Master Guy’s return to England was a little retarded by another
characteristic adventure. As he was passing through Louvain, he found
Duke Otto besieging his father in his own castle--“governor” of the
castle and the Duke. Now nothing shocked Master Guy so much as filial
ingratitude, and despite all that Otto could urge about niggardly
allowance, losses at play, debts of honor, and the parsimony of the
“governor,” our champion made common cause with the “indignant parent,”
and not only mortally wounded Otto, but, before the latter died, Guy
brought him to a “sense of his situation,” and Otto died in a happy
frame of mind, leaving all his debts to his father. The legacy was by
way of a “souvenir,” and certainly the governor never forgot it. As
for Guy, he killed the famous boar of Louvain, before he departed for
England, and as he drew his sword from the animal’s flank, he remarked,
there lies a greater boar, and not a less beast than Otto himself.
However, he took the head and hams with him, for Phillis was fond of
both; and as she was wont to say, if there was anything that could
seduce her, it was brawn!
When Master Guy stepped ashore at Harwich, where that amphibious town
now lies soaking, deputations from all quarters were awaiting him,
to ask his succor against some terrible dragon in the north that was
laying waste all the land, and laying hold of all the waists which the
men there wished to enclose. King Athelstan was then at York hoping to
terrify the indomitable beast by power of an army, which in combat with
the noxious creature made as long a tail, in retreat, as the dragon
itself.
Now whatever this nuisance was which so terribly plagued the good
folks in the North, whether a dragon with a tongue thirty feet long,
or anything else equally hard to imagine, it is matter of fact that
our Master Guy assuredly got the better of it. On his return he met
an ovation in York; Athelstan entertained him at a banquet, covered
him with honor, endowed him with a good round sum, and _thus_ all the
newborn male children in the county became Guys. At least two thirds of
them received the popular name, and for many centuries it remained in
favor, until disgrace was brought upon it by the York proctor’s son,
whose effigy still glides through our streets on each recurring 5th of
November.
I will not pause on this matter. I will only add that the Earl of
Warwick, finding Guy a man whom the King delighted to honor, accepted
him for a son-in-law; and then, ever wise, and civil, and proper, he
discreetly died. The King made Guy Earl of Warwick, in his place, and
our hero being now a married man, he of course ceased to be _Master_
Guy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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