the next a store of
sentiment, humour and worldly wisdom which, together with a
spirit of investigation and ridicule, slowly change their form and
scope with every stage of civilisation. But it is almost impossible
.
definitely to mark out an epoch of popular thought. The middle
classes entered on the sixteenth century with the same tastes as
their forefathers; a love of romantic ballads and fables, together
with the satirical humour and practical sagacity which had always
found expression in a literature quite separate from monastic
culture and the civilisation of the court. The invention of printing
greatly multiplied the production of tracts and, all through the
century, the commons continued to demand their own kind of
books. This literature remained practically untouched by the
renascence, but gathered new depth and meaning from the throes
of transition which the people underwent during the reign of the
Tudors.
One of the most important influences was the growth of city
life, which always develops a curiosity in the eccentricities of
commonplace character, and leads men to take an increasing
interest in their neighbours' lives. A striking example of this
development is Cocke Lorell's bote. The tract is a burlesque rhap-
sody on the lower middle classes; they are grouped under the
classification of a crew which takes ship and sails through England.
The idea of satirising the follies of mankind under the heading of
a mock order or fraternity comes from the Middle Ages, and, as
has been seen, a new impulse was given to this conception by
Brant's Narrenschiff. But Cocke Lorell's bote is not a mere imita-
tion of the German school. Its author does not portray moral
642
## p. 84 (#106) #############################################
84 Progress of Social Literature in Tudor Times
perversity; nor has he a touch of the German’s pedantic wealth
of classical allusion. His sentiment is medieval and goes back to
the traditional satires on shopkeepers, bakers and millers, which
had been a commonplace since the days of Joannes de Garlandia.
But, above all, we can trace the long conflict between immemorial
paganism and the institutions of a civilised Christianity. This was
still an age of blasphemous and saturnalian parody, when feasts of
the
ass,
the bull and the Innocents were celebrated before cathedral
altars. The spirit of the children of Thor appears again and again
in sixteenth century literature; in the glorification of drunken-
ness? , the ferocious conflicts between husband and wife? ; the
buffoonery and bestiality of the jest-books and the superstitions
displayed in the witch-controversy. In Cocke Lorell's bote we have
the parody of the pope's bull and the grant of privileges. Besides,
the author is not a reformer or a moralist. His tradesfolk are
knaves rather than fools. He shows the spirit of the time by
being in thorough sympathy with their roguery, ruffianism and im-
morality. The captain of his 'bote' is the notorious Cocke Lorell,
a tinker after Overbury's own heart (probably a historical per-
sonage), who was a byeword as late as Jacobean times. And yet
the tone is not that of a preacher or a satirist : the ship comes to
no misfortune. It is a sermon on the text:
Mery it is wan knaves done mete3.
a
The conception of the ‘bote' and the fraternity is mere literary
conventionality. But the style of portraying low-class character
is full of interest. The writer delights in curriers and cobblers,
whose only possession is a bleaching-pot; in a shoeman who quarrels
with them for a piece of leather; a farmer whose odour makes the
crew sick; a miller who substitutes chalk for flour. Personal
peculiarities also appeal to him. We heard of 'goggle-eyed
Thompson,'Kate with the crooked foot' and 'Alys Esy, a gay
>
1 Jyl of Breyntford's Testament ; Colin Blowbol's Testament.
* Schole-house of women; Curste Wyfe lapped in Morrelles skin, etc.
3 Compare one of the King Henry's Mirth or Freemen's Songs, in Deuteromelia, in
which the freedom and irresponsibility of the humbler walks of life are extolled over
the anxieties of more exigent occupations. The ballad ends with :
Who liveth so merry and maketh such sport
As those that be of the poorest sort ?
Chorus. The poorest sort, wheresoever they be,
They gather together by one, two and three
And every man will spend his penny,
What makes such a shot among a great many.
## p. 85 (#107) #############################################
Mock Testaments
85
story-teller,' in fact a crew not unlike Harman's list of vagabonds.
Thus, the butcher:
All begored in reed blode;
In his hande he bare a flap for flyes,
His hosen gresy upon his thyes,
That place for magottes was very good;
On his necke he bare a cole tre logge,
He had as moche pyte as a dogge.
It has already been shown that Brant and Barclay substituted
the type for the abstraction which was a familiar feature of
medieval literature. Cocke Lorell's bote marks a further advance.
Its crew are no longer types; they are almost individuals. More-
over, their personality is not elaborately described, but merely
indicated by a few suggestive traits, thus illustrating how literary
impressionism was finding its way in the coarse, doggerel verse of
the people.
This spirit of character-study found expression through another
inherited literary form. The fifteenth century had produced de-
votional and sentimental documents in the form of a will or
testament, and these were borrowed from by ribald humorists
who grouped the objects of their satire under the heading of a
legacy instead of a ship or fraternity. The idea originated among
the Romans of the decadence and was developed by French writers
of the fifteenth century, especially by Villon in his half serious,
half ribald will, Le Grant et le petit Testament (two separate
poems), 1489. The first English imitation is Jyl of Breyntford's
Testament, in which Jyl bequeaths an unsavoury and opprobrious
legacy to certain typical fools, being particularly careful to bring
the number of her legatees up to a quartern. Those for whom she
expresses her contempt are either the people who cannot take
their place in life—who quarrel without cause, who borrow without
paying back, who trample needlessly on their fellows in advancing
their own interests—or those who neglect their own interests to
serve others.
The Testament of Mr Andro Kennedy, 1508, to which
reference has been made in a previous volume, was possibly
influenced by Le Testament de Taste Vin (c. 1488), or both
were influenced by earlier drinking songs; just as Taste Vin de-
crees his body to be buried under the floor of a tavern, Kennedy
leaves his soul to his lord's wine cellar. The poem is an interesting
1 E. g. Lansdowne MS, reprinted in Reliquiae Antiquae, p. 260, and Robert
Henryson's Testament of Cresseid.
2 See vol. , p. 256.
1
>
## p. 86 (#108) #############################################
86 Progress of Social Literature in Tudor Times
specimen of macaronic verse devoted to personal satire. But
the most important production of this class is Colin Blowbol's
Testament. Colin, just recovering from an appalling surfeit, and
looking ‘pale of hew like a drowned rat,' espies an equivocal
confessor, through whose agency a will is finally composed, in
which the drunkard bequeaths his soul to Diana (as goddess of
the salt seas, in which he expects to do penance for his unflagging
indulgence in sweet wine); his lands to the notorious district of
‘Southwerke’; six marks of spruce to his secretary, ‘registered a
brother in the order of folly'; and a sum to defray a Gargantuan
burial feast to be held in a labyrinth such as Daedalus built (this
part of the description is reminiscent of Ovid and Apollodorus).
A sense of discrimination in character is shown by the provision
of a dais for those who wax boastfully loquacious in liquor, a
lower table for those who become maudlin and foolish and a third
for brawlers over their cups. Just as Cocke Lorell contains a list
of sixteenth century trades, so this tract enumerates thirty-two
kinds of wines anciently in vogue. Blowbol means a drunkard,
and the tract is a parody of more serious things in honour of drink.
The original manuscript, as we have it, is badly written and the
composition shows traces of confusion or carelessness. Yet the
production is worth notice because of the unmistakable evidence
it bears to the growing interest in character and in discrimination
a
a
of types.
This fashion of writing mock testaments appears to have be-
come popular. Evidence of its influence on the new court
poetry is found in such love complaints as The Testament of the
Hawthornel.
But the most interesting of later testaments is
The Wyll of the Devyll, printed and composed about 1550
by Humphrey Powell. The tract was probably inspired by
Manuel's Krankheit der Messe? , and the greater part is taken up
with savage invective against the Roman Catholic church, the devil,
on his death-bed, bequeathing his vices and superstitions to papists
and priests. But the booklet has a popular side. The devil, in
disposing of his treasures and worldly experience, does not
forget others who are likely to appreciate them; men of law
receive two right hands to take money of both parties ; with
Shakespearian insight into vice, lechers are presented with 'a crafty
wytte to wrest the Scriptures and to make them serve for filthy
purposes'; idle housewives are given more of the same society to
keep them company; dicers receive a thousand pair of false dice;
1 2nd ed. of Tottel's Miscellany, 1557.
See ante, p. 80.
## p. 87 (#109) #############################################
Fraternities, Orders and Dances of Death 87
butchers are supplied with fresh blood to sprinkle on their stale
meat, and other tradesmen with other means of deception. The
book is most significant. Its range covers the great religious
controversy of the century and penetrates with singular felicity
into the minor abuses of society. Yet it appears in an essentially
popular literary form, and shows how considerable a part of the
reading public was found among the common people.
