I was looking for something to write about for today’s blog
post, and decided I’d try and find Thomas Tusser’s Book of Good Husbandry, that
wonderful Elizabethan farmer’s guide written in pantomime-style couplets: this
kind of thing, from memory:
Get home with ye brakes ere summer be gone
For tethered-up cattle to sit down upon.
But I couldn’t find it. If your bookshelves are anything
like my bookshelves, you’ll understand why. Instead I spotted Caxton’s
translation of ‘The Book of the Knight of the Tower’, published by the Early
English Text Society. Pulled it out,
opened it, and came straight across this ridiculously wonderful anecdote – I’ve
modernised the vocabulary and spelling a little. When
you’ve read it, you’ll know just why I had to write about this instead. Master
Tusser must wait his turn.
Of Her that Eat the Eele and Plumed [plucked] her Pye
[Magpie]
I shall tell to you an example of the fate of women that eat the good morsels behind their husbands’
[backs]. There was a damsel that had a
Pye in a cage which spake and said all that she saw. And it happed [chanced] that the lord of the
house made to keep a great Eele in a trunk in a pond. And he kept it much
dearworthly [preciously, carefully] for to give it to some good lord of his, or to some
friend, if they came to see him. And it happed that the lady said to the
Chamberer, that it were good to eat the great Eele, and they thought that they
would say to their lord that thieves had eaten him. And when the lord came
home, the Pye began to tell and say to him, ‘My lady hath eaten the Eele.’ And when the lord heard this, he went to his
pond and found not his Eele, and came home to his wife and demanded her what
was befallen of his Eele? And she attempted to make excuses.
And he said to her that he was certain thereof, and that the Pye had
told him. And in the house therefore was
great sorrow and noise. But when the
lord was gone out, the lady and the Chamberer
came to the Pye and plucked off all the feathers of his head,
saying ‘Thou hast discovered us of the eele [told on us about the eel]’,
and thus was the poor Pye plucked and lost the feathers of his head. But from then forth on, if any man came into
that house that was bald, or shaved [like a monk] or had a high forehead, the Pye
would say to them, ‘ye have told my lord of the Eele’. And therefore this is a good example, that no
good woman should eat for licorousness [greed] sweet or dainty
morsels without the knowledge of her husband. This damsel was after much scorned and mocked
for that Eele, by cause of the Pye that so oft remembered it to such as came
thither bald or shaven.
Fabulous, yes?
That’ll teach her to eat eels behind her husband’s back. I love the
broad, almost slapstick comedy: ‘he went to his pond and found not his Eele’… It’s
clear that this story was always intended to be a funny one: the difference
between Now and Then, however, is that Now
we enjoy the comedy but ignore the moral, whilst Then, the comedy was there only to enliven the moral and make it
more memorable. The Knight of the Tower really did believe that wives had
better not sneak delicacies their husbands never intended them to have. Besides, such deceit might lead to other things. It might lead to this.
by the Master of Guillebert de Mets, Walters Art Museum |
The Knight of the Tower was Geoffrey IV de la Tour Landry,
and he wrote this long book of advice in 1371-2 for the use and instruction of
his daughters. He was a widower, and
doubtless a careful and loving parent, and he worried about his growing daughters’
reputations and morals. He opens the book in traditional medieval style,
pensive in a garden, mourning his dead wife in a passage of great tenderness:
And of all good she seemed to me
the best and the flower, in whom I so much me delighted: for in that time I
made songs, lays, roundels, ballads, virelays and new songs in the most best
wise that I could; but death which spareth none hath taken her, for whom I have
received many sorrows and heaviness in such wise that I passed my life more
than twenty years heavy and sorrowful…
Seeing his daughters coming towards him, ‘young and little…’,
he begins to remember the days when he himself was a young man ‘and rode with
my fellowship in Poitou’, how his friends (and he?) had made love to young
ladies ‘for they had neither dread nor shame… and were well-bespoken … and thus
they do nothing but deceive good ladies and damsels’.
Like many a father before and since, The Knight of the Tower
Landry decides his daughters have to be protected from such young men. ‘And for
this cause… I have thought on my well-beloved daughters whom I see so little,
to make [for] them a little book … to the end that they may learn and study and
understand the good and evil that is past [ie: that has happened in the past]
for to keep them from [that] which is to come.’
