The Man On a Donkey

by H. F. M. Prescott

  So he called up contempt to answer it. He despised Aske for being a friend of the Monks; for being a gentleman; for having but one eye. Having thus written him off, he felt better, and seeing that he had got as far as Ludgate he went on a bit and then turned down Creed Lane to find a quiet place in which to eat his dole, for he had not the heart to go back to his lodging, where, even before he had set out, the other men were already sodden with drink.

  He found a good place at Puddle Wharf and sat down on the edge of the wooden staithes, with his feet dangling over the first widely lapping tongues of the incoming tide. The sun was warm, the river bright, and what wherries passed him were full of holiday-makers; but there were few people about since most were keeping their Christmas indoors. Just opposite him, a little way out, a barge was moored; a sailor in a red hood sat eating bread and onions in the stern; as he ate he hummed, monotonously and out of tune.

  Gib for a few minutes took comfort from the sun’s warmth, from the gaiety of the shining river, from the thought of the bread and cheese he would presently eat, and even from the feeling of companionship which the presence of the sailor – apart, yet not so far away – gave to him. But before long the man’s humming began to annoy him. Once or twice, when the fellow was forced to be silent because his mouth was full, Gib whistled the tune correctly, but the sailor could not or would not learn it.

  At last Gib lost patience.

  ‘Sing in tune, fellow,’ he cried, ‘or sing not at all.’

  The sailor stopped humming and seemed to consider. ‘I sing for mine own pleasure,’ said he, and turned his back, taking up his tune again, but singing a little louder.

  Gib, under his breath, wished a murrain on the fellow, who, as so many now, had no godly humility, no reverence, even for the priesthood. That rankled, though Gib knew quite well that few would recognize the priest in him under his ragged, greasy gown. ‘But,’ he thought, ‘so is the world these days – naughty men in honourable places, and righteousness a mock and a scorn.’ Whose the blame was he knew very well, and in his mind he ran over the sins of the richprelates, nobles, monks. ‘No wonder,’ said he to himself, ‘that heretics abound,’ and he groaned in spirit, both over the heretics whom he hated, and over the rulers of the Church whom he hated more.

  And all the time the sailor went on singing, so that Gib at last could not endure it. He snatched up the bread and cheese to eat it hastily, and to be gone from here.

  He broke the bread and found that it was green with mould within. He threw it as far as he could into the river, and then was sorry, because the crust had been good enough to eat, but now only the cheese was left, since he could not eat the herrings raw.

  He looked down at the water, where the two halves of the loaf were wallowing. If he waded in he might reach it, but again, if he did he would be wet, and the loaf was by now sodden and salt.

  Watching it blackly, and eating his cheese to the very rind, his mind tumbled back into its discontents. And now that mouldy loaf seemed to sum up and set a seal on all.

  ‘To this,’ thought he, ‘is Christian charity come; to this the hospitality of monks; and to that fat paunch of the Westminster Almoner the simplicity and austerity of St. Benedict.’ He was empty as ever, though all the cheese was gone, and he saw the whole world, and more especially Christ’s Holy Church in these latter days, in desperate case. Hunger and the distress of his mind pricked him like a goad, so that he sprang up and made his way towards Ludgate, going fast yet aimlessly, his thoughts distracted – between his own need of begging or earning a meal, and the world’s need of repentance and return to the virtue of the older times. ‘Deus misereatur nobis,’ he kept muttering, and the few he met in the streets glanced at him, and stepped aside, so wild and fierce was his look.

  He came to the wall of the Black Friars’ House, and passed a little group at the gate, but then he swung about and went back. There were two comfortable, broad-shouldered, soberly clad men there, just getting down from horseback; they looked like yeomen or merchants in a small way, in from the country.

  ‘Sirs,’ said Gib, pulling off his cap, and trying to look serviceable, ‘I will hold and walk your horses for a penny.’

  They gazed at him with the slow suspicion of the country-bred, and he thought they would refuse; but just then a Friar came out of the gate and they referred the matter to him. He was a quick restless man with glancing eyes that seemed to take in more than lay on the surface of things. He said – surely they must leave the horses in charge of this – worthy man – he summed up Gib with a searching glance and hardly a pause, and then he was gone inside with his two guests, and Gib paced up and down the street beside the heavy beasts, or stood and leaned against their barrel-like girth.

