by Robert Nye
Mem: since I am now a servant of the Muses, and specifically Clio, better include an invocation of her soon. But today I don’t feel up to that.
I remember the moment my education began. It had all gone over my head. I had not listened. My thoughts had been following those goose feathers on the wind while this bald pedant with the tic stood defining amo amas amat. And then, one gloomy winter afternoon, the fire banked high, the candles already lit, he turned from the window where it had started to snow, great white flakes like moths, and I heard him saying in the same dry voice:
‘The rod was, at Trimalchio’s banquet, a mere salt, a sweet pepper, a little seasoning, and so it can be at the temple of Love herself.’
Ravenstone must have seen my chin jerk up. Without doubt, Jack Fastolf found here a titbit of information which tickled his fancy, although in those days he could not have told you why, nor even now can I altogether explain it reasonably, after three score years and ten of researches in this and allied subjects. It remains a fire in the blood. Who, however monkish, could resist it, if a lovely woman came to him and begged him to correct her body for the good of her soul? Not I.
Of course these matters have their laughable side, which is also why I like them. My Mrs Ford, of Windsor, once confessed a great black catalogue of interesting sins to her parson, Sir Hugh Evans. This Welsh fairy advising the use of the rod, she went with him behind the font and prepared her person for it. She had been followed into the church by her jealous husband, however, and after skulking and sulking in the aisle he now burst out of hiding from behind a pillar, moved I suppose by pity of the pain which he saw about to be inflicted by a celibate arm on the most vulnerable part of his wife’s anatomy. Nobly, Ford stepped out of his trousers and offered himself in the penitent’s posture. My mistress, agreeing enthusiastically that her husband would be better able to bear the punishment, called out to her confessor in the act:
‘Harder, harder, holy father, for oh! oh! oh! I am a great sinner!’
My tutor Ravenstone preferred to promise beatings rather than perform them. He was one of that not inconsiderable tribe of men who take more pleasure in the cerebral prospect than the physical aspect. All the same, I did not go without correction in my schooldays, and my lower regions learnt the language of his rod. When I failed to construe a lump of Tacitus, or let my wits wander while he explained to me the mysteries of numerals, he would demand that I consent to be horsed.
This complicated arrangement consisted of my being hoisted off the ground on the back of a manservant, with the rear portions of my person offered to my teacher. Ravenstone would then lay into them with a whippy cane which he kept in pickle. To tell you the truth, either his arm was weak, or his enthusiasm for the actual deployment of the rod indifferent, for he never hurt me much. His pleasure was rather, as I have said, in talking about the punishments which he might inflict upon my innocence if my manners were not mended or my application improved.
As for me, I observed pretty quickly that the sting of my teacher’s wand, however lacking in true pedagogic zest, did wonderfully warm all the dorsal part of my flesh, and sent shivers through which communicated a preliminary stiffness to my cock.
On one occasion, requiring me to be horsed, no manservant being by, Ravenstone called into service a maid of my mother’s by name of Katharina. I duly hoisted myself upon her back, bent over a desk, and was compelled to suffer the indignity of a whipping with my face pressed into a girl’s plump, dimpled neck for sweetener. Ravenstone did manage to lay on harder than usual that time – the monkish rogue being inspired no doubt by the proximity of female flesh to the work of his rod. Under his stripes I wriggled and writhed, more than was necessary I confess, but then Katharina’s smock was made of some thin stuff, and I knew that she could feel my young member pressing harder and harder against her sweet young bum as the cane came down. When the punishment was completed we were all rather red in the face. Katharina favoured me with a look as though to say she might be more frightened of Mr Jack than of Mr Ravenstone, just as she made to curtsey and leave the schoolroom.
Before she could go, Ravenstone said: ‘Kiss the rod.’
‘Sir?’ she said.
‘You will kiss the rod,’ insisted Ravenstone in a strangled voice. And he held his cane up level with her lips.
