[In the following essay, originally delivered as a lecture at the Adelburgh Festival in 1950, Forster surveys Skelton's major works and concludes that although the poet was a typical conservative, educated parish priest of his age, he was on the whole a comic, someone who loved improper fun and had a talent for abuse.]

John Skelton was an East Anglian; he was a poet, also a clergyman, and he was extremely strange. Partly strange because the age in which he flourished—that of the early Tudors—is remote from us, and difficult to interpret. But he was also a strange creature personally, and whatever you think of him when we've finished—and you will possibly think badly of him—you will agree that we have been in contact with someone unusual.

Let us begin with solidity—with the church where he was rector. That still stands; that can be seen and touched, though its incumbent left it over four hundred years ago. He was rector of Diss, a market town which lies just in Norfolk, just across the river Waveney, here quite a small stream, and Diss church is somewhat of a landmark, for it stands upon a hill. A winding High Street leads up to it, and the High Street, once very narrow, passed through an arch in its tower which still remains. The church is not grand, it is not a great architectural triumph like Blythburgh or Framlingham. But it is adequate, it is dignified and commodious, and it successfully asserts its pre-eminence over its surroundings. Here our poet-clergyman functioned for a time, and, I may add, carried on.

Not much is known about him, though he was the leading literary figure of his age. He was born about 1460, probably in Norfolk, was educated at Cambridge, mastered the voluble inelegant Latin of his day, entered the Church, got in touch with the court of Henry VII, and became tutor to the future Henry VIII. He was appointed “Poet Laureate”, and this was confirmed by the universities of Cambridge, Oxford and Louvain. In the early years of Henry VIII he voiced official policy—for instance, in his poems against the Scots after Flodden. But, unfortunately for himself, he attacked another and a greater East Anglian, Cardinal Wolsey of Ipswich, and after that his influence declined. He was appointed rector of Diss in 1503, and held the post till his death in 1529. But he only seems to have been in residence during the earlier years. Life couldn't have been congenial for him there. He got across the Bishop of Norwich, perhaps about his marriage or semi-marriage, and he evidently liked London and the court, being a busy contentious fellow, and found plenty to occupy him there. A few bills and documents, a few references in the works of others, a little posthumous gossip, and his own poems, are all that we have when we try to reconstruct him. Beyond doubt he is an extraordinary character, but not one which it is easy to focus. Let us turn to his poems.

I will begin with the East Anglian poems, and with Philip Sparrow. This is an unusually charming piece of work. It was written while Skelton was at Diss, and revolves round a young lady called Jane, who was at school at a nunnery close to Norwich. Jane had a pet sparrow—a bird which is far from fashionable today, but which once possessed great social prestige. In ancient Rome, Catullus sang of the sparrow of Lesbia, the dingy little things were housed in gilt cages, and tempted with delicious scraps all through the Middle Ages, and they only went out when the canary came in. Jane had a sparrow, round which all her maidenly soul was wrapped. Tragedy followed. There was a cat in the nunnery, by name Gib, who lay in wait for Philip Sparrow, pounced, killed him and ate him. The poor girl was in tears, and her tragedy was taken up and raised into poetry by her sympathetic admirer, the rector of Diss.

He produced a lengthy poem—it seemed difficult at that time to produce a poem that was not long. “Philip Sparrow” swings along easily enough, and can still be read with pleasure by those who will overlook its volubility, its desultoriness and its joky Latin.

It begins, believe it or not, with a parody of the Office for the Dead; Jane herself is supposed to be speaking, and she slings her Latin about well if quaintly. Soon tiring of the church service, she turns to English, and to classical allusions:

When I remember again
How my Philip was slain
Never half the pain
Was between you twain,
Pyramus and Thisbe,
As then befell to me;
I wept and I wailéd
The teares down hailéd,
But nothing it availéd
To call Philip again
Whom Gib our cat has slain.
Gib I say our cat
Worrowed him on that
Which I loved best. …
I fell down to the ground(1)

Then—in a jumble of Christian and antique allusions, most typical of that age—she thinks of Hell and Pluto and Cerberus—whom she calls Cerebus—and Medusa and the Furies, and alternately prays Jupiter and Jesus to save her sparrow from the infernal powers.