Except in its form, The Wyll of the Devyll belongs mostly to
the attack on social and occasional evils which figured largely
in the works of Brinkelow, Crowley, Awdeley, Harman, Bullein and
others. Meanwhile, the literature of classified character continued
its own development uncoloured by contemporary events. To this
type belong several broadsides, such as the XX Orders of Callettes
or Drabbys and its counterpart the XX Orders of Fooles,
registered in 1569–70, and A New Ballad against Unthrifts. The
Galley late come into Englande from Terra Nova,laden with Phisi-
tiens, Apothecaries and Chirurgians is now lost. In 1575, Awdeley
printed the XXV Orders of Knaves, in which brief and sarcastic
catchwords out of the iminemorial bill of charges against those
that servel' are worked into condensed portraits of remarkable
distinctness. But the French Danses Macabres of the fifteenth
century had already shown that subjection to death was the most
effective classification of human types. The song of The Shaking
of the Sheets, first alluded to in Misogonus (c. 1560), exposes,
with malicious felicity, the futility of life's different pursuits in
the face of death. These verses were meant to accompany a
symbolic 'jigge' or masquerade, which seems to have been a
common practice since the performance of a danse macabre
in the Parisian cemetery of the Innocents in 1424. The subject
was even more frequently represented by woodcuts with ex-
planatory verses. One of the most curious is a broadside with-
out title or date containing a representation of Death pursuing
the Priest, the King, the Harlot, the Lawyer, the Clown (i. e.
countryman), followed by ten stanzas in which each type boasts of
the power he or she holds over the others, and Death of his power
over them all. Another early broadside entitled The Daunce and
Song of Death has four engravings of the Miser, the Prisoner,
the Judge and two Lovers, with a moral verse under each, the
whole concluding with an apologue. This spirit of type-satire
continued till the Civil War. Its last and most striking develop-
ment is the Theophrastian character, in which the sixteenth century
1 Herford, C. H. , Literary Relations of England and Germany, p. 363.
## p. 88 (#110) #############################################
88 Progress of Social Literature in Tudor Times
view of society reappears in a form inspired by the fashionable
classicism of the Jacobean age.
As in previous centuries, the ale-house continued to figure
in popular literature as the scene where character, especially
female character, revealed itself in amusing and grotesque colours.
Jyl herself was
A widow of a homely sort,
Honest in substaunce and full of sport.
1
2
6
The out-of-door life which the middle-class husband led and
the primitive nature of the home drove the wife to seek the
society of her associates at the tavern. The fifteenth century
had produced some amusing scenes in these headquarters of
female conspiracy against men, and the sixteenth century fol-
lowed its lead. Skelton's Tunnyng of Elynour Rummyng
contains a coarse, graphic picture of the manners and morals
of the low-class women who frequented that lady's establishment
near Leatherhead. Higher in the social scale, we find the
traditional character 2 (possibly suggested by the woman of
Samaria') who has married and cheerfully buried five husbands
in quick succession. An anonymous satirist has cleverly crowded
all the vices of the middle-class wife into a career of this type in
a half moral, half burlesque poem The boke of Mayd Emlyn.
Emlyn's character is vigorously portrayed. She is one of those
women who dress gaily, get drunk at taverns, dally with gallants
and fling the nearest articles at their husbands when they re-
monstrate. She is a female Bluebeard, driving her husbands to
suicide or disposing of them by direct murder and, between each
bereavement, she goes into deep mourning, on one occasion keep-
ing an onion in her handkerchief to stimulate tears. One of her
intrigues leads her and her paramour to the stocks, where, true to
her character, she immensely enjoys her publicity. Emlyn finally
takes up her residence at the stews, and the story closes with
a glimpse of the wretched woman begging her bread in her
old age.
Sometimes the career of the ale-house adventuress throws
light on the different types of society, as in the Widow Edith.
In twelve ‘mery gestys' this ingenious personage imposes on all
i See vol. II, chap. XVI.
The grief of newly bereaved wives and their readiness to be consoled was a
commonplace as early as Gautier Le Long's La Veuve (twelfth or thirteenth century),
and may, perhaps, help to explain the scene between the duke of Gloster and lady
Anne in Richard III (Act I, sc. 2). Cf. , also, The Wife of Bath.
## p. 89 (#111) #############################################
Satires and Disquisitions on Women 89
classes by appearing to be in temporary distress and announcing
that she is a lady of considerable wealth. The tale was evidently
written to please the commons, and it is full of the character
drawing they love. Edith lodges with poor people and we see
something of their homely cheer and good nature. She encounters
a doctor of divinity who holds forth on the covetousness of men
and most willingly absolves her when he hears of her wealth.
She meets two pilgrims; the satirist discloses their weakness,
which is not love of money but vainglorying in good works, so
Edith attempts suicide and gives them the satisfaction of saving
her. The career of the adventuress leads her into the house-
holds of great men, where the head servants fall in love with her
alleged fortune. There are admirable touches of character in
the scene in which the earl of Arundel's yeomen escort her to
her home and improve the occasion by courting her wealth. The
tract purports to be the disclosure of an adventuress actually
alive; but the author is far more interested in the humour and
dramatic interest of his narrative and has borrowed largely, in
treatment and spirit, from the jest-books. Each of Edith's victims
has his own individuality, which is developed by action as well as
by appropriate speeches. There is true narrative power in the
succession of events which, in the case of each imposture, lead up
to a disillusionment.
The literature of the Middle Ages is prolific in warnings against
marriage and in tales of domestic discord. Germany began the
sixteenth century with a number of learned indictinents against
female character. But the English literature of this period was
mostly influenced by a large number of French tracts, such as
Les souhaits des hommes, et les souhaiz et beautés des dames, and
Les quinze joyes de mariage. These poems accept the traditional
views held concerning women, but begin to penetrate more deeply
into the problems of domestic life and show a keener appreciation
of its dramatic humour. A large number of English tracts are
obviously inspired from these and similar sources. In every case we
see how the readers who still delight in coarse allusions and horse-
play are also attracted by character drawing and the creation of
situations. One of the most representative is The Schole-house of
women. The author begins with a prolix disquisition on the character
of women. He comes to the conclusion that the majority are fas-
tidious, sharp tongued, quick tempered, disputatious, fond of double
dealing, and, when married, querulous and more inclined to gossip
1 Sce vol. 11, chap. XVL
a
## p. 90 (#112) #############################################
90 Progress of Social Literature in Tudor Times
than to mind the house. The writer then shows the real school of
women by means of an admirable dialogue in which a young wife
is drawn out by an experienced gossip to disclose the cruelty and
selfishness of her husband at home. The elder, out of the store-
house of her experience, counsels the younger the best way to
domesticate her consort, especially when he takes to beating.
Then the writer continues to expatiate on the subtlety, loquacity,
hypocrisy and versatility of the female mind, borrowing freely
from the Quinze joyes and the C. Mery Talys. After this comes
a list of Biblical and historical characters, all women and all bad,
supported by quotations from Solomon and Cicero. The tract
was written to please, and its author's object was attained : his
pamphlet was twice reprinted.
This popularity proved that the public were ready for two new
types of literature: the comedy of character, foreshadowed in the
dialogue of the old and young gossip, and the essay, with its discur-
sive appeals to ancient literature. So lively was the interest taken
in this type of popular reading that the Schole-house raised a
small controversy after the manner of medieval French literature'.
Edward Gosynhyll published in 1541 The Prayse of all women,
called Mulierum pacan, and, a few years later, Edward More
published The Defence of Women. Kynge eventually pub-
lished the Paean and the Schole-house side by side in the same
volume.
Another satire on women, which combined the dialogue with
the street ballad, is The Proude Wyves Paternoster. The idea of
giving piquancy to worldly sentiments by associating them with
divine service came from France. Thus, in La Paternostre à
l'userier and in La Credo à l'userier, the money-lender inter-
weaves the Latin of the missal with worldly reflections on
wealth and business. In the English tract, the scene opens at
church on a feast day, and amongst the women, all in their
best clothes, is one who intermingles each phrase of the Pater-
noster with secret prayers to gain ascendancy over her husband
and to rival her neighbours' finery. An accident leads her
into conversation with another gossip, and their chatter lasts
till the end of the service. But the wife has absorbed venomous
counsels from her companion. She returns home, asks her husband
for some money, is refused, breaks out into recriminations and
1 In the fourteenth century, Jean Le Fèvre had translated Matheolus and then refuted
him. Christine de Pisan had attacked Jean de Meun. In the fifteenth, the disputants
became far more numerous, but both factions are dominated by Martin de Franc.
## p. 91 (#113) #############################################
2
Satires on Women
91
leaves his presence with vague threats. The husband, in great
uneasiness, goes to consult the curate, who bids him trust in God's
grace. The man returns home comforted, only to find his house
rifled and his wife gone. There is here no poetic sentiment; but
the dramatic humour of the conversations, the characters of the
two women and especially those of the men, are admirable.
In the Middle Ages, domestic anarchy often took the form of a
fight for the breeches! In Germany, the city magistrates even
recognised and sanctioned a duel between the partners for life.
