by Robert Nye
Falstaff
Being the Acta domini Johannis Fastolfe,
or Life and Valiant Deeds of Sir John Faustoff,
or The Hundred Days War, as told by
Sir John Fastolf, K. G.,
to his secretaries
William Worcester, Stephen Scrope,
Fr Brackley, Christopher Hanson,
Luke Nanton, John Bussard,
and Peter Bassett;
now first transcribed, arranged
and edited in modern spelling
by
ROBERT NYE
TO. THE. ONLIE. BEGETTER. OF.
THESE. INSUING. FICTIONS.
MR. GILES GORDON
ALL. HAPPINESS. AND. THAT. ETERNITY
PROMISED. BY. OUR. EVER-LIVING
POET. WISHETH. THE. WELL-WISHING.
ADVENTURER. IN SETTING. FORTH.
R.N.
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
I About the begetting of Sir John Fastolf
II About a genealogy refused
III About the birth of Sir John Fastolf
IV About the games of Sir John Fastolf when he was young
V About the tutor Ravenstone & the whip
VI About Sir John Fastolf’s mother & the amorous vision
VII About Pope Joan (Mary Fastolf’s tale)
VIII About the Duke of Hell
IX About the number 100 & other numbers
X Sir John Fastolf’s invocation of Clio, Muse of History
XI About Sir John Fastolf’s belly & his rat
XII About an indignity suffered by Sir John Fastolf at the hands of the Duchess of Norfolk
XIII About a menu
XIV How Sir John Fastolf went to war & about the sea fight at Slugs
XV About the sea fight continued, & how Sir John Fastolf made his name terrible to the enemy
XVI Sir John Fastolf’s cursing of the cook
XVII How Sir John Fastolf was apprenticed monk
XVIII About Badby & the barrel
XIX About the death of Sir John Fastolf’s father
XX How Sir John Fastolf undressed himself of his suit of virgin white
XXI How Sir John Fastolf came to London, & his praise of London Bridge
XXII The art of farting: an aside of Sir John Fastolf’s
XXIII About King Brokenanus & his twenty-four sainted sons & daughters
XXIV About St George’s Day & Flagellants & the Earthly Paradise
XXV How Sir John Fastolf broke Skogan’s head
XXVI A parallel adventure: Mr Robert Shallow v. Mr Sampson Stockfish
XXVII About swinge-bucklers & bona-robas
XXVIII About some more figs
XXIX About great events in the wide world
XXX Sir John Fastolf’s humble address to his readers
XXXI Lord Grey of Ruthin to the Prince of Wales
XXXII Sir John Fastolf’s commentary on this exercise in the art of royal arse-licking
XXXIII Sir John Fastolf’s praise of May Day
XXXIV About Mrs Nightwork & the night at the windmill
XXXV About correspondences
XXXVI About the best meal which Sir John Fastolf never ate
XXXVII About four princes & twenty-four islands
XXXVIII Sir John Fastolf’s farewell
XXXIX Sir John Fastolf’s permission for his translation
XL About Sir John Fastolf’s prick
XLI How Sir John Fastolf fell in love with a lady of London
XLII How Sir John Fastolf went to Ireland in company with Prince Thomas
XLIII How Sir John Fastolf conducted the militia at the siege of Kildare
XLIV About leprechauns & St Boniface
XLV About Sir John Fastolf’s nose & other noses
XLVI About Sir John Fastolf’s soul
XLVII About a base attack upon Sir John Fastolf
XLVIII About honour & onions
XLIX How Sir John Fastolf came back to London
L About heroes
LI About Prince Hal
LII About some other villains
LIII About the preparations for the Battle of Gadshill
LIV How the Battle of Gadshill was won: 1st version
LV How the Battle of Gadshill was won: 2nd version
LVI How the Battle of Gadshill was won: 3rd version
LVII Sir John Fastolf’s review of the action, strategy, & tactics of the Battle of Gadshill
LVIII About a play at the Boar’s Head tavern
LIX About the picking of Sir John Fastolf’s pockets
LX About the Hotspur & Mr Glendower, with an interruption
LXI Bardolph’s tale
LXII About the holy number 7
LXIII About some things beyond numbers
LXIV About the march to Coventry
LXV About the Battle of Shrewsbury
LXVI Who killed Hotspur?
