IVORY AND APES AND PEACOCKS
There is a sentence in the biblical account of the wonders of Solomon’s reign that has always had a fascination for me. ‘Once in three years came the navy of Tarshish bringing gold and silver, ivory and apes and peacocks.’ And the fascination lies not in the crude magnificence of tusks and ingots, the burnished brilliance of peacocks, or the uncanny, too human, grotesqueness of apes, but in all the varied multitude of unnamed articles which must have constituted the cargo of those far-faring ships of Tarshish—gaudy tissues interwoven with bettle-wings, strange shells, jewel-crusted swords, carvings in sandal-wood and in the wood of the mysterious almug tree. Possibly the almug tree is not mysterious to the well-informed man, but I admit that I have always carefully avoided looking it up; I might say, as was said of the purple cow, ‘I never saw an almug tree, I never want to see one,’ because I am certain that it would prove a vast disappointment. The unlading of a ship is an enlarged and, it must be admitted, less personal version of the unpacking of a Christmas hamper, a joy apportioned to childhood, not, in nine cases out of ten, because in our maturer years we lose the appreciation of disinterring the unexpected from swathings of paper, string, and straw, but because the opportunities are denied us. Of course, it is given to few to unpack a ship, and there may be persons of little imagination to whom a bill of lading seems dull and uninspiring, but to me every such list is a potential hamper. When the bill of lading is of the fifteenth century there is added something of the feeling which we have when turning out a drawer in an old forgotten bureau of our great-grandmother’s. The everyday objects of that time are now unfamiliar, and our ingenuity is taxed to guess the use of some of them, while on the other hand it is quite a shock to find that other things which we still use were known so long ago.
‘latten “Agnus Dei.”’
The hold of a ship, like poverty, makes strange bed-fellows acquaint. A hundred distaves, emblems of peaceful home-life, came into London port in 1390 side by side with ninety-three dozen swords, these latter for Gerard van Barle, who must have been either an armourer in business on a very large scale, or else an army contractor. Six hundred oranges, at fifteen a penny, we find sandwiched between eight barrels of varnish and nine glass cups; a jar of preserved dates is thrust in between twelve yards of linen cloth and a barrel containing seven and a half dozen beaver hats. A ship of Dieppe came into Winchelsea harbour in 1490 with damask and satin and pipes of wine, razors and needles and mantles of leopard skins, five gross of playing-cards and eight gross of latten ‘Agnus Dei.’ These last, which I regret to say seem to have been considerably less valued than the ‘devil’s books’ which accompanied them, were plaques stamped with the figure of the holy Lamb, and it would seem that they were so common that the word became a synonym for a plaque, as in an inventory of the jewels of Henry VII. occurs ‘an Agnus of the Salutation of Our Lady.’ In the same way the component parts of the rosary became so intimately associated in men’s minds with prayers that when we read in a list of cargo of ‘pater-nosters’ or ‘bedys’ of amber, coral, tin, or ‘tree’ it is impossible to be sure whether they were rosaries or beads in the modern sense of ornaments. Devotional objects naturally figured largely in the imports of mediÆval days, images of painted wood or tin occurring with frequency in the London customs accounts of 1390, and the alabaster carvings for which England, and in particular Nottingham, was famous form quite the most interesting of our exports in the fifteenth century. As a whole it must be admitted that our exports at that time were very dull compared to our imports; cloth, hides, and corn are but uninspiring merchandise, and although the frequent mention of ale and beer might cheer the heart of Mr. Belloc or the late Mr. Calverley it leaves me cold. One item, however, is interesting in the fifteenth-century exports from Bristol, and that is the constant occurrence in cargoes for Ireland, and for nowhere else, of casks of ‘corrupt wine.’ This looks like ‘another injustice to Ireland.’ With this untempting liquor went a good quantity of honey, possibly to counteract its acidity, and of ‘battery-ware,’ which was really such things as kettles, but may have been endeared to the Irish from an imaginary connection with assault.
