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Page 28
But he can be more pointed than that and no less just--as when he is
telling the maids how to wash linen:
"Go wash well," saith Summer, "with sun I shall dry."
"Go wring well," saith Winter, "with wind so shall I."
He is never dull if he is never eloquent; he is always wise if he is
seldom witty. Among the Elizabethan poets there will have been many of
a lowlier quality, many who could not have reached the piety and sweet
humour of "My friend if cause doth wrest thee," which, with its happy
close of "And sit down, Robin, and rest thee," is the best known of
all his rhymes. As a verbal acrobat I don't suppose any of them
could approach him. His greatest feat in that kind was his "Brief
Conclusion" in twelve lines, every word in every line of which began
with T. Thus:
The thrifty that teacheth the thriving to thrive,
Teach timely to traverse the thing that thou 'trive,
and so on. If _Peter Piper_ dates so early, Tusser beats it
handsomely.
For the rest, he writes doggerel, and has no other pretensions that I
can see. All the Elizabethans did, Shakespeare among the best of
them. And I don't know that Shakespeare's doggerel is much better
than Tusser's doggerel. It is something that, swimming in such a brave
company, he should keep his head above water; and something more that
in one other point Tusser can vie with the foremost. His knack of
christening his personages with _ad hoc_ names recalls Shakespeare's,
which, with its Dick the Carter and Marian's nose, was of the same
kind and degree. Here is an example, where he wishes to instil the
value of hedge-mending. If you let your fences down, he says:
At noon, if it bloweth, at night if it shine,
Out trudgeth Hew Makeshift with hook and with line;
While Gillet his blowse is a milking thy cow,
Sir Hew is a rigging thy gate, or thy plow.
Autolycus sang like that. Now take an allusive couplet addressed to
the house-mistress, that she by all means see the lights out:
Fear candle in hay-loft, in barn, and in shed,
Fear Flea-smock and Mend-breech for burning their bed.
Right Shakespearian direction: few words and to the mark. But Tusser
is seldom up to that level, and never on it long.
We may as well be clear about the kind of farmer Tusser was before we
go any further. A farmer, indeed, he happens to have been; but he was
also a husbandman. A farmer in his day was a man who paid a yearly
rent for something, by no means necessarily land. To farm a thing was
to pay a rent for it. You could farm the tithe, or the King's taxes;
you could farm a landlord's rent-roll, a corporation's market-dues,
the profits of a bridge or of a highway. The first farmers of land
were the men who took over all the estates of a monastery, paying the
holy men a sufficiency, and making what they could over and above.
In Elizabeth's time the great landlords had taken a leaf out of the
monks' book, and the farmer of land was becoming more common. There
were yet, however, many husbandmen who were not farmers at all: yeomen
of soccage tenure, and tenants by copy of court-roll. That class was
probably the most numerous of all, and Tusser, though he objected to
its common fields, or "champion land," as he calls it, had plenty to
tell them. He must, I think, himself have been a copyholder in
his day, so feelingly does he deal with the detriments of a
champion-holding. The need, for example, of watching the beasts
straying at will over the open fields!
Where champion wanteth a swineherd for hog
There many complaineth of naughty man's dog.
Where each his own keeper appoints without care,
There corn is destroyed ere men be aware
And again more bitterly:
Some pester the commons with jades and with geese,
With hog without ring, and with sheep without fleece.
Some lose a day's labour with seeking their own,
Some meet with a booty they would not have known.
Great troubles and losses the champion sees,
And even in brawling, as wasps among bees:
As charity that way appeareth but small;
So less be their winnings, or nothing at all.
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