It was so pretty a fool
It would sit upon a stool
And learned after my school. …
It had a velvet cap
And would sit upon my lap
And would seek after small wormés
And sometimes white bread crumbés
And many times and oft
Between my breastés soft
It would lie and rest
It was proper and prest!
          Sometimes he would gasp
When he saw a wasp;
A fly or a gnat
He would fly at that
And prettily he would pant
When he saw an ant
Lord how he would pry
After a butterfly
Lord how he would hop
After the grasshop
And when I said “Phip Phip”
Then he would leap and skip
And take me by the lip.
Alas it will me slo
That Philip is gone me fro!

Jane proceeds to record his other merits, which include picking fleas off her person—this was a sixteenth-century girls' school, not a twentieth-, vermin were no disgrace, not even a surprise, and Skelton always manages to introduce the coarseness and discomfort of his age. She turns upon the cat again, and hopes the greedy grypes will tear out his tripes.

Those villainous false cats
Were made for mice and rats
And not for birdés small.
Alas, my face waxeth pale. …

She goes back to the sparrow and to the church service, and draws up an enormous catalogue of birds who shall celebrate his obsequies:

Our chanters shall be the cuckoo,
The culver, the stockdoo,
The “peewit”, the lapwing,
The Versicles shall sing.

—together with other songsters, unknown in these marshes and even elsewhere. She now wants to write an epitaph, but is held up by her diffidence and ignorance; she has read so few books, though the list of those she has read is formidable; moreover, she has little enthusiasm for the English language—

Our natural tongue is rude,
And hard to be ennewed
With polished termes lusty
Our language is so rusty
So cankered, and so full
Of froward, and so dull,
That if I would apply
To write ornately
I wot not where to find
Terms to serve my mind.

Shall she try Latin? Yes, but she will hand over the job to the Poet Laureate of Britain, Skelton, and, with this neat compliment to himself, Skelton ends the first part of Philip Sparrow.

He occupies the second part with praising Jane,

This most goodly flower,
This blossom of fresh colour
So Jupiter me succour
She flourishes new and new
In beauty and virtue,

bypasses the sparrow, and enters upon a love poem:

But wherefore should I note
How often did I toot
Upon her pretty foot
It bruised mine heart-root
To see her tread the ground
With heeles short and round.

The rector is in fact losing his head over a schoolgirl, and has to pull himself up. No impropriety is intended, he assures us,

There was no vice
Nor yet no villainy,
But only fantasy. …
It were no gentle guise
This treatise to despise
Because I have written and said
Honour of this fair maide,
Wherefore shall I be blamed
That I Jane have named
And famously proclaimed?
She is worthy to be enrolled
In letters of gold.

Then he too slides into Latin and back into the Office of the Dead: Requiem aeternam dona eis Domine, he chants.

This poem of Philip Sparrow—the pleasantest Skelton ever wrote—helps to emphasize the difference in taste and in style between the sixteenth century and our own. His world is infinitely remote; not only is it coarse and rough, but there is an uncertainty of touch about it which we find hard to discount. Is he being humorous? Undoubtedly, but where are we supposed to laugh? Is he being serious? If so, where and how much? We don't find the same uncertainty when we read his predecessor Chaucer, or his successor Shakespeare. We know where they stand, even when we cannot reach them. Skelton belongs to an age of break-up, which had just been displayed politically in the Wars of the Roses. He belongs to a period when England was trying to find herself—as indeed do we today, though we have to make a different sort of discovery after a different type of war. He is very much the product of his times—a generalization that can be made of all writers, but not always so aptly. The solidity of the Middle Ages was giving way beneath his feet, and he did not know that the Elizabethan age was coming—any more than we know what is coming. We have not the least idea, whatever the politicians prophesy. It is appropriate, at this point, to quote the wisest and most impressive lines he ever wrote—they are not well known, and probably they are only a fragment. They have a weight and a thoughtfulness which are unusual in him.