The Towneley and Chester Mysteries represented brawls between
Noah and his wife. In the sixteenth century, this view of the
relationship between husband and wife took the form of a Merry
Jeste of a Shrewde and Curste Wyfe lapped in Morelles skin,
compiled out of various sources, including The Geystes of Skoggan?
and two French fabliaux. This version of the domestic battle tells
how a young farmer, apparently kind-hearted and honourable,
marries the elder daughter of a man of substance. The bride soon
shows that she intends to rule her new home, but the yeoman
strips her, flogs her till she faints and sews her up in the salted
hide of an old horse. In this plight she capitulates, and peace
reigns in place of discord.
This view of the perversity, garrulousness and vanity of women
continued long after our period to influence those who preferred
satire to sentiment. It forms the basis of the Theophrastians' con-
ception of female character, and underlies much of the polite
humour of the eighteenth century essayists.
But the shrewd, ironical spirit of the sixteenth century required
something more than unchivalrous satire. The love of learning
was growing apace, but with the enthusiasm for scholarship came
depression from over-study. The melancholy which was con-
spicuous in Elizabethan and Jacobean times' was already beginning
to puzzle thoughtful men, and it was not without specific earnestness
that physicians recommended gaiety as a tonic foran exhausted body“.
Scholars found the surest relaxation then, as now, in conversation.
And their conversation took the form we should expect from men
2
a
1 Vide Wright, T. , History of Caricature and Grotesque, chap. VIII. Cf. De la Dame
qui fut corrigée.
? Cf. . How Scoggin caused his wife to be let blood. ' De la femme qui voulut éprouver,
son mari. Cf. also, The Taming of a Shrew.
3 Vide Andrew Boorde, Dyetary of Helth, 1542; Bright, T. , Treatise of Melan-
cholie, 1586; T(homas) Walkington), The Opticke Glasse of Humors, 1605.
Epistulae obscurorum Virorum, 1st series, Mugister Conradus ad magistrum
Ortuinum Gratium.
## p. 92 (#114) #############################################
92 Progress of Social Literature in Tudor Times
1
in sympathy with Plutarch, Plautus and Cicero: that is to say, of
jokes, witticisms, repartees and clinches. Thus, a large number of
Latin Facetiae appeared in print from the pens of fifteenth and
sixteenth century scholars. The style of narrative is strikingly
similar to the collections of Exempla, with which the Lativists,
thanks to their semi-ecclesiastical education, would be familiar.
These bons-mots and anecdotes diverted the student and the con-
troversialist by touches of common life or, at the most, by flashes
of classical wit. Their triviality ensured relaxation, but the scholar's
attention was held by an appeal to his sense of paradox and epigram.
This interest in witticisms and anecdotes soon spread to the
middle classes, whose habit of mind had for centuries been formed
by story-telling. The jongleurs and trouvères had preserved
‘those popular tales, which from time immemorial had circulated
among nations of Indo-European descent' and which continued to
find a place in all subsequent miscellanies down to the eighteenth
century. Ever since the Franciscans and Dominicans had used
apologues to enforce their exhortations, collections of Exempla
had been compiled from such sources as Vitae Patrum and
the Legends of the Saints. Gesta Romanorum had supplied
tales, mostly romantic, from obsolete Latin chronicles and German
legends. The sixteenth century still encouraged the medieval
love of the marvellous and heroic, but it also gave great impulse
to the half cynical, half amused indulgence which had always
greeted the triumphs of the knave, the blunders of the fool, the
flashes of the quick-witted and the innumerable touches of often
undignified nature which make the whole world kin. This in-
creased interest in the vagaries of one's neighbour was partly due
to the spread of education, which brought into clearer relief the
different grades of intelligence and stupidity. It also arose from the
growth of the city population, where legal maladministration often
reduced daily intercourse to a trial of wits. Moreover, the townsman
felt, though in a less degree than the scholar, the need for the relaxa-
tion of social intercourse. The minstrel and jester made a livelihood
and sometimes rose to fame? by gratifying this unromantic curiosity
in life; but the publication of Latin Facetiae had shown how
their place could be taken by jest-books printed in the native tongue.
These jest-books, in Italy, France, England and Germany, drew
largely on each other and even more on the inexhaustible stores
of the past, eschewing romantic and religious sentiment and
1 Courthope, History of English Poetry, vol. I, p. 63.
E. g. Scogan, Tarlton and Archie.
## p. 93 (#115) #############################################
>
Jest-books
93
reproducing only wit, ribaldry, satire and realism. The earliest
English jest-book, previous to most of the German miscellanies,
was in print by about 1526 under the title of A C. Mery Talys. This
miscellany covers practically the same ground as the Fabliaux,
treating of the profligacy of married women, the meanness and
voluptuousness of the priesthood, the superstition and crassitude of
the peasant, the standing jokes against feminine loquacity and
obstinacy, the resources of untutored ingenuity and the comedy of
the fool outwitted by the knave. All the tales are narrated with
a pointedness and simplicity which show how well English narrative
prose had learnt its lesson from Latin. Some of the anecdotes, to
modern taste, are merely silly or obscene. But a certain number,
following in the footsteps of the Latin Facetiae, harbour a sense
of wit and subtlety beneath apparent crudity. A more pro-
nounced leaning towards the new humanism is seen in Mery Tales
and Quicke Answeres (1535). The compiler draws less on medieval
stories and puts some of Poggio's facetiae and the tales of Erasmus's
Convivium Fabulosum and a selection from his Apophthegmata?
within reach of English readers. Latin quotations illustrate some
of the anecdotes, and the reflections, with which ‘jests' are fre-
quently concluded (probably in imitation of Exempla) are, in
some cases, more discursive. The twenty-eighth story ends with a
disquisition on dreams which already anticipates the essay.
Anecdotes and repartees, closely related to conversation and
practical jokes, tended to be associated with a personality. Joci
et Sales . . . ab Ottomaro Luscinio had appeared in 1529, and Facetie
et motti arguti di alcuni eccellentissimi ingegni et nobilissimi
signori, collected by Lodovico Dominichi, was published in 1548.
Following the example of the continent, English compilers soon
found it advantageous to put their jests and cranks on the market
associated with some character famous for humour or knavery.
Thus, we have the Merie Tales of Master Skelton, in which a
collection of extravagant anecdotes, associated with the laureate's
personality and his rectorship of Diss, is used to introduce clerical
burlesque such as the people loved. But the most perfect type
of biographical jest-book was registered in 1565–6, under the
title The Geystes of Skoggan. The kind of exploit which the
Fabliaux attributed to the 'clerc' is now attributed to the house-
hold jester. Amazing tales of dishonesty, insolence, and knavery
are collected from native and foreign sources, including two from
1 Vide De Vocht, H. , De Invloed van Erasmus op de Engelsche l'ooneelliteratur der
XVIe en XVIIe eeuwen. Ghent, 1908.
>
## p. 94 (#116) #############################################
94 Progress of Social Literature in Tudor Times
the Markolf legend and one (in later editions) from Brantôme.
Several had already appeared in Mery Tales and Quicke Answeres.
These are skilfully woven into a continuous narrative, marking
definite progress in the scamp's career from his student days at
Oxford to a position at the courts of two monarchs, and thence
to his death. These licentious antics were probably not accept-
able, even in the rude and profligate court of Edward IV, in whose
reign the historic Scogan lived. But the jest-book was becoming
more democratic under German influence and pictured the priest-
hood and the nobility only as accessories to the buffoonery of low
life. So welcome was this coarser, more plebeian humour that
German jest-books were put on the market in English translations.
Der Pfarrer von Kalenberg was translated and adapted to English
ideas about 1510 and Eulenspiegell was translated from an
abridged Antwerp edition by William Copland under the title
of Howleglass, while the same printer produced an English
version of the old Danish tale of Rausch as Friar Rush. Such
tales as Skoggan's and Howleglass are a link between the jester
and the adventurer whose career was becoming a part of the
people's reading. Contempt for the routine of daily life is un-
mistakable. Howleglass's biographer goes so far as to say: 'Men
let alone and take no hede of cunning men yt dwel bi them; but
prefer them a litle or nought for ther labour nor be beloved: but
rural persones and vacabundes have all their desyre. ' In such
a sentiment, the levelling tendency of democracy has already
grown into sympathy with the picaro. But these gestes have no
literary kinship with Lazarillo de Tormes. Neither Howleglass,
The Parson of Kalenborowe, Skoggan nor Skelton has the in-
dividuality which suggests the novel. Moreover, they still move in
the distorted world of caricature, where the stupid are incredibly
stupid, and the lucky unnaturally lucky. In France, the jest-
book became a vehicle for all the wisdom and satire at Rabelais's
command. But in England, the fermentation of the age found
expression through other channels, and the jest-books only helped
to prepare the way for the detached literature of the seven-
teenth century by appealing to a sense of humour, wit and verbal
subtlety.
This sense found its fullest scope in criticism and ridicule.
Again, the literature of the sixteenth century, not yet conscious of
itself, had recourse to the past. Satires against certain localities
are among the features of the Middle Ages, when decentralisation
i Ste ante, p. 82. On the Eulenspiegel cycle, see Herford, C. H. , op. cit. chap. v.
