The Boorish Fool

After Adam was driven out of Paradise and had to turn poor, hard-working peasant, did he already take up a mallet, as if to split wood? Neither I nor many others can say. But when his ill-bred son Cain had murdered his own brother Abel, and Almighty God asked him where his brother was, he gave this answer: “Am I my brother’s keeper?”¹ That, to my mind, was the first mallet-head, and a coarse-grained one at that, for he gave the Most High God so uncivil an answer.² Cain has a whole crowd of brothers like himself, all branded with the title of boorish fools, and among them Nabal very nearly takes first place.³ David, who was in great need, sent his servants to ask him most courteously for some provisions. This coarse, loutish fellow pulled a face at him as if he had eaten a dozen crab-apples, and at last broke out in these rude words: “Who is David?” Who is this David, then? Why, you coarse Knobbius!⁴ Should you not know the man whom all Israel holds so high and dear? The man who won so glorious and unheard-of a victory over the Philistines? The stately lady Abigail, this Grobian’s wife,⁵ did very rightly afterwards to make his excuses to David, begging him not to take so much to heart what her husband had done to him and to his high person: “folly is with him.” For he, she said, is a boorish fool by nature.⁶

The learned Didacus Nissenus writes that God teaches in His school not only holiness but courtesy too.⁷ Just look how courteously our blessed Saviour dealt with Peter! Once, when the people were pressing upon Him to hear the word of God, He was standing by the lake of Genesareth. Two ships stood by the lake, but the fishermen had gone out of them and were washing their nets; and the Lord stepped into a little boat that belonged to Simon, and asked him to put out a little from the land: “he desired him to draw back a little from the land.”⁸ Why, the Son of God Himself, the Saviour of the world Himself, the Lord and Ruler of all things Himself, asked Peter, and so on! Mark, then, that courtesy is a very fine and becoming virtue in everyone.

And how could Magdalen have been more courteous at the Lord’s tomb? When the Lord appeared to her in the form of a gardener, she did not recognise Him at all, and yet she gave Him the title of “Sir”: “Sir, if thou hast taken him hence . . .”⁹ People are not much in the habit of calling a man with a shovel over his shoulder “Sir”; but Magdalen, being a lady of noble birth, knew very well that courtesy sits well on one of her station.

Old Plutarch in his day was already scolding discourteous people as boorish fools, when he said: “Fools indeed are they who cannot understand how much better it is to honour than to be honoured.”¹⁰ That peasants mostly cannot fit themselves to courtesy is not so much to be held against them, since they spend most of their lives among coarse and uncouth people. There was, it is true, one man who maintained that peasants are far more polite than gentlefolk: for when peasants blow their noses, they throw the filth on the ground, but gentlefolk commonly tuck it away in their pockets, handkerchief and all.

Because the first peasant in the world was a boor, and that was Cain (“and Cain a husbandman”),¹¹ the rest believe they must follow in his footsteps, as it were. There is no need to set down examples of it here, for they are far too many and happen almost daily. I remember myself how, at a famous place of pilgrimage, a priest was obliged by the great press of people to hear confessions in the open air. The chair he sat on was rather low, so that a good deal of his habit lay on the ground beneath him. Up came a peasant in new leather breeches who wanted to kneel down; and first he pulled the confessor’s habit further out and spread it under himself like a carpet, so as not to dirty his yellow breeches. A boorish fool indeed!

Another brought his master the steward a jug of wine for his supper, begging him to accept it kindly, since you never know when one rogue will need another; and he drank his health at the same time. But when he noticed a gnat or a fly swimming in the wine, he would not fish it out; he took the snuffers from the nearest candlestick and lifted it out with those. A boorish fool too!

Countless more such rudenesses are of course to be blamed in peasants as well, in every way. But far more in other people, who have after all been brought up in towns and market-towns, or at least have spent some years and time among them. And yet you find such porcine porcelain guests,¹² such ungainly louts, knobbly forest-sceptres, Berchtesgaden ware turned upside down, knobs turned over and over, who are still of the opinion that boorishness becomes them very well.

One sits at table so unmannerly, as if he meant to prop up a vault with both his arms. Another is so shameless that he stabs into the dish with such force as if he were giving a wild boar the death-stroke. Another is so boorish that he lodges a whole roast goose on his plate, strips off its breeches and doublet, and passes the rest to his neighbour. Another is so wild that he swills with a greasy gob, so that the glass looks for all the world like a tripe-boiler’s sleeve. Another picks at his teeth with his mouth gaping, as if the gate already stood open for carting out the dung. Another has his mouth still half full of fodder and starts laughing at the same time, so that the mash flies over the table like hail or sleet, as if his mouth had turned into a squirt. Another is so beastly that he drives up a Hanakian sigh from his stomach, like a hoop springing off a lees-tub.¹³ Another loads his plate with food till it looks like a heaped bushel never struck level.¹⁴ Another brings out such smutty jokes that they could be served up to the Devil for sweetmeats, and so on. Heaven and earth abhor these and all such boorish fools.