Chapter 6: Riot in the Town
Sing we and chant it,
While love doth grant it.
Not long youth lasteth,
And old age hasteth.
Now is best leisure
To take our pleasure.
All things invite us
Now to delight us.
Hence, care, be packing,
No mirth be lacking.
Let spare no treasure
To live in pleasure.
ANONYMOUS.
1.
IT was nearly suppertime and Faithful raised his heavy head from the bony knuckles on which it was propped and sighed a little. He and Giles had been working in their room for five solid hours and he wondered if perhaps they might rest a little now. A huge beefy dinner in hall at eleven o’clock, followed by archery practice, was not to his mind the best preparation for hard work. Starving vagabond that he had been he was not used to heavy meals, nor to violent exercise immediately on top of them, and they made him feel rather peculiar. He pressed his hot palms against his temples, that ached, and then upon his stomach, that ached too, rubbed his knuckles in his eyes to clear away an unwanted film of sleep, and looked at Giles, clearing his throat tentatively.
But Giles read on and on, blind and deaf to everything but the printed words before his eyes and the explanation of their meaning spoken in his ears. For when he worked there was always present with Giles that inspiration that is like the actual corporeal presence of a real person. The voice in his ears seemed to him not his own voice but someone else’s, and when he wrote he could have sworn that a figure stood behind him, dictating. It was not so with Faithful. He was always conscious of the thing that he wrote as a lump of stone that must be hewn into shape by his own labors and no one else’s. . . . Yet when they had finished working it was generally Giles, and not Faithful, who was the more tired of the two.
But today Faithful seemed unable to work properly. It was very hot and a bee kept buzzing in and out and disturbing him, and he could not fix his mind properly upon Aristotle because not only were his head and stomach aching but he was thinking all the time of Raleigh and the land beyond the sunset. . . . God give me singleness of mind, he whispered, God give me singleness of mind. . . . He shut his eyes and tried to concentrate, and instantly his big head fell forward like an overweighted peony.
“What in the world are you doing?” demanded Giles irritably.
“I think I was falling asleep,” said Faithful.
“What do you want to go to sleep for?” demanded Giles indignantly. “You sleep like a hog for eight hours every night and keep me awake with your damned snoring. You’ll never be an M.A. if you don’t get your teeth into Aristotle.”
Faithful gritted his teeth, Aristotle being presumably between them, and re-propped his top-heavy headpiece on his bony knuckles.
Giles was not unkind to Faithful, indeed he was very fond of him, but his very admiration for his brains made him stand no nonsense. Faithful should be turned into a first-rate scholar or he, Giles, would perish in the attempt. He must learn to work whether he was well or ill, tired or fresh, happy or unhappy, full of the roast beef of old England or not full of the roast beef of old England; until his mind had learned to function regardless of the state of his body he would not be worthy of the name of scholar.
Great Tom boomed out five o’clock and there was a stampede of feet, and a joyous shouting and yelling, in the quadrangle outside.
“Curse!” said Giles. “Can it be suppertime already?” and he smacked his big book shut. His face was flushed and the hollows at his temples looked deeper than usual. Faithful looked at him anxiously. Sometimes he thought that Giles’s capacity for doing more work in one hour than most people did in three was not very good for him. . . . Yet there was no one on this earth who could stop Giles doing what he wanted to do.
They tidied themselves and ran down the stairs to join the yelling mob in the quadrangle that was surging towards the hall and food. The age of the scholars being anything from twelve upwards, and there being no rule as to keeping off the grass, the evening’s progress towards the hall was not the decorous proceeding that it became several centuries later. Nor was the hall sacred to food alone, as later. It was the common room as well, and the noise that went on in it could be heard a mile off.
Rough stone stairs open to the sky led up to the hall. It was paved with yellow and green tiles and the sun shone through rich stained glass windows. The great fireplace was in the middle of the hall, with a louvre above to carry off the smoke. Even in summer a small fire of logs burned in it, and the wainscoting on the walls reflected the leaping flames of the logs and was patterned by the sun with the green and blue and rose-color of the stained glass windows, but far up above their heads the splendid roof of Irish oak was dim and shadowy. Faithful always caught his breath when he entered the hall because it was so beautiful. He had not yet got used to its beauty, and he hoped he never would.