Though ye suppose all jeopardies are passed
          And all is done that ye lookéd for before,
Ware yet, I warn you, of Fortune's double cast,
          For one false point she is wont to keep in store,
          And under the skin oft festeréd is the sore;
That when ye think all danger for to pass
Ware of the lizard lieth lurking in the grass.

It was a curious experience, with these ominous verses in my mind, to go to Diss and to find, carved on the buttress of the church, a lizard. The carving was there in Skelton's day; that he noticed it, that it entered into his mind when he wrote, there is no reason to suppose. But its appearance, combined with the long grass in the churchyard, helped me to connect the present with the past, helped them to establish that common denominator without which neither has any validity.

That when ye think all danger for to pass
Ware of the lizard lieth lurking in the grass.

So true of the sixteenth century, so true of today! There are two main answers to the eternal menace of the lizard. One of them is caution, the other courage. Skelton was a brave fellow—his opposition to Cardinal Wolsey proves that—but I don't know which answer he recommends.

But let us leave these serious considerations, and enter Diss church itself, where we shall be met by a fantastic scene and by the oddest poem even Skelton ever wrote: the poem of Ware the Hawk. Like Philip Sparrow, it is about a bird, but a bird of prey, and its owner is not the charming Jane, but an ill-behaved curate, who took his hawk into the church, locked all the doors, and proceeded to train it with the help of two live pigeons and a cushion stuffed with feathers to imitate another pigeon. The noise, the mess, the scandal, was terrific. In vain did the rector thump on the door and command the curate to open. The young man—one assumes he was young—took no notice, but continued his unseemly antics. Diss church is well suited to a sporting purpose, since its nave and choir are unusually lofty, and the rood-loft was convenient for the birds to perch on between the statues of the Virgin and St John. Up and down he rushed, uttering the cries of his craft, and even clambering onto the communion table. Feathers flew in all directions and the hawk was sick. At last Skelton found “a privy way” in, and managed to stop him. But he remained impenitent, and threatened that another day he would go fox-hunting there, and bring in a whole pack of hounds.

Now is this an exaggeration, or a joke? And why did Skelton delay making a poem out of it until many years had passed? He does not—which is strange—even mention the name of the curate.

He shall be as now nameless,
But he shall not be blameless
Nor he shall not be shameless.
For sure he wrought amiss
To hawk in my church at Diss.

That is moderately put. It was amiss. Winding himself up into a rage, he then calls him a peckish parson and a Domine Dawcock and a frantic falconer and a smeary smith, and scans history in vain for so insolent a parallel; not even the Emperor Julian the Apostate or the Nestorian heretics flew hawks in a church. Nero himself would have hesitated. And the poem ends in a jumble and a splutter, heaps of silly Latin, a cryptogram and a curious impression of gaiety; a good time, one can't help feeling, has been had by all.

How, though, did Skelton get into the church and stop the scandal? Perhaps through the tower. You remember my mentioning that the tower of Diss church has a broad passage-way running through it, once part of the High Street. Today the passage only contains a notice saying “No bicycles to be left here”, together with a number of bicycles. Formerly, there was a little door leading up from it into the tower. That (conjectures an American scholar) may have been Skelton's privy entrance. He may have climbed up by it, climbed down the belfry into the nave, and spoiled, at long last, the curate's sport.

There is another poem which comes into this part of Skelton's life. It is entitled “Two Knaves Sometimes of Diss”, and attacks two of his parishioners who had displeased him and were now safely dead; John Clerk and Adam Uddersall were their names. Clerk, according to the poet, had raged “like a camel” and now lies “starke dead, Never a tooth in his head, Adieu, Jayberd, adieu,” while as for Uddersall, “Belsabub his soule save, who lies here like a knave.” The poem is not gentlemanly. Little that Skelton wrote was. Not hit a man when he is down or dead? That's just the moment to wait for. He can't hit back.

