Town Life in the Fifteenth Century, Volume 2. Green Alice Stopford

to give true weight, to remember ever that “Borrowed thing must needs go home.” They are not to ape their betters in dress, only

      “Be as pure as flour taken from the bran

      In all thy clothing and all thine array.”

      With one whom “thou knowest of greater state” there should be no easy fellowship, no dining or betting or playing at dice; above all there must be no show of overmuch “meekness” or servility, “for else a fool thou wilt be told.”[10] A practical religion adds its simple obligations.[11] Men ought to pay their tithes, to give to the poor, to be strong and stiff against the devil. The prayer on awaking, the daily mass before working hours, the duties of self-control and submission, must ever be kept in mind. For the trader indeed the way of virtue was a narrow one and straight. Three deaths ever stand menacingly before him. First comes the common lot, the mere severing of soul and body.

      “The tother death is death of Shame,

      If he die in debt or wicked fame;

      The third death, so saith the clerks,

      If he hath no good works.”[12]

      But side by side with directions about mercy, truth, and fulfilling the law, come other warnings – warnings about carving meat and cutting bread and dividing cheese, about a formal and dignified bearing, how to walk and stand and kneel, how to enter a house or greet a friend in the street – all carefully and laboriously shaped into rhyme. In the new sense of changing customs, of fashions that came and went with the revolutions of society,[13] training and thought and conscious endeavour were called in to replace the simplicity of the old unvarying forms. Manners became a subject of serious anxiety. Throwing aside the mass of tradition handed down from century to century, when every usage was consecrated by custom, and determined by immemorial laws as to the relations of class to class, the burghers, side by side with the professional and middle classes all over the kingdom, were tending towards the realization of a new social order, in which men were no longer obliged as formerly to pass through the door of the Church to find the way of social advancement, but might attain to it along the common high road of secular enterprise. The notion of the worth of the individual man was none the less important for the homely and practical form given to it in their rude and untrained expression. No one, they declared simply, need be shamefaced, of whatever lowly position he might come, for

      “In hall or chamber, or where thou gon,

      Nurture and good manners maketh man.”

      In whatever society he might find himself, the humblest citizen should therefore so order his behaviour that when he left the table men would say “A gentleman was here.”[14] The practical divinity of plain people easily drew the graciousness of outward demeanour within the sphere of religion, and “clerks that knew the seven arts” explained

      “That courtesy from heaven came

      When Gabriel our Lady grette

      And Elizabeth with Mary mette.”[15]

      Since “all virtues are closed in courtesy and all vices in villany” or rudeness, the best prayer one could make was to be well-mannered, for the virtues of a fine behaviour reached as far as thought could go.

      “In courtesy He make you so expert,

      That through your nurture and your governance,

      In lasting bliss He may yourself advance.”

      These books of courtesy show us one side of the great change that passed over society[16] when the mediæval theory of status was broken down by the increase of riches which trade brought with it, and the new chances of rising in the world through wealth. The yeoman might become a gentleman by getting into a lord’s household, and “spending large and plenty.” The squire who would be a knight without the danger of bearing arms need only go to the king’s court with his purse full of money. The man of letters, the merchant, the seeker after pleasure, whoever and whatever a man might be, he could win neither degree nor worship “but he have the penny ready to take to.”[17] When the acquisition of wealth or the passage from one class to another was practically impossible, poverty and a low estate might still be dignified. But as soon as fortune and position had been brought within the reach of all, the man who remained poor might be looked on as idle or incapable. A new test of superiority was applied, a test of material prosperity, and by this measure the townsman was judged by his neighbours and naturally judged himself. On all sides we find indications of the excited ambition which had begun to stir in every class,

      “Now every boy will counterfeit a knight,

      Report himself as good as he.”[18]

      New distinctions of rank and caste began to appear, and an aristocracy of energy and skill constantly recruited and invigorated made its influence felt in every borough, as public honour was attached to trade in proportion to the wealth which its followers could win. The wool trade especially held a place of distinction in common esteem; and people who took to the selling of cloth were supposed to “live like gentlemen” and rejoice in a really superior station.[19] More and more the enriched burgher hastened to give proof that he had risen into the leisured class by donning the fine dress whose cumbrous folds bespoke a sedate idleness and luxury, so that whereas “sometime afar men might lords know by their array from other folk, now a man shall stand or muse a long throw which is which.”[20]

