Travellers


People have been traveling since the discovery of feet. In all the millenia since the beginning of the world, then, there are horror tales of nights spent on the road. Here are two, taken from A Celtic Miscellany translated by Kenneth Hurlstone Jackson (Penguin Press, 1982):


Dafydd ap Gwilym, c. 1325 - 1380, was a Welsh poet who wrote of Bright Girls and Leafy Bowers. This is about a night spent in an inn.

A Night at an Inn

I came to a choice city with my handsome squire in my train, a place of liberal banqueting, a fine gay way of spending money, to find a public inn worthy enough, and I would have wine - I have been vain since childhood.
I discovered a fair lissome maiden in the house, my sweet soul! and I set my heart wholly upon the slender, blessed girl like the sun in the east. I paid for roast and expensive wine, not merely out of boastfulness, for myself and the fair girl yonder; and invited the modest maiden to my bench, a sport which young men love. I was bold and persistent and whispered to her two words of magic, this is certain; and, no laggard lover, I made a pact to come to the sprightly girl, the black-browed maid, when the company should have gone to bed.
When all were asleep but I and the lass I sought most skilfully to find my way to the girl's bed - it was a miserable journey, and came to grief. I got a vexatious fall there, and made a clatter - not a good exploit; in such reckless mischief it is easier to get up awkwardly than very nimbly. I did not spring up unhurt; I struck my shin (oh, my shank!) above the ankle against the side of a silly squeaking stool, left there by the ostler. In rising where I was placed, unable to step freely but continually led astray in my frenzied struggles - my Welsh friends, it was a deplorable affair, too much eagerness is not lucky - I knocked my forehead against the end of a table, where a basin rolled freely for a while, and an echoing copper pan. The table, a bulky object, fell, and its two trestles and all the utensils with it. The pan gave a clang behind me which was heard far away, and the basin yelled, and the dogs began to bark at me - I was a wretched man!
Beside the big walls there lay three Englishmen in a stinking bed, fussing about their three packs, Hicken and Jenkin and Jack. One of these varlets muttered angry words to the other two, with his slobbering mouth:

The groom roused all the company together, and an ignominious affair began, they hunting about furiously to find me, and I, haggard and ghastly in my anguish, keeping mum in the darkness. I prayed, not fearlessly but hiding away like one terrified; and by dint of praying hard and from the heart, and by the grace of the true Jesus, I regained my former lodging in the grip of sleeplessness, and without the reward I had looked for. I escaped, for the saints stood by me; and I implore God for forgiveness.

This unfortunate incident was written down author unknown. It is Irish, from the twelfth century.

The Guest House at the Monastery of Cork

...The guest house was open when he arrived. That day was a day of three things - wind, and snow, and rain in its doorway; so that the wind left not a straw from the thatch nor a speck of ash that it did not sweep through the opposite door, under the beds and couches and partitions of the royal house.
The blanket of the guest house was rolled up in a bundle on its bed, and it was full of lice and fleas. That was natural, because it was never aired by day nor turned by night, since it was rarely unoccupied when it might be turned. The guest house bath had last night's water in it, and with its heating stones was beside the doorpost.
The schollar found no one to wash his feet, so he himself took off his shoes and washed his hands and feet in that dirty washing-water, and soaked his shoes in it afterwards. He hung his book-satchel on the peg in the wall, put up his shoes, and tucked his arms together into the blanket and wrapped it around his legs.
But as multitudinous as the sands of the sea or as sparks of fire or as dew-drops on a May-day morning or as the stars of heaven were the lice and the fleas biting his feet, so that he grew sick at them. And no one came to visit him nor wait on him...

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