Katharina shrugged. She was an insolent slut. However, Ravenstone was cutting swift little circles in the air with the cane, so she caught it quickly in her hands, and bent her head and kissed it. As her lips closed on the birch she looked straight at me. My spine went cold. I could not have said why.
I sat for an hour after that, bottom tingling, half-listening to my tutor’s voice drone on in the summer afternoon as he rehearsed Caesar’s miserable Gallic expeditions, the while I was remembering the hot spice which came off the nape of Katharina’s neck where her dress rubbed it, and the exquisite trembling of her body as I was made to move upon her by the sting of the birch. It took more than an hour for my blood to forget.
However, it was not with Katharina that I first learnt to pay my dues to Venus.
Chapter Six
About Sir John Fastolf’s mother & the amorous vision
5th April
My mother travelled a lot when she was young. She was in Denmark and Illyria. Amongst other places she frequented the court of King Robert of Anjou, at Naples. Here she took up for a time with a crowd of penny poets. Her face made her a Muse to many; her ankles also helped. There was one of these poets, a wit called Francis Petrarch, a wearer of laurel hats, about whom in later years I heard her speak with brief affection – but otherwise she had no time for apes who write verses.
I remember an evening in winter when there were hailstones as big as my fist and I, a mere lad, sat merry as a cricket by the roaring fire, at my mother’s feet – she wore red slippers – and she told me of an ambitious young Neapolitan bank clerk, John Boccaccio by name, who wrote for her a poem in fifty chapters, entitled the Amorous Vision. This poem was nothing less than a colossal conceit or overweening anagram opening out from my mother’s name. It was prepared to a pattern cut from the Divine Comedy of Mr Dante, but it out-helled and out-paradised Dante by this manoeuvre: in addition to its story of a dream in which the poet, guided by a lady, sees the heroes and lovers of ancient and modern times, it contains three more poems in the shape of the initial letters of all the triplets throughout. It was in the first of these that this Italian idiot dedicated himself to my mother. He calls the heroine Fiammetta when you read the lines straightforwardly, but this was his fiction, and when you unpick the acrostic you see the identification of Fiammetta and my mother, whose name was Mary, or as he spells it MARIA. If you don’t believe me, take a look at the initial letters of the first, third, fifth, seventh, and ninth lines of the dedicatory poem in the Amorous Vision.
Chapter Seven
About Pope Joan (Mary Fastolf’s tale)
6th April
My mother used to tell me tales by the chimneyside. My mother’s tales were all of them about great queens and noble ladies.
I can remember the names of some of the ladies, but not their tales, such as Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt; Tamora, Queen of the Goths; Imogen, Princess of Britain; Hermione, Queen of Sicilia; Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons; Marina, Princess of Tyre; and so on.
I can remember some of the tales, but not the names which should go with them, such as the tale of the magpie that had all its feathers pulled out for telling the king that the queen had eaten his brother’s eel while he was away, and which ever after, when it met a bald man or a woman with a high forehead, used to say to them, ‘Whose eel did you see?’
There is only one name and one tale which I can still call to mind together, from all the tales of great queens and noble ladies which my mother told me. This is the tale of Pope Joan. My mother used to act out a play of the tale, somewhat as follows, with herself as all the women and me as all the men.
Act One. Scene One. Joan is born in Magontiacum,
the daughter of a money-lender.
Scene Two. She has many suitors. Chief among these is Dromio, a student. Joan loves him, but her father wishes her to marry Valentine, a fantastic.
Scene Three. Determined to discredit Valentine in the father’s eyes, the lovers persuade him to come to the house and dress in the garb of a Columbine – they have told him falsely that the money-lender is an amateur of pantomime. Joan then dons Valentine’s velvet doublet and crakow shoes, and while the fantastic pirouettes before the astonished money-lender, the lovers flee away to England. Joan assumes the name of John.