  At the end of a weary hour out came the two, and Gib got his penny and no more. Still, it would buy a dish of eggs at an ordinary if he made haste, for dinner-time was almost over. He was turning away when the same Friar who had welcomed in the two countrymen put a hand on his arm.

  ‘Have you dined, Master... Scholar? Or is it “Sir Priest”?’

  Gib answered only the first question – ‘No, but I am about to dine even now.’

  ‘Upon a penny,’ said the other, and before Gib could be angry – If you come within you shall dine, and yet save your penny. Come, come in!’

  He left Gib to follow or no, and Gib followed, wondering what the Friar did it for. He could not know that Brother Laurence was one of those who like to interfere, kindly sometimes, and sometimes of malice, in the affairs of others.

  To Gib he seemed incredibly, even, for a time, suspiciously, kind. But when a hunk of brawn, and a big piece of mutton pie, and close on a quart of ale had gone down Gib’s throat he ceased to suspect, and to resent, and even to notice the sharp glances that Brother Laurence gave him, when, every now and then, the Friar would raise his eyes from his lap where his fingers were fretting his beads up and down upon the string. Feeling himself at ease Gib flung one leg along the bench and, leaning an elbow on the table, began to talk, with the help of an occasional question from the Friar, as he had not talked since he left Oxford behind.

  He was, he told the Friar, a man of Swaledale in the north parts, of Marrick on Swale, and son of a carter. A priest he was right enough, and scholar too, for after he was priested – he stumbled there, grew vague, and passed on to the time when he served in the Queen’s College at Oxford, earning his keep and getting his learning as best he could. ‘And then,’ said Gib, taking another stride to cover another awkward part of his story, ‘I came here to London, since when I have none well sped.’

  ‘So you have studied at Oxford?’

  ‘Seven years. To no end.’ Gib brooded, and the feeling of well-being waned within him. ‘To no good end, for how could learning serve in these days, but if I were willing to creep into favour of some rich priest as other men do? For in these decaying times—’

  He jumped at the force and suddenness with which the Friar banged his fist on the table.

  ‘Master Priest, you have spoken the fit word. Decaying the times are, yea decayed, corrupt, rotten.’

  At an opinion so congruous with his own Gib’s eyes began to burn with their sombre fire. For a little while he and the Friar told each other what was amiss with the Church, and the Churchmen – Bishops, priests, monks, and nuns. Then Gib held forth alone and the other listened.

  ‘And who shall reform the whole of the Spiritual Estate?’ he concluded at last, and brooded over his own question, adding after a little, ‘No wonder heretics are many among us.’

  He was startled out of his thoughts by the Friar asking, and asking him again, ‘What were these heretics?’ It seemed to him a foolish question. Everyone knew what heretics were – Lollards, those who would have no priesthood, no sacrament, no Church; those who read books that were forbidden. So he answered stiffly, not understanding the reason of the question.

  The Friar sat silent a moment. It was quiet in the big, high, vaulted Frater. The s
unshine had waned now, and the light came dully through coloured windows, five great traceried windows down each side. There was a smell of clean rushes underfoot, and of wood smoke, of tallow candles, and of many meals.

  ‘Friend,’ said the Friar at last, looking very hard and piercing at Gib, ‘wot you what those two good men, whose horses you held, came to me for?’ Gib shook his head. ‘They came to buy from me books of the Scriptures, Englished, and other books such as are forbidden to be read.’ Then he said, ‘Come up to my chamber. It seems to me you do not yet know rightly what are heretics.’

  The room to which he led Gib was small, but pleasant and warm, for it had a glass window, and a little charcoal brazier was burning there. There was a bed with a red say coverlet, a big chest at the foot of the bed, a stool, a bench, and a shelf with books; Gib went to the books, like a fish to a may-fly. There was a Mass book, the whole of Chrysostom and Gregory, a Summa Angelica, Gregory’s Moralia, and a breviary. He sighed as he paused before turning back to the Friar, as much with pleasure as with envy, and let his hand slip lovingly over the bindings.

