Márton Szepsi Csombor

England, 1620

To
My right honourable and illustrious masters
Sebestyén Monachi,
János Kalmár of Thúr
and
István Szegedi
May the pure and Christian land of England
bear everywhere their fame, their names
and the honour and respect that are righfully theirs

 

When the ancient Romans began to conquer the world the people of England had been there long before, but the whereabouts of the country were unknown and it was only rumoured that beyond Normandy on an island there lived giants. When therefore Julius Caesar had subdued the parts of Gaul that are next the sea he could not be satisfied with that, but took his army over into England too and good fortune attended him, for the whole of Britain, which had never known a foreign ruler, fell into his hand.
It was then called Albion or Albania because of the white hills which appear afar off to the arriving traveller, as this country is rich in chalk, alabaster and white marble, and later it was called Britannia after Brutus, son of Silvius, who, forty years after the sack of Troy, was leader of an army and came into this island and cut down to the last man the aboriginal inhabitants thereof. In this country there was of old the forest of Caledonia, from which the island was also later named Caledonia. It has many rivers, many people, many towns and harbours, and on its coasts are many small islands among which that named Monia1 is very famous, since it has no foundation but goes to and fro as the wind blows it, perhaps as much as sixty mérföld2. The people in England guard their lineage jealously, and when one speaks with them they take their descent, be it ever so humble, back to a noble or royal generation. There is in their country a very great abundance of inflammable soft and sulphurous stone, and you would be amazed if you heard: beggars often request stones in the name of God.
Those who live there say that England is much better and more moderate of climate than Gaul; there is neither such great cold nor such great heat there. It has wheat, rye and barley aplenty, only the ploughlands are all enclosed, from which it appears that it is costly because the people are many that require it, and there is other fruit too in abundance. It has livestock of many kinds, but chiefly many sheep, from the wool of which all manner of fine cloths are made. Indeed, I declare that the sheep's wool is so fine that one cannot see any outer layer while it is on them, and would opine that there is on them only skin, but when one can see at close hand they have a plentiful fleece which differs little from white silk.
It is said that their sheep have such fine wool because they graze on the herb known as rosemary, which by nature has a costly and moderate temperament, which matter I believe all the more easily because on the meat of the sheep, when it has been butchered, a pleasing and delightful scent is to be detected.
In ancient times iron and copper ore were not to be found in the country, but now there are all kinds of metal. Only their king's coinage is accepted, and no foreign ruler's ever, but if any accepts pure silver or gold it is by weight and he cares not for its form. Their coinage is pure silver and gold and may not be carried out of the country, but is exchanged at the ports into the money of the country to which one means to go.
Not a single wolf is ever to be found in this country, and some say that the nature of the land cannot suffer them, but just as when snakes and other venomous creatures are taken to neighbouring Hybernia, or mice to a certain island close to Denmark, as soon as they are set on the ground they die a dreadful death. But in the Annalibus Civitatum Anglić another reason is stated for there being no wolves, and this is what is said. As in this country the greatest profit comes from the keeping of sheep, in time gone by, since the citizens suffered great loss by wolves, a certain decree went forth from the common government of the country that should a town, as an act of grace and mercy, reprieve a man sentenced to death for his crimes, he would be obliged to produce to the town council within a twelvemonth twelve wolves' heads for his liberty, which being a frequent happening, all the breed of wolves has disappeared from among them, and as [England] is on all sides surrounded by the sea there is no way that they can arise3. But however it may have come about it is certain that wolves are found nowhere in England, concerning which a fellow-traveller of mine in Delft, when I spoke of my journey to England, composed the following couplet, in which he lied:

Wolves used in England nowhere to be found,
But wolf-like heretics now there abound!

In ancient times there were not so many sorts of quarries as now, because now chalk, white marble and alabaster are nowhere found better or finer than here. Furthermore, there is that jet-stone, from which those that can use it skilfully can make eternally burning candles, which only oil can extinguish. Another thing is that if one administers the powder of that stone in wine to a maiden or youth it can furnish unquestionable testimony concerning their virginity, for if they are virgin it does not disagree with them, but if not they vomit it forth at once.

