"The beasts may teach the Atheist": Godfrey Goodman's 'The Creatures Praysing God', 1622

What was Godfrey Goodman’s The Creatures Praysing God: or, The religion of dumbe creatures. An example and argument for the stirring up of our devotion and for the confusion of atheism, G. G. (1622)? 

The ODNB life of the author, by Nicholas Cranfield, says that it was published as “an anonymous satire on the irreligion of his day”, which Goodman “used as a vehicle for dissemination of his sacramentalist understanding of the church.” This is probably the most sensible line one could take on a very odd little book. It’s not quite anonymous, being signed G.G. on the title page. The dedication to the reader (and I’m sure it’s Goodman himself writing) explains that “The Authour himselfe not vouchsafing his name, title, or preface to this his worke, and very unwilling that it should be published, I thought fit to let thee understand, that the booke it selfe containes no paradox, notwithstanding the title …” So the title we have read is not authorial, ‘G.G.’ is somehow fully anonymous, and it isn’t written as a prose paradox.

So, we are alerted to the chance that it might be a paradox, something to be read as not written sincerely.

The Creatures Praysing God might be bundled up with other early examples of failed irony (The Knight of the Burning Pestle; The Shortest Way with the Dissenters). The argument would go that Goodman means to incite more fervent devotion to God by shaming his Christian readers with an account of how pious the animals are. The animals he talks about (and they remain a very generalised concept, though he does mention a few species of birds) are like the citizens of Utopia, fictional beings designed to shame us into doing better.

The trouble is, though, that Goodman, like a 17th century Boris Johnson, gets drawn into an ardent advocacy of a point of view he doesn’t necessarily hold. Instead of establishing a satiric distance – ‘these are just animals: while this is how we humans behave’ – he gets drawn into making his case as though the general notion of animal piety has become both plausible and pleasing to him.

Here, he considers ‘The use of the creatures’:

   “Thus as they were ordained for [man's] naturall use, for his food, clothing, labour: so it should seeme, they were appointed for his spirituall use, to serve him in the nature of   Chaplaines, that they should honour and praise God, while their master, sinfull and wretched man, dishonours him, yet their service might seeme to be done by his appointment.”

The satire wavers into view: just as a wealthy man delegates piety to a chaplain, so animals can be imagined to taking up the slack on worship on behalf of us all. This is a step towards Douglas Adams’ ‘robot monk’. The necessary satiric outrage, though, doesn’t appear, for Goodman seems (to me at least) to be pleased by this fancy of mute worship because that’s actually how he’d like people to be. In theory, he’s all for active and intellectual faith, but his politics are very monarchical, and his faith was really drawn towards a borderline ceremonial-Catholic display of the divine mysteries to a trusting lay congregation. So his animals (however he pictures them, for he never specifies any particular quadruped) actually are his ideal believers.

Now, Goodman can’t have been unaware that creatures engaged in worship was a motif in earlier art in this country, and contemporary Catholic art abroad, especially in images of St Francis preaching to the birds. Therefore the thought that the animals might actually be crypto-catholics crosses his mind, and he hastens to assure us that animals are perfectly orthodox, if a little more reticent than good Church of England Protestants should be:

“Let us then enquire of the Creatures, whether they acknowledge one God, or will admit a plurality of gods in their service. And here upon the first view and appearance, they seeme unto me to cry and to testifie one God, one God, for all nature is directed to one end …the Creatures do testifie of God, which in effect is their faith; but I will passe this over: yet give me leave to passe my censure upon it … Upon due examination I finde them to be sound and Orthodoxall, I cannot taxe them with Atheisme or Heresie, but what they say or testifie of God, it is most true; onely with this defect, that they say not enough; nature cannot be raised above nature; the mysteries of grace fall not within the compasse of naturall bounds.”

Again, humour almost comes into view, but he can too readily think of human members of the church who are exactly like animals, and require things to be said for them:

“all of them [the animals] testifying the same truth, do in a sort make one common confession of their faith, they say their Creed together, as we do; this is enough, to save and excuse them from the imputation of infidelity: for children do no more in their baptisme, whom notwithstanding we know to be in the number of Gods faithfull people.”

His piety keeps taking off the satiric edge; he adores his dumb animals who can somehow say their creed.

The obvious next step was to decide whether these good but four-legged Anglican believers who happen to be animals will go to heaven. Rather surprisingly, he decides they will, if not necessarily in the same nature. 

It was a very long debate, the one about whether animals had souls. One thinks of John Wesley playing his flute to the lions in the Tower of London, or Boswell trying to argue that “when we see a very sensible dog, we know not what to think” (and Dr Johnson’s howl of derision, which I recall as being along the lines of “and when we see a very silly fellow…”).

What Goodman says is this, in a vein of pious witticism:

“If this seeme a strange doctrine then, let this reason confirme it: Creatures were first created in Paradise. Then surely they were not so much ordained for slaughter, and mans use, as for the setting forth of Gods glory. Now since our fall, they groane and travell in paine together with us under the burthen of our sinnes, and our miseries, the punishments of sinne, Rom. 8.22. yet still they continue innocent in themselves, they are often imployed in Gods service, alwaies praysing God in their owne kinde, and never incurre the breach of his law, but are patient, notwithstanding our immoderate and inordinat abuse. Then surely by a course of justice, according to their manner, and the capacity of their owne nature, though not in themselves, (that is) in the fiercenesse, malignity and corruption of their nature, yet in their owne first elements and principles, or as they have now entred into mans body, and are become parts of mans flesh, all the Creatures in generall shall partake with us, in our future intended renovation.”

This is just a proof from "reason", not from faith (and he has the Bible text at Revelations 22: 15 directly against him regarding dogs). Maybe animals get into the Holy City as they were first created, or, as we have eaten some of them, our reincarnation will involve something of them being mixed up with us in heaven,

The purportedly satirical work sounds in places very much like neo-platonically influenced writing of the Vaughan / Thomas Traherne kind:

“Thus the stocks and the stones in their silence, and in their naturall properties; the beasts in their sounds and their cries, in their sence and in their motions, all serue to praise him: for God requires no more then he hath first giuen, the right imployment of his gifts is indeed to praise him.”

That reminds me of Vaughan’s assertion that even stones “are deep in contemplation” of God, and that ecstatic brushing aside of anything as petty as facts is like Traherne.


This odd work can perhaps be thought of as a kind of pendant to his earlier and better-known work, The fall of man, or the corruption of nature, proved by the light of our naturall reason, 1616, That work involved Goodman in a long contemplation of the fallen state of God's creation, and he has much to say about 'the creatures'. In fact, an incredible amount: he can't think about humankind without triangulating between the angels (sketchy data) and the animals (a point of reference on almost every page). In this earlier text, there's no fanciful imagining of the animals as worshiping God in some silent fashion. They are simply the lower creation, and the decayed state of humankind means that we are falling closer to them, and that they are in many ways better off than us. "It should seeme wee live upon the borders, betweene God and the creatures", reflects Goodman, in thinking about why mankind is more susceptible to illness than animals are. That's because God's plagues light first on us, as is just.

