Amenities of Literature Part 21

Her s.h.i.+ning hair, so properly she dresses, Aloft her forehead, with fayre golden tresses; Her forehead stepe, with fayre browes ybent; Her eyen gray; her nose straight and fayre; In her white cheeks, the faire bloude it went As among the white, the redde to repayre; Her mouthe right small; her breathe sweet of ayre; Her lippes soft and ruddy as a rose; No hart alive but it would him appose.

With a little pitte in her well-favoured chynne; Her necke long, as white as any lillye, With vaynes blewe, in which the bloude ranne in; Her pappes rounde, and thereto right prete; Her armes slender, and of goodly bode; Her fingers small, and thereto right longe, White as the milk, with blewe vaynes among; Her feet proper; she gartred well her hose; I never sawe so fayre a creature.

The reign of Henry the Seventh was a misty morning of our vernacular literature, but it was the sunrise; and though the road be rough, we discover a few names by which we may begin to count--as we find on our way a mile-stone, which, however rudely cut and worn out, serves to measure our distances.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Speed's "History," 995.

[2] This forlorn volume of Anthony's "Stalls" is now a gem placed in the caskets of black-letter. This poetic romance, by its excessive rarity,--the British Museum is without a copy,--has obtained most extraordinary prices among our collectors. A copy of the first edition at the Roxburgh sale reached 84_l._, which was sold at Sir M.

M. Sykes' for half the price; later editions, for a fourth. A copy was sold at Heber's sale for 25_l._ It may, however, relieve the distress of some curious readers to be informed that it may now be obtained at the most ordinary cost of books. Mr. SOUTHEY, with excellent judgment, has preserved the romance in his valuable volume of "Specimens of our Ancient Poets," from the time of Chaucer; it is to be regretted, however, that the text is not correctly printed, and that the poem has suffered mutilation--six thousand lines seem to have exhausted the patience of the modern typographer. [A more perfect and accurate edition, from that printed in 1555, was published by the Percy Society in 1845, under the editors.h.i.+p of Mr.

Thos. Wright.]

FIRST SOURCES OF MODERN HISTORY.

Society must have considerably advanced ere it could have produced an historical record; and who could have furnished even the semblance but the most instructed cla.s.s, in the enjoyment of uninterrupted leisure, among every people? History therefore remained long a consecrated thing in the hands of the priesthood, from the polytheistical era of the Roman Pontiffs who registered their annals, to the days that the history of Christian Europe became chronicled by the monastic orders.[1] Had it not been for the monks, exclaimed our learned Marsham, we should not have had a history of England.

The monks provided those chronicles which have served both for the ecclesiastical and civil histories of every European people. In every abbey the most able of its inmates, or the abbot himself, was appointed to record every considerable transaction in the kingdom, and sometimes extended their views to foreign parts. All these were set down in a volume reserved for this purpose; and on the decease of every sovereign these memorials were laid before the general chapter, to draw out a sort of chronological history, occasionally with a random comment, as the humour of the scribe prompted, or the opinions of the whole monastery sanctioned.

Besides these meagre annals the monasteries had other books more curious than their record of public affairs. These were their Leiger-books, of which some have escaped among the few reliques of the universal dissolution of the monasteries. In these registers or diaries they entered all matters relating to their own monastery and its dependencies. As time never pressed on the monkish secretary, his notabilia runs on very miscellaneously. Here were descents of families, and tenures of estates; authorities of charters and of cartularies; curious customs of counties, cities, and great towns. Strange accidents were not uncommon then; and sometimes, between a miracle or a natural phenomenon, a fugitive anecdote stole in. The affairs of a monastery exhibited a moving picture of domestic life. These religious houses, whose gate opened to the wayfarer, and who were the distributors of useful commodities to the neighbouring poor--for in their larger establishments they included workmen of every cla.s.s--did not, however, maintain their munificence untainted by mundane pa.s.sions. Forged charters had often sealed their possessions, and supposit.i.tious grants of mortuary donations silently transferred the wealth of families. These lords of the soil, though easy landlords, still cast an "evil eye" on the lands of their neighbour. Even rival monasteries have fought in meadows for the owners.h.i.+p; the stratagems of war and the battle-array of two troops of cudgelling monks might have furnished some cantos to an epic, less comic perhaps than that of "The Rape of the Bucket."