If the exported cloth was uninspiring in its lack of variety the same charge cannot be brought against the imported stuffs. There is some room for imagination in the cargo of Matthew Clayson’s boat, which brought kerchiefs of Cyprus and Syria (so at least I interpret cirian), oriental kerchiefs and glittering (relusant) kerchiefs, with 707 lb. of pins wherewith to fasten them. There is also something satisfactory about baudrik powdered with Cyprian gold, and even about chamelet and sarcenet. I own to a delight in the old drapery terms, and, whatever their merits as materials, I feel that our modern trade terms such as viyella and eoline (if these be their names) are feeble and finicking besides arras, bayes, bewpers, boulters, borratoes, buffins, bustyans, bombacyes, calimancoes, carrells, dornicks, frisadoes, fustians, grograines, mockadoes, minnikins, makarells, oliotts, pomettes, plumettes, perpetuanas, rashes, russells, sayes, stamells, tukes, tamettes, and woadmolles. But if these and similar words have a fascination it is partly a fascination of the unknown, and I should be grateful to any one who could tell me what it was that Walter Hake brought into London port in 1390, for, besides two barrels with fourteen nests of mazer cups and other recognisable goods, he carried three thousand five hundred ‘redwark,’ ten hundred ‘ruskyn,’ as much ‘popl,’ and, most puzzling of all, eight thousand ‘of good work’ (boni operis). I admit the temptation to endow the work with plurality and to set this load of good works in opposition to a contemporary Rabelaisian cargo of ‘fartes of Portingale.’
‘... playing innumerable pranks.’
So far the cargoes of our ships have not greatly resembled those of the ships of Tarshish, but, if the peacocks are to seek, we can easily find the ivory, in the shape of combs, and as to the apes the Clement of Rye in 1490 brought home four dozen baboons (baboynes). It must, however, be admitted that these baboons would not have found a home at the Zoo—they were in fact little grotesque figures, and in that sense the word occurs often in mediÆval inventories. Edward III. had not only a number of pieces of plate with ‘babewyns’ upon them, but one cup described as gilt and enamelled with ‘diverse babwynrie.’ At the same time the real monkey was a common enough object; he figures in the margin of scores of illuminated manuscripts, playing innumerable pranks, not infrequently in the dress of a priest, a monk, or a friar. Monkeys were kept by many of the nobles, and when Thomas Becket went, as Chancellor of England, on an embassy to the court of France an ape sat on every pack horse of his gorgeous cavalcade. The merchandise of Venice in 1436 included ‘Apes and japes and marmusettes tayled,’ and so far was the ape a common import that at many seaports monkeys figured in the customs lists, the due at Norwich being 40d. each, no small sum. With the monkey in these lists is also found the bear, who at Norwich paid 42d. for admission to the country. Bears were even commoner sights than monkeys, for not only were there the performing bears in charge of itinerant showmen, but many of the poor brutes were kept for sport, to be baited by dogs. It was probably for purposes of sport that Sir John Bourchier, Earl of Bath, kept half-a-dozen bears, which after the Reformation he stabled in the dismantled priory of the Black Friars at Fisherton, near Salisbury. There they lived happily until, according to Harry Sutton, their keeper, John Davy and Agnes his wife with other naughty and evil-disposed persons broke into the close where they were kept, and Agnes, ‘being thene of most wyckyd and damnable disposicion,’ scattered poisoned bread on the ground and in the water where the bears drank. As a result three of the bears died, as did also a poor man’s sow that drank of the pond; and a poor woman who washed her face in the water ‘so swelled that she was like to have died,’ which I take leave to think was an exaggeration on the part of Harry Sutton. There is always another side to every story, and according to John Davy he had a lease of part of the friary lands, and his wife was quite peaceably walking there when Sutton, to frighten her away, untied ‘the grettyste and most terryble bere’ and set him at her, whereat she being ‘sore affrayed and abashed’ ran away and in running fell over a sow, not the poor man’s sow that died, but a sow of lead, and received a hurt from which she died. The two versions are singularly divergent, and if Sutton could show three dead bears and a sow in support of his story, Davy could show a dead wife in support of his.