And suddenly, it bursts out of Goodman:

"I have often seene and observed in the streets, an ould blinde decrepit man full of sores, and inward griefe; hungry, naked, cold, comfortlesse & harbourlesse, without patience to sustaine his griefe, without any helpe to releive him, without any counsell to comfort him, without feare of Gods justice, without hope of Gods mercy, which as at all times, so most especially in such distresse should be the sole comfort of a christian man. I protest before God that were it not, for the hope of my happines, and that I did truly beleeue the miseries of this life, to be the just punishments of sinne, I should much prefer the condition of dumbe creatures, before the state of man."

The human condition he sees as wretched. This destitute old man is damned in both worlds, this and the next ("without hope of Gods mercy"). Doctrinally, Goodman accepts that there is justice in God's having it so, it is the punishment we deserve. But otherwise, he'd prefer to be an animal. This seems to me to go beyond mere rhetoric. Can you really accept such a punitive God as being just? Goodman suddenly sounds like Faustus:

     O, no end is limited to damned souls!
     Why wert thou not a creature wanting soul?
     Or why is this immortal that thou hast?
     Ah, Pythagoras' metempsychosis, were that true,
     This soul should fly from me, and I be changed
     Unto some brutish beast! all beasts are happy,
     For, when they die,
     Their souls are soon dissolved in elements;

     But mine must live still to be plagued in hell.

Or like John Donne:
If lecherous goats, if serpents envious

     Cannot be damned, alas, why should I be?

The condition of the animals really is enviable. And it's because they prompt such disturbing reflections that Goodman goes on to reinvent the animal creation into perfect four-legged Christians, always worshipful, never questioning because unable to question.

The compassionate madness of the Reverend Granger

Outside my ‘early modern’ beat for this one, partly because my research isn’t pointing me at EEBO quite so often these days. Instead, my text is off ECCO: An apology for the brute creation, or Abuse of Animals censured; In a sermon on Proverbs xii. 10. Preached in the Parish Church of Shiplake, in Oxfordshire, October 18, 1772, By James Granger.

I can imagine (my copy isn’t to hand) that Keith Thomas included this in his great trawl of sources in Man and the Natural World 1500-1800, but it is worth a more extended look. The interest is local, so my image is of James Granger’s memorial wall tablet in Shiplake Church, where I met the present incumbent earlier today.

The sermon seems to me to be delivered (I am not an experienced reader of 18^th century sermons) in the manner of a Spectator essay - with a strong admixture of the Age of Sensibility. This pulpit discourse brings to my mind memories of Sterne, or of Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling, published just the year before. The title page is indicative: “This Discourse is not only intended for such as have the Care of Horses, and other useful Beasts; but also for Children, and those that are concerned in forming their Hearts” – to be solemnly concerned in ‘forming your heart’!

The published sermon starts with an explanation of the events which prompted it, in an address to T. B., ‘drayman’, whose team must have worked the road between Reading and Henley: “Neighbour Tom, Having seen thee exercise the lash with greater rage, and heard thee swear, at the same time, more roundly and forcibly than I ever saw, or heard, and of thy brethren of the whip in London, I cannot help thinking that thou hast the best right to this discourse …”

The drayman, drunk, seems to have fallen asleep, and so his fore-horse led the team along a habitual route, incurring the unreasonable wrath of his driver for doing so: “For God’s sake and thy own, have some compassion upon these poor beasts; and especially the fore-horse of thy team. He is as sensible of blows as thou art; and ought not to have been so outrageously punished for turning aside into a road to which he was long accustomed, when thou wast asleep upon thy dray.”

Granger’s manner is politely suave, and not without steel: he tells Tom B. that if he breaks any more whips upon the horse, or utters any more “horrid oaths … I will take care that thou be punished by a Justice of the Peace, as well as thy own master, in this world; and give thee fair warning, that a worse punishment waits for thee in the next; and that damnation will certainly come, according to thy call.”

What follows is a surprise, and we perhaps sense an impetuosity in Granger: “It is not likely that thy soul when separated from thy body, will sleep till the day of judgment: According to the doctrine of a very sensible man, it may inhabit the fore-horse of a dray, and suffer all the pain that guilt and whip-cord can give.” I am aware of the ‘mortalist heresy’ (as in the poems of Donne), but who was this ‘sensible man’ who thought that human souls may transmigrate at death into animals as temporary homes until judgment day? It seems to me a notion as much Pythagorean as Christian, and an odd suggestion to make in the pulpit. Anyway, Tom B. is left with stern words: “ask God forgiveness for thy cruelty and oaths … drink less ale, and no drams … save thy whips and thy horses, thy body and thy soul”.

For the sermon itself, Granger took his text from Proverbs xii. 10: “A righteous man regardeth the life of his beast”. He starts by expressing a sense of surprise that he may be the first cleric to speak of such matters: “It is strange that beasts, especially those of the most useful kind, that do so much for, and suffer so much from man, have never, at least to my knowledge, had an advocate from the pulpit”. It’s worth pausing over this: we are seeing part of a revolution in sentiment happening. If any of his congregation had read Mackenzie (and by their reaction to this sermon, it is actually doubtful that sensibility had in 1772 made it as far as Henley-on-Thames), they might have remembered the pathetic narration of Harley (the titular ‘man of feeling’) hearing old Edwards tell of his eviction from the farm that had long been in his family, and how his blind old dog Trusty, turned out with him, had made it as far as the gooseberry bush, howled once, and died. Harley’s face is bathed in tears after hearing this. Mackenzie may be exploiting his readers, but such stuff was read in earnest.

Granger reminded his congregation about their merciful God, and what He had entrusted to man, so that for a man “wantonly to provoke, punish, and put to torture, any animal that Providence hath placed in his care, is to betray his trust”. The merciful man “is of a gentle and benevolent temper, who rejoices with them that rejoice, and weeps with them that weep … whose mercy, like that of the deity, extends itself to every living object of it … Blessed, says our Saviour, are the merciful”.

This would have been familiar enough as Christian exhortation. But Granger then goes on with a eulogy of the horse, and follows up with a round condemnation of how horses are treated in England: “the horse, a gentle, docile, generous, and useful beast; to which we owe a very great part of the necessities, conveniencies, and ornaments of life; and which contributes, more than any other, to our health, ease, and security … yet how often is this noble animal … the victim of youth, wantonness, ignorance, stupidity, and cruelty? How often is he whipped, spurred, battered, and starved to death? … It hath been observed, that there is no country upon the face of the whole earth … where this beast is so ill treated: hence England is proverbially called, ‘The hell of Horses’.”