LONDINUM, where I was amazed above all at the people's ignorance of Latin8, because I went along three whole streets among merchants, furriers,
tailors, etc. and nowhere found a single person that could speak to me in Latin, but after a long time I came upon an Italian on whom I expended the little Italian that I know, and who directed me to the common master of the Italians, saying that there was there a young Hungarian gentleman, at which I was highly delighted and sought him most assiduously, but although he called himself a Hungarian he could not speak a word of Hungarian to me because he was a Czech, and had only wished to give himself a good name in coming from a distant land and therefore had called himself Hungarian.
Going from there I took lodgings at the Fox and Hounds9 before the great bridge. As I went out to look at Londinum's three streets10 first of all, which are very handsome and wide, I observed fine paved roads adorned with big houses and countless channels of running water, although the poor contend for the water, taking it in wooden vessels and bearing it from street to street to sell it. Besides these, there are in the big main street very tall stone buildings and pillars with the arms of the city, decorated with amazingly beautiful images, but the other streets are extremely narrow and many are not troubled by the light of the sun. I have seen big cities in the countries where I have been, but never before one like this, because its circumference, not only in their opinion but mine too, is four and a half Hungarian mérföld. The bridge over the river Tamesis is big, the third wonder of the land of England, with eighteen arches; it is a veritable town in itself, with a church on it and countless merchants' shops. The royal castle (the court is different11, of which I shall speak below) is on a high stone wall above the sea, with four towers in a big square with no decoration at all, and was built by Julius Caesar. In front of this castle are 270 big old bronze cannon, which were captured from the Spanish during the sea-battle in the time of Queen Elizabeth of blessed memory, and she triumphed over them, causing her arms to be engraved on each of them, and they are kept here in a heap simply for a memento, as it were. Just near here at the side of a house are two very fine water-channels, at which I was once drinking with great pleasure when a Frenchman, thinking that I was of his nation, reproached me most severely; he held it a disgrace in the eyes of those that lived there that one of his race should drink water, but on learning of my country he embraced me and begged my pardon, and left me honourably. As I went from there by a small gate into the city I encountered a crowd of Saracen girls whom armed robbers had just brought from Ethiopia, and as they were selling them they had dressed them in very fine clothes. Compared to Holland the place is not expensive, but for us it is certainly very dear, because one can eat daily five garas12 worth of bread and vegetables. They mostly drink beer, and after Danish beer I have not tasted another sort as good under Heaven. There is a great quantity of fish, and I saw crayfish13 so big, I tell no lie, they were no smaller than ten-day-old piglets, and far from eating them the sight of them would have made me feel nauseous for a long time; previously I was amazed, but it is now nothing, at the shell of the crayfish-claw which the late Miklós Szabó of Nagybánya had, which, as I have seen, held a gill14 of wine, because in these we would find an icce15, and a big crayfish like that sold for three garas. To the west is a very fine gate16, with the king's arms on the outside, a harp, a lily, six lions, a crown, held on one side by a lion and on the other by a unicorn, and beneath is written in letters of gold: Vivat rex, and beneath that:

SENATUS POPULUSQUE LONDINENSIS FECIT ANNO 1609
As one goes out by that gate there is on the other side a church and to the left of the church a magnificent grassed garden where the fine London cloth is dried, and the stone walls of these alone have a circumference of half a mérföld, and one is amazed at the amount of cloth that may be seen in these gardens. From there to the left is a fine suburban street where there is a little church entirely of carved stone, above the door of which is an inscription: C¶miterium hoc inferius a civitate Londinensi huic parochić commissum sumptibus eiusdem parochić muro latericio septum est 161517. A very fine gate18 opens before those coming into the city from there, on which there are statues of a king on the right, a bishop in the middle and Justitia on the left. Going up that street one comes to the Basilica, on the tower of which, before the hour is struck, the statues of two men drag out a bell, and I was reliably informed that both are cast in pure silver, and neither of them is smaller than me19. All around here are the many studios of the leading painters. After much going one reaches the church of St Paul, a very old building, which is divided into three aisles, its paving-stones are inordinately large, and the sanctuary, in which there are many tombs of white, red and black marble and alabaster, is twelve steps above the nave; the sanctuary is opened only at the celebration of the Lord's Supper, but looking in at a window I could see the effigy of a bishop carved in black marble; after the natural corruption of his bones they were dug up and placed above him, but there is no inscription otherwise, but this verse in two places:

