by Ann Wroe
But Tournai was apparently his home, and not, perhaps, strange territory to nourish a dissembler. The whole region, with its huge vistas and shifting lights, was good country for tricksters: a place where in 1477 two merchants had mistaken, in broad daylight, a shimmering field of hop-poles for an advancing army of France. The city itself, whether or not beset by war, made a speciality of illusions of one kind or another. Its painters, carvers and gilders produced masterpieces of imagery and statuary, capturing with every delicacy of line and colour the appearance of princes or of angels. Its weavers wove landscapes of fantasy, of love and war or of deep woodland scenes enmeshed and planted with every imaginable green leaf and flower, which were rolled up as ‘counterfeit Arras’ and sent to the King of England. Henry had such ‘pieces of verdure’ hanging in his palaces, where he could go hunting in dreams.
Tournai produced actors, too. The rhetoricians, who were treated as ‘workers’ with their own guild, put on jeux de personnages and held public-speaking competitions, in French or Flemish, with other towns. Passion plays, performed by canteurs de geste in the street, were so wildly popular that in 1446 the town banned them, ordering people to go instead to church and hear their salvation properly explained by theologians. Some years earlier, a similar ban had been imposed on plays about the mystery of the Blessed Sacrament par histoires, figures, imaginations ou experiences par personnages. The streets also saw mummers and players ‘with their faces disguised, covered and unknown’, who had to be banned in the war years, together with their outsize knives and sticks and the singing of defamatory songs.
By contrast with other towns in France, Tournai seemed overrun with players. In 1462 a troupe called ‘The Monastery of Sleepers’ went off to perform in the festival at Valenciennes, and in 1472 ‘a band of companions called the Joyful Hearts’ put on ‘An Abridged Version of the History and Destruction of Troy’ as a Christmas show in the assembly hall. The surviving records of town deliberations are haunted by a character called the Prince of Love, the lead player of the ‘Rhetoricians of the Mount of Love’, who held a feast each August together with his companions. Every year he would go before the town assembly to ask for ‘pennies’, like a beggar or a poet, for the sets and lanterns for his show. The good prevots and jurés of Tournai, though stretched by war, always humoured him. They found the money somewhere, and never called him anything but the Prince of Love, as though this was his only personality. In 1472 a princess came, ideally for him. She said she was Catherine of France, a natural daughter of the king, captured by the Burgundians and kept for seven months in Quesnoy; the townsmen innocently believed her, and gave her 100 écus ‘for the honour of the king’. You could live thus in Tournai, masked, princiant or weaving stories, if this was your talent and your inclination.
Jehan Werbecque’s world, however, was far removed from this. He was described in the town records as a boatman or pireman: both a docker, working on the quays at Caufours, the boatmen’s quarter, and the owner of his own boat, shipping goods up and down the Scheldt. The river was not wide or fast at Tournai, but it was murky and sinewy with currents, and so tidal that in 1477 the bodies of Frenchmen, drowned downriver by Burgundians, floated as far as the centre of the city. Jehan’s expertise on the water was important, especially since the objects that Tournai exported were often precious and fragile. Nonetheless, boatmen ranked low in the town’s hierarchy of trades. The top guilds were those of the cloth-merchants, weavers, dyers, fullers, cutters and tailors, with the boatmen in the bottom half of the regulations and processions, alongside the fishermen and rope-makers.
In 1474 Jehan was described as fils de bourgeois né en bourgeoisie, on the strength of which, in that year, he was claiming bourgeois or freeman status for himself. Most people in Tournai had this standing. As part of the drive to stop people leaving, or to bring them in, you could usually buy a droit debourgeoisie for 20 soustournois, with an extra 5 sous for the sergeant and the clerk. To be a bourgeois protected you from high-handed treatment under the law, especially arbitrary arrest by local lords; saved you from many seigneurial tolls and taxes; and guaranteed you a place in ‘the Valley’, the local hospital, if you fell seriously ill. In the great scheme of things, however, it did not mean you were anyone in particular. The least squire who wore his master’s livery in Tournai was recognised as ‘a person of authority’ from an outer and higher world. Those who were not bourgeois were very poor, temporary residents, or forains, outsiders, who had no rights to speak of.
