THE PROVERBS OF JOHN HEYWOOD. " Then doth he licke his lippes and stroke his beard, That's glewed together with his slavering droppes Of yestie ale, and when he scarce can trim His goutie fingers thus hee'l fillip it, ' And with a rotten hem, say hey, my hearts !' ' Merrie go sorrie ! cocke and pye, my heart ! But then their saving pennie proverbe comes." Two Angry Women ofAbingtont 1599. THE PROVERBS OF JOHN HEYWOOD. BEING THE "PROVERBES" OF THAT AUTHOR PRINTED 1546. EDITED, WITH NOTES AND INTRODUCTION, BY JULIAN SHARMAN. LONDON: GEORGE BELL AND SONS, YORK STREET, COVENT GARDEN. 1874. AND WILKINS, TO MY FRIEND, BOURCHIER F. HAWKSLEY, ESQ., THIS VOLUME IS DEDICATED. 4324G1 INTRODUCTION. traditions of old Saxon literature | HE had never been obliterated by rust or utterly defaced by invasion; even after the toll of the curfew, there yet lingered round the Saxon embers the homely folk-speech of Jutes and Angles. But the hidden graces of that English tongue no English Aristotle had attempted to uncover. No earlier Erasmus had arisen to restore the gems of speech and no to knit the learning ; English Quintilian scattered threads of idiom together. Everywhere where the English independence was subjected, was the English language as effectually despised. INTRODUCTION. Yet the Norman in proscribing the ancient literature could hardly hope to extirpate the ancient ways of thought. Still less could he hope to interrupt that flow of tears and laughter, the pathos and the humour which proceed from thought. We know that what- ever _was memorable or captivating in the old-world literature was accustomed to be recited, until the sense of property in such compositions becoming gradually lost, that grew to be the wit of many which had formerly been the wisdom of one. Such perpetual assumption of authorship would have been in itself sufficient to protect that verbal literature from desuetude, even had not the professional farceur worked mightily towards its preservation. The shrewd maxims of their Saxon forefathers had indeed been given over to the use of the meanest of the people's literary caterers, and as the common stock of glee-men and ale-poets, still continued to mingle with mirth and revel as they had done since the days of the Heptarchy. But in the popular adherence to the old charms of. speech, we think we perceive a restless importunity to bestow, as it were, upon a fitting recipient that priceless heirloom vener- able by reverence and by antiquity. Antiquity was dead, but not without issue. Already patient monas- tics had begun to embalm the decaying Saxon saws INTRODUCTION. ix and sentences in hideous cerements of Latin rhyming ; and to the antiquary who to-day unravels the leonine verses they have wrought for us, will stand revealed the sprightly sayings of mediaeval England. In this process we are reminded of nothing so much as the account given by our first Arctic navigator of the prodigious thawing of words and consonants that had long remained congealed in the atmosphere during the winter nights. In the wintry night of the Norman conquest, the direction of the English mind was one long effort to perpetuate and to transmit the pith and saltness of its bygone literature. An arm is stretched out, as it were, across three centuries the heirloom so often proffered is as often refused until the chattel at last is seized, and that by the hand of Chaucer. It might be idle to assert for an object so immaterial so definite a claim to antiquity, r but w e are not unwilling to believe that the same vein of wit and cunning which gives vitality to essen- tially English pages, from a Chaucer to a Dickens, is part and parcel of the very mine of wisdom whose produce the followers of Hengist bore away from Old Saxony. But the soil wherein the Saxon stem was planted may still perhaps be bearing herbage of a widely dif- ferent undergrowth. The doctrines of the Druids, x INTRODUCTION. preserved only by verbal narration, did not altogether perish at the destruction of the Druidic priesthood. In the maxims of Old Gaul and in the cherished sayings of Wales and Cornwall, some little of that traditional wisdom remains. The proverbial triads of the Cymri still perpetuate some facts of history. That the " settlers from the Summer Land," from the Tauric Chersonese, descended here upon these islands is recorded in the Druidic triads. That they recoiled before the invasions of Romans and of Irishmen is there also and with these his- deplored ; together torical relics are mingled an abundant crop of Druidic maxims, the condensation of ancient British thought. Another, and undeniably the merriest contributor, has contributed to the proverbial store-house. Two centuries previously, we read that a Duke of Normandy sent a son to to learn Danish