Disce mori mundo, vivere disce Deo

In the nave are the marble and alabaster tombs of many learned, gallant and statesmanlike persons, who, if I were to record them in full, would perhaps weary and bore the reader. On the left as one emerges from this church is a school with the inscription: Ingredere ut proficias.21 In the time of Queen Elizabeth the master of this school had a fifteen-year-old daughter, who as such wrote to the queen a little book of verses in Latin, Greek and the Jewish language, which now, after her death, has been printed again, and everyone reads it with great pleasure. Beside this school to left, right, front and rear are streets in which only booksellers live, so that the area occupied by bookshops is as great as the town of Szeben in Szepes.
It took me two and a half hours to walk the length of the city from Julius Caesar's castle to Westminster, from which you can easily judge the size of it. Westminster is the upper part of the city and was in times gone by the home of false monks, who kept there the Virgin Mary's milk and St Peter's middle finger, to which people from every country hastened for idolatrous purposes; Erasmus describes every part of this magnificent building in Peregrinatio religionis ergo suscepta, where the reader may find it. It has now been made into a great school and the king has some hundreds of scholars therein; I visited all of its halls, but particularly to be seen are the examination rooms of the ordinands, where on the wall are depicted to the right Hercules propter magnos labores and to the left Samson, for his forbearing, and between them Queen Elizabeth together with her crown and a rose and on the other side the arms of the country with the inscription: Beati pacifici. Then: Reges et reginć erunt nutritii tui, and furthermore in very ancient letters: Cor unum, una via. In another hall I saw: Non tota, sed pars tamen, of which many, like myslf, cannot give any explanation. The scholars wear very fine distinguishing garments, and it is easy to recognise even the smallest among the people, unlike in Germany, where one does not know who is what among them, because all wear clothing identical with that of noblemen and master craftsmen. But here the sleeves of their long fringed gowns, which even in summer have a light lining, reach to below the waist. When I went to this school there were six hundred pupils, and forty professors and other persons belonging to the school.
The church of the monastery22 is huge, and nowadays kings are buried there; the body of Queen Elizabeth of blessed memory too lies here, as does that of her sister Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, the mother of the present King James, whom Elizabeth caused to be beheaded with an axe, as is their custom, for her wicked deeds and buried here. Because of the many fine tombs therein this church is worthily counted one of the three wonders of England.
When one goes up from Westminster towards the king's palace one has to enter through two fine gateways of carved stone decorated with statues, and here as one goes in on the left is a house built in the form of a church; inside are many different amusement-places, and in one they play ball, in another bowls, in another with hoops, in a fourth marbles, beside a fair mill-stream. If you turn to the left from there, through the little gateway above which is an image of Queen Elizabeth and the inscription: Vivat regina Elizabetha, and if you enter the garden you will be amazed at its appearance, but chiefly at the fine orderliness of the players, some of whom toss stones, some beams, some wrestle and jump, while others, especially the young womenfolk and tender maidens, contend in singing - seeing all these things you would cast aside the Olympus and Helikon of the poets and marvel at the splendour of this place. A stream flows through the garden, dividing it into two: the one half is for sport and the king's fishpond, in which there are pelicans, ducks, swans and sea-ravens, the other part being a game-garden, but it is such that one can see into it on all sides, and there is much game there, deer, white and black rabbits, bison, roe deer, oxen and the rest. Directly in front of this garden is the king's palace, a building partly of brick, partly of carved stone, and all may enter the courtyards, you are not asked whom you seek or why you have come. On the first day when I went in I saw at once that famous Marcus Antonius to whom, while he held the archbishopric of Spalatum23 and the prefecture of Dalmatia, the Lord miraculously revealed the truth, and who fled from the spiritual Babylon, leaving his all, and sojourned with the king of England. I tried to glimpse King James too, but I learnt from his servants that he had at that time not left his house for fourteen days, nor would he admit any on account of his great business. These palaces are enclosed on all sides by pleasure gardens, and apart from these walks and gardens have been planted with countless linden trees, so many that other than Italy, I believe, no country may boast more of its city, and any that has seen the king of England's gardens, the people of his court and his palaces in this city will consider as nothing the oafish diversions of Germany. Seeing the condition of the place to be such I sang of it as follows:

Go look on London, thou whom Fate hath made
A wanderer, for here thou wilt behold
All England's jewels gathered, and perceive
Her throne's possessions; lo, how fortunate
This city truly is, where piety
Dwelleth in palaces, and peace and love,
And true faith riseth to the heaven above.

