Falstaff

by Robert Nye

  Father, do you think I’m getting stronger?

  Feedum, fiddledum –

  A pox of this gout!

  Or, a gout of this pox!

  (The one or the other plays the rogue with my great toe …)

  As to the other sort of family tree, I have one, as good as any now in England, somewhat superior to the shrub Plantagenet if you want to know, but I don’t intend to include much here on that subject. Chaps who seek dignity in genealogy are bandits. A man is the shape that fills his own suit, not his father’s, or his father’s father’s. At the same time I would lie if I came pretending to have made my way single-handed in this naughty world. We Fastolfs have a history of substance.

  My great great great great grandfather Fastolf is in Domesday Book. Page 777. You will find there written against our name that he held freely from King William the Conqueror the church in the borough of Stamford, County Lincoln. Not that my people came in with the Conqueror. We were here already. We were the chief directors of the work of the tower of Nimrod. We were with Arthur at Mons Badon. We had a seat of sorts at the Round Table. William of Normandy’s companions were a low form of life in any case – the dregs of Burgundy and Flanders and the sweepings of the prisons of the Rhine – and many a family now claiming descent from them just advertises its cheap heart by the connection. The Conqueror! He even had to drill holes in his boats after crossing the channel, to prevent his army from going home again. William himself was a bastard. His mother was a tanner’s daughter called Arlotta. You knew that? Bet you didn’t know that his father, Robert the Devil, the last Duke of Normandy, saw this Arlotta washing her drawers in a stream one day when he was on his way home from the hunt, and that our William was conceived when the Duke jumped into the water to help her. Later, when Robert the Devil popped off on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, his cronies told him he shouldn’t leave his lands without a ruler. Robert answered: ‘But I have a little bastard who, please God, will grow bigger.’ Robert the Devil was stung by a gnat at the Holy Sepulchre, and never came back. God must have been pleased, because his little bastard grew up to be a big bastard.

  Gurth Fastolf my ancestor fought for King Harold. The story that he obtained the Big Bastard’s favour by leading a miscellany of Saxons in the wrong direction – to wit, over a cliff on an escarpment near Dover, at the time of the skirmish at Hastings – is absolutely without foundation. It is, in short, a lie put about by envious neighbours whose talents were never so complex as to catch the eye of William’s wife Matilda, a dumpy woman but not beneath my great great great great grand-dad’s notice. Those stupid Saxons rushed forward impetuously in the dark, as was their way, uttering unintelligible remarks, while the first of the Fastolfs was consulting a map a little to the north.

  The Battle of Hastings was unfair in any case. William had a secret weapon – a hair from the head of St Peter. The Pope sent it to him. The fact that at the same time His Holiness excommunicated Harold and the entire English Army didn’t help matters either.

  Pass me my memory powder. It’s on the shelf behind you.

  April Fool you, Worcester! April bloody gob! April noddy! Don’t cry – you’ll make the ink run. Cheer up. I’ve sent Hanson and Nanton to the Friars Minor, to ask for a look at their book called The Life of Eve’s Mother.

  The famous Willy Griskin was a Fastolf too. Griskin. It’s a little pig. Will’s father was taxed out of existence, and he left young Will this pigling as his patrimony. Of course the boy’s contemporaries laughed. The Knight of the Griskin, they called him, Little Willy Gris. So Will sold his pig and emigrated on the proceeds. In France, despite the French, he advanced himself on the back of that pigling money until he was in a position to marry a marriable woman – the widow of a banker. He was rolling in it now, and the more money he made the more the world loved him. This did not escape his notice. Sitting brooding on the fact, he had one room in his house painted and decorated by an artist called Nicholas Pisano. Will kept the key of this room on a chain which he wore about his neck, and he never let anyone in there ever, not even his wife. It was his habit, by the way, to give that lucky lady a groat every time they had marriage joys. It was his habit also, whenever he came home from seeing great men, to neglect all other business and go straight to his secret chamber. He’d stay there for hours and then come out to his family with a philosophical smile. Everyone burnt to know what was in the room. His wife begged him to show them. At last, thoroughly beseiged, Will Fastolf unlocked the door. The walls of the room were white and the floor was white, but on the ceiling of the room was painted a picture of a pigling and a little boy leading it by a string, and the words written:

  Willy Gris, Willy Gris –

  Think what you was, and what you is!

  Morally impressed, no doubt, his wife had a copy of the griskin cast in bronze, and called it her piggy-bank, and she put into this piggy-bank every groat her husband gave her after their copulations. When she died, Will opened the piggy-bank with a hammer and found that it contained 140 crowns and a note wrapped round one of his groats. The note said:

  Willy Gris, Willy Gris –

  Did you think everyone’s as mean as this?