LXVII About St Swithin, Mrs Quickly, & the Lord Chief Justice
LXVIII About Doll Tearsheet & a night at the Boar’s Head
LXIX How Sir John Fastolf went to war again
LXX Why Sir John Fastolf went to war again
LXXI About glory & a double Gloucester cheese
LXXII About the death of the Leper King
LXXIII How Pistol brought the good news from Jerusalem to Paradise
LXXIV About the coronation of King Henry V
LXXV Sir John Fastolf’s review of his banishment
LXXVI About the marrying of Sir John Fastolf
LXXVII Mrs Quickly’s account of the nuptials of Sir John Fastolf
LXXVIII How Sir John Fastolf went on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land (1st Note by Stephen Scrope)
LXXIX About some merry tricks of Sir John Fastolf’s
LXXX About Bartholomew Fair
LXXXI How Sir John Fastolf went as a nun to a nunnery (2nd Note by Stephen Scrope)
LXXXII Pistol’s tale
LXXXIII About the siege of Harfleur
LXXXIV About Bardolph’s execution
LXXXV About the Battle of Agincourt
LXXXVI How the King came back in triumph to London
LXXXVII How Sir John Fastolf drank the elixir of life
LXXXVIII About divers minor charges, costs & wages owing to Sir John Fastolf (3rd Note by Stephen Scrope)
LXXXIX How Sir John Fastolf went to the wars again, & about the siege of Rouen
XC How Sir John Fastolf was made Captain of the Bastille, & about the marriage of King Henry V & the Princess Katharine (4th Note by Stephen Scrope)
XCI About the capture of Meaux, & the death of King Henry V
XCII How Sir John Fastolf was installed a Knight of the Garter
XCIII A fancy of Sir John Fastolf’s concerning the marriage of Joan of Arc & the Marshal Gilles de Retz.
XCIV Sir John Fastolf’s great Bill of Claims against the Crown (With Notes by Stephen Scrope)
XCV About the Battle of the Herrings
XCVI An inventory of Caister Castle (Compiled by Stephen Scrope)
XCVII About the reverse at Patay, & the fall of France
XCVIII The Last Will & Testament of Sir John Fastolf
XCIX Sir John Fastolf’s confession to Friar Brackley
C About the death of Sir John Fastolf (7th Note by Stephen Scrope)
About the Author
By Robert Nye
Copyright
Chapter One
About the begetting of Sir John Fastolf
New Year’s Day
I was begotten on the giant of Cerne Abbas.
That will do. It’s true. Start there.
Now introduce me:
John Fastolf – Jack to my familiars, John to my brothers and my sisters, Sir John to all Europe – Knight of the m
ost noble Order of the Garter (once removed, but I’ll come to that), Lord of Lasuze, Governor of Anjou and Maine, Captain of Le Mans, Grand Butler of Normandy, Baron of Silly-le-Guillem, Constable of Bordeaux, Lieutenant of Harfleur, Keeper of the Bastille of St Anthony in Paris, master of Caister Castle and Castle Combe, owner of the Boar’s Head tavern, warrior and gentleman, hey diddle diddle and hey diddle dan, fill in the details later, all the titles, Thing of Thing, This of That, all the bloody rest of it, feedum fiddledum fee – me, Fastolf, now telling you the true story of my life and the history of my valiant deeds, starting my telling today, the 25th day of March, New Year’s Day of the year of our Lord 1459, which is I think the thirty-seventh year in the reign of his majesty King Henry VI, the prickless holy wonder, son of Harry the Prig, of Gadshill and Agincourt, and which is rather more certainly and much more vitally the eighty-first year of my own great march to heaven.
That will be the longest sentence in the book. Don’t worry. I don’t like long sentences either.
My feet itch.
PRICK
and
PRIG.
Worcester, if you really don’t know the difference you must be one or the other or both yourself.
Write down every word I say, just as I say it, or I assure you I will have your balls for full-stops.
Captain of the Palace of Rouen – I am the man who built the tower there, above the river Seine on the east side. Sometime Grand Master of the Household of John, Duke of Bedford, Regent of the Kingdom of France.
GADShill, you marvellous bloody fool, an expedition as famous in its day as the one at Agincourt. I should know. I fought in both.
Everything the way I tell it, in the order I give it to you, none of your literature. When a man has scaled as many ramparts and breached as many maidenheads as I have, he doesn’t need to make a sentence bob and curtsey.
Bless me, father. Bugger all. Whoops. We’re off then.
It was a fig tree they lay under, my father and my mother, my father under the fig tree and my mother under my father, and the fig tree growing on the giant’s sex.
A dark, religious wayfarer – my uncle Hugh used to say Wiclif himself, hot down from Oxford, not yet a heretic but riding a lollardy donkey and preaching in the churchyards after Mass – this wandering Wiclif comes along shouting that the giant is the Devil’s work. He recognised him no doubt as a survivor of that race descended from the thirty-three wicked daughters of Diocletian. He sweats in the sun with hammer and boards, disgust and nails, and builds himself a pulpit on the giant’s stalk, for the purpose of delivering a sermon against it.