## p. 95 (#117) #############################################
Riddles and Broadsides
95
gave counties and even towns the isolation of a separate country.
A monk of Peterborough in the twelfth or thirteenth century
satirised the inhabitants of Norfolk"; while satires are also found
concerning the people of Stockton and Rochester, and, at a later
period, on the inhabitants of Pevensey. 'Merry tales' were com-
posed or compiled on these lines for readers sufficiently intellectual
to laugh at folly. Germany set the example by producing, in the
sixteenth century, a collection of witticisms on Schildburg: the
inhabitants of this famous town are represented as experiencing
so much inconvenience from their far-famed wisdom that they
determine to establish a reputation for folly, a reputation which
still lives. A similar method of unifying anecdotes of stupidity
was adopted by the English in the reign of Henry VIII, when
Merie Tales of the Mad Men of Gotam appeared. The same type
of humour took a slightly different form in The Sack-Full of News,
a collection, mostly of bucolic ineptitudes, compiled for city readers
in an age when Barclay could say to the countryman: 'even the
townsmen shall laugh you to scorn. '
Jest-books did not efface a kindred form of miscellany-books
of riddles. Wynkyn de Worde printed Demaundes joyous, which
.
was chiefly an abridgment of Les demandes joyeuses; and the
Booke of Merry Riddles probably appeared before the earliest
known edition of 1600. These questions and answers enjoyed no
mean consideration as a mental training? , and, undoubtedly, helped
to form the standard of wit and conceit in later Elizabethau and
Jacobean times. The riddle books are full of such questions as:
"What is that that shineth bright of day and at night is raked up
in its own dirt? '—'The fire'; 'What is it that getteth his living
backward? '—'The ropemaker'; 'Of what faculty be they that
every night turn the skins of dead beasts? '—'The friars. ' In the
character writers, we meet with the same type of wit, only, in
them, it is reversed. Thus, in the Overbury collection, we read that
a serving man is a creature who, though he be not drunk, yet is not
his own man, and that the daily labour of a waterman teaches
him the art of dissembling because he goes not the way he looks.
In Micrologia, 'a player. . . is much like a counter in arithmetic and
may stand one while for a king, another while a beggar, many
times as a mute or cipher. In Butler, 'a melancholy man is one
that keeps the worst company in the world, that is, his own. '
1 Cf. Wright, T. , Early Mysteries and other Latin Poems, 1838.
This tendency begins to be marked before the sixteenth century by such books
as Mensa philosophica and Liber Paceti.
## p. 96 (#118) #############################################
96 Progress of Social Literature in Tudor Times
The primary object of these anecdotes, facetiae and riddles was
to occupy idle hours. The English miscellanies are always 'merry';
and the foreign jest-books have even more suggestive titles. This
natural inclination for amusement, in which even elderly students
took refuge from over-work, had come down to the sixteenth cen-
tury with a love of singing and dancing? By 1510, Erasmus
declared that Britanni, praeter alia, formam, musicam et lautas
mensas, proprie sibi vindicent. Miles Coverdale”, in 1538, testifies
that the taste for singing was universal among carters, ploughmen
and women 'at the rockes' and spinning wheel. Words in metre
were composed to give a fuller zest to music and dancing, but the
conditions of their production were quite different from those
which evolved the folk-lore balladº. The change was inevitable
from the time the minstrel left the baronial hall for the city square.
The transformation became complete so soon as the invention of
printing made it more profitable to sell ballads than to sing them.
These fly-leaves and broadsides, specially produced for the occasion
and sold for a penny, have nearly all perished. Popular ones
were pasted on the wall and the less valued were devoted to more
ephemeral purposes. Both destinies led to annihilation, but the
demand for them must have grown rapidly, for, in the second decade
of the sixteenth century, the author of the Interlude of the Nature
of the Four Elements complains of the toys and trifles' printed in
his time; so that, while in English there were scarcely 'any works
of connynge,' the most ‘pregnant wits' were employed in compiling
'ballads and other matters not worth a mite. ' Henry VIII encour-
aged such productions in the early part of his reign but suppressed
them wholesale when any part of his policy was attacked. In 1533,
a proclamation was issued to suppress ‘fond books, ballads, rimes
and other lewd treatises in the English tongue. ' In 1543, an act of
parliament was passed to put a stop to the circulation of 'printed
ballads, plays, rimes, songs and other fantasies. ' 'At the beginning
of Mary's reign, an edict was made against ‘books, ballads, rimes
and treatises' which had been 'set out by printers and stationers,
of an evil zeal for lucre and covetous of vile gain. These sup-
pressions, added to the perishable nature of the product, have
destroyed all but about fifty-six ballads of the reigns from
Henry VIII to Elizabeth.
## p. 79 (#101) #############################################
Characteristics of Skelton
79
To wryte or to indyte,
Eyther for delyte
Or elles for despyte;
Or bokes to compyle
Of dyvers maner style,
Vyce to revyle
And synne to exyle;
To teche or to preche,
Aş reason wyll reche?
Lack of constructive power often spoils the impression of
Skelton's poems; but this deficiency is made up for in many cases
by an immense vivacity and by the originality of the ideas. His
satires against the clergy in general, and, particularly, those
against Wolsey, are remarkable for their boldness. Of all the poetical
successors of Chaucer in England Skelton is by far the most original.
a
Compared with The Ship of Fools, most of the other contribu-
tions of German to English literature in the beginning of the
sixteenth century seem insignificant'. That German influence
should be felt in England at the time was only natural. In
Germany, the reformation had its chief seat, many publications of
a reformatory character were printed there or in Holland, and it
became a second home to many refugees, who became acquainted
with German literature and adopted what they found useful
for their purpose. But, as most of these men were not great
writers, and, as Germany was very soon left behind by Elizabethan
England, this influence, in most cases, was not lasting.
Of German popular poetry, next to nothing became known in
England, and it is not before 1593 that we find the titles of a few
stray German ballads mentioned in the Stationers' Register. Miles
Coverdale tried to introduce the protestant hymn into England
about 1540. His Goosily Psalmes and Spiritual Songes are a fair
selection of the first period of protestant hymnology (1527—31),
and might have been effective under more favourable conditions.
But the translation was too poor; moreover, Italian influence was
so strong just at that time that the attempt proved a failure.
From Germany, the English reformers learned how to use the
dialogue as a weapon in the religious struggle. A great many
polemical dialogues were written in Germany by advocates of
either side, with a decided balance in favour of the protestant,
in number as well as in literary value. The most distinguished
1 Fuller information concerning the subjects treated in the remaining paragraphs
of this chapter will be found in Herford's Studies, and Brie's Eulenspiegel in England.
See also the chapter that follows this.
## p. 80 (#102) #############################################
80
Early German Influences
6
>
9
>
names in the beginning of the movement were those of Erasmus
and Hutten, who were followed by a host of more or less capable
men. The strain of these discussions' varies very much, accord-
ing to the individuality of the authors. Learned and popular
elements were blended in various ways; and sometimes we have
miniature dramas, especially when the writers, to illustrate their
point, used the background of contemporary life.
In England, the number of controversial dialogues is com-
paratively small; and there is no such continuous tradition as in
Germany. One of the first is Rede me and be not wrothe, com-
posed by two converted Greenwich friars, William Roy and Jerome
Barlow, in Strassburg, in 1528. The framework is suggested by
Niclas Manuel's famous Krankheit der Messe-, of which the dialogue
is simply a continuation; the contents are English- a violent
attack on the English clergy and its highest representative,
cardinal Wolsey. Numerous striking parallels to Skelton's satires
occur; but the tone of the whole is emphatically protestant.
Compared with Manuel's spirited production, the English imitation
seems dull, and it is far too long to be impressive. Wolsey's
agents bought up all copies obtainable almost instantly, and, in
1531, it was proscribed and soon forgotten. According to Tindale,
Roy had translated another reformatory work, Dialogus inter
patrem christianum et filium contumacem; but the translation,
as well as the original, are lost. Barlow recanted in 1533 and
wrote, probably very soon after, a somewhat feeble Dialogue upon
the origin of the protestant fashions. Purely English in spirit is
the Proper Dyalogue betwene a Gentillman and a Husbandman,
complaining of the oppression of the lay people by the clergy after
a fashion which would have been impossible in Germany.
The Catholic side is represented at that time by no writer of
distinction. Skelton, who, apparently, had written the interlude,
Negromansir, alluded to above, in the favourite form of a trial,
was dead, and More's somewhat lifeless dialogue against Tindale's
book on the mass is of an entirely different type.
Under Edward VI, protestant dialogue flourished with the
official sanction of the government, dealing particularly with the
mass, which was ridiculed under various names as 'Round Robin,'
Jack in the Box,'Jack of Lent' and so on. Among the transla-
tions of German dialogues we find Hans Sachs's Goodly disputa-
cion between a christian shoemaker and a Popysshe Parson,
printed by one Anthony Skoloker, in 1547. In 1548, Day
i See post, p. 86.