  The Friar was smiling. ‘Those are not the books I would show you, and talk with you of.’ He took a key from his neck and unlocked the great chest, letting the lid fall back on the bed.

  Gib knelt, and began to look at the books that lay within, together with an old sparver cloth, and some sheets, two or three linen shirts, and a lute. The Burying of the Mass, The Psalter in English, An A.B.C. against the Clergy, The Practice of Prelates, he read.

  ‘All proclaimed against, whether to sell, buy or read,’ said the Friar.

  Gib sat back on his heels. Yesterday he would have been horrified, but to-day it was different. As though his mind had been full of gunpowder, which it needed but a trifle to touch off, the tuneless singing of a sailorman and a mouldy loaf had caused an explosion which had unbolted doors and window shutters. And now he would listen without fear to this Friar who had fed him, and who spoke his own thoughts of the corruption of the Church, and of the greed of rich men.

  So, while the Friar talked, he listened. At first, it made his skin creep to hear the holy mystery of the Bread called ‘Round Robin’, or ‘Jack in the Box’. When the Friar blamed much of the ills in the Church upon the Pope’s Court of Rome and said, ‘Yea, and the Hollow Father himself must shoulder it too,’ Gib crossed himself and blinked. But he grew used to such outrageous words, and was able to smile when the Friar read aloud to him from A dialogue betwixt the Gentleman and the Plowman.

  ‘So,’ the Friar came to his conclusion, ‘these are your heresies, and I, no doubt, one of your heretics, but what do I hold but you hold it too, though maybe you know it not? And what is it that I would do to cleanse and reform the Church, but you would do the very same?’

  They were sitting now on either side of the brazier, Gib on the bench and the Friar on the stool. Gib drew a deep breath. ‘By God’s Soul!’ he cried. ‘It is the truth,’ and he brought his fist down on the seat beside him.

  ‘Let us,’ said the Friar, ‘root out from the Church all these proud prelates with their jewelled rings, and their tippets of satin, and their scarlet hats from Rome. And with them let us root out also all these fat, lascivious abbots that keep paramours, two or three, in their lodgings, and these ignorant and beastly priests that haunt brothels...’

  He ran on quite a time, but Gib lost him, because those words of the Friar had thrown him back into his own past, and into the darkness of the old sore shame. So he sat, hearing nothing, but going hot and cold, and feeling the sweat start on his back, knowing he would speak, and telling himself there was no need to speak. Then, as if someone had jolted it out of him without his will, he cried, not in his own voice, which was strong and harsh, but in a wavering voice that sounded strange in his ears, though he had heard the like of it from the lips of others in the confessional, – ‘Listen to me. Stop! I am one of them. I am a fornicator; I committed fornication with a woman, not once but often and for years, so that she bore me four children.’

  When he had said that he turned away upon the bench and let his head hang down so that the Friar could not see his face.

  Brother Laurence had pulled up short. The thread of his discourse, which had been at that moment of the feigned miracles of St. Thomas of Canterbury, was broken off, and he needed a moment to collect himself. During the silence Gib seemed to himself to live again through all those years with Joan, the Miller of Marrick’s girl, from the evening they first met under the hawthorn, with all the air heavy-sweet with the scent of the blossom and the milky scent of the cows that were swinging slowly by them – from that evening to the moonless night among the haycocks, and the winter day she came to him at Richmond, and their journey to the South.

  All that was eight years ago, yet the same pang of shame went through him now, fresh as the memory of that time was fresh. What came after was more dim, more dully aching. The years of servitorship at Oxford were confused in his mind: he could remember the birth of his first son, and of the daughter that died; but when the second boy had been born he could not be sure. Joan was a servant at the Blue Anchor Inn in Ship Lane, and there the children were born, and there they had died, of the sweating sickness, just as Joan was brought to bed of a fourth child, a puny boy.

  And suddenly he found himself telling all this to the Friar, who, though a good talker, knew also how to listen, and let Gib stumble on, halting, returning, now mumbling indistinctly, now shamelessly candid.