Most of the scholars ate their supper in the lower part of the hall, at long oak tables set out with wooden trenchers and cups of horn, but the Dean, the Canons and the College dons sat at the high table on the dais, under the portraits of Henry Tudor and Cardinal Wolsey, and they ate from silver plates and drank out of tall, slender opal Venice glasses. Scholars who were the sons of noblemen dined with the Canons, and a great nuisance they were to the Canons, for they were most of them of a tender age, twelve or thereabouts, and their table manners left much to be desired. It was true they were waited on, as the Canons also were, by their own servants, who tucked their napkins in at their necks, picked up the pieces of bread they hurled on the floor, thumped them on the back when they choked over capon bones and saw to it that they did not drink more than was good for them; but even then they were a nuisance, and made intellectual conversation among the Canons totally impossible. . . . It was only by the skin of his teeth that Philip had avoided being one of them. Had the Earl of Leicester, Chancellor of the University, been his father instead of mercifully only his uncle he would have. Philip, a humble person, daily gave thanks for his escape.
Pandemonium was reigning in the hall when Giles and Faithful entered. Leap frog was being played round and round the tables and a brisk game of club kayles was going on in the open space by the fire. Faithful joined in at once but Giles, bored and aloof, perched on the edge of a table and took his Greek Testament out of his wallet. . . . The amount of Greek that he mastered while waiting for and eating his meals was incredible. . . . Faithful was popular. Not only had he the kind of back view that simply cries out to be kicked but, what was more, he did not in the least mind having it kicked. It was fun, too, to jeer at him for his huge head and flapping ears, and the good-humored grin and well-aimed blow with which he received all mocking references to his person, and hid the hurt they did him, were very endearing. Giles, strangely enough, was popular too. There was a fire and a force in him that commanded respect and “youth with comeliness plucked all gaze his way.”
Suddenly the hubbub stilled a little, though it did not cease, for there had entered upon them with arrogant step and princely stride the scholars over twenty years of age. These gentlemen were in a peculiarly happy position, for Wolsey’s statutes had laid down that no scholar over the age of twenty was to be flogged, though under that age the great Cardinal considered corporal punishment highly beneficial. It was this happy immunity from violence that caused persons of over twenty to look so pleased with themselves. They could now swear as much as they liked and get nothing worse than a fine of twelve pence per cuss overheard by authority, which to a man of means, as many of them were, was a mere flea bite.
Glances of envy and hatred followed the progress of these gentlemen up the hall. Nicolas especially, playing club kayles by the fire, glowered like the devil himself. For Nicolas still had two more years to run before he reached the haven of twenty years and it was more
than probable that he would have to go down from Christ Church without ever winning immunity from flogging. That very afternoon, upon returning from archery practice, he had been soundly flogged by the Senior Censor for having shot an Alderman. It was the Alderman’s own fault. He had himself placed his person—of the usual Aldermanic shape, several yards round—between Nicolas’s flying arrow and its mark at exactly the wrong moment. It was true that Nicolas had forgotten the rule of calling out “Fast!” before he shot, but that had been a mere oversight, in no way intentional. And anyhow the Alderman’s figure was so enwrapped with layers of fat that the arrow had been unable to penetrate to any vital part, so Nicolas could see no necessity for the Senior Censor to make such a song and dance about it. . . . He was so stiff that he doubted if he would even be able to sit down to imbibe nourishment.
Then came a long, shrill blast on a trumpet, blown by a servitor posted at the hall door, everyone scurried to his seat and dead silence fell as the Dean, the Canons, the senior College dons—the Treasurer, the two Censors and the Readers in Natural and Moral Philosophy, Dialectic, Rhetoric and Mathematics—together with the noblemen and their servants entered the hall in procession.
