Peasants, too, are found there. Christine de Pisan, that poetess whose writings and character so often recall steady John Gower, shows them drinking, fighting, gambling; they have to appear before the provost, and fines accrue to augment their losses: “At these taverns each day will you find them established, and enjoying long potations. As soon as their work is over, many agree to go there and drink, and they spend, you may be sure, more than they have earned all day. Do not ask if they fight when they are tipsy, the provost has several pounds in fines from it during the year. . . . And there also are to be seen some of those idle gallants who haunt taverns, handsome and gay.”[154] Art, literature, the trend of thought were changed at the time of the Renaissance, but taverns remained the same; witness Skelton’s description of an alehouse on the highroad, quite similar to those which Langland had known a century and a half earlier. The ale-wife, who brews, God knows how, her beer herself, is a withered old crony, not unlike the “weird sisters” who were to welcome {137} Macbeth on the heath. She keeps her tavern near Leatherhead, in Surrey, on a declivity by the highroad, and there gathers as motley a crowd as that in the “Visions,” “Her nose somdele hoked, And camously croked. . . . Her skynne lose and slacke, Grained like a sacke, With a croked backe. . . . She breweth noppy ale, And maketh therof port sale To travellars, to tynkers, To sweters, to swynkers, And all good ale drinkers.” Passers-by and dwellers in the neighbourhood flock to her house: “Some go streyght thyder, Be it slaty or slyder; They holde the hye waye, They care not what men say, Be that as be may; Some, lothe to be espyde, Start in at the back syde, Over the hedge and pale, And all for the good ale.” The reputation of the houses with a long pole and bush had not improved, and many of those who frequented them had, as we see, little wish to be “espyde.” As for paying the score, there was the rub! Devotees of drink whose purse was empty would not deprive themselves, however, and they paid in kind: “Instede of coyne and monny, Some brynge her a conny, And some a pot with honny, Some a salt, and some a spone, Some their hose, some theyr shone.” {138} As to the women, one brings: “her weddynge-rynge To pay for her scot, As cometh to her lot. Som bryngeth her husbandes hood, Because the ale is good.”[155] The worst-famed of these houses began a little later to receive the visits of the most illustrious of their customers, one who held his court under their smoky rafters and came there to his earthly end, “babbling of green fields,” immortal Sir John Falstaff. IV