L. F. Salzman

“ The discovery of one era is lost in the next, only to reappear at a later day, welcomed as a triumph of modern ingenuity or science. In maps of three centuries ago the Nile is shown rising from great lakes, but in the atlases that our fathers used the lakes have vanished and a range of imaginary mountains lies like a little woolly caterpillar in the heart of Africa as the source of the Nile, only to be replaced once more in our own days by the great lakes. ”

“ If, then, gold and silver can be split into the same constituents it might well be possible to recombine those constituents in such manner that the silver should become gold and the gold silver. To the scientific mind the two transmutations would be of equal value, but to the philosopher aiming ever at perfection, and to the sordid speculator, aiming ever at profit, the production of gold from the baser metal has always been the goal. ”

“ Whatever the meaning of ‘Wekare,’ there can be no doubt of the insult conveyed by Robert Sutton to Roger of Portland, clerk of the Sheriff of London, when he exclaimed in full court, ‘Tprhurt, tprhurt!’ This monosyllable is a very trumpet blast of contempt and its significance surely did not require to be emphasised by Robert’s ‘raising his thumb’—whether to his nose or not it is not stated, which is a pity, as it would have been interesting to find the ‘long nose’ flourishing in 1290. ”

“ Occasionally the pension took the form of landed estate, as when Edward III. gave land in Kildare to his surgeon, John Leche, a grant which proved rather a white elephant, for early in the next reign Parliament, seeing the evils of absenteeism, ordered that all owners of estates in Ireland should reside on them in person or else pay for an able-bodied man to assist in policing the country, two alternatives equally trying to the old surgeon’s feelings. ”

“ A case in which the motive of rebellion was more clearly resentment to oppression occurred at Preston in Sussex, in 1280, when the villeins of Simon de Pierpoint set fire to his manor-house, and with drawn knives and flourished axes compelled him to swear upon the Gospels that he would demand no services from them without their consent, and would take no action against them for their violence. At the same time they destroyed their lord’s tabard, so beat his charger that it could never be used again and slew his ‘gentle falcon,’ thus wreaking their wrath on the outward signs of his nobility. ”

“ During this halt Wilkoc the clerk was sent into Genoa to fetch a doctor for Sir Hugh, and at the same time, money having run short, fresh supplies were obtained from some Pistoian merchants resident in the town. Fortunately Genoa was well furnished with both cash and curatives, for not only was it one of the richest ports in Europe, but it shared with its rival, Venice, the fame of producing a ‘treacle’ which possessed as many healing virtues as any of the quack compounds that now make England hideous to the railway traveller. ”

“ Then the spread of printing enabled so many votaries of the science to publish their ideas and theories that all belief in Alchemy was swept away by the flood of mystical nonsense, but now science is back on the threshold of the knowledge of transmutation. The old alchemists seem to have based their theories on the belief that all metals, and indeed all matter, contained one common element, of which the purest and most perfect form on this earth was gold. ”

“ At the present time [1] the coronation is the Rome towards which all roads lead; and if a walk down Oxford Street lands us among ‘coronation’ cuffs and collars and soaps and souvenirs it is only to be expected that a Mediæval Byway should bring us into the subject of coronations. For of all the survivals with which we are surrounded in this conservative country the coronation ceremonies, though shorn of much of their grandeur and significance during the last hundred years, are still the most unchanged in spirit and in detail. ”

“ There were a great many varieties of dragons, but I think the most curious that I have met was one of silver gilt belonging to Henry IV. which was described as ‘au guyse d’un boterflie’; anything less like a dragon than a butterfly it would be difficult to imagine. At the same time some of these terrible beasts seem to have been quite insignificant. The amphisbæna, though it developed in the Bestiaries into a fearsome dragon with a head at each end, started as quite a small worm, so small indeed that a whole one could be carried on the person without inconvenience. ”