Act Two. Scene One. In Canterbury Joan is easily interpreted as a cleric.
Scene Two. When Dromio dies (pricked in a duel by an envenomed foil), Joan does not take off her man’s dress. She keeps up her religious studies and excels all the Anglican priests in counting angels on pinheads.
Scene Three. In time she leaves England and travels to Rome.
Act Three. Scene One. In Rome, Joan, now a mature woman, although in appearance a man, lectures on the Golden Bull, the Golden Legend, the Golden Mass, the Golden Number, the Golden Rose, the Golden Rule, and the Golden Sequence. Since in addition to being as scholarly as a death-watch beetle she is also as chaste as a coffin, it doesn’t cross anyone’s mind that she can possibly be female. When the Pope dies – it was Leo IV, who could put out conflagrations by praying at them – Joan is elected to succeed him by an overwhelming vote of the cardinals. She refuses. They insist. She refuses again. They insist again. The third time, she accepts.
Scene Two. ‘I don’t know what it is about the new Pope,’ says one of the cardinals, ‘but he’s different.’ Others remark that they can’t get to the bottom of it either, but they all find the new Supreme Pontiff attractive.
Joan is called John. If she had been a man she would have been Pope John VIII.
Now, buzz, buzz, here’s the best bit. While Joan had been a common or graveyard priest, her life had been pure enough to make her seem saintly. But now that she is Pope she becomes a vast victim of lust. She proceeds (Scene Three) to debauch herself and the sacred pontificate. She finds an Ephesian cardinal more than willing to mount in secret on the surprising successor of St Peter. This cardinal, Alonso, assuages her lecherous itch. But he takes off his red hat at the crucial moment and the Pope becomes pregnant!
Act Four. Scene One. At long last, then, the game is up. The one thing a woman cannot hide, once she has it in her, betrays Pope Joan. Popes are inexperienced in pregnancy, and this one does not even know herself to be so close to the time of giving birth as in fact she is. Going from the Janiculum to the Lateran in solemn procession around the holy city, between the Colosseum and the church of Pope Clement, Joan lies down in the street and publicly gives birth to twins without any midwife present.
Scene Two. The sacred college cannot believe its 140 eyes.
Scene Three. Pope Joan is thrown into a dungeon, where she dies. Her last words are, ‘Poor our sex.’
I’ve heard that, to the present day, if the Pope is processing around Rome, he will turn and skip down a side street when he reaches the place where his predecessor gave birth.
My mother used to act out this tale flatly and without betraying her own feelings, until she got to the point where Joan was elected by the dazzle of infatuated cardinals. Then she would fling herself up and down the gallery there, playing Pope, and make me kiss her rings and kneel before her on a plump red cushion. When it got to the pregnancy bit, she would introduce this same cushion to her belly, under her dress, and then give birth to it with many a Papal sentence and decree. Once, she took a lap dog under her dress, instead of the cushion. So one of my earlier memories of my mother, Mary Fastolf, is of her wearing a mitre and embroidered gloves and giving birth to a black-and-white puppy on the floor of Caister.
Chapter Eight
About the Duke of Hell
7th April
My lord the Black Death, the Duke of hell.
I used to think as a boy that the plague was a person. I lay in bed at night imagining him as a great duke galloping on a black horse down streets cobbled with dead men’s bones, or else as a swart-skinned giant striding along, his head reaching above the roofs of the houses, every now and again leaning down to breathe a stench of death in at the upper windows.
In time, of course, I came to learn from my tutor Ravenstone that this duke of mine was born in China, where men say he started to rage early in the year of our Lord 1333. He soon killed so many that his sweat infected the middle region of the air. From China he passed into India, then into Persia, then Russia. When with evil pomp he had crossed the Alps, my lord the Black Death, he lost no time in advancing through those parts of France which are called Hesperia, and so along into Germany and Dutchland. By the time he came into England he was a past master of his art.