      As the chance of rising in the world stirred in the trader a new ambition, so it stirred too the sense of the power of knowledge. When the writer of Piers Ploughman counts up the gifts of the Spirit that were distributed among the commons at the descent of the Holy Ghost as “treasure to live by to their lives’ end,” and “weapon to fight with when Anti-Christ assaileth,” he carefully reckons in with the rest the wit to use words skilfully as preachers and prentices of law who live leally by labour of tongue, the crafts and “connynge” of sight by which men win their livelihood with selling and buying, the wisdom to till and thatch and cook as their wit would when the time came; the art of divining and dividing numbers, and all such learning of the schools.[21] Already the workers of the town were reaching forward, as some of their rough rhymes show, to a true love of learning.[22] Their zeal took very practical form. Side by side with the great movement for education which was going on under the patronage of kings and queens, of archbishops and bishops, and great lords and ladies, humbler work was taken in hand by burghers and tradesmen for the teaching of their own people.[23] The founding of free grammar schools all over England was the work of the trading classes themselves. Sometimes the schools were founded by Guilds.[24] Sometimes townsmen who had thriven in the world remembered gratefully the place of their birth or their education. “By some divine chance” a “teacher of grammar learning” came to live in Rotherham about the beginning of the fifteenth century, and one of the town boys, Thomas Scott, who had been taught by him about 1430, became in 1474 Lord Chancellor, and in 1480 Archbishop of York. In 1483 he founded a college in his old home with a Provost and three Fellows who were to teach freely any one who came to them. One was to give lessons in grammar, poetry, and rhetoric; the second in music, especially singing, playing, and broken song; and if possible these two were to be priests, or at least one of them. The third Fellow was to teach writing and arithmetic to youths who were not intended for the priesthood, but for trades and other employments; for among the children of Rotherham, said the archbishop, there were many who were “valde

10

Manners and Meals, 182.

11

Percy Society, vol. xxiii. Songs and Carols, see songs xxxii. and xxxv.

12

Commonplace book of the fifteenth century edited by Miss Toulmin Smith. Catechism of Adrian and Epotys, p. 40, lines 421-8.

13

“Men’s works have often interchange

That now is nurture sometime had been strange.

Things whilom used be now laid aside

And new fetis [fashions] daily be contrived.”

– Caxton’s Book of Courtesy (E. E. Text Society), 45.

14

Manners and Meals, 271.

15

Ibid. p. 265.

16

The popularity of the “Ship of Fools,” with its trite, long-winded, and vague moralities, is an excellent indication of the intellectual position of the new middle class.

17

Songs and Carols (Percy Society, xxiii.), song xxx.

18

Songs and Carols (Percy Society, xxiii.) lxxvi.

19

Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 174.

20

Book of Precedence, 106. “Money maketh merchants, I tell you, over all.” Skelton’s Poems (ed. Dyce) i. 277.

21

“‘Though some be clannere than some, ye see well,’ quoth Grace,

That all craft and connyng came of my gift.”

– Passus xxii. 252-3.

22

“Son, if thou wist what thing it were,

Connynge to learn and with thee to bear,

Thou would not mis-spend one hour,

For of all treasure connynge is the flower;

If thou wilt live in peace and rest

Hear and see and say the best.”

Book of Precedence, 69. Another rhyme gives the lesson in ruder form.

“Learn as fast as thou may and can

For our Bishop is an old man

And therefore thou must learn fast

If thou wilt be Bishop when he is past.”

– Manners and Meals, 383.

23

See Manners and Meals, lii to lxii.

24

At Lynn there was in 1383 a Guild “of young scholars”; at Worcester the Guild of S. Nicholas kept “time out of mind a free school within the said city in a great hall belonging to the said Guild called the Trinity Hall.” The Guild of Palmers supported a school at Ludlow; and so did Guilds at Stratford and at Deritend. The Guild of Kalenders in Bristol had in the twelfth century kept a school of Jews, and when that business came to an end were still charged with education, public lectures, and the management of a free library. (English Guilds, 51, 205, 196, 221, 288. See Hunt’s Bristol, 112, 249, 260.) The Drapers had a school at Shrewsbury (Hibbert’s Inf. of English Guilds, 33); and the Merchant Tailors in London (Clode, 35). I learn from Mr. A. F. Leach that at Ashburton the Grammar School founded 1314 by Bishop Stapledon of Exeter (who also founded Exeter College) was entrusted to the Guild of St. Lawrence, whose chantry-priest was the schoolmaster. The school is still kept on the site of the Guild Chapel, the original tower of which forms part of the School.