Henry III. was the proud possessor of a polar bear, which used to be taken for a swim in the Thames to disport itself and to catch fish, no doubt to the great joy of the young Londoners. This was a present from the King of Norway, and gifts of strange beasts were often made to our kings, the favourites naturally being lions and leopards, in allusion to the royal arms, the Black Prince on one occasion sending his father a lion and a leopard. In passing it may be remarked that it is a curious trait of the heraldic lion that it cannot look a man in the face; when a lion looks at you it becomes a leopard. This, I admit, sounds rather like the schoolboy’s description of the tortuous river of Palestine, ‘The Jordan runs straight down the middle of the map, but when you look at it it wriggles,’—but it is none the less a fact. In early heraldry the lean and fearsome beast that does duty for a lion when seen in profile is called a leopard when its full face is shown; it is true that a later generation of heraldic writers converted the three golden leopards of England into ‘lions passant guardant,’ but leopards they were, and, for those of us who prefer the heraldry of the classic period to its debased and jargonised descendant, leopards they remain. At the same time, as the live lions could hardly be expected to look continuously over their left shoulders, the royal menagerie at the tower was usually stocked with real leopards as well as lions. For generations, and indeed centuries, the lions of the Tower enjoyed much the same privileged position as the eponymous bears of Berne, and were so emphatically the sight to which all country cousins, by a humane version of ‘Christianos ad leones,’ had to be taken that their name became, and remains, synonymous with all that is double-asterisked by Baedeker.
‘When a lion looks at you it becomes a leopard.’
MediÆval Englishmen seem to have a partiality for strange beasts, combined with a reluctance to pay exorbitant fees for seeing them. In 1364 Edward III. had to order the mayor and sheriffs of London to protect Roger Owery and John Want, to whom he had committed the custody of a certain Egyptian beast called an ‘Oure,’ various persons, who apparently wished to see the beast without paying, having threatened to assault them and kill the ‘Oure.’ What this creature was is not clear; possibly it was the aurochs or buffalo—Borde’s ‘vengeable beast,’ the Bovy of Bohemia. Whatever it was its keepers, who had no doubt looked forward to making a good thing out of exhibiting it, seem to have had a doubtful bargain, and the same fate befell Thomas Charles, ‘squier,’ and William Lynde just about a century later when they obtained from the king the keeping of his ‘foul called an Estrich.’ They sent the ostrich round the country in charge of Richard Axsmith and John Piers, ‘for to disporte with the sight of hym the kynges true lieges,’—and incidentally, though they do not think that worth mentioning, to put money in their own pockets. ‘How be hit that oother mysdoers in certain places wher lite reverence is doon or shewed to anything of the kinges, as the dede hathe proven, have withoute cause wrongfully doon grete trespasses and offenses as wel to the said foul as to Richard Axsmyth and John Piers.’ At Royston a mob, egged on by the prior, assaulted the keepers and caused the ostrich ‘to ben seyn of alle peuple’ and the unfortunate ‘fowle’ was ‘hurten so sore that he may never be hool, as hit on hym wel appereth.’ When they came to Norwich one of the sheriffs cast them into prison as ‘false Flemings,’ and ‘caused the foul to be seyn in the common strete of alle peuple that list to come seen hym for nought.’ Nor did they have any better luck at the next town, Bury St. Edmunds, where they were again imprisoned and the bird exhibited for nothing, the townsmen ‘axing hem who made hem so hardy as to go on with the kinges foule about among his peuple without a commission.’ This seems to have been the end of their tour in the eastern counties.
‘The unfortunate “fowle” was “hurten so sore.”’
The ostrich does not often occur under that name, but its egg was often made into a cup, under the name of a griffon’s egg or ‘grype’s ey.’ Edward III. had more than one ‘oef de greffon,’ and Henry IV. had half-a-dozen ‘gryppesheys,’ but possibly by this time the term was only conventional and the true origin of the egg was known, as one of these ‘gryppesheys’ was mounted on ‘two white ostriches.’ The griffin, half eagle and half lion, was a very popular mediÆval beast; that no specimen is ever recorded to have been taken round on show may have been due to the fact that this beast ‘so much disdaineth vassalrey and subjection that he will never be surprised alive.’ The appearance amongst the jewels of Richard II. of an almsdish supported by two griffons suggests an analogy with its modern relation the Jubjub, of which it is said that ‘In charity meetings it stands at the door, And collects though it does not subscribe.’ If doubt is to be thrown on examples of the griffon’s eggs, still more dubitable is the ‘drinking vessel made of the horn of a griffon, mounted in copper gilt,’ which belonged to Edward III. This may well rank with a relic preserved in the Cathedral Priory of Rochester,—‘the rod of Moses which budded,’—in view of the fact that it was Aaron’s rod which budded and that a griffon has no horns.