(
## p. 81 (#103) #############################################
81
3
English Protestant Dialogues
printed John Bon and Mast Parson, a disputation on Corpus
Christi by L Shepherd. Robin Conscience is a good English
example of the well known “son against father' type, showing
strong influence of the morality play. The excellent transla-
tions of two of Erasmus's dialogues, published about 1550, are
absolutely un-English,
The more elaborate form of the trial, used largely in Germany
already in the Fastnachtsspiele, was adopted in England par-
ticularly by William Turner, a Northumbrian man of science and
theologian and a disciple of Latimer, who travelled in Germany
between 1530 and 1540. His Hunting of the Fox (Basel, 1573),
answered by Gardiner's Contra Turneri vulpem, was followed by
the much better Hunting of the Wolf and, in 1547, by the
Examination of the Mass. Still more elaborate than this
specimen of the drama of debate' is the Endightment against
Mother Messe. The last dialogue of Edward's reign, a dialogus
duarum sororum, mentioned by Bale, is a translation of one
of Wolfgang Resch's dialogues, by Walter Lynne, of very little
literary value. Under Mary, only very few protestant dialogues
were written ; under Elizabeth, German influence was dead, and
the form was applied to all sorts of secular subjects. Six dialogues
by Wingfield, printed 1566, Contra Expugnatores Missae, taking
the Catholic side, are rather weak and tame'.
Towards the end of the century, translations of sensational
German news sheets occur sporadically in the Stationers' register.
These details of strange occurrences, explained by protestant
pessimists as signs of doom, became extremely popular in England,
as is seen, for instance, in Ben Jonson's The Staple of News. A
ballad of bishop Hatto was entered in the Stationers' register in
1586, and the story of the greedy ecclesiastic occurs again in The
Costlie Whore, while The Piper of Hamelin is mentioned in
Verstegen’s Restitution of Decayed Intelligence in 1605. Of the
numerous German collections of amusing stories, compiled by
learned and unlearned authors in the sixteenth century, sometimes
without method, sometimes attached to certain personalities, and
illustrating with coarse humour the low life of the time without
much pretension to literary distinction, only a very few became
known in England. Strange to say, of the most interesting figure
of all, Markolf, we have only a few traces? The Pfaffe Amis, in
1 German influence is also to be seen in the English draina at the time of the
reformation; but of this some acoount is given in a later volume of this History.
* Cf. Herford, pp. 267 ff. ; Brie, Eulenspiegel, p. 72.
CII. IV.
6
E. L. III.
## p. 82 (#104) #############################################
82
Early German Influences
spite of his being called a native of England, seems quite unknown.
In The Parson of Kalenborowe (Der Pfarrer von Kalenberg),
c. 1510 (? ), we have a very free prose version of a South German
original, but taken, probably, from a more copious Dutch prose
narrative. Of Howleglass, something is said in the chapter
which follows this. Copland's versions of the feats of Eulen-
spiegel, the best known representative of German low life of
the time, printed between 1559 and 1563, were thought the
oldest ones, until, a few years ago, there was found a short
fragment of a much older one, printed by John of Doesborch
1516–20. It is a very clumsy translation, full of misunder-
standings, taken not from one of the High German versions but
from a lost Low German original".
Exposing the coarseness of his time, Brant, in Das Narren-
schiff, created a new saint, Grobianus, who soon became the typical
representative of rude and indecent behaviour, particularly at
table. He must have been a very popular figure when, in 1549, a
young student of Wittenberg, F. Dedekind, wrote his Latin
Grobianus, which was translated (1551) by Caspar Scheidt into
German with considerable additions. A new version by Dedekind,
Grobianus et Grobiana, in which the hero has a female companion,
followed in 1552. The book enjoyed a vast popularity, not only
in Germany, but also in France and England. In 1605, Grobianus
was translated into English as The Schoole of Slovenrie. Traces
of grobianism can be found in Dekker’s Gul's Hornbooke
(1609). The figure of Grobianus appears utterly transformed in
the interlude Grobiana's Nuptials, where it has become the
type of the Oxford man of Jacobean time with his affectation of
simplicity. Dedekind's book was appreciated in England even
so late as the eighteenth century, and it was certainly not by
chance that a new translation of it, which appeared in 1739, was
dedicated to Swift.
1 Cp. Brie, 'Eulenspiegel in England,' Palaestra, XXVIL
## p. 83 (#105) #############################################
CHAPTER V
THE PROGRESS OF SOCIAL LITERATURE IN
TUDOR TIMES
The popular literature of each nation does not begin or end :
it evolves. One generation hands down to the next a store of
sentiment, humour and worldly wisdom which, together with a
spirit of investigation and ridicule, slowly change their form and
scope with every stage of civilisation. But it is almost impossible
.
definitely to mark out an epoch of popular thought. The middle
classes entered on the sixteenth century with the same tastes as
their forefathers; a love of romantic ballads and fables, together
with the satirical humour and practical sagacity which had always
found expression in a literature quite separate from monastic
culture and the civilisation of the court. The invention of printing
greatly multiplied the production of tracts and, all through the
century, the commons continued to demand their own kind of
books. This literature remained practically untouched by the
renascence, but gathered new depth and meaning from the throes
of transition which the people underwent during the reign of the
Tudors.
One of the most important influences was the growth of city
life, which always develops a curiosity in the eccentricities of
commonplace character, and leads men to take an increasing
interest in their neighbours' lives. A striking example of this
development is Cocke Lorell's bote. The tract is a burlesque rhap-
sody on the lower middle classes; they are grouped under the
classification of a crew which takes ship and sails through England.
The idea of satirising the follies of mankind under the heading of
a mock order or fraternity comes from the Middle Ages, and, as
has been seen, a new impulse was given to this conception by
Brant's Narrenschiff. But Cocke Lorell's bote is not a mere imita-
tion of the German school. Its author does not portray moral
642
## p. 84 (#106) #############################################
84 Progress of Social Literature in Tudor Times
perversity; nor has he a touch of the German’s pedantic wealth
of classical allusion. His sentiment is medieval and goes back to
the traditional satires on shopkeepers, bakers and millers, which
had been a commonplace since the days of Joannes de Garlandia.
But, above all, we can trace the long conflict between immemorial
paganism and the institutions of a civilised Christianity. This was
still an age of blasphemous and saturnalian parody, when feasts of
the
ass,
the bull and the Innocents were celebrated before cathedral
altars. The spirit of the children of Thor appears again and again
in sixteenth century literature; in the glorification of drunken-
ness? , the ferocious conflicts between husband and wife? ; the
buffoonery and bestiality of the jest-books and the superstitions
displayed in the witch-controversy. In Cocke Lorell's bote we have
the parody of the pope's bull and the grant of privileges. Besides,
the author is not a reformer or a moralist. His tradesfolk are
knaves rather than fools. He shows the spirit of the time by
being in thorough sympathy with their roguery, ruffianism and im-
morality. The captain of his 'bote' is the notorious Cocke Lorell,
a tinker after Overbury's own heart (probably a historical per-
sonage), who was a byeword as late as Jacobean times. And yet
the tone is not that of a preacher or a satirist : the ship comes to
no misfortune. It is a sermon on the text:
Mery it is wan knaves done mete3.
a
The conception of the ‘bote' and the fraternity is mere literary
conventionality. But the style of portraying low-class character
is full of interest. The writer delights in curriers and cobblers,
whose only possession is a bleaching-pot; in a shoeman who quarrels
with them for a piece of leather; a farmer whose odour makes the
crew sick; a miller who substitutes chalk for flour. Personal
peculiarities also appeal to him. We heard of 'goggle-eyed
Thompson,'Kate with the crooked foot' and 'Alys Esy, a gay
>
1 Jyl of Breyntford's Testament ; Colin Blowbol's Testament.
* Schole-house of women; Curste Wyfe lapped in Morrelles skin, etc.
3 Compare one of the King Henry's Mirth or Freemen's Songs, in Deuteromelia, in
which the freedom and irresponsibility of the humbler walks of life are extolled over
the anxieties of more exigent occupations. The ballad ends with :
Who liveth so merry and maketh such sport
As those that be of the poorest sort ?
Chorus. The poorest sort, wheresoever they be,
They gather together by one, two and three
And every man will spend his penny,
What makes such a shot among a great many.
## p. 85 (#107) #############################################
Mock Testaments
85
story-teller,' in fact a crew not unlike Harman's list of vagabonds.
Thus, the butcher:
All begored in reed blode;
In his hande he bare a flap for flyes,
His hosen gresy upon his thyes,
That place for magottes was very good;
On his necke he bare a cole tre logge,
He had as moche pyte as a dogge.
It has already been shown that Brant and Barclay substituted
the type for the abstraction which was a familiar feature of
medieval literature. Cocke Lorell's bote marks a further advance.
Its crew are no longer types; they are almost individuals. More-
over, their personality is not elaborately described, but merely
indicated by a few suggestive traits, thus illustrating how literary
impressionism was finding its way in the coarse, doggerel verse of
the people.