In the literary simplicity of the twelfth to the fourteenth century, while every great monastery had its historian, every chronicle derived its t.i.tle from its locality; thus, among others, were the Glas...o...b..ry, the Peterborough, and the Abingdon Chronicles: and when Leland, so late as the reign of Henry the Eighth, in his search into monastic libraries, discovered one at St. Neot's, he was at a loss to describe it otherwise than as "The Chronicle of St. Neot's." The famous Doomsday Book was originally known as "Liber de Winton," or "The Winchester Book," from its first place of custody. The same circ.u.mstance occurred among our neighbours, where _Les grandes Chroniques de Saint Denys_ were so called from having been collected or compiled by the monks of that abbey. An abstract notion of history, or any critical discrimination of one chronicle from another, was not as yet familiar even to our scholars; and in the dearth of literature the cla.s.sical models of antiquity were yet imperfectly contemplated.

It is not less curious to observe that, at a time when the literary celebrity of the monachal scribe could hardly pa.s.s the boundaries of the monastery, and the monk himself was restricted from travelling, bound by indissoluble chains, yet this lone man, as if eager to enjoy a literary reputation, however spurious, was not scrupulous in practising certain dishonest devices. Before the discovery of printing, the concealment of a ma.n.u.script for the purpose of appropriation was an artifice which, if we may decide by some rumours, more frequently occurred than has been detected. Plagiarism is the common sin of the monkish chronicler, to which he was often driven by repeating a mouldy tale a hundred times told; but his furtive pen extended to the capital crime of felony. I shall venture to give a pair of literary anecdotes of monkish writers.

Matthew of Paris, one of these chroniclers, is somewhat esteemed, and Matthew of Westminster is censured, for having copied in his "Flores Historiarum" the other Matthew; but we need not draw any invidious comparison between the two Matthews, since Matthew the first had himself transcribed the work of Roger the Prior of Wendover. The famous "Polychronicon," which long served as a text-book for the encyclopaedic knowledge of the fourteenth century, has two names attached to it, and one, however false, which can never be separated from the work, interwoven in its texture. This famed volume is ascribed to Ranulph, or Ralph Higden of St. Werberg's Monastery, now the Cathedral of Chester.

Ralph, that he might secure the tenure of this awful edifice of universal history for a thousand years, most subdolously contrived that the initial letter of every chapter, when put together, signified that Ralph, a monk of Chester, had compiled the work. Centuries did not contradict the a.s.sumption; but time, that blabber of more fatal secrets than those of authors, discovered in the same monastery that another brother Roger had laboured for the world their universal history in his "Polycratica Temporum." On examination, the truth flashed! For lo! the peccant pen of Ralph had silently transmigrated the "Polycratica" into the "Polychronicon," and had only laid a trap for posterity by his treacherous acrostics![2]

These universal chroniclers usually opened, _ab initio_, with the Creation, dispersed at Babel reach home, and paused at the Norman Conquest. This was their usual first division; it was a long journey, but a beaten path. Whatever they found written was history to them, for they were without means of correcting their apt.i.tude for credence. Their anachronisms often ludicrously give the lie to their legendary statements.

Most of these monastic writers composed in a debased Latinity of their own, bald and barbarous, but which had grown up with the age; their diction bears a rude sort of simplicity. Yet though they were not artists, there were occasions when they were inevitably graphic--when they detail like a witness in court. These writers have been lauded by the grat.i.tude of antiquaries, and valued by philosophical historians. A living historian has observed of them, that "nothing can be more contemptible as compositions; nothing can be more satisfactory as authorities." But it is necessary that we should be reminded of the partial knowledge and the partial pa.s.sions of these sources of our earlier modern history. Lift the cowl from the historiographers in their cells recording those busy events in which they never were busied, characterising those eminent persons from whom they were far removed; William of Malmesbury, not one of the least estimable of these writers, confesses that he drew his knowledge from public rumours, or what the relaters of news brought to them.[3] In some respects their history sinks to the level of one of our newspapers, and is as liable to be tinged with party feelings. The whole monastery had as limited notions of public affairs as they had of the kingdom itself, of which they knew but little out of their own county.