If our forefathers never had a chance of seeing a griffon and failed to appreciate an ostrich when they did see one, there is no question that they saw and appreciated the first elephant that landed in England. It was a present from King Louis of France to Henry III. and landed at Sandwich in 1255, whence it proceeded leisurely to London, filling all beholders with astonishment. It only lived a couple of years, and when its successor came over I do not know, but I suspect that there was a very long interval before England was again visited by an elephant. Before its lamented decease it sat for its portrait to Matthew Paris and another contemporary chronicler, and the resulting sketches are quite recognisable. The elephant was not a very favourite subject with mediÆval artists, though the Earl of Arundel in 1397 had a piece of tapestry (probably oriental) ‘powdered with lions, olyfauntes and imagery,’ and if any one wants to know what it was like they have only to go to an old house in Market Street at Rye, where they can see just such a piece of tapestry, ‘olyfauntes’ and all, reproduced as a wall-painting. Talking of elephants, a learned man not many years back wrote an article with the fascinating title, ‘How the Elephant became a Bishop’; as a matter of fact it dealt with the evolution of the chess ‘bishop,’ but what a title for a fairy tale!
Elephants, to one mediÆvally minded, infallibly suggest dragons, for it is notorious that there was bitter enmity between elephants and dragons. And the subject of dragons is a wide one. So far as I know the last, in Western Europe at least, was killed in the Roman Campagna in 1660, its slayer himself dying from the poison in its breath, but it was less than half a century before that, in 1614 to be precise, that a young half-fledged dragon—it was nine feet long and its wings were only just sprouting—was seen in Sussex, at Faygate in St. Leonards Forest. Of course in earlier times they were much more numerous; Switzerland swarmed with them, in fact Lucerne seems to have been almost as much the happy hunting-ground of the dragon and the cockatrice as it is now of the Cook’s tourist. The northern counties, especially Durham and Northumberland, were also much pestered by ‘laidly worms’; two estates were held of the Bishop of Durham from early time by exhibiting to him annually the swords with which redoubtable ancestors of the tenants had slain the Worm of Sockburn and the fearsome Brawn of Brancepeth, a boar to which all ordinary boars were but as ordinary cattle to the Dun Cow, slain by Guy of Warwick with a sword still shown at Warwick Castle. Perhaps the most satisfactory dragon on record was that slain at Rhodes in 1345 by Deodatus de Gonzago. That wily and prudent knight constructed a pantomine dragon on the pattern of the real article and made two of his servants get inside and work it realistically; in this manner he accustomed his horse and his dogs to dragon-baiting, and his trouble was rewarded by the death of the monster and his own election to the mastership of the Knights of St. John. Another famous dragon was the Tarask. It seems that when St. Mary Magdalene landed at Marseilles she installed herself in a dragon’s cave; the dragon was unceremoniously ejected and went off higher up the Rhone; but he had no luck; the first person he met on landing was St. Martha, who gave him a good dressing down and handed him over to the peasants, who slew him but immortalised his name in Tarascon. There were a great many varieties of dragons, but I think the most curious that I have met was one of silver gilt belonging to Henry IV. which was described as ‘au guyse d’un boterflie’; anything less like a dragon than a butterfly it would be difficult to imagine. At the same time some of these terrible beasts seem to have been quite insignificant. The amphisbÆna, though it developed in the Bestiaries into a fearsome dragon with a head at each end, started as quite a small worm, so small indeed that a whole one could be carried on the person without inconvenience. So carried it prevented the wearer from ever feeling chilly; in which respect it would seem to have been the opposite of the salamander, whose flesh was so cold that it quenched fire. Henry V. bought a parrot, two monkeys, and three salamanders from a fishmonger. I wonder what the salamanders were; if they were the squabby and unattractive lizard, black, with yellow spots, which now goes by that name I fear the king must have been disappointed. If he experimented upon their alleged ability to live in fire, or at least to extinguish it, I fear the disappointment would have been shared by the salamanders.
‘... constructed a pantomime dragon on the pattern of the real article.’
