CANYNGE AS MAYOR. 115 his induction we have a picture in the Calendar of Ricart, Canynge's contemporary, and the equally solemn manner of his retirement is disclosed by a singular extract in Mr. Barrett's History. Of his farewell speech to his brethren and the Commons, this is especially remarkable-"I heartily pray you if there be any of you who by my negligence, uncunning, or wilfulness, have been wronged or hurt in any wise by colour of my late office, or if I have done to any person otherwise than of right, law, or conscience, come to me and show your griefs. I am ready to make you amends if my goods will thereunto suffice, or else I will ask you forgiveness, so that you shall be well contented and pleased." It is quite within the bounds of probable conjecture that this was something more than a formula of office, and that it may have been the speech of Canynge himself, appropriated as a model for those who came after him. The successive occasions on which he filled the office are a cumulative proof of his superior efficiency. He was mayor in 1441, 1449, 1456, 1460, and 1466, yet almost all that we know of his administration is the fact, that in his mayoralty of 1449 he ordained certain minute regulations for the drinking of the crafts on the eve of St. John and St. Peter." In 1456 he had to entertain Margaret of Anjou, and, on a later occasion, Edward the Fourth, which involved the insertion of his name in the commission appointed for the trial of Sir Baldwin Fulford, the well-known Sir Baudin of the Ballad of Chatterton. According to the corporate custom he would have to visit St. Catherine's chapel, in Temple church, in grand procession, on St. Catherine's Eve; and he would have to go through the annual ceremony of drinking in state, with the Abbot of St. Augustine. If we assume that he was competent to either duty-that his eyes would stand the glare of the torches, and his head resist the potency of the sherris, this is as much as we can venture to affirm. We know that he must have fulfilled each of these observances five several times, and of his mayoralty we know little more. We tread on a firmer basis of conjecture when we find that he twice represented Bristol in Parliament, in 1451 and 1455, on both occasions having his father-in-law, Thomas Yonge, for his colleague. Both these Parliaments were held in Westminster, and the statutes which they respectively and successively enacted will give us a notion of Canynge's occupation so far. In the first, the session described as of 1450, he was probably a participator in the attainder of Jack Cade, in the confirmation and extension of the statute of safe conducts, and in a statute to remedy the ill effects of certain exemptions from official duties in the city of York. In the second Parliament, that of 1455, his duties as a legislator would be all the more onerous, in consequence of the comparative tranquillity of the session. The following would have been the more interesting business that came before him :-The * Barrett, 125. See also the picturesque description of the setting of the London city watch on the Eve of St. John, in Knight's Volume of Varieties, p. 97. bills to prevent embezzlement by servants of their masters' goods after death; to prevent the extortions committed by the officers of the Exchequer; to limit the quantity of beer brewed by the brewers of Kent; to protect the silkwomen and spinners of the mystery and occupation of silkworking, by forbidding the importation of foreign ribands, &c.; to relieve the Abbot of Fountains from certain legal disabilities; and to repress the contentious attorneys in Norfolk and Suffolk, by limiting their numbers and fining all usurpers. To all of these bills his assent would be asked, and probably with his assent they became statutes of the realm. And this is the boundary not only of our knowledge, but even of our guesses, as to his parliamentary duties. The only remaining phase of his history is that by which his reputation lives among the citizens of Bristol for piety and munificence. He was the benefactor of various foundations, of which the particulars are given by Mr. Dallaway. Also, either at his sole expense, or "with the help of others of the worshipful town of Bristol," he restored the ruined church of St. Mary Redcliff to the fair proportions which have made it a local boast. He paid the Franciscan Friars for the benefit of their masses, and gave a supplement of forty pence, in small change, to be distributed among the poor in bread and beer. He founded charities, and supported priests, till, as he was verging on the grave, he became a priest himself. He had had a wife, but at that time he was a widower. He had begotten children, but his children were dead. The tradition was that he took holy orders to avoid a marriage which the king designed for him. At all events, he became an acolyte in 1467-in 1468 a priest, and in 1475 he died, so that we are taking a liberty in assuming him to have been alive so late as 1480. He had lived four years longer than the term allotted by the Psalmist for the life of man. He was buried in St. Mary Redcliff. This is nearly the sum of his authenticated history. And yet it may not be altogether impossible to obtain a fuller conception of his character by tracing as it were the outline of his various surroundings. He was born in the year following that in which Bolingbroke despoiled Richard of his crown. As a boy of fifteen, lounging about on Bristol quays, he may have witnessed the shipment of the famous sherry which went to kindle the courage of Harry the Fifth.