No monastic writer, as an historian, has descended to posterity for the eminence of his genius, for the same stamp of mind gave currency to their works. Woe to the sovereign who would have clipt their wings! then "tongues talked and pens wrote" monkish. There was a proverb among them, that "The giver is blessed, but he who taketh away is accursed." None but themselves could appeal to Heaven, and for their crowned slaves they were not penurious of their beat.i.tude. They knew to crouch as well as to thunder. They usually clung to the reigning party; and a new party or a change of dynasty was sure to change their chronicling pen. HALL, the chronicler of Henry the Eighth, at the first moment when it was allowable to speak distinctly concerning these monkish writers, observed, "These monastical persons, learned and unliterate, better fed than taught, took on them to write and register in the book of fame the arts, and doings, and politic governance of kings and princes." It seems not to have occurred to the chronicler of Henry the Eighth that, had not those monks "taken on them to write and register," we should have had no "Book of Fame." It is a duty we owe to truth to penetrate into the mysteries of monkery, but the monks will always retain their right to receive their large claims on our admiration of their labours.

There was also another cla.s.s of early chroniclers throughout Europe; men who filled the office of a sort of royal historiographer, who accompanied the king and the army in their progress, to note down the occurrences they deemed most honourable or important to the nation. But incidents written down by a monk in his cell, or by a diarist pacing the round with majesty, would be equally warped, by the views of the monastery in the one case, or by a flattering subservience to the higher power in the other.

In this manner the early history of Europe was written; the more ancient part was stuffed with fables; and when it might have become useful in recording pa.s.sages and persons of the writer's own times, we have a one-sided tale, wherein, while half is suppressed, the other is disguised by flattery or by satire. Such causes are well known to have corrupted these first origins of modern history, a history in which the commons and the people at large had very little concern, till the day arrived, in the progress of society, when chronicles were written by laymen in the vernacular idiom for their nation.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Archbishop Plegmund superintended the Saxon Annals to the year 891. The first Chronicles, those of Kent or Wess.e.x, were regularly continued by the Archbishops of Canterbury, or by their directions, as far as 1000, or even 1070.--"The Rev. Dr. Ingram's preface to the Saxon Chronicle."

These were our earliest Chronicles; the Britons possibly never wrote any.

[2] We have a remarkable instance among the Italian historians of this period. Giovanni Villani wrote about 1330; Muratori discovered that Villani had wholly transcribed the ancient portion of his history from an old Chronicle of Malespini, who wrote about 1230, without any acknowledgment whatever. Doubtless Villani imagined that an insulated ma.n.u.script, during a century's oblivion, had little chance of ever being cla.s.sed among the most ancient records of Italian history. Malespini's "Chronicle," like its brothers, was stuffed with fables; Villani was honest enough not to add to them, though not sufficiently so not silently to appropriate the whole chronicle--the only one Dante read.--"Tiraboschi," v. 410, part 2nd.

[3] We have an elegant modern version of this monk's history by the Rev. J. Sharpe.

ARNOLDE'S CHRONICLE.

Very early in the sixteenth century appeared a volume which seems to have perplexed our literary historians by its mutable and undefinable character. It is a book without a t.i.tle, and miscalled by the deceptive one of "Arnolde's Chronicle, or the Customs of London;" but "the Customs" are not the manners of the people, but rather "the Customs" of the Custom-House, and it in no shape resembles, or pretends to be "a chronicle." This erroneous t.i.tle seems to have been injudiciously annexed to it by Hearne the antiquary, and should never have been retained. This anomalous work, of which there are three ancient editions, had the odd fate of all three being sent forth without a t.i.tle and without a date; and our bibliographers cannot with any certainty ascertain the order or precedence of these editions. One edition was issued from the press of a Flemish printer at Antwerp, and possibly may be the earliest. The first printer, whether English or Flemish, was evidently at a loss to christen this monstrous miscellaneous babe, and ridiculously took up the t.i.tle and subjects of the first articles which offered themselves, to designate more than a hundred of the most discrepant variety. The ancient editions appeared as "The names of the Baylyfs, Custos, Mayres, and Sherefs of the Cyte of London, with the Chartour and Lybartyes of the same Cyte, &c. &c., with other dyvers matters good and necessary for every Cytezen to understand and know;"--a humble t.i.tle equally fallacious with the higher one of a "Chronicle,"

for it has described many objects of considerable curiosity, more interesting than "mayors and sheriffs," and even "the charter and liberties" of "the cyte."