This spirit of character-study found expression through another
inherited literary form. The fifteenth century had produced de-
votional and sentimental documents in the form of a will or
testament, and these were borrowed from by ribald humorists
who grouped the objects of their satire under the heading of a
legacy instead of a ship or fraternity. The idea originated among
the Romans of the decadence and was developed by French writers
of the fifteenth century, especially by Villon in his half serious,
half ribald will, Le Grant et le petit Testament (two separate
poems), 1489. The first English imitation is Jyl of Breyntford's
Testament, in which Jyl bequeaths an unsavoury and opprobrious
legacy to certain typical fools, being particularly careful to bring
the number of her legatees up to a quartern. Those for whom she
expresses her contempt are either the people who cannot take
their place in life—who quarrel without cause, who borrow without
paying back, who trample needlessly on their fellows in advancing
their own interests—or those who neglect their own interests to
serve others.
The Testament of Mr Andro Kennedy, 1508, to which
reference has been made in a previous volume, was possibly
influenced by Le Testament de Taste Vin (c. 1488), or both
were influenced by earlier drinking songs; just as Taste Vin de-
crees his body to be buried under the floor of a tavern, Kennedy
leaves his soul to his lord's wine cellar. The poem is an interesting
1 E. g. Lansdowne MS, reprinted in Reliquiae Antiquae, p. 260, and Robert
Henryson's Testament of Cresseid.
2 See vol. , p. 256.
1
>
## p. 86 (#108) #############################################
86 Progress of Social Literature in Tudor Times
specimen of macaronic verse devoted to personal satire. But
the most important production of this class is Colin Blowbol's
Testament. Colin, just recovering from an appalling surfeit, and
looking ‘pale of hew like a drowned rat,' espies an equivocal
confessor, through whose agency a will is finally composed, in
which the drunkard bequeaths his soul to Diana (as goddess of
the salt seas, in which he expects to do penance for his unflagging
indulgence in sweet wine); his lands to the notorious district of
‘Southwerke’; six marks of spruce to his secretary, ‘registered a
brother in the order of folly'; and a sum to defray a Gargantuan
burial feast to be held in a labyrinth such as Daedalus built (this
part of the description is reminiscent of Ovid and Apollodorus).
A sense of discrimination in character is shown by the provision
of a dais for those who wax boastfully loquacious in liquor, a
lower table for those who become maudlin and foolish and a third
for brawlers over their cups. Just as Cocke Lorell contains a list
of sixteenth century trades, so this tract enumerates thirty-two
kinds of wines anciently in vogue. Blowbol means a drunkard,
and the tract is a parody of more serious things in honour of drink.
The original manuscript, as we have it, is badly written and the
composition shows traces of confusion or carelessness. Yet the
production is worth notice because of the unmistakable evidence
it bears to the growing interest in character and in discrimination
a
a
of types.
This fashion of writing mock testaments appears to have be-
come popular. Evidence of its influence on the new court
poetry is found in such love complaints as The Testament of the
Hawthornel.
But the most interesting of later testaments is
The Wyll of the Devyll, printed and composed about 1550
by Humphrey Powell. The tract was probably inspired by
Manuel's Krankheit der Messe? , and the greater part is taken up
with savage invective against the Roman Catholic church, the devil,
on his death-bed, bequeathing his vices and superstitions to papists
and priests. But the booklet has a popular side. The devil, in
disposing of his treasures and worldly experience, does not
forget others who are likely to appreciate them; men of law
receive two right hands to take money of both parties ; with
Shakespearian insight into vice, lechers are presented with 'a crafty
wytte to wrest the Scriptures and to make them serve for filthy
purposes'; idle housewives are given more of the same society to
keep them company; dicers receive a thousand pair of false dice;
1 2nd ed. of Tottel's Miscellany, 1557.
See ante, p. 80.
## p. 87 (#109) #############################################
Fraternities, Orders and Dances of Death 87
butchers are supplied with fresh blood to sprinkle on their stale
meat, and other tradesmen with other means of deception. The
book is most significant. Its range covers the great religious
controversy of the century and penetrates with singular felicity
into the minor abuses of society. Yet it appears in an essentially
popular literary form, and shows how considerable a part of the
reading public was found among the common people.
Except in its form, The Wyll of the Devyll belongs mostly to
the attack on social and occasional evils which figured largely
in the works of Brinkelow, Crowley, Awdeley, Harman, Bullein and
others. Meanwhile, the literature of classified character continued
its own development uncoloured by contemporary events. To this
type belong several broadsides, such as the XX Orders of Callettes
or Drabbys and its counterpart the XX Orders of Fooles,
registered in 1569–70, and A New Ballad against Unthrifts. The
Galley late come into Englande from Terra Nova,laden with Phisi-
tiens, Apothecaries and Chirurgians is now lost. In 1575, Awdeley
printed the XXV Orders of Knaves, in which brief and sarcastic
catchwords out of the iminemorial bill of charges against those
that servel' are worked into condensed portraits of remarkable
distinctness. But the French Danses Macabres of the fifteenth
century had already shown that subjection to death was the most
effective classification of human types. The song of The Shaking
of the Sheets, first alluded to in Misogonus (c. 1560), exposes,
with malicious felicity, the futility of life's different pursuits in
the face of death. These verses were meant to accompany a
symbolic 'jigge' or masquerade, which seems to have been a
common practice since the performance of a danse macabre
in the Parisian cemetery of the Innocents in 1424. The subject
was even more frequently represented by woodcuts with ex-
planatory verses. One of the most curious is a broadside with-
out title or date containing a representation of Death pursuing
the Priest, the King, the Harlot, the Lawyer, the Clown (i. e.
countryman), followed by ten stanzas in which each type boasts of
the power he or she holds over the others, and Death of his power
over them all. Another early broadside entitled The Daunce and
Song of Death has four engravings of the Miser, the Prisoner,
the Judge and two Lovers, with a moral verse under each, the
whole concluding with an apologue. This spirit of type-satire
continued till the Civil War. Its last and most striking develop-
ment is the Theophrastian character, in which the sixteenth century
1 Herford, C. H. , Literary Relations of England and Germany, p. 363.
## p. 88 (#110) #############################################
88 Progress of Social Literature in Tudor Times
view of society reappears in a form inspired by the fashionable
classicism of the Jacobean age.
As in previous centuries, the ale-house continued to figure
in popular literature as the scene where character, especially
female character, revealed itself in amusing and grotesque colours.
Jyl herself was
A widow of a homely sort,
Honest in substaunce and full of sport.
1
2
6
The out-of-door life which the middle-class husband led and
the primitive nature of the home drove the wife to seek the
society of her associates at the tavern. The fifteenth century
had produced some amusing scenes in these headquarters of
female conspiracy against men, and the sixteenth century fol-
lowed its lead. Skelton's Tunnyng of Elynour Rummyng
contains a coarse, graphic picture of the manners and morals
of the low-class women who frequented that lady's establishment
near Leatherhead. Higher in the social scale, we find the
traditional character 2 (possibly suggested by the woman of
Samaria') who has married and cheerfully buried five husbands
in quick succession. An anonymous satirist has cleverly crowded
all the vices of the middle-class wife into a career of this type in
a half moral, half burlesque poem The boke of Mayd Emlyn.
Emlyn's character is vigorously portrayed. She is one of those
women who dress gaily, get drunk at taverns, dally with gallants
and fling the nearest articles at their husbands when they re-
monstrate. She is a female Bluebeard, driving her husbands to
suicide or disposing of them by direct murder and, between each
bereavement, she goes into deep mourning, on one occasion keep-
ing an onion in her handkerchief to stimulate tears. One of her
intrigues leads her and her paramour to the stocks, where, true to
her character, she immensely enjoys her publicity. Emlyn finally
takes up her residence at the stews, and the story closes with
a glimpse of the wretched woman begging her bread in her
old age.
Sometimes the career of the ale-house adventuress throws
light on the different types of society, as in the Widow Edith.
In twelve ‘mery gestys' this ingenious personage imposes on all
i See vol. II, chap. XVI.
The grief of newly bereaved wives and their readiness to be consoled was a
commonplace as early as Gautier Le Long's La Veuve (twelfth or thirteenth century),
and may, perhaps, help to explain the scene between the duke of Gloster and lady
Anne in Richard III (Act I, sc. 2). Cf. , also, The Wife of Bath.
## p. 89 (#111) #############################################
Satires and Disquisitions on Women 89
classes by appearing to be in temporary distress and announcing
that she is a lady of considerable wealth. The tale was evidently
written to please the commons, and it is full of the character
drawing they love. Edith lodges with poor people and we see
something of their homely cheer and good nature. She encounters
a doctor of divinity who holds forth on the covetousness of men
and most willingly absolves her when he hears of her wealth.