Granger goes on to condemn “our barbarous customs of baiting and worrying animals”, especially in some Shrove Tuesday atrocities (he does not specify what or where). Though such festive cruelties as these, he says, are practiced by the “stupid, ignorant, and uncivilized part of our countrymen. Those of higher rank and knowledge are far more humane and benevolent”.

One senses that Granger, in such class distinctions, was trying to keep his congregation sympathetic to his case. But he was soon running back towards trouble, remarking that many people quite simply “think [beasts] should be treated with harshness and severity”, for to do so is simply a matter of good practice. This insight into general opinion provokes him to another extended ‘Man of Feeling’ moment, a discourse upon dogs: “I think myself also obliged to say something of the dog, the servant, the companion, and the friend of man. He defends his property, contributes to his diversion, and helps supply his table; is grateful for the smallest favour bestowed upon him, and is ever ready to protect and fight for the tyrant who abuses him … how often is he taught to be fierce and cruel, which is foreign to his nature…”

Granger had been unusually particular about dogs (not an animal that gets a good press in the Bible, as far as I am aware). He next moves to the general issue about all killing of animals, raising the question (which he says is put by some), “whether we have a right to destroy so many creatures as we daily do for our necessary conveniency, or sport”. His response to this extreme view is a surprisingly robust one. He reiterates the doctrine of subjection Keith Thomas describes as typical of the Bible-influenced culture in England, and sees killing animals not as something to be avoided, but as a moral necessity: “This is easily answered: all inferior creatures were, by the creator, subjected to the dominion of man: And it is certain, that if he does not exercise this power, in taking away their lives, upon many occasions, that we should be over-run by them; and it would be impossible for us to subsist: So that we are compelled to destroy them by the great law of necessity”.

For all that he is writing against of his congregation’s prejudices, we can see that Granger remains a man of his time. God’s animals must be (humanely) culled to prevent their numbers becoming deleterious to the prime human good. He does not specify particular pests, say rats or mice. He has no sense that there might be a natural balance in animal populations; nor that the numbers of some animals are anyway a product of human intervention. His argument about this necessary culling might have come out of the mouth of Milton’s Comus (who argues to the Lady that if we didn’t consume without restraint, Nature “would be quite surcharged with her own weight, / And strangl’d with her waste fertility; / Th’earth cumber’d, and the wing’d air dark’t with plumes, / The herds would over-multitude their Lords, / The Sea o’refraught would swell … ”).

Granger’s heart actually doesn’t seem to me to be in this part of the argument. He is soon far away from the strictures of ‘necessity’, arguing that “God intended the preservation of the meanest of his animals” and happily citing a text from Deuteronomy: ‘If thou find a bird’s nest in the way, thou shalt not take the dam with the young …” Granger rushes on to give his view that small cruelties cauterize the development of proper feelings, and this leads to ever-worse actions: “To deprive the meanest insect of life, without a good reason for so doing, is certainly criminal … If a child dismembers a bee, or an ant, he may, for any thing we know to the contrary, distress a whole common-wealth … cruelty, like other vices, steals upon human nature by slow and imperceptible degrees”. The printed text has a footnote, referring the reader to the same sentiment “admirably exemplified in ‘The Four Stages of Cruelty’ a set of prints designed and engraved by Mr Hogarth” (1751).

The sermon ends with a belated, and perhaps rather uneasy switch back towards pious thoughts about the more customary objects for pity, as he enjoins his listeners to show kindness ‘to every living creature under our eye, and beneath our roof, especially to those beasts to whose labour we owe so much in cultivating the earth: And may we treat our poor servants and labourers in these times of dearth and scarcity, and especially when they are advanced in years, and worn out with drudgery, with still greater kindness than we treat our dogs and horses”.

But the shock for the present day reader comes in Granger’s postscript, which tells us how this well-meaning sermon (it seems he gave it twice) was received. Considering how difficult this reception must have been for him, he tells it with an unflinching directness:

“The foregoing discourse gave almost universal disgust to two considerable congregations. The mention of dogs and horses, was censured as a prostitution of the dignity of the pulpit, and considered as a proof of the Author’s growing insanity. It was written in great haste, of which, indeed, it carries the marks; but it was dictated by his heart, and is published as it fell from his pen. It is, with great humility, submitted to the judgment and candour of the public; and particularly, to the cool consideration of those who were pleased to censure it, and by whose disapprobation, without any premeditated design of the Author, it now sees the light.”

It looks to me from that last sentence as though Granger decided to put his sermon into print as an appeal over the heads of those two congregations to a wider public. And if they were readers of Sterne and Mackenzie, they might have been more attuned to what he had argued than (perhaps) the local Phillimores (the gentry family of Shiplake Hall, who fill a large part of the graveyard at the Church). As the sermon went to four editions, Granger may have been right about finding a more receptive audience in the reading public. The fourth edition contains his real vindication, though: “Advertisement (4^th edition). The poor wretch, to whom this sermon is dedicated, was killed by the kick of a horse since the third edition was printed. I shall only observe upon this event; that it is a truth … that when there is an apparent connection between a crime and its punishment, we are naturally struck with surprise and horror.” Providence had given its own verdict.

Granger’s other work was a biographical dictionary, one that is arranged reign by reign, and then by a scheme of rank: royalty, great officers of state, clergy, ‘commoners who have born great Employments’, ‘Men of the Robe’; ‘Men of the Sword’; ‘Physicians, poets, and other ingenious Persons’; ‘Painters, Artificers, Mechanics, and all inferior Professions’ – and the final class ‘Ladies, and others, of the Female Sex, according to their Rank, &c’. Nothing quite so suspect about that, and it was frequently reprinted.

The mutable James Howell

I had meant to read James Howell’s Dendrologia Dodona’s grove, or, The vocall forest (for a few talking and ambulant trees) as a follow up to my last post, but I rebounded and digressed to another work by the same writer, Therologia, The parly of beasts, or, Morphandra, queen of the inchanted iland wherein men were found, who being transmuted to beasts, though proffer’d to be dis-inchanted, and to becom men again, yet, in regard of the crying sins and rebellious humors of the times, they prefer the life of a brute animal before that of a rational creture ... : with reflexes upon the present state of most countries in Christendom (1660).

The narrative line here is simple. A voyaging prince, Pererius, has reached an idyllic island ruled by the enchantress ‘Morphandra’, who emphatically explains that she is not a witch, but has transformed certain humans into animal shape. He may talk with them, for she can re-imbue them with the power of speech, and, if he can persuade them to give up their animal form, he may sail away with them - and repatriate them should he wish.

So, in the immediate background is Spenser’s ‘Bower of Bliss’ and its enchantress Acrasia, and those concluding stanzas in which Gryll, transformed back from pig to man, repines, and announces that he wishes to remain a pig: ‘Let Gryll be Gryll, and have his hoggish mind’, concludes Guyon’s Palmer (his Reason), and they leave him there. However, Howell’s satiric point involves an inversion of Spenser’s fable: in this version, the human state is far more corrupt than the animal, so not heading back for home and human society is the more moral choice. As Howell’s full title explains, Pererius fails again and again, until finally a hive of bees collectively assent to become once more a nunnery full of nuns – which is curious, as they have just been praised as a model of a perfect commonwealth, intolerant of idleness. If Howell was thinking about this (for he does seem to fall foul of the active life /contemplative life divide), one can suppose that a nunnery constitutes a human community separated from the vices of the world. Howell’s more than slightly odd work ends with the bees intoning a church gradual hymn of praise to God. They might do this better if they waited till they were nuns again. But if your fable has bees that can talk, why not have them singing too?

There’s a lot of fun to be had on the way. The first interviewee is an Otter, who was when formerly human one of those amphibious neither-sea-nor-land Dutch folk. He condemns the human body: human excrement, symptomatically, even smells worse than any other creature’s: “ther is none whose excrements are more faetid, and stinking; the fewmets of a Deer, the lesses of a Fox, the crotells of a Hare, the dung of a Horse, and the spraints that I use to void backward, are nothing so foetid”.

“Well, let’s give over these impertinent altercations pro & con…” says Pererius later in the work, having haggled with a former Venetian courtesan, in her new shape as a white hind with a black spotted ‘shingle’ (her tail). Argument for and against was one way Howell, like so many others of his time, showed his wit. The otter produces a fulminating attack on his former nation, so Pererius conversely praises the Dutch, in terms that make you think of Vermeer’s paintings and all those neat Dutch interiors:

“How much are they to be commended for their neatness? Go to their Ships, they may be said to be as cleanly as a milking-pail; in their Kitchins, the outside of their Utensils are as bright as the inside; ther’s never a room in their house, where so much dust may be found as to draw the name of Slutt upon it.” I like that suggestion of domestic practice: that if you found a dusty surface, maybe it was acceptable to indicate with a finger-tip scrawl what you thought of the maid’s deficient standards.

The ape refuses re-transformation in these terms, as Howell vents his sense of how bad things have become: “Man! Truly Sir, I am sorry the shape I now bear resembleth Man so much, I could wish it were far more unlike, for the horrid and unheard-of sacrileges and perjuries of my own Nation makes me abhor the very name of Man, much more his nature”. Into the ape’s testimony he inserts a Dantean vision of hell. Hell is extensively re-equipped with new instruments for the perpetual torment of the malefactors of the civil war and instigators of the execution of King Charles, both male and female:

“My good Spirit answered, All these, except Ixion’s wheel, are new torments appointed for Gherionian Sectaries, who had destroyed from top to bottom all Government both of Church and State, And as their brains turn’d round upon earth after every wind of Doctrine, so their souls turn here in perpetuall torments of rotation … Couches of Toads, Scorpions, Asps, and Serpents were in a corner hard by; I asked for whom they were prepared, I was answered, for som Evangelizing Gherionian Ladies, which did egg on their husbands to War.”

‘Gherionian’ is Howell’s name for England, and he says it means a ‘land of wool’. Howell had begun his whole work with a couplet addressing the reader “If you will ope this Work with ease, / You must from Greece go fetch your Keys”, but fortunately he had relented, and supplied ‘An Etymologicall Derivation of som Words and Anagrams in the Parly of Beasts, according to the ALPHABET.’

Perhaps the best part of the work comes in the dialogue with the hind, formerly a cortigiana onesta in Venice. They debate views of women, and the hind, though she will refuse to resume her former shape, is smartly feminist. She is keen to assert a woman’s equal part in conception, and takes a swipe at Sir Thomas Browne. Pererius, agreeing with her, has just argued that mules are clear evidence of how both male and female contribute to the mixed nature of offspring. She continues “You may well add hereunto that the child oftentimes resembleth the mother, therfore she must also be an active principle in the formation; If it be so, what a wrong is it to the justice and rules of nature that Women shold be held but little better than Slaves? how comes it that they shold be so vilipended and revil’d? As that foolish Naturalist or Ninny, who wish’d ther were another way to propagat Mankind than by copulation with Women.”

Pererius makes his usual offer: “I told you that Queen Morphandra is willing, at my intercession, to restore you unto your former nature, and I have a lusty Galeon in port to convey you to Marcopolis, that renowned and rare City”. But she says that while she would like, if possible, to retain the power of speech, she would prefer to stay in her form as hind. Deer, she explains, have a blessedly short mating season, and their act of sexual congress itself is quickly over. They are temperate and clean (she testifies, like Marvell’s nymph, to the sweetness of a deer’s breath). Best of all, they do not menstruate:

“But, Sir, touching my former nature, truly I wold desire nothing of it again but the faculty of speech that I might talk somtimes; In all other things I prefer by many degrees this species wherin I am now invested by Queen Morphandra, which is far more chaste and temperat, far more healthfull and longer-liv’d: Touching the first, Ther's no creture whose season of carnall copulation is shorter, for the Rutting-time lasts but from the midst of September to the end of October, nor is there any other creture whose enjoyment of plesure is shorter in the act; moreover when we are full, we never after keep company with the male for eight months; Concerning the second, viz. our temperatnes, we never use to overcharge or cloy nature with excesse, besides our food is simple, those green leafs and grasse you see are our nutriment, which our common mother the Earth affords us so gently, we require no variety of Viands, which makes that our breath is sweeter than the fairest Ladies in Marcopolis, and our fewmishes with what else comes from within us is nothing so unsavoury; Nor need we that monthly purgation which is so improperly called Flowers, it being such rank poyson that it will crack a tru crystall glass; Nay 'tis observed, that if a menstruous woman come near an alveary or hive of Bees, they forsake their food all the while, finding the aire to be infected.”

Howell’s work is full of points sustained by such unlikely yarns. But he was, among his other activities as a man of letters, a collector of proverbs, and these help prevent his work from becoming intolerably verbose: “Well, I find here two Proverbs verified, the one is a homely one, viz. Chanter a un Asne, il vous donnera un pet, Sing to an Asse and he will give you a Bum-crack.”

Actually, he did intolerably verbose pretty well: the ass counter-attacks from the charge of braying with a long account of what laughing does to the human form divine:

“the eyes extenuat, they half shut themselfs, and grow humid, the nose crumples up, and growes sharp, the lipps retire and lengthen, ther is an ill-favor’d kind of gaping, and discovery of the teeth, the cheeks lift up themselfs and grow more stiff, they have pitts digg’d in them during the time, the mouth is forc’d to open, and discovers the tremblings of the suspended toung, it thrusts out an obstreperous interrupted sound, and oftentimes ther is a stopping of breath, the neck swells and shortens it self, all the veins grow greter, and extended, an extraordinary hue disperseth it self over all the face, which grows reddish, the brest is impetuously agitated, and with sudden reiterated shakes, that it hinders respiration, the perfect use of speech is lost, and it is impossible to swallow during the fit, a pain rises in the flanck, the whole body bends … The hands becom feeble, the leggs cannot support themselves, and the body is constrained to fall, and tumble, nay it causeth sometimes dangerous syncopes in the heart, and so brings death.”

After this particular dialogue, Morphandra twits the prince about his success in bandying arguments with the ass: “I saw you somwhat earnest in banding arguments with that Asse, but how have you sped? doth he desire to be disasinated, and becom Man again, as I promised he should be, provided his will concurred therunto?” I love that nonce-word, ‘disasinated’.

Therologia was a fable about mutations. In my favourite passage from his letters, Epistolae Ho-elianae, Howell reflects on a less obvious form of mutation, on how we mutate into ourselves. He is in Venice, and is prompted to reflect by seeing the Doge’s state barge, the Bucentore. Like Lord Nelson’s H.M.S. Victory at Southampton, it exists as a continuous reconstruction of itself, or as a reproduction of itself. This makes Howell reflect on himself, brilliantly: is he really continuous with his former self, or has his bodily selfhood completely changed?

“I fell, I say, to consider whither our bodies may be said to be of like condition with this Bucentore; which though it be reputed still the same Vessell, yet I beleeve ther’s not a foot of that Timber remaining which it had upon the first Dock, having bin as they tell me, so often plank’d and ribb’d, caulk’d and peec’d: In like manner our bodies may be said to be daily repaired by new sustenance, which begets new bloud, and consequently new spirits, new humours, and I may say new flesh, the old by continuall deperdition and insensible transpirations evaporating still out of us, and giving way to fresh; so that I make a question, whither by reason of these perpetuall reparations, and accretions, the body of man may be said to be the same numericall body in his old age that he had in his manhood, or the same in his manhood, that he had in his youth, the same in his youth that he carried about him in his childhood, or the same in his childhood which he wore first in the Womb: I make a doubt, whither I had the same identicall, individually numericall body, when I carried a Calf-Leather Sachell to School in Hereford, as when I woar a Lamskin Hood in Oxford, or whither I have the same masse of bloud in my Veins, and the same Flesh now in Venice which I carried about me three yeers since, up and down London streets, having in lieu of Beer and Ale, drunk Wine all this while, and fed upon different Viands; now the stomach is like a crusible, for it hath a chymicall kind of vertue to transmute one body into another, to transubstantiat Fish and Fruits into Flesh within, and about us; but though it be questionable, whither I wear the same Flesh which is fluxible, I am sure my Hair is not the same, for you may remember I went flaxen-hair’d out of England, but you shall find me return’d with a very dark Brown, which I impute not onely to the heat and ayr of those hot Countries I have eat my bread in, but to the quality and difference of food; but you will say, that hair is but an excrementitious thing, and makes not to this purpose; moreover, me thinks I hear you say, that this may be true, onely in the bloud and spirits, or such fluid parts, not in the solid and heterogeneall parts: But I will presse no further at this time this Philosophical notion which the sight of Bucentore infus’d into me, for it hath already made me exceed the bounds of a Letter.”

“The same identicall, individually numericall body…” Are we ‘individually numerical’, can we be counted just the once, was he the unique James Howell, or is he in effect a sequence of ‘fluxible’ James Howells? He sees his selfhood as a series of processes. Nor does he jump to the soul as a reassuring answer. In Therologia, none of the mutated humans worry about being soulless (as animals), indeed the otter refers to the Turks believing that “we also sensitive Cretures have a better World provided for us after we have run out our cours here”: that animals have souls (and that they obey divine laws, rather than transgress them).

Therologia reads as hyperbolised satire, a rhetorical display of condemnation. But it may also hint, alongside the passage about his own mutating body, at a deeper philosophical gloom in Howell.

(Throughout this post, I have retained Howell’s own spelling. Usually, I lightly modernise my early texts, but Howell was a spelling-reformer, who believed that English would only spread beyond its narrow use in the world if it were made easier for other nationalities to learn, so it should be spelled as it sounds, without confusing superfluous letters. His printers did not always heed his dictates, but the spelling is his own as given.

My images are of Howell himself, communing with a tree, and the illustration of Morphandra, the Prince, and his animal interlocutors from 'Therologia')

That animals can't look upwards: George Hakewill, 1608

George Hakewill’s THE VANITIE OF THE EYE, First beganne for the Comfort of a Gentlewoman bereaved of her sight, and since upon occasion enlarged & published for the Common good (1608; 1615) does what it says on the title page (at least for those able to read it), opening out the “disputable question whither we should more regard the benefit of nature in the one (i.e., seeing things we need to see ), or the hazard of grace and virtue in the other” (i.e., being able to see things we ought not to see).

Hakewill set out to write a brief consolatory exposition, but found that the “particular vices, which flow from the eye” offered him the chance of a far more widely edifying discourse than he had at first envisaged, and he went into print with the expanded version.

As you’d expect from a man appointed chaplain to Prince Charles “with special orders from the king never to leave the prince and to protect him from any influence of Roman Catholicism” (ODNB), of the vices which stem from the vanity of the eye “among the chiefest … is Idolatry, which as it had his original from the eye, so is it still nourished by the same”.

The first idolatrous act was original sin: “we find the first outward occasion of it to have been the fairness of the apple apprehended by the woman’s eye, & the punishment first inflicted on it to have been the opening of the eyes, whether of the mind or the body I dispute not.”

When I next have my Longman Annotated Andrew Marvell to hand, I will check if Nigel Smith (that busy annotator!) connected this book to Marvell’s ‘Eyes and Tears’, for Hakewill continues:

“Whence it may be in the Hebrew the same word signifieth as well an eye as a fountain; to show that from it as from a spring or fountain did flow both sin itself, the cause of sin, and misery the punishment of both; and because by the eye came the greatest hurt, therefore God hath placed in it the greatest tokens of sorrow. For from it comes tears, by which the expressing of sorrow is peculiar to man alone.”

(“How wisely Nature did decree,
With the same Eyes to weep and see!
That, having view'd the object vain,
They might be ready to complain.”)

The final idolatry is, predictably, that of the Catholic faith, to which Hakewill gives a chapter headed: “That the popish religion consists more in eye service then the reformed” - “Our adversaries indeed, place a great and main part of their superstitious worship in the eye-service; in the magnifike & pompous fabric, and furniture of their Churches and attiring their Priests…”

But fortunately, once Hakewill has got the moral issues sorted out (with this splendid bit of Solomon’s wisdom aptly cited “Thine eyes shall look upon strange women, & thine heart shall speak lewd things”), and adroitly passing by those awkward New Testament moments when Christ takes the trouble to cure the blind, he can digress into a rather entertaining fund of stories. We get the tale of the rat-catcher of ‘Hammel’, drawn in as an instance of the devil’s power to deceive the eye “(I confess I urge it not so much for the fitness, as the strangeness of the story)”. From his secular reading we get Mark Antony exploiting the power of sight by displaying the dead Caesar’s blood-stained garments to the Roman mob, followed shortly afterwards by the story of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester getting the beggar who had falsely proclaimed a miracle at the shrine of St Albans to betray himself by correctly nominating the colours of men’s gowns. It’s a fuller account than in Henry VI Part 2, but the proximity to Mark Anthony perhaps hints that our Oxford fellow knew his Shakespeare, and, in thinking of stories about the dangerous power of sight, and about blindness, recalled these two anecdotes. But it could be a coincidence, for, officially at least, Hakewill disapproves of theatre: “Hither also may be referred, the lewd masking, which the Papists use in their Carnivals, or rather Bacchanals, at Shrovetide; the women marching through the open streets, in man’s apparel, and the men in women’s; as also the Jesuits exhibiting of heaven and hell, God & the divell, the damned, and the elect, upon their stages”. This said, he seems to know rather a lot about it, for instance the “lascivious gross action, which is ever represented, in the French Comedies and dances, and sometimes in our common Mercenary interludes here at home, whereat the greatest part, would surely otherwise rather blush, then laugh; but that they hold that place in a manner privileged…” In a definite literary allusion, he refers to Sir Thomas More’s apologue about pride in the story of how the “Anemolian Ambassadors … thinking to dazzle the eyes of the poor Utopians, with the lustre, and glistering of their chains, & precious stones” (discovered that) “the children playing in the streets, took them for great boys, which had not yet laid aside their brooches, & baubles.”

Hakewill digresses most on the way the eye is deceived. It’s a strange mixture of stories. He mentions many diabolic deceits, as practiced by conjurers like Agrippa and Faustus, a recently reported story of a possessed girl at Frankfort who was apparently able to stretch out an empty hand and pluck real money out of thin air (a simple conjuring trick, one would think), “an old woman in the Dukes of Meckelburges country, who appearing in the shape of a great Mastiff dog the hounds espying her, ran with full mouth upon her, & the country hinds with prongs, and pike staves, fell about her, till at length she being sore wounded, the shape of the Mastiff vanished, and nothing was left to the flake (sic – a hurdle on which to drag a criminal to execution?), but a poor silly old woman, begging mercy & pardon”. But Hakewill also describes common optical illusions and the camera obscura, which he tells you how to make: “The practise is thus; take a study, or closet, where (by closing the wooden leaves) you may shut out all the light: then bore an hole, through the midst of one of the leaves to the bigness of a pease, and cover it with a piece of spectacle glass, and when the sun shines on the ground before the window, hold on the inside right before the hole (to the distance of two foot or thereabout) a sheet of white paper or a large piece of faire linen; and you shall perfectly discern by the shadows; the shapes, and motions of men, and dogs, and horses, & birds, with the just proportion of trees, and chimneys, and towers, which fall within the compass of the sun near the window”.

In its way, Hakewill’s prose has striking moments: here he reflects on the eye not being able to see itself. I normally modernize my quotations, to make them easier to read, but this one I will leave as it appears, as the spelling ‘eie’ appears so much more appropriate than ‘eye’ for the enamourment with self he here complains of:

“nature hauing so framed the eie, as it can neither behold it selfe, nor the face, in which it is set, yet haue men invented for the supplying of that vse looking-glasses, as the artificial eies of pride; the eie being as it were a liuing looking-glasse, & the looking-glas again a dead eie, by means wherof many Narcissus like become enamored of themselues”

The moral point he wants to make leads him into this story, most uncompassionately told to show the dangers of mirrors and the self-love they promote: “I remember I have heard, of a young Gentleman of this University, who being newly recovered from the small pox, & by chance seeing the change of his face in a looking-glass, for mere grief fell into a relapse, and within short time died.”

Hakewill consoles his first audience, the newly blind gentlewoman, and edifies his readership, with a series of accounts of those who have overcome their disability: princes, poets, soldiers, scholars “And lastly for the work of the ministry, my self have seen more then once in this University a blind man in our solemn meetings, making a godly & profitable sermon to the body of the University assembled” (odd that he didn’t switch here to having ‘heard’ this blind man preach). I did not know how the Venerable Bede was supposed to have got his name. Hakewill tells a story from an unspecified life of Bede, about Bede after he had gone blind: “it is a merry jest howbeit seriously related by him who hath written Bedaes life, that his guide persuading him one day as he passed by an heap of stones, that the people (according to their wonted manner) were there assembled to hear him preach; the good old man moved at his speech, was content to give them a sermon, but there being no body present to say, amen, at his conclusion, the very stones cried out amen venerable Priest, by which means being then baptized by the name of venerable, he hath retained it ever since…”

Hakewill argues tenuously that as night is “the mantle of defects & imperfections, and by consequent the mother of union and love; the repose and closing up of the day’s labours … if then the night bring not tediousness with it, why should a day which is like a night be thought to bring it?” But this leads him on to the way that people who are blind can nevertheless excel “in those very sports which seem necessarily to require (sight), as bowling, shooting, quoiting, shoufgrating, & the like”. I wonder what you were doing when you ‘shoufgrated’?

My image is Durer’s drawing of an apostle looking up to heaven, which I chose because Hakewill anticipates an objection to his general argument about sight being morally bad, that God gave man alone “an upright figure of body to the end he might behold the heavens”. It was apparently proved (“as the Anatomists have observed”) to everyone’s satisfaction that humankind has “one nerve (i.e., muscle) more than …Brute beasts, for the turning of the eye upward, to the end he might behold the heavens, and in them … the glory of their maker.” Animals, it was affirmed, can’t look upwards (this reminds me of Adam, Godlike erect in Paradise Lost). But Hakewill explains that such divinely augmented eye control could only have been used properly by unfallen man “I answer that man indeed considered in the state of integrity, might & would have made excellent use thereof; but in the state of corruption the greatest part, either thereby are induced to Idolatry (as hath been before showed)”.

"this Monster eating beast"

After a frustrating few weeks with, initially, a failing broadband connection, and then all the chores of getting started with a new ISP, I can at last return to my neglected blog.

