she did.  ‘Tush,’ said the fryer, ‘here are not enow, go fetch ten or twelve.’  So the good wife was constrayned to fetch more, for feare that the pan should burn, and when he had them he put them in the pan.  ‘Now,’ quoth he, ’if you have no butter, the pan will burn and the eggs too.’  So the good-wife, being very loth to have her pan burnt, and her eggs lost, she fetcht him a dish of butter, the which he put into the pan and made good meat thereof, and brought it to the table, saying, ’Much good may it do you, my hostess, now may you say you have eaten of a buttered whetstone.’”

Another story runs as follows:—­

“There was a priest in the country, which had christened a child; and when he had christened it, he and the clerk were bidden to the drinking that should be there, and being there, the priest drank and made so merry that he was quite foxed, and thought to go home before he laid him down to sleep; but, having gone a little way, he grew so drousie that he could go no further, but laid him down by a ditch-side, so that his feet did hang in the water, and lying on his back, the moon shined in his face; thus he lay till the rest of the company came from drinking, who, as they came home, found the priest lying as aforesaid, and they thought to get him away, but do what they could, he would not rise, but said, ’Do not meddle with me, for I lie very well, and will not stir hence before morning, but I pray lay some more cloathes on my feet, and blow out the candle.’”

At first it occasions us no little surprise to find the clergy of the early centuries so prone to attack and ridicule one another, but we must remember that there was then no reading public, and that the few copies of books in existence were mostly within the walls of the monasteries.  Thus, the object of these writers would be like that of St. Jerome in his letters, not so much to disgrace the Church as to improve its discipline.  We can also, perhaps, understand how the conflicts between the parish priests and monks led them sometimes to caricature each other in the grotesque heads of corbels and gargoyles; nor does it surprise us that Luther, indignant and rude, should portray the Pope to the public under the form of a jackass.

But how can we account for the strange and profane caricatures which are so numerous in the stone and wood carvings of our cathedrals?  In the scriptural ornamentation of the thirteenth century in Strasburg Cathedral, there was the representation of a funeral performed by animals—­a hare carried the taper, a wolf the cross, and a bear the holy water—­while in another place a stag was celebrating mass, and an ass reading the gospel.  We often find carvings in which foxes are habited as ecclesiastics, sometimes accompanied by geese, who represent their flock, and thus we can understand the significance of the design in Sherborne Minster and Wellingborough, where two geese are hanging a fox.