Jehan’s father, Deryk (as the English confession had him), had been a boat-carpenter from Beveren, near Oudenaarde. The nearby hamlet of Weerbecke was where the family sprang from, and they affected ‘van Weerbecke’ or ‘de Werbecque’ at times, which gave a touch of class. According to the French confession, Perkin’s cousin John Steinbeck still lived in Oudenaarde and held office there; and it was here, not to Antwerp (as in the English confession), that his mother took him to learn Flemish. The town, on the Scheldt about twenty miles north-north-east of Tournai, was a Flemish place, and the Weerbeckes were Flemish-speakers, but Frenchified Tournai was the place to go to advance in life. Grandfather Deryk had purchased his own droit de bourgeoisie in Tournai in 1429. He also bought the house, on the river at Caufours, where the family was to live for the next seventy years.
His son Jehan had a more chequered history. As a young man he moved back to Beveren and became a bourgeois there, presumably in the boat business. Early in 1462 he was involved in a tavern brawl, wounding a man called Weyne with a beer-mug. (Beer, and who was allowed to sell it, was a subject of much passion around Oudenaarde at the time.) Jehan petitioned the Duke of Burgundy to pardon him; it was only ‘a little wound’, though it had bled, which had increased his punishment, and it was Lent in any case, ‘the holy time . . . of the holy Passion of our holy saviour Jesus Christ’, an apt moment for mercy. The duke and his council agreed, and just before Easter pardoned him of the ‘corporal’ part of his punishment. Jehan was heavily fined and, as part of the arrangement, took himself away as a banished man to Tournai. As it happened, he was pardoned not long after the duke had received the first ambassadors sent to him by the new King of England, Edward IV. As Philip the Good, at Valenciennes, was plying the English ambassadors with banquets, silverware and their own choice of women in bath-houses ‘equipped with everything for the work of Venus’, beer-stained Jehan, probably taking his own boat slowly upriver, was leaving Beveren in disgrace. The two worlds could scarcely be imagined to touch and yet, for a moment, they had done so; as, it seemed, they were to do again.
Once back in Tournai, Jehan settled down a little, living in his father’s house and pursuing the boat business with his brother Noel. Noel was a wantier, a rigging-and-ropes man, who like his brother gave his trade in Flemish. After twelve years, Jehan became a bourgeois of the town. It was a long time to wait, but he had arrived in Tournai under a cloud, having forfeited his bourgeoisie in Beveren and, as a banished man, all the property he could not take with him. He was probably about forty by this time, and his behaviour had not improved. In February 1476 he and Noel were caught up in a series of quayside fights which, by all accounts, Jehan started. He hit Bernard du Havron, another boatman, with his fist, was punched back, tried to hit him with a hef (a sort of forked stick) and then joined in with Noel, who was laying about him with a sword. Swords, though allowed to bourgeois, were not commonly worn around town, attesting again to the family’s violent streak. Pierart Flan, who was working beside the Werbecque brothers, got into the fight too, beating du Havron with a pitchfork.
These infractions brought down the wrath of the magistrates. Jehan had to go on pilgrimage to Cologne as his punishment. Noel was sent on pilgrimage to Rouen, and Flan and du Havron, more important figures in the town, were fined 100 sous. Jehan’s sentence, only one step away from perpetual banishment again, took immediate effect. Anyone under such a sentence, if found to be still in the town, was thrown in prison ‘and treated so badly that they wi
ll feel they have to leave’. Cologne, where Jehan was tasked to make his penitent prayers before the relics of the Magi in the cathedral (and to bring back proofs afterwards), was 200 miles away. The journey would have taken him from home for months, leaving his wife and, presumably, his baby son to live somehow without him. Women could take over many enterprises, but less easily the steering of a boat.