Dean Thomas Godwin entered first. He was a breathtaking figure, tall and of an amazing dignity and comeliness. It was no wonder that the Queen’s Grace, always peculiarly susceptible to male charm, went all of a dither as soon as she set eyes on him. His black gown, made of the finest cloth and most delicately perfumed, swept the ground as he moved and his ruff was snowy as blackthorn blossom. He had magnificent dark eyes with delicately penciled brows and a fine, gracefully pointed silky beard. The eight Canons and the College dons who followed him, like stately magpies in their black and white, might have been fine looking men, but one did not notice them beside Dean Godwin.
After them came the little noblemen in all their glory. The rules about modest garb that prevented other scholars from making much of a splash in the haberdashery line were found to be difficult of application to those of noble birth—their august fathers were apt to cut up rough at any curtailment of the wardrobe—so these small people were a sight to behold. They wore velvet trunks, with silken hose gartered at the knee with scarlet. Their little shoes were of softest leather worked in gold thread, with pompons on them, and trod the tiled floor in fine disdain. Their doublets were of all colors of the rainbow, encrusted with jewels, and one or two of them, and those the youngest, wore pearl drops in their ears. . . . Yet their passing lit no envy in the breasts of poorer scholars. . . . For these imps were future courtiers of Gloriana, destined for her service, and Gloriana ruled supreme over the breast of nearly everything in trunk and hose from north to south, from east to west, of the pleasant land of England.
The tail of the procession was made up of the servants of the great ones who had just passed by. In winter they would have carried the lighted lanterns that lit their masters across the dark quadrangle, but now, in summer, they carried only bowls of rose water, and folded napkins laid across their arms.
Dean Godwin mounted the dais, the Canons, dons and noblemen took their places, their servants behind them, grace was sung, and the pantlers, who had toiled up the stone steps from the kitchen below, entered one behind the other with the great dishes upon their shoulders.
At the tables in the lower part of the hall they had the usual beer and beef, bread and oatmeal, enlivened with fresh garden peas and a little fruit, but at the high table they had as well capons, pies, marchpanes and jellies. Their drinks were more varied, too, for as well as beer they drank burgundy and malmsey wine. The scholars below envied them their burgundy but not their malmsey. Years later one of them was to complain that the College malmsey “still tastes of the Duke.”
The four friends sat together, or rather three of them sat, for Nicolas, unable as yet to bend the figure, stood, and held forth upon his woes at the top of his voice between each bite. Faithful and Philip, their mouths full, made sympathetic noises, and Giles, his book propped open in front of him, read, taking no notice of any of them, masticating his food meanwhile with the unconscious thoroughness of a cow chewing the cud.
A babel of voices rose and fell, swelled and roared, the sound bearing up to the ceiling and rolling in waves from side to side of the wainscoted walls. Jaws champed and heads were tipped well back that knives might shovel peas into capacious mouths without spilling half of them under the tables. Bones, when finished with, were thrown on the floor or hurled at the head of a dear friend. The pantlers, swearing and perspiring, rushed hither and thither, refilling the horn cups, bringing in fresh supplies of beef and dodging the crusts of bread thrown at them by wellwishers. The fumes of hot humanity and meat and drink mingled with the wood smoke and hung over the scene in a dense cloud through which the rich colors of the stained glass windows, the silver on the high table and the jewels of the noblemen, winked and gleamed like the lights of a harbor seen through a mist at sea. The noise, the smoke and the smell rose to a final crescendo of volume, aroma and density and then, suddenly, it was over, and the trumpet was announcing the departure of the Dean, Canons, dons and noblemen from the hall.
They departed as they had come, magnificently, the Dean holding a scented handkerchief to his nose with one hand and with the other lifting the skirts of his fine gown well above the bone-strewn floor.
It was now considered right that there should be a brief half hour of rest and recreation before the scholars returned to their work, and the din that broke out was unequaled by anything that had gone before. The interrupted games of leap frog became more and more violent, the pantlers meanwhile clearing the tables at peril of their lives, while by the fire the game of club kayles waxed very hot.
It was only ninepins, the pins being aimed at with a stick, but an elaborate system of betting had been evolved in connection with it so that a good deal of heat was likely to be engendered, the tall pointed pins, shaped like fir cones, coming in very handy as missiles. In the rhyme of the period young men were implored to “Eschew always evil company, kayles, carding and haserdy.” But at Christ Church, if they had heard the rhyme, they had failed to lay it to heart.
