68. A blind beggar and his boy. The trick played upon the blind man by his boy is well known as being one of the incidents in the first chapter of the sixteenth-century Spanish novel, “Lazarillo de Tormes.” It has long been suspected that the materials for this chapter were drawn by the Spanish author from an earlier tale. This drawing and several others that follow it, never adverted to with reference to “Lazarillo de Tormes,” put the fact beyond a doubt; they tell in their way the same tale, and they are of the first part of the fourteenth century. MS. 10 E. IV., in the British Museum, fol. 217 _b_; see above No. 30 • 419 [Illustration 3. THE THREE-BRANCHED BRIDGE AT CROWLAND.] {23} English Wayfaring Life in the Middle Ages (Fourteenth Century) INTRODUCTION “_O, dist Spadassin, voici un bon resveux; mais allons nous cacher au coin de la cheminée et là passons avec les dames nostre vie et nostre temps à enfiler des perles ou à filer comme Sardanapalus. Qui ne s’adventure n’a cheval ni mule, ce dist Salomon._” VIE DE GARGANTUA. At the present day there are but few wayfarers. The small trades plyed along the road, in every chance village, are disappearing before our newer methods of wholesale manufacture; more and more rarely do we see the pedlar unstrap his pack at the farm door, the travelling cobbler mend by the wayside the shoes which on Sunday will replace the wooden clogs, or hear the wandering musician drone at the windows his oft rehearsed tunes. Professional pilgrims exist no longer, even quack doctors are losing their credit. It was far otherwise in the Middle Ages; many people were bound to a wandering existence, and started even from childhood on their life-long journey. Some trotted their strange industries in the broad sunshine, through the dust of the highroads; others skulked in bye-lanes or {24} even in coppices, hiding their heads from the sheriff’s officer—may be a criminal, may be a fugitive, “a wolf’s head that anyone may cut down,” according to the terrible expression of an English jurist of the thirteenth century. Among these, many labourers who had broken the villeins bond, unhappy and oppressed in their hamlets, and who wandered through the country in quest of work, as though flight could enfranchise them: but “service est en le sank” (“service is in the blood”), the magistrate warned them.[1] Among them also, pedlars laden with petty wares; pilgrims who from St. Thomas’ to St. James’ went begging along the roads, living by alms; pardoners, those strange nomads, who sold to the common people the merits of the saints in paradise; mendicant friars and preachers of all sorts who, according to the times, delivered ardently liberal harangues or contemptibly selfish discourses at the church doors. All these had one character in common, namely, that in the wide extent of country where they passed their lives, ever on the move, they served as links between the separated groups of other men who,