It is the custom not only of the people of this city but of the whole country to drink of a morning before eating, and to invite their fellow man not to a piece of roast meat but to a drink of beer, concerning which they dispute with the Germans as to which works the better; the English argue their case as follows: When one wishes to cook, first one rinses the pot and then puts in it what one wishes to cook. The Germans, however, say: When one wishes to keep good fresh-tasting water in one's well, first one lays a strong foundation of stone in it. Those people are immoderately weak and effeminate.
When I spoke with a pleasant fellow concerning the fruit of England, he told me: I have seen a single cherry sold in this country for sixty-five pfennig, which in Hungary is as many garas. That I took in a different sense and thought that he spoke of some costly thing, and asked what sort of cherry that was; he replied that certainly it was such as in any other country, and that if I would tarry two weeks in that city I would see them at seventy English pfennig, and not only cherries but any fresh fruit, because the people of England are of such a disposition that when they see some new thing they will buy it at a high price, some for their lovers, some for their husbands, others for their good friends, some simply to hang it on their ears to give themselves airs, and keep it there until it rots.
The people in London are so many that one would consider it every day crowded, and I heard that in addition to persons visiting there are at all times three hundred thousand people to be found there, and, I believe, there must be food for these. I can say with confidence that there is not a week in which a hundred and fifty oxen and a thousand sheep are not slaughtered there, in addition to which how many birds and fish must there be?

CANTUARIUM or Cantuaria, in the English tongue Cantábury, is the greatest place of pilgrimage after St James of Compostella, St Mary of Loretto and the breeches of St Joseph in Aquisgranum (where the ancient Hungarians went to worship an idol), to which people come because of the body of St Thomas the bishop, who was killed by three knights and buried here. When I went in I first met Jacobus Lambe, the archdeacon28 there, greeted him and when I enquired of him the whereabouts of the grave of the late Whittakerus he replied in these words: Toto cćlo errat dominus studiosus, haec civitas non est Cantabrigia sed Cantuaria29, at which I was very distressed because I had wished above all to see that university, but as I had put behind me a whole thirty mérföld30 I was very reluctant to return. The priest saw that I regretted the wasted journey, and said: Ne pćniteat huc venisse, hic enim videbis primum miraculum Anglić31, and taking me by the hand first of all, before showing me other things, took me to an inn (because they do not hold it a disgrace to eat and drink anywhere) where both he and I became very merry on English beer, and from there to his house; he sent for the key to the church in which, in papist times, the body of St Thomas of Cantuarium was venerated, opened it and took me everywhere, and a more beautiful building no one ever saw, for which reason it is reckoned one of the three wonders of England.
Never in my life would I have believed that so beautiful a church could be without gold and silver (for the golden vessels and vestments have all been removed thence) in this world. It has two exceedingly big towers outside, and inside it is very high, and on the vaulting are all the coats of arms of the lords of the land; there are countless aisles in it, supported by some hundreds of black marble columns, many picturesque chapels and high and low flights of steps. There are two sanctuaries; the first, in which the everyday prayers and singing take place, is 22 steps above the nave, and there are the episcopal and archiepiscopal seats; the lectern is very big, of pure Venetian brass, on which a great eagle holds the book on its spread wings; the second sanctuary is somewhat higher than the first, and in it lies the body of St Thomas. On all the columns in the nave there are books, exceedingly old, and among them, to show the eternal blindness of the papists, the Gospel of St Nicodemus too is kept, in which there are as many falsehoods as words. There is no plain glass in the windows, but they are decorated with pictures of scenes from the New and Old Testaments; it is an amazing thing that among so many hundreds of columns every corner of the church is so light. A large chapter keeps the church nowadays too, and just as in papist times they sing the psalms in antiphonal manner, and many, young and old alike, put on the monastic cowl and sing in monkish fashion. There are very many tombstones of men of rank in alabaster, marble and Venetian brass; the inscriptions on some I could not read because of their antiquity, but many I could make out and read fully, and I will record just one out of them all:

Ottho Severus, qui ob nimiam iustitiam Severi nomen meruit, ex illustri Dacorum prosapia ortus, ex ethnico Christianus factus, ob id a fratribus domo pulsus relicta patria ad Christiani cuiusdam ducis famulatum sese contulit, hominis indole a duce perspecta Graecć et Latinć doctis eum docendum tradidit, tandem sacra purgatus unda ob magnam in sacris literis peritiam archiepiscopale munus hic 25 annis gessit, tandem senio confectus rationem suae villicationis redditurus ad cćlos migravit anno post sacrum partum 95832.