The last East Anglian poem to be mentioned is a touching one: to his wife. As a priest, he was not and could not be married, but he regarded his mistress as his legal consort, and the poem deals with a moment when they were parting and she was about to bear a child:

'Petually
Constrained am I
With weeping eye
          To mourn and 'plain
That we so nigh
Of progeny
So suddenly
          Should part in twain.
When ye are gone
Comfort is none,
But all alone
          Endure must I
With grievely groan
Making my moan
As it were one
          That should needs die.

There is a story about the birth of this child which was written down after Skelton's death, in a collection called The Merry Tales of Skelton. According to it, there were complaints to the bishop from the parish, which Skelton determined to quell. So he preached in Diss church on the text Vos estis, you are, and suddenly called out, “Wife! Bring my Child.” Which the lady did. And he held the naked baby out to the congregation saying: “Is not this child as fair as any of yours? It is not like a pig or a calf, is it? What have you got to complain about to the bishop? The fact is, as I said in my text, Vos estis, you be, and have be and will and shall be knaves, to complayne of me without reasonable cause.” Historians think that this jest-book story enshrines a tradition. It certainly fits in with what we know of the poet's fearless and abusive character.

Tenderness also entered into that character, though it did not often show itself. Tenderness inspires that poem I have quoted, and is to be found elsewhere in his gentle references to women; for instance, in the charming “Merry Margaret”, which often appears in anthologies.

          Merry Margaret
                    As midsummer flower,
          Gentle as falcon
          Or hawk of the tower:
With solace and gladness
Much mirth and no madness
All good and no badness.

And in the less known but still more charming poem “To Mistress Isabel Pennell” which I will quote in full. Isabel was a little girl of eight—even younger than Jane of the sparrow. (“Reflaring”, near the beginning of the poem, is “redolent”. “Nept” means catmint.)

          By Saint Mary, my Lady,
Your mammy and your daddy
Brought forth a goodly baby.
          My maiden Isabel,
Reflaring rosabel,
The fragrant camomel:
          The ruddy rosary,
The sovereign rosemary
The pretty strawberry
          The columbine, the nept,
The jelofer well set,
The proper violet:
          Ennewed your colour
Is like the daisy flower
After the April shower;
          Star of the morrow gray,
The blossom on the spray
The freshest flower of May:
          Maidenly demure,
Of womanhood the lure;
Wherefore I make you sure
          It were an heavenly health,
It were an endless wealth,
A life for God himself
          To hear this nightingale
Among the birdés small
Warbelling in the vale:
Dug dug,
Jug jug,
          Good year and good luck,
          With chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck!

Women could touch his violent and rugged heart and make it gentle and smooth for a little time. It is not the dying tradition of chivalry, it is something personal.

But we must leave these personal and local matters, and turn to London and to the political satires. The main group is directed against Cardinal Wolsey. The allusions are often obscure, for, though Skelton sometimes attacks his great adversary openly, at other times he is covering his tracks, and at other times complimentary and even fulsome. The ups and downs of which have furnished many problems for scholars. Two points should be remembered. Firstly, Skelton is not a precursor of the Reformation; he has sometimes been claimed as one by Protestant historians. He attacked the abuses of his Church—as exemplified in Wolsey's luxury, immorality and business. He has nothing to say against its doctrines or organization and was active in the suppression of heresy. He was its loyal if scandalous son.

Secondly, Wolsey appears to have behaved well. When he triumphed, he exacted no vengeance. Perhaps he had too much to think about. The story that Skelton died in sanctuary in St Margaret's, Westminster, fleeing from the Cardinal's wrath, is not true. He did live for the last years of his life in London, but freely and comfortably; bills for his supper parties have been unearthed. And though he was buried in St Margaret's it was honourably, under an alabaster inscription. Bells were pealed, candles were burned. Here again we have the bills.

The chief anti-Wolsey poems are Speke Parrot, Colin Clout, Why come ye not to Court? and the cumbrous Morality play Magnificence.

Speke Parrot—yet another bird; had Skelton a bird complex? Ornithologists must decide—Speke Parrot is one of those convenient devices where Polly is made to say what Polly's master hesitates to say openly. Poor Polly! Still, master is fond of Polly, and introduces him prettily enough.