She meets two pilgrims; the satirist discloses their weakness,
which is not love of money but vainglorying in good works, so
Edith attempts suicide and gives them the satisfaction of saving
her. The career of the adventuress leads her into the house-
holds of great men, where the head servants fall in love with her
alleged fortune. There are admirable touches of character in
the scene in which the earl of Arundel's yeomen escort her to
her home and improve the occasion by courting her wealth. The
tract purports to be the disclosure of an adventuress actually
alive; but the author is far more interested in the humour and
dramatic interest of his narrative and has borrowed largely, in
treatment and spirit, from the jest-books. Each of Edith's victims
has his own individuality, which is developed by action as well as
by appropriate speeches. There is true narrative power in the
succession of events which, in the case of each imposture, lead up
to a disillusionment.
The literature of the Middle Ages is prolific in warnings against
marriage and in tales of domestic discord. Germany began the
sixteenth century with a number of learned indictinents against
female character. But the English literature of this period was
mostly influenced by a large number of French tracts, such as
Les souhaits des hommes, et les souhaiz et beautés des dames, and
Les quinze joyes de mariage. These poems accept the traditional
views held concerning women, but begin to penetrate more deeply
into the problems of domestic life and show a keener appreciation
of its dramatic humour. A large number of English tracts are
obviously inspired from these and similar sources. In every case we
see how the readers who still delight in coarse allusions and horse-
play are also attracted by character drawing and the creation of
situations. One of the most representative is The Schole-house of
women. The author begins with a prolix disquisition on the character
of women. He comes to the conclusion that the majority are fas-
tidious, sharp tongued, quick tempered, disputatious, fond of double
dealing, and, when married, querulous and more inclined to gossip
1 Sce vol. 11, chap. XVL
a
## p. 90 (#112) #############################################
90 Progress of Social Literature in Tudor Times
than to mind the house. The writer then shows the real school of
women by means of an admirable dialogue in which a young wife
is drawn out by an experienced gossip to disclose the cruelty and
selfishness of her husband at home. The elder, out of the store-
house of her experience, counsels the younger the best way to
domesticate her consort, especially when he takes to beating.
Then the writer continues to expatiate on the subtlety, loquacity,
hypocrisy and versatility of the female mind, borrowing freely
from the Quinze joyes and the C. Mery Talys. After this comes
a list of Biblical and historical characters, all women and all bad,
supported by quotations from Solomon and Cicero. The tract
was written to please, and its author's object was attained : his
pamphlet was twice reprinted.
This popularity proved that the public were ready for two new
types of literature: the comedy of character, foreshadowed in the
dialogue of the old and young gossip, and the essay, with its discur-
sive appeals to ancient literature. So lively was the interest taken
in this type of popular reading that the Schole-house raised a
small controversy after the manner of medieval French literature'.
Edward Gosynhyll published in 1541 The Prayse of all women,
called Mulierum pacan, and, a few years later, Edward More
published The Defence of Women. Kynge eventually pub-
lished the Paean and the Schole-house side by side in the same
volume.
Another satire on women, which combined the dialogue with
the street ballad, is The Proude Wyves Paternoster. The idea of
giving piquancy to worldly sentiments by associating them with
divine service came from France. Thus, in La Paternostre à
l'userier and in La Credo à l'userier, the money-lender inter-
weaves the Latin of the missal with worldly reflections on
wealth and business. In the English tract, the scene opens at
church on a feast day, and amongst the women, all in their
best clothes, is one who intermingles each phrase of the Pater-
noster with secret prayers to gain ascendancy over her husband
and to rival her neighbours' finery. An accident leads her
into conversation with another gossip, and their chatter lasts
till the end of the service. But the wife has absorbed venomous
counsels from her companion. She returns home, asks her husband
for some money, is refused, breaks out into recriminations and
1 In the fourteenth century, Jean Le Fèvre had translated Matheolus and then refuted
him. Christine de Pisan had attacked Jean de Meun. In the fifteenth, the disputants
became far more numerous, but both factions are dominated by Martin de Franc.
## p. 91 (#113) #############################################
2
Satires on Women
91
leaves his presence with vague threats. The husband, in great
uneasiness, goes to consult the curate, who bids him trust in God's
grace. The man returns home comforted, only to find his house
rifled and his wife gone. There is here no poetic sentiment; but
the dramatic humour of the conversations, the characters of the
two women and especially those of the men, are admirable.
In the Middle Ages, domestic anarchy often took the form of a
fight for the breeches! In Germany, the city magistrates even
recognised and sanctioned a duel between the partners for life.
The Towneley and Chester Mysteries represented brawls between
Noah and his wife. In the sixteenth century, this view of the
relationship between husband and wife took the form of a Merry
Jeste of a Shrewde and Curste Wyfe lapped in Morelles skin,
compiled out of various sources, including The Geystes of Skoggan?
and two French fabliaux. This version of the domestic battle tells
how a young farmer, apparently kind-hearted and honourable,
marries the elder daughter of a man of substance. The bride soon
shows that she intends to rule her new home, but the yeoman
strips her, flogs her till she faints and sews her up in the salted
hide of an old horse. In this plight she capitulates, and peace
reigns in place of discord.
This view of the perversity, garrulousness and vanity of women
continued long after our period to influence those who preferred
satire to sentiment. It forms the basis of the Theophrastians' con-
ception of female character, and underlies much of the polite
humour of the eighteenth century essayists.
But the shrewd, ironical spirit of the sixteenth century required
something more than unchivalrous satire. The love of learning
was growing apace, but with the enthusiasm for scholarship came
depression from over-study. The melancholy which was con-
spicuous in Elizabethan and Jacobean times' was already beginning
to puzzle thoughtful men, and it was not without specific earnestness
that physicians recommended gaiety as a tonic foran exhausted body“.
Scholars found the surest relaxation then, as now, in conversation.
And their conversation took the form we should expect from men
2
a
1 Vide Wright, T. , History of Caricature and Grotesque, chap. VIII. Cf. De la Dame
qui fut corrigée.
? Cf. . How Scoggin caused his wife to be let blood. ' De la femme qui voulut éprouver,
son mari. Cf. also, The Taming of a Shrew.
3 Vide Andrew Boorde, Dyetary of Helth, 1542; Bright, T. , Treatise of Melan-
cholie, 1586; T(homas) Walkington), The Opticke Glasse of Humors, 1605.
Epistulae obscurorum Virorum, 1st series, Mugister Conradus ad magistrum
Ortuinum Gratium.
## p. 92 (#114) #############################################
92 Progress of Social Literature in Tudor Times
1
in sympathy with Plutarch, Plautus and Cicero: that is to say, of
jokes, witticisms, repartees and clinches. Thus, a large number of
Latin Facetiae appeared in print from the pens of fifteenth and
sixteenth century scholars. The style of narrative is strikingly
similar to the collections of Exempla, with which the Lativists,
thanks to their semi-ecclesiastical education, would be familiar.
These bons-mots and anecdotes diverted the student and the con-
troversialist by touches of common life or, at the most, by flashes
of classical wit. Their triviality ensured relaxation, but the scholar's
attention was held by an appeal to his sense of paradox and epigram.
This interest in witticisms and anecdotes soon spread to the
middle classes, whose habit of mind had for centuries been formed
by story-telling. The jongleurs and trouvères had preserved
‘those popular tales, which from time immemorial had circulated
among nations of Indo-European descent' and which continued to
find a place in all subsequent miscellanies down to the eighteenth
century. Ever since the Franciscans and Dominicans had used
apologues to enforce their exhortations, collections of Exempla
had been compiled from such sources as Vitae Patrum and
the Legends of the Saints. Gesta Romanorum had supplied
tales, mostly romantic, from obsolete Latin chronicles and German
legends. The sixteenth century still encouraged the medieval
love of the marvellous and heroic, but it also gave great impulse
to the half cynical, half amused indulgence which had always
greeted the triumphs of the knave, the blunders of the fool, the
flashes of the quick-witted and the innumerable touches of often
undignified nature which make the whole world kin. This in-
creased interest in the vagaries of one's neighbour was partly due
to the spread of education, which brought into clearer relief the
different grades of intelligence and stupidity. It also arose from the
growth of the city population, where legal maladministration often
reduced daily intercourse to a trial of wits. Moreover, the townsman
felt, though in a less degree than the scholar, the need for the relaxa-
tion of social intercourse. The minstrel and jester made a livelihood
and sometimes rose to fame? by gratifying this unromantic curiosity
in life; but the publication of Latin Facetiae had shown how
their place could be taken by jest-books printed in the native tongue.