* Unquestionably he would hear of Agincourt with the interest which boys take in the narrative of battles. And about the same date, though we gather from his features that he was not easily impressed, he would hear from his parents the sin of heresy illustrated by the penalties which had lately overtaken an arch-heretic, FIFTEENTH CENTURY INVENTIONS. 117 of the name of "Huss," at the Council of Constance. He would hear much of English victories during his youth, and of the tide turning as he grew into manhood. At the age of twenty-nine he would, perhaps, be concerned at the singular inattention of Providence which permitted a fiend in the shape of a peasant girl to compel the English to raise the siege of Orleans; and he would probably share in the devout satisfaction of his fellow-citizens, when he heard subsequently that she was executed as a witch. The Bristol ships which came from the Mediterranean, about the same period, would interest his seniors and probably himself-in the gossip which they brought about a great Florentine merchant, one Cosmo de Medici, who traded to the Levant. If he kept his ears open to the tales from over the sea, he might have heard also of the Tartars of the Golden Horde, of the wars and invasions of the Turkomans, and of the appearance of a tribe of Egyptians in Hungary, and these latter would naturally recall to his mind his very limited stock of information as to Potiphar and the chief Butler and Baker of Pharaoh. He would be drawing on nearly to his fortieth year before he heard of the greatest piece of witchcraft of his epoch-how a certain Faustus or Gutenberg, being in league with the devil, had acquired the power of multiplying manuscripts. Before long he may actually have seen one of these diabolical productions, and, as we assume ho was conscious of no deadly sin, after due deliberation and a few crosses, he may have even ventured to touch it. A few years before his death he would have felt no such repugnance, through the agency of one William Caxton, of Westminster, who had proved to the satisfaction of the Abbot and others, that his copying art was a mechanical invention. If Canynge could have taken stock of his impressions, if he had had the least inkling that his own age was different from any other age since the beginning of time, he might naturally have reasoned from such inventions that man had attained to his highest possible development. He lived at an epoch which had just ascertained the practical influence of gunpowder upon civilisation. In his later years he could have purchased a spelling-book, and it is barely possible that before he died, in the spirit of inquiry, he may have handled a fork.* The age he was living in was teeming with such wonders. How a tithe of its inventions would have astonished his great grandfather. As we hinted, it is idle, however, to suppose that he reasoned at all upon the progress he witnessed, for we have no right to credit * Beckman says that the use of forks was first known in Italy towards the end of the fifteenth century, but at that time they were not very common. Galeotus Martius, an Italian, resident at the court of Matthius Corvinus, king of Hungary, who reigned from 1458 to 1490, praises the king for eating without a fork, yet conversing at the same time, and never dirtying his clothes. The "Gentle Prioresse" of an earlier date will naturally recur to our readers, whose precaution not "to wet her fingers deep in the sauce," with other little gentilities, is immortalised by Chaucer. Canynge with a penetration which was not possessed by the ablest of his contemporaries. Though the knell of the middle ages was shortly about to sound, the men of his time lived quietly and complacently, as if their social status was destined to endure for ever. Philip de Comines, who flourished at this date, and composed memoirs of surpassing historical interest, as Dr. Arnold has sagaciously remarked, betrays no conception of what was then imminent. It was in fact impossible that men should appreciate their place in history when they knew nothing of a past as distinguished from the present; and on this point their chronicles, commencing with the year one, and their pictures of the ancients in the costume of their own time, offer general indications of the extent of their information. If Canynge, for instance, had heard of Pericles from Grocyne, who was his fellow-townsman, and was one of the first to study Greek, assuming he was conversant with the facts of his history, it is probable he would have regarded him as an eminent burgess, a