Jehan’s offence sounded like typical boatmen’s brawling, the sort of thing for which Southampton’s galleymen were often up in court. Low class meant low behaviour, naturally enough. The culprits were probably well watered at the many quayside taverns offering black beer, strong beer, fermented beer, goudale, or ‘ordinary’ beer, and blanche forte, ‘called Oudenaarde’, the best of the local brews. The instruments they used were mostly the tools of their trade: sticks and forks to pick up bales or to pluck stuff out of the river. In Jehan’s case his offences, though far apart, suggested that he took readily to violence. Middle age had not calmed him. He sowed his wild oats, too, and two illegitimate sons, Colin and Innocent, were fostered with other families outside town, though Jehan sent money for their keep. He was apparently never an officer in the boatmen’s guild or a particular contributor to town efforts, and may have remained to the end of his life a rough-edged character ready with his fists.
At Setubal the royal herald Tanjar, who claimed to be a native of Tournai, said Jehan was a rich man; not just a river pilot, but the master (señor) of ‘a boat that comes and goes between Flanders and other places by river’. Yet Jehan was not rich by town standards. The only reference explicitly to Perkin in a Tournai chronology, drawn up some time after his death, said that his parents were poor and implied that they were unknown. The boatmen’s wealth lay in their boats, not in their property on shore. The larger boats, like Jehan’s, were nefs, flat-bottomed vessels that could take whole shipments of wheat, wine or men. The smaller craft, called bacquets and pieches de bos – literally, buckets and bits of wood – were for shorter trips and lighter loads, or for ferrying people from their homes when the Scheldt flooded. Many boatmen had two or three bacquets, darting between the slow nefs and crowding the narrow river. The loss of a large boat – as Farou lost his at Condé – might mean the end of a family’s livelihood. The place where they were moored was secondary.
This was just as well. Caufours was a rough industrial place on the north-east side of town, outside the walls, stinking with the coal-fired lime-kilns from which it drew its name and with the effluent that flowed through from the tanning works at Marvis, just to the north. Wash-water from cod-gutting and fish-salting was tipped illegally into the Scheldt at night. Soot-covered vines grew in people’s gardens, pigs rooted there, and sheep were dipped in the river among the boats. (Fishing was absolutely forbidden, by day or night and with any sort of tackle, including eel-baskets, fish-hoops and pails, by town regulations of 1449 and 1466.) In 1468, the floor of the little grey-white church of St Jean, with its neatly budded spire and buttresses, was mud, with no paving. The parish was lumped in with richer St Brice, next door, for elected supervisors and for watch duty. Caufours was dela Escaut, on the wrong side of the river, ranked at the bottom of the tax- and watch-lists as the poorest part of town. From the quay there, where a small boy might stand and dream with his forbidden fishing tackle hidden in his hand, the town and the great five-spired cathedral rose to the south-west on a little hill that proclaimed their separateness and their importance.
Pierart Flan had made money in Caufours. He was evidently among the more important residents, though well down the pecking order of town officials. The guilds made up the fourth layer of government, under the prevots et jurés, the maieurs et echevins and the eswardeurs, or supervisors; there were seventy-two guild deans and sub-deans, of which Flan was one. Between his guild duties, with a full meeting of the four colleges every Tuesday ‘at the sound of the bell’, and his wicquet-watch, he was also running what was probably the town’s most successful boat business. When the boatmen were mobilised in May 1479 to take provisions to the siege of Condé, Flan claimed, over four sheets of paper delivered to the receiver, to have spent £162 17s. tournois on the boat, the victuals and the journey. He was also put in charge of the sappers sent by the town ‘in the service of the king our lord’; in the name of all the boatmen, he demanded payment for the boat-hire and everything else.
The Werbecques’ circle was therefore the highest of their poor parish and their relatively lowly trade. The list of neighbours and friends in the appendix to the French confession contained some who had ‘de’ before their names, as well as Nicholas Dubos from the family of the dean of the harness-makers (a ‘notable man’ in the town records). It also included Jehan Carlier, otherwise known as ‘the armed goat’, who in 1479 was made to stand in the pillory, with a mitre on his head and two distaffs on his belt, for having made a bigamous marriage and falsified the papers.