These jest-books, in Italy, France, England and Germany, drew
largely on each other and even more on the inexhaustible stores
of the past, eschewing romantic and religious sentiment and
1 Courthope, History of English Poetry, vol. I, p. 63.
E. g. Scogan, Tarlton and Archie.
## p. 93 (#115) #############################################
>
Jest-books
93
reproducing only wit, ribaldry, satire and realism. The earliest
English jest-book, previous to most of the German miscellanies,
was in print by about 1526 under the title of A C. Mery Talys. This
miscellany covers practically the same ground as the Fabliaux,
treating of the profligacy of married women, the meanness and
voluptuousness of the priesthood, the superstition and crassitude of
the peasant, the standing jokes against feminine loquacity and
obstinacy, the resources of untutored ingenuity and the comedy of
the fool outwitted by the knave. All the tales are narrated with
a pointedness and simplicity which show how well English narrative
prose had learnt its lesson from Latin. Some of the anecdotes, to
modern taste, are merely silly or obscene. But a certain number,
following in the footsteps of the Latin Facetiae, harbour a sense
of wit and subtlety beneath apparent crudity. A more pro-
nounced leaning towards the new humanism is seen in Mery Tales
and Quicke Answeres (1535). The compiler draws less on medieval
stories and puts some of Poggio's facetiae and the tales of Erasmus's
Convivium Fabulosum and a selection from his Apophthegmata?
within reach of English readers. Latin quotations illustrate some
of the anecdotes, and the reflections, with which ‘jests' are fre-
quently concluded (probably in imitation of Exempla) are, in
some cases, more discursive. The twenty-eighth story ends with a
disquisition on dreams which already anticipates the essay.
Anecdotes and repartees, closely related to conversation and
practical jokes, tended to be associated with a personality. Joci
et Sales . . . ab Ottomaro Luscinio had appeared in 1529, and Facetie
et motti arguti di alcuni eccellentissimi ingegni et nobilissimi
signori, collected by Lodovico Dominichi, was published in 1548.
Following the example of the continent, English compilers soon
found it advantageous to put their jests and cranks on the market
associated with some character famous for humour or knavery.
Thus, we have the Merie Tales of Master Skelton, in which a
collection of extravagant anecdotes, associated with the laureate's
personality and his rectorship of Diss, is used to introduce clerical
burlesque such as the people loved. But the most perfect type
of biographical jest-book was registered in 1565–6, under the
title The Geystes of Skoggan. The kind of exploit which the
Fabliaux attributed to the 'clerc' is now attributed to the house-
hold jester. Amazing tales of dishonesty, insolence, and knavery
are collected from native and foreign sources, including two from
1 Vide De Vocht, H. , De Invloed van Erasmus op de Engelsche l'ooneelliteratur der
XVIe en XVIIe eeuwen. Ghent, 1908.
>
## p. 94 (#116) #############################################
94 Progress of Social Literature in Tudor Times
the Markolf legend and one (in later editions) from Brantôme.
Several had already appeared in Mery Tales and Quicke Answeres.
These are skilfully woven into a continuous narrative, marking
definite progress in the scamp's career from his student days at
Oxford to a position at the courts of two monarchs, and thence
to his death. These licentious antics were probably not accept-
able, even in the rude and profligate court of Edward IV, in whose
reign the historic Scogan lived. But the jest-book was becoming
more democratic under German influence and pictured the priest-
hood and the nobility only as accessories to the buffoonery of low
life. So welcome was this coarser, more plebeian humour that
German jest-books were put on the market in English translations.
Der Pfarrer von Kalenberg was translated and adapted to English
ideas about 1510 and Eulenspiegell was translated from an
abridged Antwerp edition by William Copland under the title
of Howleglass, while the same printer produced an English
version of the old Danish tale of Rausch as Friar Rush. Such
tales as Skoggan's and Howleglass are a link between the jester
and the adventurer whose career was becoming a part of the
people's reading. Contempt for the routine of daily life is un-
mistakable. Howleglass's biographer goes so far as to say: 'Men
let alone and take no hede of cunning men yt dwel bi them; but
prefer them a litle or nought for ther labour nor be beloved: but
rural persones and vacabundes have all their desyre. ' In such
a sentiment, the levelling tendency of democracy has already
grown into sympathy with the picaro. But these gestes have no
literary kinship with Lazarillo de Tormes. Neither Howleglass,
The Parson of Kalenborowe, Skoggan nor Skelton has the in-
dividuality which suggests the novel. Moreover, they still move in
the distorted world of caricature, where the stupid are incredibly
stupid, and the lucky unnaturally lucky. In France, the jest-
book became a vehicle for all the wisdom and satire at Rabelais's
command. But in England, the fermentation of the age found
expression through other channels, and the jest-books only helped
to prepare the way for the detached literature of the seven-
teenth century by appealing to a sense of humour, wit and verbal
subtlety.
This sense found its fullest scope in criticism and ridicule.
Again, the literature of the sixteenth century, not yet conscious of
itself, had recourse to the past. Satires against certain localities
are among the features of the Middle Ages, when decentralisation
i Ste ante, p. 82. On the Eulenspiegel cycle, see Herford, C. H. , op. cit. chap. v.
## p. 95 (#117) #############################################
Riddles and Broadsides
95
gave counties and even towns the isolation of a separate country.
A monk of Peterborough in the twelfth or thirteenth century
satirised the inhabitants of Norfolk"; while satires are also found
concerning the people of Stockton and Rochester, and, at a later
period, on the inhabitants of Pevensey. 'Merry tales' were com-
posed or compiled on these lines for readers sufficiently intellectual
to laugh at folly. Germany set the example by producing, in the
sixteenth century, a collection of witticisms on Schildburg: the
inhabitants of this famous town are represented as experiencing
so much inconvenience from their far-famed wisdom that they
determine to establish a reputation for folly, a reputation which
still lives. A similar method of unifying anecdotes of stupidity
was adopted by the English in the reign of Henry VIII, when
Merie Tales of the Mad Men of Gotam appeared. The same type
of humour took a slightly different form in The Sack-Full of News,
a collection, mostly of bucolic ineptitudes, compiled for city readers
in an age when Barclay could say to the countryman: 'even the
townsmen shall laugh you to scorn. '
Jest-books did not efface a kindred form of miscellany-books
of riddles. Wynkyn de Worde printed Demaundes joyous, which
.
was chiefly an abridgment of Les demandes joyeuses; and the
Booke of Merry Riddles probably appeared before the earliest
known edition of 1600. These questions and answers enjoyed no
mean consideration as a mental training? , and, undoubtedly, helped
to form the standard of wit and conceit in later Elizabethau and
Jacobean times. The riddle books are full of such questions as:
"What is that that shineth bright of day and at night is raked up
in its own dirt? '—'The fire'; 'What is it that getteth his living
backward? '—'The ropemaker'; 'Of what faculty be they that
every night turn the skins of dead beasts? '—'The friars. ' In the
character writers, we meet with the same type of wit, only, in
them, it is reversed. Thus, in the Overbury collection, we read that
a serving man is a creature who, though he be not drunk, yet is not
his own man, and that the daily labour of a waterman teaches
him the art of dissembling because he goes not the way he looks.
In Micrologia, 'a player. . . is much like a counter in arithmetic and
may stand one while for a king, another while a beggar, many
times as a mute or cipher. In Butler, 'a melancholy man is one
that keeps the worst company in the world, that is, his own. '
1 Cf. Wright, T. , Early Mysteries and other Latin Poems, 1838.
This tendency begins to be marked before the sixteenth century by such books
as Mensa philosophica and Liber Paceti.
## p. 96 (#118) #############################################
96 Progress of Social Literature in Tudor Times
The primary object of these anecdotes, facetiae and riddles was
to occupy idle hours. The English miscellanies are always 'merry';
and the foreign jest-books have even more suggestive titles. This
natural inclination for amusement, in which even elderly students
took refuge from over-work, had come down to the sixteenth cen-
tury with a love of singing and dancing? By 1510, Erasmus
declared that Britanni, praeter alia, formam, musicam et lautas
mensas, proprie sibi vindicent. Miles Coverdale”, in 1538, testifies
that the taste for singing was universal among carters, ploughmen
and women 'at the rockes' and spinning wheel. Words in metre
were composed to give a fuller zest to music and dancing, but the
conditions of their production were quite different from those
which evolved the folk-lore balladº. The change was inevitable
from the time the minstrel left the baronial hall for the city square.
The transformation became complete so soon as the invention of
printing made it more profitable to sell ballads than to sing them.
These fly-leaves and broadsides, specially produced for the occasion
and sold for a penny, have nearly all perished. Popular ones
were pasted on the wall and the less valued were devoted to more
ephemeral purposes. Both destinies led to annihilation, but the
demand for them must have grown rapidly, for, in the second decade
of the sixteenth century, the author of the Interlude of the Nature
of the Four Elements complains of the toys and trifles' printed in
his time; so that, while in English there were scarcely 'any works
of connynge,' the most ‘pregnant wits' were employed in compiling
'ballads and other matters not worth a mite. ' Henry VIII encour-
aged such productions in the early part of his reign but suppressed
them wholesale when any part of his policy was attacked. In 1533,
a proclamation was issued to suppress ‘fond books, ballads, rimes
and other lewd treatises in the English tongue. ' In 1543, an act of
parliament was passed to put a stop to the circulation of 'printed
ballads, plays, rimes, songs and other fantasies. ' 'At the beginning
of Mary's reign, an edict was made against ‘books, ballads, rimes
and treatises' which had been 'set out by printers and stationers,
of an evil zeal for lucre and covetous of vile gain. These sup-
pressions, added to the perishable nature of the product, have
destroyed all but about fifty-six ballads of the reigns from
Henry VIII to Elizabeth.
