No. 46. Ecclesiastical Sincerity.
No. 47. Reynard turned Monk.
Popular sculpture and painting were but the translation of popular literature, and nothing was more common to represent, in pictures and carvings, than individual men under the forms of the animals who displayed similar characters or similar propensities. Cunning, treachery, and intrigue were the prevailing vices of the middle ages, and they were those also of the fox, who hence became a favourite character in satire. The victory of craft over force always provoked mirth. The fabulists, or, we should perhaps rather say, the satirists, soon began to extend their canvas and enlarge their picture, and, instead of single examples of fraud or injustice, they introduced a variety of characters, not only foxes, but wolves, and sheep, and bears, with birds also, as the eagle, the cock, and the crow, and mixed them up together in long narratives, which thus formed general satires on the vices of contemporary society. In this manner originated the celebrated romance of “Reynard the Fox,” which in various forms, from the twelfth century to the eighteenth, has enjoyed a popularity which was granted probably to no other book. The plot of this remarkable satire turns chiefly on the long struggle between the brute force of Isengrin the Wolf, possessed only with a small amount of intelligence, which is easily deceived—under which character is presented the powerful feudal baron—and the craftiness of Reynard the Fox, who represents the intelligent portion of society, which had to hold its ground by its wits, and these were continually abused to evil purposes. Reynard is swayed by a constant impulse to deceive and victimise everybody, whether friends or enemies, but especially his uncle Isengrin. It was somewhat the relationship between the ecclesiastical and baronial aristocracy. Reynard was educated in the schools, and intended for the clerical order; and at different times he is represented as acting under the disguise of a priest, of a monk, of a pilgrim, or even of a prelate of the church. Though frequently reduced to the greatest straits by the power of Isengrin, Reynard has generally the better of it in the end: he robs and defrauds Isengrin continually, outrages his wife, who is half in alliance with him, and draws him into all sorts of dangers and sufferings, for which the latter never succeeds in obtaining justice. The old sculptors and artists appear to have preferred exhibiting Reynard in his ecclesiastical disguises, and in these he appears often in the ornamentation of mediæval architectural sculpture, in wood-carvings, in the illuminations of manuscripts, and in other objects of art. The popular feeling against the clergy was strong in the middle ages, and no caricature was received with more favour than those which exposed the immorality or dishonesty of a monk or a priest. Our cut No. 45 is taken from a sculpture in the church of Christchurch, in Hampshire, for the drawing of which I am indebted to my friend, Mr. Llewellynn Jewitt. It represents Reynard in the pulpit preaching; behind, or rather perhaps beside him, a diminutive cock stands upon a stool—in modern times we should be inclined to say he was acting as clerk. Reynard’s costume consists merely of the ecclesiastical hood or cowl. Such subjects are frequently found on the carved seats, or misereres, in the stalls of the old cathedrals and collegiate churches. The painted glass of the great window of the north cross-aisle of St. Martin’s church in Leicester, which was destroyed in the last century, represented the fox, in the character of an ecclesiastic, preaching to a congregation of geese, and addressing them in the words—Testis est mihi Deus, quam cupiam vos omnes visceribus meis (God is witness, how I desire you all in my bowels), a parody on the words of the New Testament.[25] Our cut No. 46 is taken from one of the misereres in the church of St. Mary, at Beverley, in Yorkshire. Two foxes are represented in the disguise of ecclesiastics, each furnished with a pastoral staff, and they appear to be receiving instructions from a prelate or personage of rank—perhaps they are undertaking a pilgrimage of penance. But their sincerity is rendered somewhat doubtful by the geese concealed in their hoods. In one of the incidents of the romance of Reynard, the hero enters a monastery and becomes a monk, in order to escape the wrath of King Noble, the lion. For some time he made an outward show of sanctity and self-privation, but unknown to his brethren he secretly helped himself freely to the good things of the monastery. One day he observed, with longing lips, a messenger who brought four fat capons as a present from a lay neighbour to the abbot. That night, when all the monks had retired to rest, Reynard obtained admission to the larder, regaled himself with one of the capons, and as soon as he had eaten it, trussed the three others on his back, escaped secretly from the abbey, and, throwing away his monastic garment, hurried home with his prey. We might almost imagine our cut No. 47, taken from one of the stalls of the church of Nantwich, in Cheshire, to have been intended to represent this incident, or, at least, a similar one. Our next cut, No. 48, is taken from a stall in the church of Boston, in Lincolnshire. A prelate, equally false, is seated in his chair, with a mitre on his head, and the pastoral staff in his right hand. His flock are represented by a cock and hens, the former of which he holds securely with his right hand, while he appears to be preaching to them.
No. 48. The Prelate and his Flock.
Another mediæval sculpture has furnished events for a rather curious history, at the same time that it is a good illustration of our subject. Odo de Cirington, the fabulist, tells us how, one day, the wolf died, and the lion called the animals together to celebrate his exequies. The hare carried the holy water, hedgehogs bore the candles, the goats rang the bells, the moles dug the grave, the foxes carried the corpse on the bier. Berengarius, the bear, celebrated mass, the ox read the gospel, and the ass the epistle. When the mass was concluded, and Isengrin buried, the animals made a splendid feast out of his goods, and wished for such another funeral. Our satirical ecclesiastic makes an application of this story which tells little to the credit of the monks of his time. “So it frequently happens,” he says, “that when some rich man, an extortionist or a usurer, dies, the abbot or prior of a convent of beasts, i.e. of men living like beasts, causes them to assemble. For it commonly happens that in a great convent of black or white monks (Benedictines or Augustinians) there are none but beasts—lions by their pride, foxes by their craftiness, bears by their voracity, stinking goats by their incontinence, asses by their sluggishness, hedgehogs by their asperity, hares by their timidity, because they were cowardly where there was no fear, and oxen by their laborious cultivation of their land.”[26]
No. 49. The Funeral of the Fox.
A scene closely resembling that here described by Odo, differing only in the distribution of the characters, was translated from some such written story into the pictorial language of the ancient sculptured ornamentation of Strasburg Cathedral, where it formed, apparently, two sides of the capital or entablature of a column near the chancel. The deceased in this picture appears to be a fox, which was probably the animal intended to be represented in the original, although, in the copy of it preserved, it looks more like a squirrel. The bier is carried by the goat and the boar, while a little dog underneath is taking liberties with the tail of the latter. Immediately before the bier, the hare carries the lighted taper, preceded by the wolf, who carries the cross, and the bear, who holds in one hand the holy-water vessel and in the other the aspersoir. This forms the first division of the subject, and is represented in our cut No. 49. In the next division (cut No. 50), the stag is represented celebrating mass, and the ass reads the Gospel from a book which the cat supports with its head.
No. 50. The Mass for the Fox.
This curious sculpture is said to have been of the thirteenth century. In the fifteenth century it attracted the attention of the reformers, who looked upon it as an ancient protest against the corruptions of the mass, and one of the more distinguished of them, John Fischart, had it copied and engraved on wood, and published it about the year 1580, with some verses of his own, in which it was interpreted as a satire upon the papacy. This publication gave such dire offence to the ecclesiastical authorities of Strasburg, that the Lutheran bookseller