  I like that Griskin Fastolf tale. I’d let it stand as a complete genealogy, an explanation of my inheritance, if I hadn’t mentioned the Domesday Fastolf. I brought him up to account for three things.

  First, our Fastolf land. It’s true that with the death of five or six or seven cousins in the engagement at the cliff, my great great great great grandfather Gurth fell heir not only to the church at Stamford, but to one or two small estates here in Norfolk.

  However, to the second point – we were always accounted less than the uncouth Norman overlords in that despite or perhaps because of Queen Matilda’s patronage, the Big Bastard refused my ancestor any leg up to the ranks of his so-called nobility. Gurth was told, by the burstable king himself, that he was lucky to be allowed to keep possession of his estates, and that the honours and subtleties of chivalry were not for a False Thief like him. This strange title of False Thief stuck to him, and has been by some illiterate annalists supposed to be the origin of our family name – corrupted, so to say, into Fals-taff. The declension is nonsensical, and easily refuted by the fact that not one of these same annalists can prove that my ancestor ever so much as set foot in Wales.

  Which brings me to my third reason for going back this far with the family tree – that the origin of our name, as ancient as any man in England now could wish, reaches beyond the Saxon Fel-staf, meaning a felling-staff, or cudgel, and beyond even, as some have it, the vulgar self-command ‘Fall Staff!’ meaning ‘Down, weapon, down!’ – much as you might cry, ‘Wag, wick!’ or ‘Shake, spear!’ on keener occasions – reaches in truth to some obscure and wonderful source in the Old Norse, where you find Fastulfr used as title for a pirate prince, and then again Falst and Fast who were gods in those times.

  This last point is important. It is from my Scandinavian ancestors in heaven and earth that I inherit my thirst. These Fastulfrs and Falsts could drink as well as they could foin or fight, and this has also been the case with me. The shape, depth, and beauty of it will be evident when we pass beyond these petty matters of where I come from to the larger matter of where I have been and what I have done.

  The burstable king. The Big Bastard burst when they buried him. The grave was dug too narrow, and it had been encased with stone and lime. When they tried to get the body in, it wouldn’t fit, and they had to squeeze him in sideways, three priests pushing down, and then he burst.

  Of the rest of the family I’d better say only that none of them made much of a job recommending himself to history between the Conquest and my birth. There was, it’s true, a Someone de Forstalff – yes, spell it that way, there are as many ways of spelling the name as pleasing a lady, for instance:

  Fastolff Fourstalf Forestolf

  Fasstolff Fourestalf Forrestolf

  Fastolfe Forstolfe Forestalf

  ffast
olfe fforstolfe fforestalf

  Farsstolf Fairstolf Forstolf

  ffarsstolf ffairstalff fforstolf

  Farstolf Farstalff Farestolf

  Fairstelf Forrstolf Forlstalf

  Farlstolf Farlstalf Farstelf

  Faulstalf Faulstellf Faulstolf

  Faustolf Forcetalf Forcetolf

  Faustelf Fausthalf Faustulf

  Faustoff Faustoff Faustoff

  ffalstolf ffalstof ffalstaf

  Falstolf Fallstolf Farestalf

  Fallstuff Fallstiff Fallstealth

  Fallestolf Fallestalf Fallestelf

  Falstalfe Fallstelf Fairstalf

  Falstaffe Fallstalfe Fallstelfe

  Falstalffe Falstalff Falstalf

  Falstaf Fallstaf Falsstaf

  ffalstaff ffallstaf ffalsstaf

  Falstafe Falstoff Falstaff

  – they are all of them right, every one. This Someone de Forstalff is supposed to have climbed a mountain in the Alps and thrown a stone in a great puddle on the top with such force that he disturbed a dragon who had been sleeping there for a thousand years or so. The dragon immediately ate him. How the story can be true when Someone de Forstalff is the only one who could have told it, and he was inside the dragon at the only time it could have been told, I confess I don’t know.

  There was also a Magna Fastolfe who went with Richard Lionheart to the crusades. The story of Magna F and the five hundred Turkish Lesbians being somewhat exaggerated I shall not bother to repeat it. In lower Syria he was pursued by ants as big as foxes, but escaped on a resolute camel.

  Cosmas Faustolf possessed the unusual power of destroying sheep, or trees, or children, by bestowing praise upon them.

  I had as well an ancestor who saw out the Albigensian heresy by standing on one foot and staring at the sun.

  And in the reign of Edward I there was Hannibal fforstolf, who lost his right testicle in the massacre of the Sicilian vespers, and won vast sums of money by laying bets with any man he met that, added together, their mutual equipment would come to an odd number. He amassed a small fortune. Then he met William Wallace, who was reluctant to bet with him. Hannibal kept raising the stakes until the Wallace could not refuse. William Wallace had three testicles.

