The Old Inns of England (Vol. 1&2). Charles G. Harper

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СКАЧАТЬ day long they sat there, boozing, chaffering, and quarrelling:

      There was laughing and louring, and “let go the cuppe,”

       And seten so till euensonge and son gen vmwhile,

       Tyl glotoun had y-globbed a galoun and a Iille.

      By that time he could neither walk nor stand. He took his staff and began to go like a gleeman’s bitch, sometimes sideways and sometimes backwards. When he had come to the door, he stumbled and fell. Clement the cobbler caught him by the middle and set him on his knees, and then, “with all the woe of the world” his wife and his wench came to carry him home to bed. There he slept all Saturday and Sunday, and when at last he woke, he woke with a thirst—how modern that is, at any rate! The first words he uttered were, “Where is the bowl?”

      A hundred and fifty years later than Piers Plowman we get another picture of an English ale-house, by no less celebrated a poet. This famous house, the “Running Horse,” still stands at Leatherhead, in Surrey, beside the long, many-arched bridge that there crosses the river Mole at one of its most picturesque reaches. It was kept in the time of Henry the Seventh by that very objectionable landlady, Elynor Rummyng, whose peculiarities are the subject of a laureate’s verse. Elynor Rummyng, and John Skelton, the poet-laureate who hymned her person, her beer, and her customers, both flourished in the beginning of the sixteenth century. Skelton, whose genius was wholly satiric, no doubt, in his Tunning (that is to say, the brewing) of Elynor Rummyng, emphasised all her bad points, for it is hardly credible that even the rustics of the Middle Ages would have rushed so enthusiastically for her ale if it had been brewed in the way he describes.

      His long, rambling jingles, done in grievous spelling, picture her as a very ugly and filthy old person, with a face sufficiently grotesque to unnerve a strong man:

      For her viságe

       It would aswage

       A manne’s couráge.

       Her lothely lere

       Is nothyng clere,

       But vgly of chere,

       Droupy and drowsy,

       Scuruy and lowsy;

       Her face all bowsy,

       Comely crynkled,

       Woundersly wrynkled,

       Lyke a rost pygges eare

       Brystled wyth here.

       Her lewde lyppes twayne,

       They slauer, men sayne,

       Lyke a ropy rayne:

       A glummy glayre:

       She is vgly fayre:

       Her nose somdele hoked,

       And camously croked,

       Neuer stoppynge,

       But euer droppynge:

       Her skin lose and slacke,

       Grayned like a sacke;

       Wyth a croked backe.

       Her eyen jowndy

       Are full vnsoundy,

       For they are blered;

       And she grey-hered:

       Jawed like a jetty,

       A man would haue pytty

       To se how she is gumbed

       Fyngered and thumbed

       Gently joynted,

       Gresed and annoynted

       Vp to the knockels;

       The bones of her huckels

       Lyke as they were with buckles

       Together made fast;

       Her youth is farre past.

       Foted lyke a plane,

       Legged lyke a crane;

       And yet she wyll iet

       Lyke a silly fet.

       ····· Her huke of Lincoln grene, It had been hers I wene, More than fourty yere; And so it doth apere. For the grene bare thredes Loke lyke sere wedes, Wyddered lyke hay, The woll worne away: And yet I dare saye She thinketh herselfe gaye. ····· She dryueth downe the dewe With a payre of heles As brode as two wheles; She hobles as a gose Wyth her blanket trose Ouer the falowe: Her shone smered wyth talowe, Gresed vpon dyrt That bandeth her skyrt.

      ELYNOR RUMMYNG.

      And this comely dame

       I vnderstande her name

       Is Elynor Rummynge,

       At home in her wonnynge:

       And as men say,

       She dwelt in Sothray,

       In a certain stede

       Bysyde Lederhede,

       She is a tonnysh gyb,

       The Deuyll and she be syb,

       But to make vp my tale,

       She breweth nappy ale,

       And maketh port-sale

       To travelers and tynkers,

       To sweters and swynkers,

       And all good ale-drynkers,

       That wyll nothynge spare,

       But drynke tyll they stare

       And brynge themselves bare,

       Wyth, now away the mare

       And let vs sley care

       As wyse as a hare.

       Come who so wyll

       To Elynor on the hyll

       Wyth Fyll the cup, fyll

       And syt there by styll.

       Erly and late

       Thyther cometh Kate

       Cysly, and Sare

       Wyth theyr legges bare

       And also theyr fete.

       ····· Some haue no mony For theyr ale to pay, That is a shrewd aray; СКАЧАТЬ