A house ‘on the Scheldt at Caufours’, as Jehan’s was described in the town records, was probably one of the better ones, right by the water and with the nefs and bacquets moored in front of it, as the houses there were shown in a map of a century later. The Pont de l’Arcq that crossed the Scheldt here (not ‘the St Jean bridge’, as Brampton called it) was an obvious landmark, and could have been Jehan’s toll-point later, if he ever had one. Yet a regulation of 1473, around the time Jehan’s son Piers was presumed to have been born, gave a vivid picture of the scene outside the room where his cradle rocked.
[Item, it is ordered] . . . That no person from now on keep taverns or brothels or hostelries on the quay [werp] of the Scheldt at Caufours, from the little bridge that crosses the quay towards the wicquet up to the rue Rifflart, to avoid the dangers of fire . . . to the wool workers in the vicinity.
For that son’s birth there is no evidence, other than the confession and the evidence at Setubal. Births were not normally recorded, any more than marriages were. The date of Jehan’s marriage was itself a nineteenth-century guess, based mostly on Perkin’s age when he was captured in 1497. Since he was then twenty-three or so, Jehan was assumed to have married Nicaise Farou – the ‘Kateryn de Faro’ of the confession – in 1473, the year before he took up his bourgeoisie in Tournai. The arrival of a child in the first year of marriage was usual and expected.
It may have happened that way. Marriage and bourgeoisie would have gone well together, doubly respectable, at least for a short spell. Pierre Farou, Nicaise’s father, was in the right trade and of slightly higher standing. The Farou family had been settled in Tournai since the twelfth century, and were French-speakers. They were also relatively new in the boat business; they had previously been fullers, a job considered rather better-class in Tournai. But Jehan was old for a first marriage, if it was his first, and Nicaise was clearly much younger, since many years later she was still having children. There is no proof, in fact, that she was the woman Jehan married in 1473; only that she was his wife in 1497, when the confession was redacted.
The confession mentioned no children, other than Piers. A ‘letter home’ that accompanied it mentioned several more: Jehanne, who died around 1486 of the plague; Thiroyan, a younger brother, who died with Jehanne; and a second daughter, born in 1486 as her siblings were buried. This daughter was probably the second Jehanne, known as Jenette, who lived on for many years and, in the next century, made a good marriage to a lawyer in a prosperous parish. There are indications, too, of another son, possibly born as late as the mid-1490s. But in the early 1490s, when Jehan was allegedly quoted in the Setubal testimony, Piers – by then a teenager – was said to be his only legitimate son.
According to the confession, this child had a strangely unsettled early life. A boy born in Caufours was expected to be a boatman, without much argument or alternative. The quarter showed its dedication to the business in the little boatmen’s chapel on the quayside, where the piremen themselves had charge of the ornaments and the vessels of the altar. To whom could the family nef be passed on, if not to the eldest or
only son?
But rather than staying at his father’s side, learning the trade, the Piers of the confession was shuttled round to relations in Tournai and in Oudenaarde and, at about the age of ten, was ‘sent’ to Antwerp with a merchant called Berlo. (In the French confession, he simply ‘went to the fair’ with Berlo, an interesting outing for a small boy.) The foray with Berlo was never described as a formal apprenticeship. The boy’s first proper master seemed to be John Strewe at Middleburg, who perhaps contracted him to make leather purses in his haberdasher’s shop, a craft that took two years to learn. Piers was still too young, however, to make a contract for himself, and Berlo presumably signed the papers for him. It was odd in itself that he took up a trade so far from any of his family, who would normally have inducted him into the workshop of his new master. But he had been left to fend largely for himself, in sickness and in health, ever since he had been taken to Antwerp.
Up to this point, according to the main text of both confessions, he was barely educated. The only subject he appeared to have learned in his wanderings was Flemish with cousin John – a language he could have learned just as well from his Flemish-speaking father at home. As a result, he could presumably read and write to a fair standard in two languages, and could add up bills. Such an education would not have been unusual for a boy of his class: Tournaisiens who wished their children to prosper took care to have them trained in the city’s second language. What was unusual was how much the boy was sent away, as though he was not wanted at home.