Charity, Some Say

by Erasmus of Rotterdam, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

---

The loom in Margery Pake's back room at Coldhithe was a broadloom, and a broadloom takes two weavers, one at each end of the shuttle's flight, because no woman's arms are long enough to throw it across a cloth that wide and catch it on the other side. For eleven years the second weaver had been her husband. For a year and a half after he died it had been Nicholas Tebbe, a journeyman from Colchester at fourpence a day and his dinner. Since the second week of Lent it had been nobody. The warp stood dressed, half a broadcloth wound on the beam, the colour of oatmeal, and Margery wove a narrow kersey on the old small loom by the window, which paid less and which she could manage alone.

Nicholas had burned the book in the copper before he went. She had watched him do it. He had bought it in London the summer before for three shillings and twopence, which was near two weeks of his wages, and it was a small fat thing in a plain binding, no bigger than his hand, with no name in it anywhere, neither the printer's nor the man's who had made the English. A closed book does not burn. Nicholas found that out on his knees in front of the copper, with the dye-house smelling of woad and wet ash, and in the end he had to tear the quires out one at a time and feed them in loose, and stir them, and even then the binding lay in the coals the whole night like a brick. In the morning Margery raked it out and buried it under the midden. Two days later Nicholas was taken up at Colchester market, with half the town looking on, and that was the last she saw of him.

He had read to them on four evenings out of seven since the summer: to Margery, to old Simkin Gage, who had been a fuller until his hands went, to Simkin's daughter-in-law Joan, and to whichever of the neighbours could be trusted, which by autumn was nine people and by Christmas was fewer. Kat Hewlet was there every time, because Kat was eleven and wound the quills for the shuttle, and a child who winds quills sits on a stool in the corner of a weaving room whatever is being said in it, and nobody thinks to send her out.

They came on the Thursday after the book was burned, because it was Thursday. Nobody had arranged it. Simkin came first, because he lived nearest, and Joan with him, carrying a rushlight, and then the Wodes from the end of the lane, husband and wife, who sat by the door as people do who mean to leave early. Margery put another log on the fire. Kat sat on her stool with a bundle of empty quills in her lap and wound nothing.

For a while they talked about the weather and the price of wool, and then about who had seen Nicholas taken, which was everyone, though they had seen it differently. Then the talking stopped, and they sat looking at the place on the settle where he had sat with the book on his knee, and Joan said, "Say the one about love, Margery. You had it best."

Margery had asked for it more than any other. That was the truth of it, and everybody knew. She could not read a letter; she could count a warp of two thousand ends in her head and tell you without looking when a thread had gone. She had made Nicholas read her the thirteenth chapter of the first letter to the Corinthians so often that he had begun to turn to it before she asked, and the Wodes had grumbled that there were other chapters. She had it, she supposed. She shut her eyes as she did when she was counting.

"Though I spake with the tongues of men and angels," she said, "and yet had no love, I were even as sounding brass, or as a tinkling cymbal."

"Charity," said Simkin.

She opened her eyes.

"And have not charity," said Simkin. "I am made as brass sounding, or a cymbal tinkling." He said it slowly, with his ruined hands flat on his knees, the way a man says a thing he has said to himself in the dark for fifty years. "That's how it goes."

"That's not how Nick read it," said Joan.

"That's how my father read it," said Simkin. "Off his own book, that he had from his father. Wrote out by hand. It was before the printing." He looked at the fire. "They had it off him in the old bishop's time."

Nobody asked what else they had had off him. Everybody in the room knew that Simkin's father had walked round Colchester market on a Saturday with a faggot of sticks on his shoulder and his head bare, and had worn a faggot sewn on his sleeve until he died, and that it had been green worsted, because Simkin's mother had been made to sew it and had used what she had.

"Love," said Goodman Wode from the door. "Nick said love. I heard him say it a score of times."

"And my father said charity a hundred."

"Your father's been dead these fifteen years."

"So has the man who wrote Nick's," said Simkin, "for all you know of him," and that was unanswerable, because none of them knew anything about the man who wrote Nick's, except that there was no name in the book.

This might have gone on all night, and in other rooms in Essex that Lent it did. But Margery had stood up. She went to the kersey loom by the window and took a piece of chalk from the ledge where she kept it for marking the cloth, and came back and knelt on the hearthstone, which was swept, and drew a line down the middle of it.

"Say it again," she said to Simkin. "The next bit. Slow."

"Charity is patient," said Simkin. "It is benign. Charity envieth not."

She could not write the words. She made a mark on the left of the line for each of them, as she would have made a tally of ends: a stroke for charity, a stroke for is, a stroke for patient. They were not letters. They were the places where words had been.

"Now Nick's," she said, and said it herself, since she was the one who had it. "Love suffereth long, and is courteous. Love envieth not." She made the strokes on the right.

They looked at the hearthstone. There were eight strokes on one side and eight on the other, and that was all the chalk could show, and it settled nothing. But Simkin had stopped arguing, and so had Wode. There were simply two of them now, in two columns, and you could look at the space between.

"Envieth not," said Joan, pointing. "That's the same in both."

It was. Margery put a cross through both those marks, a little one, the way she marked a place where two threads had been tied.

They went on like that for an hour, while the rushlight burned down and the Wodes forgot to leave. It doth not wickedly, said Simkin, and it doth not frowardly, said Margery, and Joan said that came to the same thing, and Simkin said that it might, but it was not the same word, and Margery said nothing, and made the marks. It is not blown, said Simkin, which nobody understood, and swelleth not, said Margery, which they did. They found that the old book and the new one were nearly at one about what love did, or charity did, and almost never at one about the words for it, and that most of the places where they agreed were the short words, not and all and things.

Then Kat spoke from her stool, for the first time.

