I and by the English tuuf: it was made with feathers of various colours, in the form of a globe, and fastened upon a pole." It is unnecessary to multiply citations; for which reason, shall only add another. Canute the Dane, who is said to have been the richest and most magnificent prince of his time in Europe, rarely appeared in public without being followed by a train of three thousand horsemen, weil mounted and completely armed. These attendants, who were called house carles, formed a corps of body guards, or household troops, and were appointed for the honour and safety of that prince's person.2 The examples of royalty were followed by the nobility and persons of opulence. In the middle ages, the love of show was carried to an extravagant length; and as a man of fashion was nothing less than a man of letters, those studies that were best calculated to improve the mind were held in little estimation. XXI.-ROYAL AND NOBLE ENTERTAINMENTS. The courts of princes and the castles of the great barons were daily crowded with numerous retainers, who were always welcome to their masters' tables. The noblemen had their privy counsellors, treasurers, marshals, constables, stewards, secretaries, chaplains, heralds, pursuivants, pages, henchmen or guards, trumpeters, and all the other officers of the royal court. To these may be added whole companies of minstrels, mimics, jugglers, tumblers, rope-dancers, and players; and especially on days of public festivity, when, in every one of the apartments opened for the reception of the guests, were exhibited variety of entertainments, according to the taste of the times, but in which propriety had very little share; the whole forming a scene of pompous confusion, where feasting, drinking, music, dancing, tumbling, singing, and buffoonery, were jumbled together, and mirth excited too often at the expense of common decency. If we turn to the third Book of Fame, a poem written by our own countryman Chaucer, we shall find a perfect picture of these tumultuous court entertamments, drawn, I doubt not, from reality, and perhaps without 1 Bede, Eccl. Hist. lib. ii. cap. 16. 2 Dr. Henry's Hist. vol. ii. lib. v. cap. 7. any exaggeration. It may be thus expressed in modern language: Minstrels of every kind were stationed in the receptacles for the guests; among them were jesters, that related tales of mirth and of sorrow; excellent players upon the harp, with others of inferior merit seated on various seats below them, who mimicked their performances like apes to excite laughter; behind them, at a great distance, was a prodigious number of other minstrels, making a great sound with cornets, shaulms, flutes, horns, pipes of various kinds, and some of them made with green corn, such as are used by shepherds' boys; there were also Dutch pipers to assist those who chose to dance either "love-dances, springs, or rayes," 994 or any other new-devised measures. Apart from these were stationed the trumpeters and players on the clarion; and other seats were occupied by different musicians playing variety of mirthful tunes. There were also present large companies of jugglers, magicians, and tregetors, who exhibited surprising tricks by the assistance of natural magic. Vast sums of money were expended in support of these absurd and childish spectacles, by which the estates of the nobility were consumed, and the public treasuries often exhausted. But we shall have occasion to speak more fully on this subject hereafter. XXII. CIVIC SHOWS. The pageantry and shows exhibited in great towns and cities on occasions of joy and solemnity were equally deficient in taste and genius. At London, where they were most frequently required, that is to say, at the reception of foreign monarchs, at the processions of our own through the city of London to Westminster previous to their coronation, or at their return from abroad, and on various other occasions; besides such as occurred at stated times, as the lord-mayor's show, the setting of the midsummer watch, and the like, a considerable number of 1 Smale harpers with ther glees. * Cornmuse and Shalmes-many a floyte and lytlyngehorne. Pypes made of grene corne are also mentioned in the Romance of the Rose. In the chapters on Minstrels, Jugglers, &c. pp. 170, 197. The plays and pageants exhibited at court are described in the chapter treating on Theatrical Amusements. p. 150, different artificers were kept, at the city's expense, to furnish the machinery for the pageants, and to decorate them. Stow tells us that, in his memory, great part of Leaden Hall was appropriated to the purpose of painting and depositing the pageants for the use of the city. The want of elegance and propriety, so glaringly evident in these temporary exhibitious, was supplied, or attempted to be supplied, by a tawdry resemblance of splendour. The fronts of the houses in the streets through which the processions passed were covered with rich adornments of tapestry, arras, and cloth of gold; the chief magistrates and most opulent citizens usually appeared on horseback in sumptuous habits and joined the cavalcade; while the ringing of bells, the sound of music from various quarters, and the shouts of the populace, nearly stunned the ears of the spectators. At certain distances, in places appointed for the purpose, the pageants were erected, which were temporary buildings representing castles, palaces, gardens, rocks, or forests, as the occasion required, where nymphs, fawns, satyrs, gods, goddesses, angels, and devils, appeared