You can’t help but like him; and I like him even more when
he adds: “I have made two books, one for
my sons and the other for my daughters.”
Sadly, I don’t think the one he wrote for his sons has made it down to
us. I dare say people have commonly been
less concerned about the morals and behaviour of their boys: the book of advice
for girls, however, became an instant smash hit. The introduction of the EETS
edition says: “It was copied many times, and by the end of the 15th
century it had become widely known. There are still at least twenty-one
manuscripts of the French text in existence; and English translation was made
during Henry VI’s reign; Caxton made a new English translation which he printed
in 1484, and German version made by Marquart vom Steim, ostensibly for his own two
daughters, was published at Basle in
1493” with woodcuts like the one below, in which a fiend stalks around a young woman who is committing the sin of vanity by dressing her hair and looking in a mirror.
The book continued to be printed right
down into the 19th century, and it’s still so lively that you can see why. It must have been
a popular read even for the young women who were supposed to be benefiting from
it. The chapter on ‘How women ought not to be jealous’ begins with a fight
between two ladies in which one of them breaks the other’s nose with a staff.
Chapter 15 (xviij) is entitled ‘How a woman sprang upon the table’. In Chapter 19 (xix), ‘Of the woman that gave
the flesh to her hounds’, a lady insists on feeding her two little dogs on
‘daily dysshes of soupes and fryandyses delycyous’ (delycyous is so much more delicious than delicious, don’t you think?) in spite of the warnings of a friar
who tells her not to waste food which could be given to the poor. Naturally she then falls ‘sick unto the
death’ and ‘there came upon her bed two little black dogs’ which lick her lips
and mouth till they turn it ‘as black as a Cole’! Shiver!
Yes, there are nine chapters listing the nine follies of Eve
(some of which I lifted for evil Brother Thomas to use in my medieval fantasy
‘Dark Angels’). Yes, there are plenty of pious examples taken from the
Bible. But these are constantly
enlivened by tabloid stuff such as Chapter 62 (lxij) ‘Of the roper or maker of
cordes and kables and of the fat Pryour that was Ryche and a great lechour’.
Who wouldn’t want to read it?
A last example:
Fair daughters, see that you
begin no strife to no fool [ie: don’t begin arguments with a fool], nor to them
that are hasty and hot. For it is great peril. Wherof I shall show to you an
example which I saw happen in a Castle wherein many ladies and damsels dwelt.
And there was a damsel, daughter of a right good knight. And she wax angry
[lost her temper]in playing at tables [gambling] with a gentleman, which was
hot and hasty and most Riotous, and was not right wise. And the debate was of a dice, which she said
was not truly made. And so much it increased that words were enhanced, and that
she said he was a coward and a fool. And so they left their play by chiding and
strife.
Then said I to the damsel, My
fair Cousin, anger yourself with nothing that he says, for you know well he is
of high words and foolish answers … but she would not [take my advice] and she
said to him that he was worth nothing and … not truth; and so the words arose,
that he said, if she had been wise and good, she should not come by night into
the men’s chamber and kiss them and embrace them without candles. And she … said
that he lied, and he said he did not … and there was much people that heard it
and knew not what to think.
It seems young people haven’t changed much down the
years! It’s a bright little glimpse of
the lives of the privileged, bored and hasty-tempered young noblemen and women
of the fourteenth century castle.
From a Book of Hours c. 1460 in the collection of the Walters Art Museum |
5 comments:
I love this, all very pleasing - aside from the lips licked black as cole which is delycyously horrific. Thank you.
Delightfully delycyous, Kath! I do have such strong sympathy with the poor young woman peering hopefully into her mirror, and seeing something that looks like a devil's nether regions - to be polite - staring back. Know that moment!
(Thank you again. I did not know there was an Early English imprint.)
Wait - she actually ate an eel, and that wasn't a metaphor? ;-)
Wonderful! I want a talking magpie now (even if it might rat me out to my husband).
Loved this! - And these things go on and on, don't they? - My mother hated her stepfather partly because he always told her that one day, when she looked in a mirror, she 'would see the Devil looking back.'
And the talking pye reminds me of a long string of 'parrot' jokes I heard when a child that are very similar - the punch-lines are all delivered by a very knowing and rather sinister parrot. Sometimes the joke is on the parrot - as with the plucked pye - and sometimes on the owner.
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