I remember that in my twelfth year a terrible rain started falling on the Feast of the Nativity of St John and lasted until the next midwinter, so that not a day saw the sun or a night the moon. In the same year there was this murrain of sheep everywhere in the kingdom. In one field in Norfolk more than five thousand lay dead. I saw them. I smelt it. They putrefied and even the crows wouldn’t touch them.
Death brings down the cost of living. You could buy a horse for seven and six, which before the plague had been worth forty shillings. A fat ox went for four shillings, a cow for ten pence, a heifer for six pence, a lamb for tuppence. Cattle ran wild. There was no memory in England of death like this since the time of Vortigern. In his day they say that there were not enough left alive to cope with the burying of the dead. It was as bad in some places in my boyhood, while the Black Duke reigned.
The symptoms of this Death consisted of pains through the whole body, boils about the size of lentils on the thighs and upper arms, with bloody vomitings. Vomiting of blood continued without intermission in most cases for three days.
Not everyone who touched a plague victim died himself – but most did. For this reason, when the Black Death came into a family, fathers rejected their own sons. As for the priests – most of them found abstruse theological reasons for not going into the houses of diseased persons. I heard one of them say it was on account of the Gratian Decretals (whatever they might be, and they don’t sound very English). Dominicans and minor friars who did enter to hear the last confessions of the dying were themselves usually overcome by the plague. I knew two who went into a death room and never came out again.
Corpses lay forsaken, rotting in the houses. In the early days, servants were sometimes tempted to bury the dead by the paying of extraordinary wages. As things got worse, not even the greediest or neediest servants could be bribed to do it, and the houses of the dead lay open with all their valuables winking in the moon. Any who chose to enter met with no impediment. Death made them welcome, the perfect host.
Burn boils or burn blisters. I remember that’s what they called those swellings in the thighs. Gland boils would follow in different parts of the body. Titus the wheelwright had them on his cock. The Abbot of St Benet Hulme on his legs. Seven brothers in Horsham St Faith all in identical places on their necks – like a collar, like a noose. When a burn boil started it was about the size of a hazel nut. It would grow, and at the same time you’d have violent shivering fits, until your boil was the size of a walnut, then the size of a hen’s egg, then a goose’s egg, excruciatingly tender and painful where it touched the sheet. The blood would rise into your throat, the sickness lasting three days as I said. Never longer.
I remember the miller in Caister, John Tregose, who died without a priest or a physician. He lay among his sacks, covered in flour. The rats watched him die. He cried at the end for his mother. His mother had been dead for thirty years.
Little Alice Prowte at Thrigby. Her parents left her in her cot and ran away when they saw the burn blisters. If I shut my eyes now I can still hear her crying:
‘I’m so thirsty! Mummy, bring me just a cup of water! My hand moves, look, I�
�m still alive. Daddy, please don’t be afraid of me.’
Her puppy dog was the only thing that would come near her. The girl and her dog were found together. They had to be shovelled up.
Because the Black Duke always took three days, at the height of the horror some people kept a linen shroud by them, so that they could sew themselves into their shrouds as soon as they saw the boils. That way, you could at least be sure of going well-dressed to your funeral.
The jails were thrown open. Condemned prisoners were let out to do the burying. Some by eating garlic by the ton managed to survive without infection, and went free after.
Day and night the dead bell sounded. At every corner you met coffins – coffins carried by hand, coffins piled on carts, coffins dragged along. I remember when the bearers stumbled with Mrs Bigot’s coffin, and it flew from their shoulders and broke to pieces. The naked corpse fell out. She must have weighed twenty stones.
Wolves roamed in packs at night. In the villages round Thetford they ran into houses, tearing children from their mothers’ sides.
The bishop of Bury St Edmunds, lying dead in his palace, was eaten by his dogs.
The air was thick and misty. Foul. I remember a woman’s body alive with rooks. A bird had an eye on its beak.