in company with giants, savages, dragons, saints, knights, buffoons, and dwarfs, surrounded by minstrels and choristers; the heathen mythology, the legends of chivalry, and Christian divinity, were ridiculously jumbled together, without meaning; and the exhibition usually concluded with dull pedantic harangues, exceedingly tedious, and replete with the grossest adulation. The giants especially were favourite performers in the pageants; they also figured away with great applause in the pages of romance; and, together with dragons and necromancers, were created by the authors for the sole purpose of displaying the prowess of their heroes, whose business it was to destroy them. Some faint traces of the processional parts of these exhibitions were retained at London in the lord mayor's show about twenty or thirty years ago; but the pageants and orations have been long discontinued, and the show itself is so much contracted, that it is in reality altogether unworthy of such an appellation. [Before 1801.] XXIII-SETTING OUT OF PAGEANTS. In an old play, the Historie of Promos and Cassandra, part the second, by George Whetstoue, printed in 1578,' a carpenter, and others, employed in preparing the pageants for a royal procession, are introduced. In one part of the city the artificer is ordered "to set up the frames, and to space out the rooms, that the Nine Worthies may be so instauled as best to please the eye." The "Worthies" are thus named in an heraldical MS. in the Harleian Library: "Duke Jossua; Hector of Troy; kyng David; emperour Alexander; Judas Machabyes; emperour Julyus Cæsar; kyng Arthur; emperour Charlemagne; and syr Guy of Warwycke;" but the place of the latter was frequently, and I believe originally, supplied by Godefroy, earl of Bologne: it appears, however, that any of them might be changed at pleasure: Henry VIII. was made a " Worthy" to please his daughter Mary, as we shall find a little farther on. In another part of the same play the carpenter is commanded to "errect a stage, that the wayghtes in sight may stand;" one of the city gates was to be occupied by the fowre Virtues, together with "a consort of music;" and one of the pageants is thus whimsically described: 3 They have Hercules of monsters conquering; Huge great giants, in a forrest, fighting With lions, bears, wolves, apes, foxes, and grayes, Oh, these be wondrous frayes! The stage direction then requires the entry of "Two men apparelled lyke greene men at the mayor's feast, with clubbs of fyreworks;" whose office, we are told, was to keep a clear passage in the street," that the kyng and his trayne might pass with ease."-In another dramatic performance of later date, Green's Tu Quoque, or the City Gallant, by John Cooke, published in 1614, a city apprentice says, " By this light, I doe not thinke but to be lord mayor of London before I die; and have three pageants carried before me, besider a ship and an unicorn." The following passage occurs in Selden's Table Talk, under the article Judge, "We see the pageants in Cheapside, the lions 1 Garrick's Collection of Old Plays, H. vol. iii. 2 Or waits, the band of city minstrels. 2 No. 2220, fol. 7 and the elephants; but we do not see the men that carry them we see the judges look big like lions; but we do not see who noves them." XXIV. PROCESSIONS OF QUEEN MARY AND KING PHILIP OF SPAIN IN LONDON. In the foregoing quotations, we have not the least necessity to make an allowance for poetical licence: the historians of the time will justify the poets, and perfectly clear them from any charge of exaggeration; and especially Hall, Grafton, and Holinshed, who are exceedingly diffuse on this and such like popular subjects. The latter has recorded a very curious piece of pantomimical trickery exnibited at the time that the princess Mary went in procession through the city of London, the day before her coronation:-At the upper end of Grace-churchStreet there was a pageant made by the Florentines; it was very high; and "on the top thereof there stood foure pictures; and in the midst of them, and the highest, there stood an angell, all in greene, with a trumpet in his hand; and when the trumpetter who stood secretlie within the pageant, did sound his trumpet, the angell did put his trumpet to his mouth, as though it had been the same that had sounded." A similar deception but on a more extensive scale, was practised at the gate oi Kenelworth Castle for the reception of queen Elizabeth,' Holinshed, speaking of the spectacles exhibited at London, when Philip king of Spain, with Mary his consort, made their public entry in the city, calls them, in the margin of his Chronicle," the vaine pageants of London ;" and he uses the same epithet twice in the description immediately subsequent ; Now," says he, "as the king came to London, and as he entered at the drawbridge, [on London Bridge,] there was a vaine great spectacle, with two images representing two giants, the one named Corinens, and the other Gog-magog, holding betweene them certeine Latin verses, which, for the vaine ostentation of flatterye, 1 overpasse." He then adds: "From the 66 See further on, p. xivi. 2 These passages do not prove that the historian was disgusted with the pageantry, abstractedly considered, but rather with the occasion of its exhibition; for, he speaks of the same kind of spectacles, with commendation, both anterior and subsequent to the present show, which do not appear to have had the least claim for superiority in point of reason or consistency. |