Besides the monsters of the land and air there were, of course, mediÆval varieties of the sea-serpent. Matthew Paris records that in 1255 a monster bigger than the biggest whale was thrown up on the coast of Norfolk. As this was the year in which the first elephant came over I almost wondered if two had started and one had fallen overboard and been drowned, but quite by accident I came upon a legal case connected with this very sea monster, arising out of foreshore rights and rights of wreck, which showed that the creature, whatever it was, was very much alive when first seen, as no less than six boats were sunk in effecting its capture. Unfortunately no description of the monster is given, but probably it was a great sperm whale. Fifteen years earlier, in 1240, according to the same chronicler, there was a great battle of whales off the mouth of the Thames, and one of the wounded came up the river, just managed to squeeze through the arches of London Bridge and got as far as Mortlake before it was killed. A fresh-water monster, or at least one which started life in a river and developed in a well but afterwards took to the land, was the terrible Lambton worm, which seems after all to have been more of a nuisance than a danger, as, so long as it got its trough full of milk regularly, it was content to lie about, coiled round Lambton Hill.
Terrible beasts were the basilisk—for which I have always felt an affection since I saw his portrait by Carpaccio in the church of St. George of the Sclavs (after much furious argument with a gondolier who knew no St. George but S. Giorgio Maggiore) at Venice—the cockatrice, and that strange hybrid of the two, the basilcok, known chiefly for its mean and unrelenting enmity to the centichore or yale, the strange pig-antelope who now sits once more as he sat of yore on the bridge at Hampton Court. Terrible beasts all; but none so morally destructive as that noble friend of man, the horse. Everybody knows the famous derivation of hypocrite, ‘from two Greek words—hippos, a horse, and krites, a judge: a horse-dealer, therefore, a deceiver.’ The Archbishop of York would seem to have been of the same opinion when he inhibited the cellarer of Newburg from dealing in horses, on the ground that it was not fitting for a man of religion, because in the negotiations between buyer and seller it is almost impossible to avoid sin. It would have been well if John Hill, vicar of Coliton in Devon in 1426, had considered this before he sold a horse to Walter Trouns, ‘knowing the horse to have contracted divers diseases and to be incapable of working.’ From the description the horse would seem to have been of the same breed as the ‘hakeney’ hired by William Driffeld from Thomas Plevener, a London innkeeper, who ‘promysed and warantized the said hakeney to be of helth and of habilitie and well and trewlay’ to carry Master William to Walsingham, whither he was going, no doubt, on pilgrimage. In spite of the warranty, the hackney, before he had covered twenty miles, ‘wold nor myght go no ferther’ and had to be left at Ware, where he died ‘of dyverse infyrmytes.’ Richard Chapman had a similar experience when he hired a horse from Christopher Thomas to carry him to York; at the end of the first day it ‘failed hym and was morefounded.’ Probably the hirers out of the horses threw the blame on their clients, as did Robert Grene, ‘corsour’ (i.e. horse-dealer, not to be confused with corsair, a pirate), who, having sold a horse to John Bonauntre, complained that ‘the said John rode upon the said hors’ with the result that it was ‘perished and utterly destroyed,’ though whether that was due to the delicacy of the horse, which was only intended for ornament, or to the ‘unresonable and outrajus rydyng’ of the purchaser is not clear. Mules, as we might expect, occasionally gave as much trouble as horses. There was a Welsh clergyman in the fifteenth century, John Yevan by name, upon whom a brother clerk, John Grigge, managed to plant a mule ‘the whiche he wold not have had, but through the gret labour and desyre of the said Sir John Grigge he toke the same mule upon his warantie that he shuld bere hym from Rome to London, orells not to paye therefore.’ Exactly what happened on that journey is not revealed, but the mule would seem to have proved several degree more aggravating than Modestine in the Cevennes, for John Yevan ‘was fayne and glad to make a cambicion (exchange) by the waye, to his gret hurte and hynderance,’ and felt much injured at being called upon to account for the missing mule on his return. The good man’s knowledge of legal jargon seems to have been oral rather than literary, as he invoked the magic of the law by demanding a ‘wryte of sorserare,’ in which it is not easy to recognise a writ of certiorari.
‘Hakeney.’
