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 rhapsody 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 imitation of the German school. Its author does not portray moral

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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 drunkenness1, the ferocious conflicts between husband and wife2; 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 immorality. The captain of his 'bote' is the notorious Cocke Lorell, a tinker after Overbury's own heart (probably a historical personage), 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.

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.

2 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.

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. Moreover, 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 devotional 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 volume2, was possibly influenced by Le Testament de Taste Vin (c. 1488), or both were influenced by earlier drinking songs; just as Taste Vin decrees 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. II, p. 256.

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 of types.

This fashion of writing mock testaments appears to have become popular. Evidence of its influence on the new court poetry is found in such love complaints as The Testament of the Hawthorne1. 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 Messe2, 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. 2 See ante, p. 80.

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 Brinklow, 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 Phisitiens, Apothecaries and Chirurgians is now lost. In 1575, Awdeley printed the XXV Orders of Knaves, in which brief and sarcastic catchwords out of the immemorial bill of charges against those that serve1' 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 explanatory verses. One of the most curious is a broadside without 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 development is the Theophrastian character, in which the sixteenth century 1 Herford, C. H., Literary Relations of England and Germany, p. 363.