2.
Afterwards, no one was quite sure how the great fight started. The scholars said it started on the dais, where the servants of the Canons were quarreling with the servants of the noblemen over what was left of the food, which was their perquisite. The servants, on the other hand, said it was nothing on earth to do with them; they quarreled about the food every evening, and nothing came of it; no, it was the fault of the young gentlemen playing club kayles by the fire.
And certain it was that Nicolas, already in a bad temper from one reason and another, had hit Toby Stapleton over the head with the kayles stick. He had reason to, for Toby had cheated, and had moreover a wart on the end of his nose that always annoyed Nicolas, but his action was unwise because Toby hailed from Westminster while Nicolas himself hailed from Ipswich.
The famous school at Ipswich had been founded by Cardinal Wolsey and naturally its boys came up to Christ Church in large numbers, and between them and the Westminster scholars there was naturally a loathing too deep for words. Westminster had to be careful what it said to Ipswich, and vice versa, for the slightest word, or a blow given with the best of intentions, was liable to be misconstrued and act like a torch set to a haystack.
The thing was in full swing before anyone knew it had started. Shouting and yelling the mob surged backwards and forwards, kicking, scuffling, hitting and swearing. The servants’ quarrel on the dais somehow got tacked on to the scholars’ quarrel down below and the minor quarrel, being conducted by grown men and strong, succeeded in pushing the whole horde of them out of the hall door and on to the staircase. Here the pantlers and cooks came dashing up from the kitchen below to join in, and the whole mass surged down the stairs and across the quadrangle to the Fair Gate. Heatherthwayte, of course, should have shut the great gates and stopped
them, but he was having forty winks at the moment and by the time he had got his mouth shut and his eyes open and staggered towards the gates it was too late; he and Satan were picked up like a couple of straws by the advancing tide and carried out into Fish Street.
And out in Fish Street the row took an entirely new turn. Within half an hour of its occurrence Nicolas’s little upset with the Alderman had been the talk of the town. The story grew with the telling as it was handed from corn factor to merchant’s wife, from merchant’s wife to servant girl, and servant girl to apprentice. Within an hour of the accident, what time Alderman Burridge was seated comfortably at home with a tankard of ale at his elbow, he was reported to be dying in agonies, and half an hour later he was dead. The Alderman was popular and the rage and fury of the town was unbounded. By six o’clock quite a nasty little crowd had collected at Carfax and a few bold spirits had marched down towards Christ Church and were considering the advisability of demanding that Nicolas be delivered up to justice. A few bargees, strolling up from the river to get a drink in the town, encountered these gentlemen and heard the latest version of Alderman Burridge’s murder, so that by the time Westminster and Ipswich, locked in combat, reeled out of the Fair Gate they found the Town ready for them.
Word of the grand fight going on in Fish Street between Town and Gown, over Alderman Burridge’s murder, flew round Oxford. Reinforcements to both sides flocked out of every College, house and inn in the town and rushed to the scene of action. In no time at all there was one dense crowd of fighting humanity right up Fish Street, across Carfax and down Cornmarket; seething backwards and forwards like a turbulent sea, shouting, yelling, kicking and swearing. The Proctors, with the Constable of the watch and his minions, were powerless. They danced up and down on the edge of the hurly-burly, shouting and threatening, but no one noticed them, let alone attended to them. The excitement rose to fever pitch and, quite suddenly, a flight of arrows appeared, shot by unseen bowmen inside the Swyndlestock, a tavern at the southwest corner of Carfax. It was not known for certain who shot them, whether Town or Gown, though it was thought Town because of the raucous cries of “Who shot the Alderman?” that accompanied them, but a wild yell of fury rose up and rent the very heavens, for this was not playing fair; fists, nails, sticks, dead cats, rotten eggs and other missiles of a like character might be used in a Town and Gown riot, but not arrows. . . . Things began to look uncommonly ugly.
Towers in the Mist Page 15