For the tithing of a duck Or of an apple, or of an ey [egg They make man swear upon a book; Thus they foulen Christës fay. [faith Such bearen evilly heaven's key; They may assoil, and they may shrive, With mennës wivës strongly play, With truë tillers sturt and strive [struggle
At the wrestling, and at the wake, And chiefë chanters at the ale; Market-beaters, and meddling-make, Hopping and hooting with heave and hale. At fairë fresh, and at wine stale; Dine, and drink, and make debate; The seven sacraments set a-sale; How keep such the keys of heaven gate? ("Political Poems" (R.S.), i., 330).
"Accident plays a greater part in the fourteenth century than perhaps at any other epoch.... At bottom society was neither quite calm nor quite settled, and many of its members were still half savage."--JUSSERAND, "English Wayfaring Life."
The key to these contrasts, and much else that we are slow to imagine in medieval life, lies in the comparative simplicity of that earlier civilization. We must indeed beware of exaggerating this simplicity; there were already many complex threads of social development; again, the subtle tyranny of custom and opinion has in all primitive societies a power which we find it hard to realize. But certainly work and play were far less specialized in Chaucer's day than in ours; far less definitely sorted into different pigeon-holes of life. The drinking-bouts and rough games which scandalized the reformers of the 13th century had once been religious ceremonies themselves; and the two ideas were still confused in the popular mind. If, again, Justice was so anxious to forbid popular sports, this was partly because some of her own proceedings still smacked strongly of the primeval sporting instinct for which her growing dignity now began to blush. The scenic penances of the pillory and cucking-stool were among the most popular spectacles in every town; and a trial by battle "till the stars began to appear" must often have been a better show than a tournament, even without such further excitement as would be afforded by the match between a woman and a one-armed friar, or the searching of a bishop's champion for the contraband prayers and incantations sewn under his clothes, or the miracle by which a defeated combatant, who was supposed to have been blinded and emasculated in due course of justice, was found afterwards to be perfectly whole again by saintly intercession. Still more exciting were the hue and cry after a felon, his escape to some sanctuary, and his final race for life or "abjuration of the realm." What vivid recollections there must have been in Chaucer's family, for instance, of his great-uncle's death under circumstances which are thus drily recorded by the coroner (November 12, 1336): "The Jurors say that Simon Chaucer and one Robert de Upton, skinner, ... after dinner, quarrelled with one another in the high street opposite to the shop of the said Robert, in the said parish, by reason of rancour previously had between them, whereupon Simon wounded Robert on the upper lip; which John de Upton, son of Robert, perceiving, he took up a 'dorbarre,' without the consent of his father, and struck Simon on the left hand and side, and on the head, and then fled into the church of St. Mary of Aldermari-chirche; and in the night following he secretly escaped from the same. He had no chattels. Simon lived, languishing, till the said Tuesday, when he died of the blows, early in the morning.... The Sheriffs are ordered to attach the said John when he can be found in their bailiwick, ..." There was an evident sporting element in this race for sanctuary, and the subsequent secret escape; and we cannot help feeling some sympathy with the son whose dorbarre had intervened so unwisely, yet so well. But this affair, except for its Chaucerian interest, is commonplace; to realize the true humours of criminal justice one needs to read through a few pages of the records published by the Surtees Society, Professors Maitland and Thorold Rogers, Dr. Gross, and Mr. Walter Rye.