Parrot is no churlish chough nor no fleckéd pie,
          Parrot is no penguin that men call a carling,
Parrot is no woodcock, nor no butterfly,
          Parrot is no stammering stare that men call a
                    starling,
          But Parrot is my own dear heart and my dear
                    darling,
Melpomene, that fair maid, she burnished his beak:
I pray you, let Parrot have liberty to speak.

Skelton's genuine if intermittent charm continues into the next stanza:

Parrot is a fair bird for a lady.
          God of his goodness him framéd and wrought;
When parrot is dead, he doth not putrify.
          Yet all things mortal shall turn unto nought,
          Except man's soul, that Christ so dearly bought;
That never may die, nor never die shall—
Make much of Parrot, the popinjay royal.

The “popinjay royal”—that is to say the bird of King Henry VIII, whose goodness and generosity Wolsey abuses. And parrot, given his beak, says many sharp things against the Cardinal, who “carrieth a king in his sleeve” and plays the Pope's game rather than his liege's. Subtly and obscurely, with detailed attention to his comings and goings, the great man is attacked. It is a London poem, which could not have been written in a Norfolk rectory.

Much more violent is Why come ye not to Court? where the son of the Ipswich butcher gets brutally put in his place.

Why come ye not to Court?
To which court?
To the king's court
Or to Hampton Court?
The king's court should have the excellence
But Hampton Court hath the pre-eminence.

And at Hampton Court Wolsey rules, with

                              his base progeny
And his greasy genealogy,
He came of the sang royall
That was cast out from a butcher's stall. …
With lewd conditions coated
As hereafter be noted—
Presumption and vainglory,
Envy, wrath and lechery,
Covertise and gluttony,
Slothful to do good,
Now frantic, now stark mad.

As for “Colin Clout”. The title is the equivalent of Hodge or the Man in the Street, from whose point of view the poem is supposed to be written. It is a long rambling attack on bishops, friars, monks and the clergy generally, and Wolsey comes in for his share of criticism. I will quote from it not the abusive passages, of which you are getting plenty, but the dignified and devout passage with which it closes. Skelton was, after all, inside the church he criticized, and held its faith, and now and then he reminds us of this.

Now to withdraw my pen
And now a while to rest
Meseemeth it for the best.
          The forecastle of my ship
Shall glide and smoothly slip
Out of the waves wild
Of the stormy flood
Shoot anchor and lie at road
And sail not far abroad
Till the coast be clear
And the lode-star appear
My ship now will I steer
Towards the port salu
Of our Saviour Jesu
Such grace that He us send
To rectify and amend
Things that are amiss
Where that his pleasure is. Amen.

It is a conventional ending, but a sincere one, and reminds us that he had a serious side; his “Prayer to the Father of Heaven” was sung in the church here, to the setting of Vaughan Williams. He can show genuine emotion at moments, both about this world and the next. Here are two verses from “The Manner of the World Nowadays”, in which he laments the decay of society.

Sometimes we sang of mirth and play
But now our joy is gone away
For so many fall in decay
          Saw I never:
Whither is the wealth of England gone?
The spiritual saith they have none,
And so many wrongfully undone
          Saw I never.

Magnificence, the last of the anti-Wolsey group, is a symbol for Henry VIII, who is seduced by wicked flatterers from his old counsellor (i.e. from Skelton himself). Largess, Counterfeit-Countenance, Crafty—Conveyance, Cloaked—Collusion and Courtly-Abusion are some of the names, and all are aspects of Wolsey. At enormous length and with little dramatic skill they ensnare Magnificence and bring him low. By the time Stage 5, Scene 35 is reached he repents, and recalls his former adviser, and all is well.