In addition to this, many tombs of kings are enclosed in chapels. There is a board on which the entire legend of the vision of St John is told in pictures, a marvel to behold.
Around the church on all sides are the palaces of the archbishop, bishop and canons, and a fine school, but principally a cloister, a wonderfully dark and serpentine building, in a word everywhere that one looks in this place one sees nil nisi stupenda antiquitatis vestigia.33 The town is not very big, nor beautiful, nevertheless it is flat, has many lapidaria in ruins, fine gates and a decent town hall; bread and wine are expensive there, and the beer is good and tolerable in price.
Having gone all round these things we went to the priest's house and from three to six o'clock kept the company of the beer glasses, and that pious man entertained me heartily because, in my opinon, as he had been to Germany he knew what it was to be away from home. He had been a pupil of Whittakerus.
Even surrounded by so many good things, and although he sought very much to detain me, I did not delay my journey because my purse was becoming very thin in England for two reasons, and by the way that I planned my homeland was still four hundred Hungarian mérföld away. My money was running short firstly because in England, as in the countries that I had visited, everything was exceedingly costly. Secondly, because I was given for a gold forint no more than a hundred and sixty pénz. I took my leave of Jacobus Lambe, therefore, after he had written his name in my book, and set off for the British ocean sea; in the evening I became lost in a dense forest, where, as I could no longer see to continue my way, I lay down under a thorn bush, and there too I had very good fortune, because when I had laid my drawn sword across me and was very quietly, though certainly fearfully, resting, there came two peasants whispering loudly, each with an axe, intent on stealing wood, I believe; they stopped beside the bush and as it was dark perhaps they could not see me, but I could see them clearly standing by my head, and was terribly afraid in case they were thieves and would catch sight of me and so one would throw or strike at me, for they were so close that they could have struck me, and I would die a terrible death.
I grasped my naked rapier in my hand and leapt up and they saw this and retreated, but when I enquired of them for an inn their courage returned and approaching me they said that I had left the right way two whole mérföld back, and nevertheless they directed me to an inn which was only a mérföld away, but as I was quite worn out I thought that even if I did reach the inn they would not admit one in the night, especially one who did not know their language, and so I looked for another place in the forest and lay there surrounded by the song of nightingales and the doleful cries of owls.
Next morning I rose very early and reached the town of Dover, known as the harbour of England, at seven o'clock. It is a tiny oppidum without any wall, but has two bastions, both overlooking the sea, with four cannon on each. It has a strong castle on the hilltop almost like that of Szepes, and its walls extend to the seashore. Here and in the other coastal towns of England, when leaving for a foreign country the sailors dare take no one aboard without a credential. Since, therefore, I wished to go to France I went to the Commissioner and since, from my dress and especially the fact that I always wore boots with yellow uppers on my travels, everyone said that I was a Walloon and took me for such, he began to question me very harshly in that tongue as to where I was going; I replied in Latin, whereupon he spoke to me in German and questioned me further, but civilly, where was I from and what was my religion? I said that I was a Protestant from the city of Frankfurt ad Oderam in Germany, and he therefore gave me a document in these terms:

Probatć religionis juvenis, natione Alemanus, Martinus Czombor portum Normandicum Diepć aggredi conatur, libere, petimus, dimittatur.
Subscripsit Nicolaus Katon, M. Jonas in Dover

I should have paid thirty-five garas35, but the kindly men took not a farthing from me. I lodged in the Plough and Four Oxen, where a dumb girl waited on six of us, cooked, baked, laid the table for us; if I were to so much as see her cooking now certainly I would be sick enough to die, but at the time everything was good, because what the occasion brought we could not alter; she had bulbous, rheumy eyes, crippled legs, loathsome hands, certainly she had not washed once in three weeks, and if one reproved her for anything she gave a terrible scream in wordless fashion so that one's hair all but stood on end at it, and I, when I left her, cursed her for her unbelief, but I thought that even a curse would have no effect on her. In England I never saw a single oven, as in Holland and Zealand likewise.

Translated by Bernard Adams

Márton Szepsi Csombor