“_Qui ne s’adventure n’a cheval ni mule, ce dist Salomon.—Qui trop s’adventure perd cheval et mule, respondit Malcon._” VIE DE GARGANTUA. We have seen the aspect and usual condition of English roads; we must now take separately the principal types of the wandering class and see what sort of a life the wayfarer led, and what was his importance in society or in the State. Wayfarers belonging to civil life were, in the first place, quacks and drug-sellers, glee-men, tumblers, minstrels, and singers; then messengers, pedlars, and itinerant chapmen; lastly, outlaws, thieves of all kinds, peasants out of bond or perambulating workmen, and beggars. To ecclesiastic life belonged preachers, mendicant friars, and those strange dealers in indulgences called pardoners. Lastly there were palmers and pilgrims, whose journeyings {182} had a religious object, but in whose ranks, as in Chaucer’s book, clerk and lay were mingled. Many of these individuals, the friars for instance, had, it is true, a resting-place, but their existence was spent, for the greater part, on the roads; when they left their abode their purpose was not to reach this or that place, they had no fixed itinerary, but spent their time in ceaseless rambles about the country, begging as they went. They had, in the long run, caught the manners and the language of true nomadic wayfarers, and in common opinion were generally confounded with them; they belonged to that caste or family of beings. As for the strange race which we still see at the present day wandering from country to country, and which, later than any, will represent among us the caste of wanderers, it had not yet made its appearance in the British world, and are outside the limits of the present work. The Bohemians or Gipsies remained entirely unknown in England till the fifteenth century. [Illustration 36. BLIND BEGGAR AND HIS DOG. (_From the MS. 10 E. IV._)] {183} [Illustration 37. “THER WAS ALSO A DOCTOUR OF PHISIK” (CHAUCER’S DOCTOR). (_From the Ellesmere MS._)] CHAPTER I HERBALISTS, CHARLATANS, MINSTRELS, JUGGLERS, AND TUMBLERS