Well, so much for the quarrel between Skelton and Wolsey—between the parson from Norfolk and the Cardinal from Suffolk, and Suffolk got the best of it. Skelton may have had right on his side and he had courage and sincerity, but there is no doubt that jealousy came in too. At the beginning of Henry VIII's reign he was a very important person. He had been the King's tutor, he went on a semi-diplomatic mission, and as Poet Laureate he was a mouthpiece for official lampoons. With the advent of Wolsey, who tempted the king with pleasure, his importance declined, and he did not live to see the days when Henry preferred power to pleasure, and Wolsey fell.

The satires against the Scots, next to be mentioned, belong to the more influential period of Skelton's life. They centre round the Battle of Flodden (1513). King Henry's brother-in-law, James IV of Scotland, had challenged him, had invaded England, and been killed at Flodden, with most of his nobility. Skelton celebrates the English victory with caddish joy. In quoting a few lines, I do not desire to ruffle any sensitive friends from over the Border. I can anyhow assure them that our Poet Laureate appears to have got as good as he gave:

King Jamie, Jemsy, Jocky my jo,
Ye summoned our king—why did ye so
To you nothing it did accord
To summon our king your sovereign lord? …
Thus for your guerdon quit are ye,
Thanked be God in Trinitie
And sweet Saint George, our Lady's knight
Your eye is out: adew, good-night.

And still more abusively does he attack an enemy poet called Dundas who wrote Latin verses against him.

Gup, Scot,
Ye blot
Set in better
Thy pentameter
This Dundas
This Scottish ass,
He rhymes and rails
That Englishmen have tails. …
Shake thy tail, Scot, like a cur
For thou beggest at every man's door
Tut, Scot, I say
Go shake thee dog, hey. …
Dundas,
That drunk ass. …
Dundee, Dunbar
Walk Scot,
Walk sot
Rail not so far.

The accusation that Englishmen have tails is still sometimes made, and is no doubt as true as it ever was. I have not been able to find out how Dundas made it, since his poem has vanished. We can assume he was forcible. Nor have I quoted Skelton in full, out of deference to the twentieth century. He is said to have written it in his Diss rectory. That is unlikely—not because of its tone, but because it implies a close contact with affairs which he could only have maintained at Court.

Our short Skeltonic scamper is nearing its end, but I must refer to the Tunning of Elinor Rumming, one of the most famous of Skelton's poems. Elinor Rumming kept a pub—not in East Anglia, but down in Surrey, near Leatherhead. The poem is about her and her clients, who likewise belonged to the fair sex.

Tell you I will
If that you will
A while be still
Of a comely Jill
That dwelt on a hill:
She is somewhat sage
And well worn in age
For her visage
It would assuage
A man's courage …
Comely crinkled
Wondrously wrinkled
Like a roast pig's ear
Bristled with hair.

You catch the tone. You taste the quality of the brew. It is strong and rumbustious and not too clean. Skelton is going to enjoy himself thoroughly. Under the guise of a satirist and a corrector of morals, he is out for a booze. Now the ladies come tumbling in:

Early and late
Thither cometh Kate
Cisly and Sare
With their legs bare
And also their feet
Fully unsweet
Their kirtles all to-jagged
Their smocks all to-ragged,
With titters and tatters
Bring dishes and platters
With all their might running
To Elinor Rumming
To have of her tunning.

They get drunk, they tumble down in inelegant attitudes, they trip over the doorstep, they fight—Margery Milkduck, halting Joan, Maud Ruggy, drunken Alice, Bely and Sybil, in they come. Many of them are penniless and are obliged to pay in kind, and they bring with them gifts often as unsavoury as the drink they hope to swallow—a rancid side of bacon for example—and they pawn anything they can lay their hands on, from their husbands' clothes to the baby's cradle, from a frying-pan to a side-saddle. Elinor accepts all. It is a most lively and all-embracing poem, which gets wilder and lewder as it proceeds. Then Skelton pulls himself up in characteristic fashion.

My fingers itch
I have written too mich
Of this mad mumming
Of Elinor Rumming.