‘Gentlemen of Dorset,’ Wiclif thunders, ‘I stand here on the worst part of our human nature.’
It is ten yards long, the cock of the giant of Cerne Abbas. The giant himself is a hillside high. His outline is a white chalk-filled trench as wide as my arm and two feet deep. His inside is complete in every part – ribs, nipples, eyebrows, belly-button. In his right hand he carries a knobbled club pointing up to the clouds. His left hand saws the air as he steps westward. His member is magnificently erect. Nearby is the abbey founded by St Augustine, with the silver spring that gushed up at his wink.
Don’t imagine that this forked radish Wiclif got red in the face preaching to sheep. Every seven years the giant is scoured, to keep his art safe from the grass. Some that live in those valleys have an inherited obligation to repair and cleanse him. If they didn’t, in time he would turn green like the rest of the hill and be forgotten. It was at the festival of the scouring that Wiclif criticised the giant’s erection, and there was a good-sized crowd to listen to his opinions, after they had wrestled for silver buckles and jumped in sacks and raced for cheeses rolled down the giant’s legs.
‘It should be covered,’ Wiclif complains.
‘Cover the giant?’ A great laugh goes up in the sun. ‘How could you cover it?’
Wiclif considers, calling to mind his education, and then he announces: ‘In Greek times, the statues were given fig leaves to hide what should not be seen by shamefast eyes.’
‘Extraordinary big fig leaf you’ll need here,’ points out some Pythagoras of the hedgerows.
Wiclif said: ‘Let it be a fig tree then!’
And, lo, there was a fig tree. Wiclif’s disciples planted one when the greasy pole had been taken down and the seven-year scouring was over. That is why in those days, before they were called Lollards, some called his people Figgers. They dug diligently, these flesh-abhorring Figgers, and they planted their fig tree on the wick of the Cerne giant, with a purpose to obscure the terrible splendour of him from the eyes of virgins passing on the road through the valley below.
Now, life being what it is, the villagers of Cerne Abbas found that fig tree a useful and appropriate addition to their giant’s attributes. In summer it was cool and shady to lie under, and a man and a woman could be secret there. In winter, it kept some of the rain off.
Glasses, glasses, is the only drinking. Tell Macbeth he can pawn or smash the plate.
My mother was a well-known wearer-out of husbands. (This is not criticism. I do not criticise. I observe.) She had been married three times before she met my father, joined to fellows of substance too, none of your Johns of Gaunt – men of pepper, ginger, cloves, my ghostly fathers, who did not fail to make me for a lack of kidneys. Yet knock as they might, I did not answer. Ferret as they did in her sweet little moss-grown coney patch, there was never a scut of a child.
Put it away, Worcester. You’ll never get to heaven doing that.
My father was a man of iron will. He had a red beard and eyes like caves. He married my mother sensibly for the triple joy of her widowhood, the three estates, but he was concerned – as an English country gentleman and an epitome of the chivalric virtues – with the making of a son.
Having heard well of the giant’s child-inspiring powers, my father takes my mother by the hand and leads her up to him the night before their wedding. It had been a hot day, the hottest day that any man could remember, the skylarks swooning in the sticky air, milk turning sour in the cows’ udders. At the end of that hottest day now it is suddenly Midsummer Eve and the giant stands out bold and wonderful and monstrous on his long green Dorset hill, the moon at the full above his knobbled club. My father lays my mother down on the giant’s thistle, in the modest shade of Mr Wiclif’s burgeoning fig tree.
‘Dear heart,’ says he, taking off his spurs and his liripipe hat, ‘I shall require an heir.’
If ever widow woman blushed then my mother blushed hot when she saw my father unbuttoned above her in the moonlight. ‘My womb,’ says she, ‘is empty.’
My father engages the key in the lock. It is well-oiled. He turns and enters and makes himself at home.
‘I have been told,’ he says,
‘that any true woman,’ he says,
‘childless,’ he adds,
‘who lies,’ he says,
‘on the Cerne giant,’ – my father
takes a shuddering juddering breath –
‘conceives without fail,’ he explains.
My father goes on, without need of saying.
It is sixty yards if it is an inch from the top to the toe of the giant of Cerne Abbas. The creature’s club alone must be every bit of forty yards.
‘O Gog,’ says my mother eventually. ‘O Gog, O Gog, O Gog.’