One of the most deadly of vicarious insults was to crop the tails of your adversary’s horses; it would seem to have been as bad as the biblical custom of cutting off the skirts of his messengers. John Enot, archdeacon of Buckingham in the fifteenth century, complained tearfully that one Thomas Coneloye (was he a lawless Irish Connelly?) prevented him from carrying out his duties in the punishment of sinners and had caused the tails of his horses to be cut. It was a similar insult to the hot-tempered Thomas Becket that caused that archbishop’s furious denunciation of his enemies and led to his murder and so to his canonisation, from which it follows that we owe Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to the curtailment of the archbishop’s horses. From insult to assault is a short journey, and horses have brought so many to the ‘demnition bow-wows,’ that I am reminded at this point of the adventure of the vicar and the dog and the door-key, which fell out in this wise. William Russell, vicar of Mere in Somerset, some time during the reign of Henry VI., left his church at five o’clock one Good Friday evening, having been ‘bysyly occupyed all that day before in hyryng of confessions.’ He locked up his church and turned homewards, but on his way met one of his parishioners, John Totyn, an evil man, ‘not dredyng God ne the censers of the chirche.’ Totyn had in his hand a seven-foot staff with ‘a grete pyke of yren’ at one end and with him was ‘an horryble grete Dogge called a lymer,’ and he at once attacked the vicar and ‘provoked and stered his saide dogge to renne upon hym, callyng hym by his name and saide Hay Dewgarde.’ I am not clear whether the dog’s name was Dieugarde, which seems rather unlikely, or Dugald, which is possible, but I rather incline to the idea that Totyn really said ‘good dog,’ with a provincial accent—‘Hey! gude darg!’ in fact. Anyhow, ‘the saide dogge, knowyng the condicions of his maister, ran upon (the vicar) and bote hym by the arme in iij places and pullyd hym downe to grounde twyes and so was likely then to have been murthored by the saide John Totyn and his dogge,’—the good vicar at the recollection of the exciting incident becomes oblivious of grammar and changes the subject of his verbs—‘but as God woold he smote the said dogge with the chirche dore key under his ere, and with that the said dogge departed.’ Next day worthy William Russell trotted off to his patron, the Abbot of Glastonbury, and showed him his injuries—‘his shurte beyng full of blode, his gowne to torne, his arme sore byten’; but he got cold comfort and scant sympathy. Totyn was the abbot’s servant and the abbot said, ‘that that was doon it was doon in the defence of my man, and it shall coste me xlli or thou shalte do my man any wrong, for I lete the wete I wyll defende hym.’
‘... showed him his injuries.’
Dogs of all kinds,—
‘Mastiff, greyhound, mongrel grim,
Hound or spaniel, brach or lym,
Or bobtail tike or trundle tail,’
figure often enough in our old records, and often enough got their owners into trouble for poaching, but they were not so frequently complained of for assault as might have been expected. I remember coming across one rather interesting case in which a man complained that a neighbour’s dogs had chased a tame deer belonging to his daughter, and when she interfered to rescue it had bitten her hands. The keeping of tame deer was common enough; Edward III. had a tame hind brought from St. Albans to Woodstock on one occasion, and about a couple of centuries later a Lincolnshire clergyman, John Barnardiston, rector of Great Coates, for his own recreation and comfort and the amusement of his friends, ‘norysched, kept and brought up a tame hynde calfe.’ Unfortunately he had annoyed Sir Christopher Askew, who instigated William Morecropp and other ‘lyght and evyll disposed persons’ to kill the hind. They discovered where it frequented day and night and carried it off to Morecropp’s house, where they assembled next day ‘with force and aryms; that is to saye wyth staves, bylles, swordes and bokelers,’—an almost excessive armament for the purpose,—and slew the unfortunate hind and carried its body to Sir Christopher, who, when Barnardiston complained, ‘lyghtly and wantonly made a gret game and sport therat’ and threatened that worse should befall him if he did not sit still. While sympathising with the rector for the loss of his pet, it is difficult to deny that the assembly of half-a-dozen ruffians fully armed with swords and bucklers to tackle one tame little fawn suggests the four-and-twenty tailors who set out to kill a snail, and is not without its ludicrous side.
‘... fully armed with swords and bucklers.’
Printed by T. and A. Constable, Printers to His Majesty
at the Edinburgh University Press
Footnotes:
[1] June 1911.
[2] The record of one of this man’s acts of torture is worth preserving, though it is, for obvious reasons, best left in the original Latin: ‘cepit unum vermem qui vocatur clok [i.e. a sheep tick] et posuit infra virgam Roberti de Alverton et ligavit virgam cum parva corda et posuit ipsum Robertum super unam cordam et ligavit cordam de una trabe ad aliam et fecit ipsum moveri super cordam predictam et membra sua frotari quousque finem fecit pro x marcis.’