In conveying a notion of a jumble,[1] though the things themselves are sufficiently grave, we cannot avoid a ludicrous a.s.sociation; yet this should not lessen the value of its information.

A considerable portion of this medley wholly relates to the munic.i.p.al interests of the citizens of London--charters and grants, with a vast variety of forms or models of public and private instruments, chiefly of a commercial description. Parish ordinances mix with Acts of Parliament; and when we have conned the oath of the beadle of the ward, we are startled by Pope Nicholas' Bull. We have the craft of grafting trees and altering of fruits, as well in colour as in taste, close to an oration of the messenger of "the Soudan of Babylon" to the Pope in 1488. Indeed, we have many more useful crafts, besides the altering of the flavour of fruits, and the oration of the Mahometan to the representative of St.

Peter; for here are culinary receipts, to keep sturgeon, to make vinegar "shortly," "percely to grow in an hour's s.p.a.ce," and to make ypocras, straining the wine through a bag of spices--it was nothing more than our mulled wine; and further, are receipts to make ink, and compound gunpowder, to make soap, and to brew beer. Whether we may derive any fresh hints from our ancestor of the year 1500 exceeds my judgment; but to this eager transcriber posterity owes one of the most pa.s.sionate poems in our language; for betwixt "the composition between the merchants of England and the town of Antwerp," and "the reckoning to buy wares in Flanders," first broke into light "A Ballade of the Notbrowne Mayde." Thus, when an indiscriminating collector is at work, one cannot foresee what good fortune may not chance to be his lot.

Warton has truly characterised this work as "the most heterogeneous and multifarious miscellany that ever existed;" but he seems to me to have mistaken both the design of the collector, and the nature of the collection. Some supposed that the collector, Richard Arnolde, intended the volume to be an antiquarian repertory; but as the materials were recent, that idea cannot be admitted; and Warton censures the compiler, who, to make up a volume, printed together whatever he could ama.s.s of notices and papers of every sort and subject. The modern editor of "Arnolde's Chronicle" was perplexed at the contents of what he calls "a strange book."

The critical decision of Warton is much too searching for a volume in which the compiler never wrote a single line, and probably never entertained the remotest idea of the printer's press. This book without a name is, in fact, nothing more than a simple collection made by an English merchant engaged in the Flemish trade. Nor was such a work peculiar to this artless collector; for in a time of rare publications, such men seemed to have formed for themselves a sort of library, of matters they deemed worthy of recollection, to which they could have easy recourse.[2] By the internal evidence, Arnolde was no stranger at Antwerp, nor at Dordrecht. Antwerp was then a favourite residence of the English merchants; there the typographic art flourished, and the printers often printed English books; and as this collection was printed at Antwerp by Doesborowe, a Flemish printer, we might incline with Douco to infer that the Flemish was the first edition; for it seems not probable that a foreign printer would have selected an English volume of little interest to foreigners, to reprint; although we can imagine that from personal consideration, or by the accident of obtaining the ma.n.u.script, he might have been induced to be the first publisher.

Whoever was the first printer, the collector himself seems to have been little concerned in the publication, by the suppression of his name, by the omission of a t.i.tle, by not prefixing a preface, nor arranging in any way this curious medley of useful things, which he would familiarly turn to as his occasions needed, and--if we may compare a grave volume with the lightest--was of that cla.s.s which ladies call their "sc.r.a.p-books," and a.s.suredly not, according to its fallacious t.i.tle, a CHRONICLE.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] In Oldys' "British Librarian" there is an accurate a.n.a.lysis of the work, in which every single article is enumerated.

[2] A similar volume to Arnolde's may be found in the "Harl. MSS.,"

No. 2252.

THE FIRST PRINTED CHRONICLE.