And remembering that he is a clergyman and a Poet Laureate he appends some Latin verses saying that he has denounced drunken, dirty and loquacious women, and trusts they will take his warning to heart. I wonder. To my mind he has been thoroughly happy, as he was in the church at Diss when the naughty curate hawked. I often suspect satirists of happiness—and I oftener suspect them of envy. Satire is not a straight trade. Skelton's satires on Wolsey are of the envious type. In Elinor Rumming and Ware the Hawk I detect a coarse merry character enjoying itself under the guise of censoriousness.

Thought is frank and free:
To think a merry thought
It cost me little nor nought.

One question that may have occurred to you is this: was Skelton typical of the educated parish priest of his age? My own impression is that he was, and that the men of Henry VIII's reign, parsons and others, were much more unlike ourselves than we suppose, or, if you prefer it, much odder. We cannot unlock their hearts. In the reign of his daughter Elizabeth a key begins to be forged. Shakespeare puts it into our hands, and we recover, on a deeper level, the intimacy promised by Chaucer. Skelton belongs to an age of transition: the silly Wars of the Roses were behind him; he appears even to regret them, and he could not see the profounder struggles ahead. This makes him “difficult”, though he did not seem so to himself. His coarseness and irreverence will pain some people and must puzzle everyone. It may help us if we remember that religion is older than decorum.

Of his poetry I have given some typical samples, and you will agree that he is entertaining and not quite like anyone else, that he has a feeling for rhythm, and a copious vocabulary. Sometimes—but not often—he is tender and charming, occasionally he is devout and very occasionally he is wise. On the whole he's a comic—a proper comic, with a love for improper fun, and a talent for abuse. He says of himself, in one of his Latin verses, that he sings the material of laughter in a harsh voice, and the description is apt; the harshness is often more obvious than the laughter, and leaves us with a buzzing in the ears rather than with a smile on the face. Such a row! Such a lot of complaints! He has indeed our national fondness for grumbling—the Government, the country, agriculture, the world, the beer, they are none of them what they ought to be or have been. And, although we must not affix our dry little political labels to the fluidity of the past (there is nothing to tie them on to), it is nevertheless safe to say that temperamentally the rector of Diss was a conservative.

On what note shall we leave him? A musical note commends itself. Let me quote three stanzas from a satire called “Against a Comedy Coistroun”—that is to say, against a good-looking kitchen-boy. The boy has been conjectured to be Lambert Simnel, the pretender to the crown of England. He was silly as well as seditious, and he fancied himself as a musician and “curiously chanted and currishly countered and madly in his musicks mockishly made against the Nine Muses of politic poems and poets matriculate”—the matriculate being Skelton, the Poet Laureate. Listen how he gets basted for his incompetence; you may not follow all the words, but you can hear the blows fall, and that's what matters:

He cannot find it in rule nor in space,
He solfas too haute, his treble is too high
He braggeth of his birth, that born was full base,
His music without measure, too sharp is his Mi,
He trimmeth in his tenor to counter pirdewy,
His descant is busy, it is without a mean
Too fat is his fancy, his wit is too lean.
He rumbleth on a lewd lute “Roty bully joys”
Rumble down, tumble down, hey go now now!
He fumbleth in his fingering an ugly good noise,
It seemeth the sobbing of an old sow!
He would be made much of, an he wist how;
Well sped in spindles and turning of tavells;
A bungler, a brawler, a picker of quarrels.
Comely he clappeth a pair of clavichords
He whistleth so sweetly, he maketh me to sweat;
His descant is dashed full of dischords
A red angry man, but easy to entreat:
An usher of the hall fain would I get
To point this proud page a place and a room
For Jack would be a gentleman, that late was a groom.

Kitchen-boy Simnel, if it be he, was evidently no more a performer than he was a prince. Yet I would have liked to have him here now, red, angry, good-looking, and making a hideous noise, and to have heard Skelton cursing him as he screeched. The pair of them might have revived for us that past which is always too dim, always too muffled, always too refined. With their raucous cries in your ears, with the cries of the falconer in Diss church, with the squawkings of Speke Parrot, and the belchings of Elinor Rumming, I leave you.

Note

1. The quotations are not verbally accurate. The text has been simplified for the purpose of reading aloud.