‘I do believe,’ says my father, ‘Magog.’
Now, in the moment of my conception, as a star falls into my mother’s left eye, as the wind catches its breath, as the little hills skip for joy, and the moon hides her face behind a cloud – a bit of local history. When St Augustine came calling in those parts the people of Cerne tied a tail to his coat and whipped him out of their valley. The saint was furious. He got down on his knees and prayed to God to give tails to all the children that were born in Dorset. ‘Right,’ said the Omnipotence. This went on, tails, tails, tails, tails, until the folk regretted their pagan manners. When they expressed their regre
t, St Austin came back and founded the abbey, calling it Cernal because he was soon seeing his visions there – from the Latin, cerno, I see, and the Hebrew, El, God.
That’s enough history. I prefer mystery.
The sun at my making was in the sign of Libra near Venus. The moon was in Capricorn. My conceptual Jupiter, so they tell me, is on Joan of Arc’s Saturn, and my Mars up her Uranus.
Chapter Two
About a genealogy refused
All Fools’ Day
You see this fig then? My family tree has figs on it. As I was explaining eight days ago, before my autobiography was interrupted by alcohol. O times, O manners. We’ll never get through hell at this rate. Courage, I’m eating the fig now. I’ve eaten them all my life. By the bushel I used to roll the little demons down my throaty before entering the lists of love. Half a dozen do these days. My niece Miranda comes this afternoon.
Your fig, being your ficus, has other properties than that sly service noticed by Pliny. Mashed, by all means, a bowl of figs works wonders in the bowels, and there’s nothing like a brace of them for inspiriting a generous fart. Fig puddings on Palm Sundays. Fig-sue on Good Friday – ale, sliced figs, bread and nutmeg boiled together and supped hot like soup. Fine, discharging stuff. But I’m not talking about Ajax. I am talking about Aphrodite. I am talking about your fat plum-purplish Queen Fig, your ripe and autumn forky fig, gone out to turn gold in the sun along the wall, then cherished in silk and pulled and squeezed and sleeked by a young girl’s fingers. A boon to the weary warrior. Pliny himself says that the milky juice of the fig leaf and the fig stem raises blisters. It’s the raising capacities and capabilities of the purple fig itself that interests me. The fat, wild, swelling fig, my hero. Sacred to Bacchus. Anno mundi 4483 – there was a fig tree overshadowing Romulus and Remus, where they sucked on the mother wolf’s mammets.
Talking of figs and thistles, when I was a young man I used to wake up in the morning with a cock like a sword, like an iron bar. I couldn’t push it down with two hands. Two strong wives couldn’t push it down with four hands – Mrs Ford and her friend, they tried. I was delighting the both of them, sweet ladies of Windsor. We made merry in an enormous linen-basket full of their underwear, the three of us, and all round the roots of the old oak in Windsor Park. Mrs Ford’s friend had a bum like a melon. She liked me to bugger her while she sucked her neighbour’s titties. Then she would have me futter Mrs Ford, while the two of them wriggled about poking their fingers up each other’s arses. And so on. They couldn’t get enough of it. They had to have their servants burn my buttocks with tapers to make me stop, but that only made my man the hotter and I swear I turned into a bull, a stag, a pagan god of the hunt to satisfy the pair of them. Lord, I went at it with a whopping will! I rogered and rammed and ploughed them until they thought the sky was raining potatoes and thundering to the tune of Greensleeves. When they flagged, I fed them eringoes, little candied roots of sea-holly, useful in their amatorious properties for ladies whose desires outreach their abilities. My merry mistresses divided me – a haunch each. The muscle in the middle did for both. That midsummer night by the Herne Oak they must have had more luxury from me than their husbands had given them in all the years of their married bliss. I took them in turn, until the starlight and moonshine ran out. All the same, in the morning, even after that most extreme and thirsty intercourse – like a sword, Worcester, like an iron bar! I couldn’t push it down with both hands, no matter how I tried. Even in France, when I was raising hell and raping up the Meuse and bringing great joy to all the burghers’ wives in the garrisons we took, and when I was captain of Conde Norean and it was my duty to satisfy seven French matrons a night – still, in those dandled days, I couldn’t get my cock down with both hands. But this is why I’ve had you call Friar Brackley. Father, I’ve a confession to make. A moment of truth. An instant of self-knowledge in an aging soul. Just yesterday, at the end of our New Year revels, I woke up in the morning and took stock of my stick and you know what? I realised that now I can push it down with both hands. Indeed, I’ll tell you the truth, I can just about push it down with one hand. That’s why I’ve called for you. A simple question. Worcester knows I mean it: