The late date of this statute of pedlars, if it may be called so, is the more remarkable that they swarmed along the roads in the Middle Ages, more numerous than tinkers or any other wandering representatives of petty trades. There were not then as now large shops in every village with all the necessaries of life ready provided for the inhabitants. The shop itself was itinerant, being nothing else than the pack of travelling chapmen. In the same way {237} as the literature propagated by the minstrels, as news, tales, and letters, pardons from Rome and many other commodities, so household wares were carried about the country by indefatigable wayfarers. A host of small useful things, or sometimes useless, but so pleasing! were concealed in their unfathomable boxes. The contents of them are pretty well shown by a series of illuminations in a fourteenth-century manuscript, where a pedlar is represented asleep at the foot of a tree, while monkeys have got hold of his box and help themselves to the contents. They find in it vests, caps, gloves, musical instruments, purses, girdles, hats, cutlasses, pewter pots, and a number of other articles.[316] As to the means by which pedlars came by their goods, a variety seem to have been used by them, and purchase was only one among several. A proverbial saying preserved for us by Langland shows how they secured furs for their country customers. The author of the “Visions” states how Repentance came once to Avarice, and examined him as to his usurious doings: “‘Hastow pite on pore men · that mote nedes borwe?’ ‘I have as moche pite of pore men · as pedlere hath of cattes, That wolde kille hem, yf he cacche hem myghte · for coveitise of here skynnes.’”[317] a practice which cannot fail to be deeply resented by all lovers of cats. The regular merchants whom Langland and Chaucer describe, so splendid to look at that no one knew they were “in dette,” adorned with Flaundrish hats and “botes clasped faire and fetisly,” were a very different sort of {238} people; but though no mere wanderers, they were, too, great wayfarers. Many of them had had to visit the continent to find markets for their goods, and for their purchases. Through them too, and it was in fact, perhaps, the safest and most reliable among many such channels of information, ideas of what was going on in the outer world and how things were managed in France and elsewhere, points of similitude and comparison, were introduced into England and made the subject of thought and discussion. [Illustration 46. A PEDLAR ROBBED BY MONKEYS. (_From MS. 10 E. IV._)]