  This is also the place – because I say it is the place – to set it on record once and for all that the derivation which would have Fastolf mean ‘son of Fastof’ is pudding-brained. Fastof in such a context would have to refer to some necessity of the Church – the Fast of this, or the Fast of that, and while the members of this family have never forgotten what the inside of a church is like, or I am a peppercorn and a brewer’s horse, we have never been conspicuous for our fasting. Pride, father, is not the first of the Seven Deadly Sins for nothing, eh? Pious pride – such as you get in rich libertines who abruptly give all their clothes to the poor and sing psalms naked to the scandal of young girls, or in monks who fast and pray away to skeletons and then have to put their abbots to the expense of burying them – that’s the worst sort.

  Let it ride then, that I am descended from a house sufficiently genteel, although without much service to the crown and the subsequent dignity of knighthood until myself. How and why I was knighted we shall come to in due course.

  We are of Norfolk, we Fastolfs, and these words are set down here in Norfolk, at my Caister Castle, the building of which we shall also come to later, together for that matter with my building of the Bastille.

  Eight days drunk. Tantarra! A happy New Year to all my ancestors.

  Worcester, I should mention also my great great grandfather Alexander Fastolf, Bailiff of Yarmouth until they found out, which was in the year of God’s Death 1280. And my great grandfather Thomas, who filled the same office and they never found out, 1305. Dates I like less than figs and I promise that’s the last one that will disfigure your pages today. Don’t underline fig in disfigure. I’m telling this for people who won’t need hitting over the head to see puns.

  By great great grandfather Alexander’s time we had given up dragons and crusades. Dragons and crusades are neither of them very English. We Fastolfs are as English as they come.

  My uncle Hugh the admiral left me a seal-ring worth £26. 13s. It is a measure of the meanness of the late Harry Monmouth – whose most loyal subject I remained ho hum – that his idea of a joke was to insist more than once that this heirloom of mine was made of copper. On the occasion when my pocket was picked at the Boar’s Head tavern, this same seal-ring and four bonds of forty pounds apiece were what was stolen. The prince, informed, assessed my total loss at eightpence! But then his father had leprosy, his grandfather was a madman, and he was taught mathematics by a Scottish sheepstealer. His son has inherited the family nose. No wonder the country is in such a mess.

  Chapter Three

  About the birth of Sir John Fastolf

  2nd April

  I was born at three o’clock in the afternoon, with a white head and something of a round belly. The place of my birth was Wookey Hole, in Somerset, where my mother had gone at the last minute to drink water from the holy well. If you want to know why my father did not have the water brought to her in a green bottle it was because she took a fancy to go herself on a pilgrimage, and besides he was busy making preparations for the feast which was to usher in my nativity. At the same time – while my father was ordering up cheese and cherries from Norwich, and while my mother having slipped in underground and sipped the water from the holy hole was giving birth to me attended by stalagmites – there was an earthquake. I have never understood the relation between these events.

  The food consumed at my baptismal feast in Caister was nothing compared with what my father ate when he arrived at Wells. News came to him at home in Norfolk of my mother being in labour – a labour which lasted for three days and three nights, so reluctant was I to put in an appearance in this world – and he jumped to horse and left the cooks and shipmen at their business. When he reached Wells he had ridden seven stallions into the ground, and his belly was giving him hell. First things first: He went straight to an inn and ordered breakfast. He told the innkeeper to lay the table for seven men.

  ‘Seven?’ said the innkeeper.

  ‘Seven,’ said my father. ‘As in Deadly Sins, and Wise and Foolish Virgins, and colours of the rainbow.’

  My father was a man of credit. Red beard, white hood, a key at his belt. So the innkeeper had the table set for seven, with trenchers by each plate.

  No guests appeared. The innkeeper tiptoed to the window to look for my father’s keeper.

  ‘Serve up the breakfast!’ cried my father.

  The innkeeper decided to humour him. He served up a meal that would have suited seven hungry travellers. My father ate in one place without stopping. Then he moved eating from seat to seat.

  For the first course my father had seven swans with chawdwyn – which was a mash made of chopped liver and entrails boiled with blood, bread, peppers, and wine vinegar, all the rage in those days. For titbits there were capons and a leche lombard.

  For the second course my father had a black soup, then seven rabbits and a peacock that had been sewn back in its skin after roasting.

  For the third course my father had a plate of sparrows seven times, a vat of baked quinces, and a fritter.

  The meal was followed by a dessert of white apples, caraway, wafers, and seven jars of hippocras to drink.

  My father, finished, wiped his beard and passed back his empty dishes to the innkeeper.

  When the innkeeper totted up the reckoning, he said: ‘How would you like this meal for free?’

  My father said that he would very much like that, being about to be a father for the first time, and being himself an esquire of no great estate or prospects.

  ‘The meal’s on the house,’ said the innkeeper, ‘so long as you call again on your way home with your wife and child.’