“ To read a medical dictionary is to marvel that any man should enjoy even brief intervals of health, there are so many delicate organs in the body and so many diseases lying in wait for them. Read the pronouncements of specialists on diet and the dangers which attend the eating of any food or the drinking of any liquid, and the marvel grows. ”

“ In early heraldry the lean and fearsome beast that does duty for a lion when seen in profile is called a leopard when its full face is shown; it is true that a later generation of heraldic writers converted the three golden leopards of England into ‘lions passant guardant,’ but leopards they were, and, for those of us who prefer the heraldry of the classic period to its debased and jargonised descendant, leopards they remain. ”

“ For one thing the unprejudiced historian is practically bound to be uninteresting; the works of the most judicially impartial historian of the present time—so far as English history goes—are unreadable. ”

“ From insult to assault is a short journey, and horses have brought so many to the ‘demnition bow-wows,’ that I am reminded at this point of the adventure of the vicar and the dog and the door-key, which fell out in this wise. ”

“ A fresh-water monster, or at least one which started life in a river and developed in a well but afterwards took to the land, was the terrible Lambton worm, which seems after all to have been more of a nuisance than a danger, as, so long as it got its trough full of milk regularly, it was content to lie about, coiled round Lambton Hill. ”

“ The average City man is within inches and seconds of death every day, and it is only when the inches and seconds become fractional that he realises for the moment his insecurity of tenure. Which is just as well. Every age has its own dangers: we have the motor car, unwitting apostle of socialism in its brutal, individualistic disregard for the rights of others ”

“ It is rather remarkable that the year 1324, in which the great Irish trial of the Lady Alice Kyteler took place, was the date of the fullest and in many ways the most interesting of the early English trials for sorcery. In that year Robert Marshall of Leicester, under arrest for a variety of offences, endeavoured to save his own neck by turning King’s evidence and accusing his former master, John Notingham, and a number of Coventry citizens of conspiring to kill the King, the two Despensers, and the Prior and two other officials of Coventry by magical arts. ”

“ Nor is the threat of a similar penalty needed to ensure the polite treatment of foreigners attending the coronation. A certain amount of severity was no doubt required to counteract the effects of nine conduits in the Cheap running red and white wine, with auxiliary fountains at Westminster, however weak the wine may have been. Modern coronations are not ‘hanseld and auspicated,’ as was that of Richard I., with the blood of many Jews, because some of their number had dared sacrilegiously to gaze upon the king—a privilege notoriously accorded to cats, but evidently forbidden to a dog of a Jew. ”

“ Of course, it is given to few to unpack a ship, and there may be persons of little imagination to whom a bill of lading seems dull and uninspiring, but to me every such list is a potential hamper. When the bill of lading is of the fifteenth century there is added something of the feeling which we have when turning out a drawer in an old forgotten bureau of our great-grandmother’s. ”

“ James of Compostella drawing thousands every year to Spain. Still earlier the Crusades drew the pious and the martial alike yet farther afield, but of those who journeyed to the East many did not return. At all time a pretty sharp limit was set to the travels of the ordinary man by the seaboard of Palestine, and those who penetrated still deeper into the mysterious East were few. It is therefore interesting to follow Geoffrey of Langley on his embassy to the Tartar Court in 1292 and back to England, piecing together the story of his travels from the prosaic accounts of his paymaster. ”

“ All those in authority were not brutes; it is even recorded of a Suffolk bailiff that finding on his recovery from illness that his deputy had been guilty of extortion, he returned the money and dismissed the deputy. But the reports from Yorkshire in 1275 were fairly typical; the bailiff of the Earl of Lincoln had done ‘many acts of oppression, rapine, and injuries beyond belief’; ‘many other things, beyond number and astonishing,’ were related of the sub-sheriff, and ‘innumerable devilish acts of oppression’ were accredited to the steward of Earl Warenne. ”

“ The unlading of a ship is an enlarged and, it must be admitted, less personal version of the unpacking of a Christmas hamper, a joy apportioned to childhood, not, in nine cases out of ten, because in our maturer years we lose the appreciation of disinterring the unexpected from swathings of paper, string, and straw, but because the opportunities are denied us. ”