under the had Bayeux ; earlier Plantagenets, the young Norman aristocracy might have visited England to learn French. The humbler Englishman may have possessed little apti- tude for acquiring the Norman speech, but even the Gurths and Wambas of the time could not fail to be attracted by the light and sparkle which glittered on the surface of the smoother tongue. If the Norman best of fine the was the sayer things ; Englishman INTRODUCTION. xi was incomparably the best hearer of them. When the smack of novelty had once passed away, those crumbs of merriment which the Frenchman discarded were by the other gratefully retained. In truth the palate of the Norman was gratified only by the crispness and the unexpectedness of the saying. It was the Englishman alone who was capable of luxuriating in its perfect infinity of application. But what wonderful resources were displayed by the Norman mind ! The Saxon could look only to his glebe or his farmyard for a simile. The Frenchman had the run of the tavern, the boothie, and the play- house he morsels from the ; brought away dainty convent-cell he curious scholar-talk from ; imported Paris and Montpellier. Such, then, being the genealogy of our hereditary folk-lore, it will seem strange that the patrimony should at any time be liable to diminish. Neverthe- less it would appear to be the fact that for upwards of a hundred years the people's wisdom was rigidly expugned from whatever prints and writings were intended for preservation. The prejudice of Lord Chesterfield that a national proverb was not becoming to the conversation of a man of breeding, would seem to have held good as well for the fifteenth as for the eighteenth century. It was not until the second de- xii INTRODUCTION. cade of the next century that our vernacular litera- ture again began to raise its head. In what measure the publication of Heywood's book contributed to the general restoration it is quite impossible to con- jecture, but it is not unreasonable to believe that its conservative influence was considerable. But here we may make room for a fine retrospect as it has been left us by two of the leading scholars of their day, Sir Thomas More and Roger Ascham. " " In our forefather's tyme," says Ascham, when Papistrie as a standyng poole, covered and overflowed all England, fewe bookes were read in our tong, savyng certaine bookes of Chevalrie, as they said, for pastime and pleasure, which, as some say, were made in monasteries by idle monkes or wanton chanons, as one for example, Morte Arthure: the whole pleasure of which booke standeth in two in special poyntes ;' open maunslaughter and bold bawdrye. In which booke, those be counted the noblest knightes that do kill most men without any quarrell and commit fowlest advoulteres subtlest shiftes as by ; Sir Launce- with the wife of his master lote, King Arthure, ; Syr with the wife of his uncle Tristram, Kynge Marke, ; Syr Lamerocke with the wife of King Lote, that was his owne aunte ... I know when God's Bible was banished the court, and Morte Arthure received into the Prince's chamber." INTRODUCTION, xiii " Prior to him Sir Thomas More writes : There is an use nowe a daies worse than amonge the Pagans, that bookes written in our mother's tonges, that be made but for idel men and women to read e, have none other matter but of war and love. What a cus- tome is thys, that a song shall not be regarded, but it bee full of fylthynes, and this the lawes oughte to take hede of, and of those ungracious fokes, such as bee in my countrey in Spayne : Amadise, Florisande, Ti- rante, Tristane, and Celestina the baude, mother of naughtynes. In Fraunce : Launcelote du Lake, Paris and Vienna, Ponthus and Sidonia, and Mel- neyne. In Flanders : Flory and Whyte flowre : Leonell and Canomoure, Curias and Florete, Pyramus and Thisbe. In England : Parthenope, Genarides, Hippomadron, Willyam and Meliour, Livius and Arthur, Guye and Bevis, and many other, and some translated out of Latyne into vulgare speaches, as the unsavery conceites of Pogius, and of Aneas Silvius, Gurialus and Lucretia." Those monastic writings, which, as Ascham had " " heard, were the work of wanton canons or worth- less monks, had been too foreign in their antecedents to adhere to the idiom and racy phraseology of fore- going times. The volumes which proceeded from the presses of the early printers were frequently the xiv INTRODUCTION. most inhistoric of histories or the most wearisome of romances. But already in Germany and in our own country, Polydore Vergil and Erasmus had begun to garner up the treasured sayings of classical antiquity; and the laureate Skelton, himself a sage and a classic, had preferred to sound a note better attuned to the public ear and more pleasing to the popular imagination.