grave, sad, worshipful man," who was mayor of a certain borough called Athens, in much the same sense that he was Mayor of Bristol. With respect to his own age it is, therefore, obvious that he could know nothing of the future to which it was tending, from his ignorance of the antecedents on which it reposed. He was a member of parliament, but it was not within his view to discern the future vocation of parliaments. He was one of a middle class just starting into importance, but he could less foresee its prospective dominance than others at this day can speculate on its overthrow. He was especially, we believe, a conscientious Churchman, but he had no conception of the destiny of the Church. Though his own edifice, with its widened windows, was an obvious forecast of the moral expansion which was opening to the search of inquisitive eyes the shrinking mysteries of its innermost sanctuary, we imagine that his own convictions were unchequered by the least anticipation of the impertinent light. We may safely assume that he founded masses for the good of his soul without the least apprehension that they would be dispensed with by act of parliament-that he laid stone upon stone of his beautiful fabric without the least suspicion that the ages to come, with wealth a thousandfold greater than his, would find it an arduous effort to save it from utter ruin. It would be very unreasonable to complain of Chatterton, because his forgeries evince a want of comprehension, which is easily accounted for, of Canynge and his epoch. By a misconception common enough in his own day, he has been led for instance into the folly of suggesting, that good old Canynge kept a cabinet, in which he stored up antiquarian relics, gauntlets of Robert Courthose and the like. This form of misconception may possibly be owing to the interest which Chatterton himself had acquired in the cotemporary collector of Strawberry-hill. At the same time, if any one portion of his fictions is more absurd and incongruous than another, it is this, which invests Canynge with an attribute which was CANYNGE A LANCASTRIAN. 119 the indication of a later age, and the certain evidence of another state of society. It may not, indeed, be immediately evident to all, why Canynge's cabinet should contain no gauntlets, nor such other antiquarian relics as we are eager to collect in our day. But the fact is, such collections were never made then, not for the want of objects, but for the want of motives to collect them. It is obvious that before men could appreciate the difference between themselves and their ancestors they would not accumulate memorials of this class for the interest which is attached to them as subjects of comparison. Their sense of wonder was sufficiently satisfied by cotemporaneous importations of the rare and remote-menageries of wild animals from over the sea, griffins' talons or pelican's eggs, or gigantic ribs of a whale or dun cow.* In respect of beauty they were not discriminative, nor given to survey critically and comparingly; and they had not this faculty, with its subordinate tendency to fill cabinets and institute museums, because they were simply true to their epoch, too credulous to sift their actual knowledge, and too contented to be impatient at its limits.t We can, nevertheless, see that within certain limits they had suitable food for their mental activity. Thus Canynge was the witness of a bloody contest which ravaged all the kingdom, and in which, from time to time, he had ample excitement for his political convictions. He beheld kings set up and overturned with as much celerity as if the fates were playing at a game of nine-pins; and, whether he was Yorkist or whether he was Lancastrian, he must have been sorely puzzled by some of their crooked bowling. It is observable that Mr. Seyer describes him as the former, Mr. Dallaway as the latter, while we incline to think, although there are facts to favour both hypotheses, that in the main Mr. Dallaway is correct, and that the subjugation of the Red Rose by the White was a triumph over Canynge's early prepossessions. We must never forget, for its bearing on this controversy, that Canynge's sympathies as a zealous churchman would be due to the House, which supported the church, with remarkable tenacity, against all its enemies. Nor must we overlook the natural attraction which a saintlike character like Henry the Sixth would exercise upon Canynge's similar predilections. The probability is that he bent to the force of circumstances, with a sense of impotence, but a conscious *See a rib of the Dun Cow, said to have been killed by Guy Earl of Warwick, and still exhibited in the Church of St. Mary Redcliff. +Their character, perhaps, is nowhere better phrased than in the beautiful poem by Mr. Monckton Milnes : "With rights, tho' not too closely scanned, They from to-day and from to-night Than yesterday and yesternight # Man now his Virtue's diadem Great thoughts, great feelings came to Like instincts unawares : Blending their souls' sublimest needs They went about their gravest deeds |