“ Dragons, after being commonplaces of ancient time, fell into undeserved contempt, their very existence denied by a sceptical generation, and have only been rescued and rehabilitated in recent years by men of science, who, ashamed to admit that they have found the fabulous monsters of faery, have disguised them in polysyllabic nomenclature of ‘saurus.’ The ‘travellers’ tales’ of old Herodotus, scoffed at by the superior minds of the unimaginative Victorian era, are daily gaining acceptance ”

“ Monkeys were kept by many of the nobles, and when Thomas Becket went, as Chancellor of England, on an embassy to the court of France an ape sat on every pack horse of his gorgeous cavalcade. The merchandise of Venice in 1436 included ‘Apes and japes and marmusettes tayled,’ and so far was the ape a common import that at many seaports monkeys figured in the customs lists, the due at Norwich being 40d. ”

“ On the contrary, in even the largest monasteries it was customary to call in a doctor from outside in any case of serious illness, and the greater houses frequently retained the services of a secular physician. The cathedral monastery of Winchester, for instance, in the fourteenth century, made an agreement with Master Thomas of Shaftesbury that he should attend the convent in return for his board and lodging, the board, it may be noticed, including a daily allowance of one and a half gallons of the best ale and a gallon of a smaller brew. ”

“ Whatever it was its keepers, who had no doubt looked forward to making a good thing out of exhibiting it, seem to have had a doubtful bargain, and the same fate befell Thomas Charles, ‘squier,’ and William Lynde just about a century later when they obtained from the king the keeping of his ‘foul called an Estrich.’ They sent the ostrich round the country in charge of Richard Axsmith and John Piers, ‘for to disporte with the sight of hym the kynges true lieges,’—and incidentally, though they do not think that worth mentioning, to put money in their own pockets. ”

“ But in spite of the ill-success of Sir Henry Grey the King in 1476 licensed David Beaupee [Pg 7] and John Merchaunt to practise for four years ‘the natural science of the generation of gold and silver from mercury.’ Alchemy, indeed, was clearly flourishing in the fifteenth century. In 1468 Richard Carter received authority to practise the art, while under Henry VI. several such licences were granted. Thus in 1444 Edward Cobbe was authorised ‘to transmute the imperfect metals from their own kind by the art of Philosophy and to transubstantiate them into gold or silver’ ”

“ Bears were even commoner sights than monkeys, for not only were there the performing bears in charge of itinerant showmen, but many of the poor brutes were kept for sport, to be baited by dogs. It was probably for purposes of sport that Sir John Bourchier, Earl of Bath, kept half-a-dozen bears, which after the Reformation he stabled in the dismantled priory of the Black Friars at Fisherton, near Salisbury. ”

“ At the same time the thoroughly unpractical searcher, who allows his attention to be distracted and does not confine himself to the strict object of his search, is constantly rewarded by the discovery of entries, quaint, amusing, or grimly significant, throwing a light upon the lives of men and women whose very names perished out of memory centuries ago. ”

“ No doubt this lent an appearance of merriness to life in the country, just as the wriggling of the worm on the hook lent it a superficial air of gaiety which deceived old Isaak Walton, but it is questionable if the feasters really enjoyed themselves, as they knew that the ale which formed the main feature of the meal was brewed from malt which they had unwillingly contributed, and that they were paying for the (compulsory) privilege of consuming their own produce. ”

“ Passing again over a century we find in 1426 William, Lord Botreaux, complaining that Sir Ralph Botreaux, William Langkelly, and others, ‘unmindful of the salvation of their souls and not having God before their eyes,’ had procured John Alwode of Trottokeshull, Hugh Bower of Kilmington, chaplain, and John Newport, who were said to practise soothsaying, necromancy, and art magic, ‘to weaken, subtly consume, and destroy by the said arts,’ the complainant’s body. ”