I was reading Robert Baron’s An apologie for Paris for rejecting of Juno and Pallas, and presenting of Ate’s golden ball to Venus (1649). This fawning, over-written and highly derivative book re-tells the story of the Judgment of Paris. I was initially interested in how Venus is described, for instance in getting Paris’s full attention with a timely wardrobe malfunction:

“faire Aphrodite approached with a world of winning majesty in her looks; and as the Elixar turneth all things into gold, so the Sunny beames of this illustrious Deities eyes, (whose every motion shot ten thousand Cupids into the hot Phrygians soule) reflecting upon his, soon affected him with her passion, and made him ready to prostrate (without further cunctation) the Ball, with his glowing heart, at her feet. First she slipt downe her loose flower-embroydered mantle, and inriched his gullon eyes with the wealth of her lovely breasts, those nectar running fountaines, as farre excelling those two Pallaces of pleasure which Juno even now promised, as they did the humble colleges that were the mothers of the Capitoll; and before she opened the cherry of her lips, she emparadised him with a winning smile…”

Prior to this, Minerva had told Paris that, if he awarded the ball to her, he would as a reward:

“make a new edition of, and addition to, Arithmeticke, and compleate her with numbers enow to count those many Atomes whose accidentall concourse made this big-bellied earth, and how many minutes have thrust out one another since that accident happened”.

Not exactly tempting, so when Venus offers Paris a ravishingly beautiful partner (Helen of Troy, of course), it’s a done deal that she gets the golden ball. She entices him with these reflections: “Tell me for Loves sake, is it not more lovely to lie intwined in her foulding armes, like a Lilly imprisoned in a Jaile of snow, or Ivory in a band of Alablaster, than to sit muffled in furres like a bedrid Miser?” - where of course Baron is having his goddess quote Shakespeare’s poem about her -

(“Full gently now she takes him by the Hand,
A Lilly prison’d in a Jayl of Snow,
Or Ivory in an Alabaster Band,
So white a Friend ingirts so white a Foe…”)

But Baron writes by assembling poeticisms. A more original expression struck me: I was interested by how Venus “inriched his gullon eyes with the wealth of her lovely breasts”: what does ‘gullon’ mean?

The OED is not immediately helpful, but rooting around with the stem of the word gets you to the animal depicted above in Topsell’s The history of four-footed beasts (1658 edition, p.205), the ‘Gulon’.

Baron is simply transferring the nature of this beast to Paris’s eyes, which are greedy, or gluttonous. But Robert Baron’s prim excursions into erotica lack all interest compared to the ‘gulon’ itself. We call it a wolverine,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolverine

but Topsell’s account of it largely ignores the real animal, and embroiders upon the ‘gulon’ as a signal instance of four-footed beastliness: it has been ordained by God to typify the gluttony of the men in Russia, Lithuania, and other intemperate zones.

In the illustration, the gulon is performing its unpleasant and signature habit of squeezing its fully-gorged body between two closely adjacent trees, so that it excretes copiously (as shown), and is able to resume eating. In case this seems at all implausible, Topsell goes into the details of what happens if the creature can’t find trees close enough together.

This is Topsell's whole entry:

Of the GVLON.

This Beast was not known by the Ancients, but hath been since discovered in the Northern parts of the World, and because of the great voracity thereof, it is called (Gulo) that is, a devourer in imitation of the Germans, who call such devouring creatures Vilsiuss, and the Swedians, Gerff; in Lituania and Muscovia, it is called Rossomokal. It is thought to be engendered by a Hyaena and a Lioness, for in quality it resembleth a Hiaena, and it is the same which is called (Crocuta:) it is a devouring and an unprofitable creature, having sharper teeth then other creatures. Some think it is derived of a Wolf and a Dog, for it is about the bigness of a Dog: it hath the face of a Cat, the body and tail of a Fox; being black of colour: his feet and nails be most sharp, his skin rusty, the hair very sharp, and it feedeth upon dead carkases.

When it hath found a dead carkass he eateth thereof so violently, that his belly standeth out like a bell; then he seeketh for some narrow passage betwixt two trees, and there draweth through his body, by pressing whereof, he driveth out the meat which he had eaten: and being so emptied returneth and devoureth as much as he did before, and goeth again and emptieth himself as in former manner; and so continueth eating and emptying till all be eaten. It may be that God hath ordained such a creature in those Countries, to express the abominable gluttony of the men of that Countrey, that they may know their true deformed nature, and lively ugly figure, represented in this Monster eating beast: for it is the fashion of the Noble men in those parts, to sit from noon till midnight, eating and drinking, and never rise from the table, but to disgorge their stomachs, or ease their bellies: and then return with refreshed appetites to ingurgitate and consume more of Gods creatures: wherein they grow to such a heighth of beastliness, that they lose both sense and reason, and know no difference between head and tail. Such they are in Muscovia, in Lituania, and most shameful of all in Tartaria.

These things are reported by Olaus Magnus, and Mathias Michou; But I would to God that this same (more then beastly intemperate gluttony) had been circumscribed and confined within the limits of those unchristian or heretical-apostatical countries, and had not spread it self and infected our more civil and Christian parts of the World; so should not Nobility, Society, Amity, good fellowship, neighbourhood, and honesty, be ever placed upon drunken or gluttonous companions: or any man be commended for bibbing and sucking in Wine and Beer like a Swine: When in the mean season no spark of grace, or Christianity, appeareth in them: which notwithstanding they take upon them, being herein worse then Beasts, who still reserve the notes of their nature, and preserve their lives; but these lose the markes of humanity, reason, memory and sense, with the conditions of their families, applying themselves to consume both patrimony and pence in this voracity, and forget the Badges of Christians, offering sacrifice to nothing but their bellies. The Church forsaketh them, the spirit accurseth them, the civil world abhorreth them, the Lord condemneth them, the Devil expecteth them, and the fire of Hell it self is prepared for them; and all such devourers of Gods good creature.

To help their digestion, for although the Hiena and Gulon, and some other monsters are subject to this gluttony, yet are there many creatures more in the world, who although they be Beasts and lack reason, yet can they not by any famine, stripes, or provocations be drawn to exceed their natural appetites, or measure in eating or drinking. There are of these Beasts two kindes, distinguished by colour, one black, and the other like a Wolf, they seldom kill a Man, or any live Beasts, but feed upon carrion and dead carkasses, as is before said; yet sometimes when they are hungry, they prey upon Beasts, as Horses, and such like, and then they subtilly ascend up into a tree, and when they see a Beast under the same, they leap down upon him and destroy him. A Bear is afraid to meet them, and unable to match them by reason of their sharp teeth.