The first chronicle in our vernacular prose, designed for the English people, was the earnest labour of one of themselves, a citizen and alderman, and sometime sheriff of London, ROBERT FABYAN. Here, for the first time, the spectacle of English affairs, accompanied by what he has called "A Concordance of Stories," which included separate notices of French history contemporaneous with the periods he records, was opened for "the unlettered who understand no Laten." Our chronicler, in the accustomed mode, fixes the periods of history by dates from Adam or from Brute. He opens with a superfluous abridgment of Geoffry of Monmouth--the "Polychronicon" is one of his favourite sources, but his authorities are multifarious. His French history is a small stream from "La Mere des Chroniques," and other chronicles of his contemporary Gaguin, a royal historiographer who wandered in the same taste, but who, Fabyan had the sagacity to discover, carefully darkened all matters unpleasant to Frenchmen, but never "leaving anything out of his book that may sound to the advancement of the French nacyon."

It was a rare occurrence in a layman, and moreover a merchant, to have cultivated the French and the Latin languages. Fabyan was not a learned man, for the age of men of learning had not yet arrived, though it was soon to come. At that early day of our typography, when our native annalists lay scattered in their ma.n.u.script seclusion, it was no ordinary delving which struck into the dispersed veins of the dim and dark mine of our history. So little in that day was the critical knowledge of our writers, that Fabyan has "quoted the same work under different appellations," and some of our historical writers he seems not to have met with in his researches, for the chronicles of Robert of Gloucester and of Peter Langtoft, though but verse, would have contributed some freshness to his own. In seven unequal divisions, the chronicle closes with the days of the seventh Henry. These seven divisions were probably more fantastical than critical; the number was adopted to cheer the good man with "the seven joys of the Virgin," which he sings forth in unmetrical metre, evidently partic.i.p.ating in the rapturous termination of each of his own "seven joys."

Our grave chronicler, arrayed in his civic dignities, seems to have provoked the sensitiveness of the poetical critic in Warton, and the caustic wit in Horace Walpole. "No sheriff," exclaims Walpole, "was ever less qualified to write a history of England. He mentions the deaths of princes and revolutions of government with the same phlegm and brevity as he would speak of the appointment of churchwardens."

We may suspect that our citizen and chronicler, however he might be familiar with the public acts of royalty, had no precise notions of the principles of their government. We cannot otherwise deem of an historical recorder whose political sagacity, in that famous interview between our Edward the Fourth and Louis the Eleventh, of which Comines has left us a lively scene, could not penetrate further than to the fas.h.i.+on of the French monarch's dress. He tells us of "the nice and wanton disguised apparel that the King Louys wore upon him at the time of this meeting, _I might make a long rehearsal_, apparalled more like a minstrel than a prince." Fabyan shared too in the hearty "John Bullism"

of that day in a mortal jealousy of the Gaul, and even of his _Sainte Ampoule_. Though no man had a greater capacity of faith for miracles and saints on English ground, yet for those of his neighbours he had found authority that it was not necessary for his salvation to believe them, and has ventured to decide on one, that "they must be folys (fools) who believe it." Had the _Sainte Ampoule_, however, been deposited in Westminster Abbey for our own coronations, instead of the Cathedral at Rheims for a French king, Fabyan had not doubted of the efficacy of every drop of the holy oil.

But the dotage of FABYAN did not particularly attach to him; and though his intellectual comprehension was restricted to the experience of an alderman, he might have been the little Machiavel of his wardmote--for he has thrown out a shrewd observation, which no doubt we owe to his own sagacity. In noticing the neglect of a mayor in repairing the walls which had been begun by his predecessor, he observes that this generally happens, for "one mayor will not finish that thing which another beginneth, for then they think, be the deed ever so good and profitable, that the honour thereof shall be ascribed to the beginner, and not to the finisher, which lack of charity and desire of vainglory causeth many good acts and deeds to die, and grow out of mind, to the great decay of the commonwealth of the city." A profound observation, which might be extended to monarchs as well as mayors.

Indulging too often the civic curiosity of "a citizen and alderman,"

FABYAN has been taunted for troubling posterity. "FABYAN," says Warton, "is equally attentive to the succession of the mayors of London and the monarchs of England. He seems to have thought the dinners at Guildhall and the pageantries of the city companies more interesting transactions than our victories in France and our struggles for public liberty at home."