  ‘And three years ago, when the three elder brats were dead, and the other weaned, she went away. I think it was with one of those gentlemen scholars; perhaps the children also were his, or another’s. Nay. Nay. They were mine. But,’ he cried sharply, coming back to the heart of the matter, ‘never for one instant, no, not when I first sinned, never did I take joy in it, but always shame. Shame,’ he repeated, as if he savoured the word and the thing once more.

  ‘Tell me!’ said the Friar at his side. ‘Did you keep yourself wholly to this woman, or did you have commerce with others?’

  ‘With her only.’

  ‘Then I count you as it were married unto her.’

  ‘I, a priest, married!’ Gib gave a sharp bray of laughter, but the Friar was grave.

  ‘“Let the Bishop be the husband of one wife,”’ he said. ‘And if the Bishop, then why not the priest, or senior?’

  Gib stared so that a smile went over the Friar’s quickly changing face. ‘Friend,’ said he, ‘read you in the Scriptures, and you shall know shame no longer.’

  ‘But – priests – to marry!’

  The Friar laughed outright at that.

  ‘You shall read the Scriptures new Englished.’ He got up and went to the great chest that still stood open.

  ‘I cannot buy,’ Gib muttered hastily.

  ‘No; but I can lend.’

  Gib passed out of the Black Friar’s gate in the early twilight with the New Testament in English clutched close to his side. As he went through the empty and darkening streets he was like a man newly come out of prison. Now he need not think of all the years when he had lived, the Friar said, as a married priest. For it was not wrong to be a married priest, still less, he thought to himself, when he had never taken joy in it. Joan had not had much more joy than he, so greatly had she suffered from his bitter, tormented temper; but that, though he knew it well enough, did not seem to be a thing which he needed to consider.

  May 1

  A number of the gentlemen of Gray’s Inn got up before dawn and rode out to the fields towards Islington to bring in Summer. They found and picked little tufts of budding may, for not much was in flower yet, and decked their horses’ head stalls with them, and their own caps. Then they came on some young maidens sitting in a ring under a beech tree that was here and there splashed pale shining green with the young leaves, as if it had been with sea spray. The girls were making garlands of primroses, and purple orchis, and a few early cowslips. Four of the young gentlemen who were still together
in company bought garlands, paying for each garland a groat and a kiss. After that they would not let the maids remain under the beech tree, but had them away, not unwilling, to Islington village to eat cakes, and cream, and brawn, mutton pie and water-cresses. By the time that they had drunk their ale each young gentleman had his lass on his knee, and there was a great deal of laughter and not a little kissing.

  But May morning passes, and at last Robert Aske gave his tankard into his maid’s hands, bidding her sup the rest for he must be going. The others cried, ‘Fie upon you, for the day is early yet.’ But said he, ‘No, look at the church clock,’ and that he must be at Westminster Hall before the Courts closed.

  ‘Oh,’ Hal groaned, ‘why did we bring this spoilsport in our company?’ But he did not mean what he said, because Aske was always a merry companion.

  They took their horses again, and the young maids went down the road with them a little way and then parted. They were all very good friends, and the men promised to come again soon, though but half meaning it, for May morning was one morning different from all others of the year, when gentle and simple, learned and unlearned, met in pleasant comradeship.

  The other three young gentlemen, being not so willing as Robert Aske to return to the collar, said they would come with him as far as Westminster, and then lead his horse back with them; so they went merrily, lengthening out the holiday with teasing and talking. At Charing Cross they had to stop, because a great number of horsemen and footmen were going by; there were gentlemen and serving-men all in scarlet, and after them a number of priests, and crosses that flickered and blazed when they passed the southward-leading streets where the sun touched them. After these went the two Cardinals, the English on a white mule and the Italian Campeggio on a black.

  When the gentlemen from Gray’s Inn could move on again Robert Aske was silent, so that Hal asked, ‘What’s amiss?’

  Aske turned his head. ‘Do you like this business of the King’s Divorce?’ He gave Hal no time for answer but said, ‘I tell you I do not.’