This Beast is tamed, and nourished in the Courts of Princes, for no other cause then for an example of incredible voracity. When he hath filled his belly, if he can finde no trees growing so near together, as by sliding betwixt them, he may expel his excrements; then taketh he an Alder-tree, and with his fore-feet rendeth the same asunder, and passeth through the midst of it, for the cause aforesaid. When they are wilde, men kill them with bows and gins, for no other cause than for their skins which are precious and profitable; for they are white spotted, changeably interlined like divers flowers; for which cause the greatest Princes, and richest Nobles use them in garments in the Winter time, such are the Kings of Polonia, Sweveland, Goatland, and the Princes of Germany; neither is their any skin which will sooner take a colour, or more constantly retain it. The outward appearance of the said skin is like to a damaskt garment, and besides this outward part, there is no other memorable thing worthy observation in this ravenous Beast, and therefore in Germany, it is called a four-footed Vulture.

And the Catholic bees...

“A certaine simple woman having some stals of Bees which yielded not unto her hir desired profit, but did [sicken?] and die of the murraine, made hir moan to another Woman more simple then hir selfe: who gave her counsel to get a consecrated Host, and put it among them. According to whose advice she went to the Priest to receive the host, which after she had done, she kept it in her mouth, and being come home againe she tooke it out, and put it into one of hir Hives. Whereupon the murraine ceased, and the Honie abounded. The Woman therefore lifting up the Hive at the due time to take out the Honie, saw there (most strange to be seene) a Chappell built by the Bees, with an altar in it, the wals adorned by the marvellous skill of Architecture, with windowes conveniently set in their places: also a doore and a steeple with bells. And the Host being laid upon the altar, the Bees making a sweet noise, flew about it.

But whether this doe more argue the supernaturall knowledge and skill of the Bees, or the miraculous power of the Host, or the spirituall craftinesse of him, whose cunning is by the working of Satan with all power and signes and lying wonders, some scrupulous Skeptick may make question.” [sig C 4 v]

My source is Charles Butler’s The feminine monarchie or a treatise concerning bees, and the due ordering of them wherein the truth, found out by experience and diligent observation, discovereth the idle and fondd conceipts, which many haue written anent this subiect. By Char: Butler Magd. At Oxford 1609.

I read the 1623 edition, part of the extensive literature of apiary. Butler is an agreeably fussy author, who arranges his text with meticulous attention: “When you have once, for your satisfaction, perused this Booke, you need not afterward seeke farre for anything therein, whereof you doubt: the Index of the Chapters or Contents of the Booke; and of the Marginall notes, or Contents of the Chapters will readily direct you.” Despite these efforts, he is often quite obscure on the technical details of what he wants his bee-keeper to do, and refers to the months throughout according to the sign of the zodiac (the EEBO copy of the 1623 edition has an early author write out the zodiac opposite the normal names of the months, for easy reference). Butler seems to want to impart, and not impart.

On this story of the Catholic bees, Butler is similarly divided: rather unwilling to deny any miraculous behaviour to the social insects he so much admires, but finally scoffing at the tale as a delusion of Satan.

His book has a dedicatory poem by George Wither:

…Great God Almighty! In thy pretty Bee,

Mine Eie (as written in small letters) sees

An Abstract of that Wisdom, Power and Love,

Which is imprinted on the Heavn’s above…

(etc, one should presumably read ‘bees’ at the end of the first line quoted).

Butler briskly surveys the available bee-books: he cites as an authority Georgius Pictorius

“Whom one T.H. of London translating word for word into English, as well as he could, concealing the authors name, adventured to publish in his owne name”. This would I think be Thomas Hill’s The proffitable arte of gardening …To this annexed, two propre treatises, the one entituled The marueilous gouernment, propertie, and benefite of the bées, with the rare secrets of the honny and waxe (printed from1568 onwards).

After this, he starts off with assertions of the excellence and general political soundness of the bee:

Bees yield great profit with small cost

Bees abhorre idelnesse

Bees have a Common-wealth

Bees always loyall to their Soveraigne

Bees endure no government, but a Monarchie.

And later: “The Bees abhorre as well Polyarchie, as Anarchie, God having shewed in them unto men, and express pattern of A PERFECT MONARCHIE, THE MOST NATURALL AND ABSOLUTE FORME OF GOVERNMENT.”

Butler deals very directly with a major problem about this little creature and its almost ideal commonwealth: he asserts ‘Divers reasons proving the Drone to be the Male’, and freely announces that ‘The male-Bees are subject to the females’. He cites the silly counter-views: “The generall opinion of the Drone is, that he is made of a hony-Bee, that hath lost hir sting.”

Butler compares his bees to the Amazons, and to hawks, where he points out that the female bird is always bigger and better than the male.

His apiary is still very basic, relatively knowledgeable though he is. His hives are still primitive, with no chance to open them (though he does discuss this as a vague possibility). I was pleased to see that Butler thinks of hives that “The best that I have seene are wrought by Thomas May of Sunning, about one mile from Redding”: he was a local man to me here, and speaks of the different flavours of Hampshire honey, depending on the local flora.

He gives rather confusing directions about making ‘armour’ against getting stung, and in the end recommends washing your face and hands with beer and proceeding gently with your hives. More mystifyingly, he recommends chastity and sobriety in the bee-keeper:

“If thou wilt have the favour of thy Bees that they sting thee not, thou must avoid such things as offend them: thou must not be 1) unchaste or 2) uncleanly: for impuritie and sluttishnesse (themselves being most chaste and neat,) they utterly abhorre: thou must not come among them (3) smelling of sweat, or having a stinking breath.”

Most shockingly, in our current anxiety about the world population of bees, Butler was a man of his time when it comes to harvesting the honey, “The Vindemiation or taking of Combes” (the OED first records the word from him): “The most usuall, and generally most usefull manner of taking the Combes, is by killing the Bees.”

The whole swarm is killed – he recommends a fumigation with brimstone. He knows about trying to eject the resident swarm, and about ‘castration’, or cutting into a hive to remove just some of the honey, but he firmly opts for total destruction of the colony. This was normal until the 18^th and 19^th centuries:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bee-keeping

My illustrations are a photograph I took of a swarm of bees invading one of the medieval ‘put-log’ holes in the tower of East Hendred Church, and one of Butler’s odder pages, a song in praise of bees. Butler has listened attentively to the various hums emerging from his hives, and believes that “In the Bees song are the grounds of musicke”. In the first edition of his book he merely scores the various buzzes and hums, the 1623 edition expands into a song set out like other song books of the period, for four singers sitting round the same sheet.

EEBO’s subject search does not seem to throw up another bee book I found, Samuel Purchas’s A theatre of politicall flying-insects wherein especially the nature, the vvorth, the vvork, the wonder, and the manner of right-ordering of the bee, is discovered and described.