"Love is patient," she said, "and is courteous. Love envieth not."

She said it beautifully. She had a clear, high voice and she did not stumble, and it was so much easier to say than either of the others that the whole room turned to it as if a door had opened. Goodman Wode said, "That's it. That's how it went." His wife nodded. Even Joan nodded.

Margery sat back on her heels and looked at Kat for some time.

"Who read it you like that?"

"Nobody," said Kat. "Nick said love. Master Gage says patient. It's both."

"It's neither," said Margery.

She did not say it unkindly. She said it as she would have told the girl a quill was badly wound. It was the best of the three, and no book had ever held it; it had been made that minute, on a stool, by a child who had heard two books and wanted them to agree. Say it every Thursday for ten years, and it would be the only one anyone in the room remembered, and the books it came from were in a midden and a bishop's cupboard.

She did not put any marks on the stone for Kat's reading. She rubbed the stone clean with her apron before they went, all the same, because it was Lent, and the summoner was about.

---

The bishop's commissary sat in the chancel of the church at Coggeshall on the Tuesday after Mid-Lent Sunday, at a table that had been brought in from the vicarage, with a clerk on his left and a brazier on his right, and the cold coming up through the floor from the dead underneath. He was a Doctor of Laws called Rowland Faunt, a thin man in a good gown, with chilblains, and he had been in Essex for three weeks and seen thirty-one people, and he did not look forward to the thirty-second.

There were books on the table. Margery did not know what they were. One was very large and bound in boards. One was smaller, and open, and had two kinds of writing on the page side by side, one of which she could see was not letters at all as the parish clerk made them, but something curled.

The Doctor knew everything already. That was the first thing she understood, and the most frightening. He had Nicholas's examination in front of him, written out fair, and he read her pieces of it in a tired voice: the book bought in London, the price, the evenings, the names. Hers was the third. Nicholas had not left anybody out, and Margery found, standing there in her good kirtle with her hands folded, that she could not hate him for it. She had seen the copper. She had seen his face over it.

"You heard this book read in your house."

"Yes."

"Many times."

"Yes, sir."

"Where is it?"

"Burned."

"So he says." The Doctor turned a leaf. "He says you had the thirteenth of the first to the Corinthians best of all of them. Say it."

She had not expected that. She had expected to be asked whether she believed in the sacrament of the altar, which she did, and whether she had spoken against the saints, which she had not, and she had her answers to those ready, as you have the next pick ready on the quill. She had not expected to be asked to say the thing itself, in a church, to a doctor of laws.

So she said it, as she had settled it on the hearthstone, because that was the only way she had it now. "Though I spake with the tongues of men and angels, and yet had no love — charity, some say — I were even as sounding brass."

The clerk had begun to write. He stopped. The Doctor looked up.

"Some say," he said.

"Master Gage says. Off his father's book."

"Which was written by hand."

"Yes, sir."

"And this other man's book says love."

"Yes."

The Doctor took his spectacles off. His eyes without them were pale and much younger. "Do you know why it says love?"

"No, sir."

"Because a man who has run away to Germany has decided that he knows better than the Church of God how to say one word in the English tongue." He said this without heat, as a man recites the price of a thing. "My Lord of London said at Paul's Cross that there are two thousand such places in that book. That is one of them."

Margery looked at the smaller book, the one with the two kinds of writing. "Is that in there?"

The Doctor followed her eyes. For a moment he did not answer, and the clerk looked at his pen.

"That," said the Doctor, "is the Greek, with a Latin beside it, made by a very learned man who is still alive and lives in Basel, and is a friend of my Lord of London." He tapped the curled side of the page. "The Greek has a word that is neither love nor charity. It has its own word. Whether one English word is nearer to it than the other is not a question for this court, and you will not be asked it, and I would be obliged if you did not answer it."

He put his spectacles back on, and turned a leaf in the large book, and the clerk wrote something.

Then, to the clerk, not to her, in a different voice, the voice men use at table with one another when the servants are in the room, he said something in Latin. It was not long, and it went up at the end like a tune, and while he said it he looked at her hands, which were a weaver's hands, blue at the nails from the woad. The clerk smiled at his paper.

"What did you say, sir?"

The Doctor looked at her over his spectacles. She had not been asked to speak and she knew it.

"I said," he said, "that the learned man in Basel once wrote that he wished the ploughman might sing the Scripture at his plough, and the weaver hum it at the shuttle." He considered her. "He also wrote that he wished all women might read the Gospel. You may take that as a kindness."

"Then why am I here?"

"Because he wished it in Latin," said the Doctor, and the clerk laughed out loud and then stopped, and the Doctor did not laugh at all.

---

She abjured. There was never any question that she would. She had a loom, and a half-dressed broadcloth on the beam, and a girl who wound her quills, and no husband, and no one in Coldhithe or in Coggeshall or anywhere in the world who would have thanked her for burning. She stood at the chancel step and repeated what the clerk read to her a phrase at a time, the way she had once heard Nicholas read her the Corinthians. She renounced the English book and every book like it. She promised never again to hear such a book read, nor keep one, nor say what was in it. Her voice was perfectly steady. That surprised her.

On the Saturday she walked once round Coggeshall market with a faggot of hazel on her shoulder and a taper in her other hand and her head bare, behind the parish clerk, while the people who knew her looked at the stalls. The faggot was not heavy. It was the kind of bundle a woman carries home every day of the winter. That was, she supposed, the point of it.

She sewed the badge on her own sleeve. She was told to, and she had the thread. She chose a brown worsted that was nearly the colour of the kersey, and worked it small and close, in a running stitch, like the mark a weaver puts at the end of a piece to show whose loom it came from. Anyone looking could see it. She did not hide it. She only did not make it any larger than she had been told.

---

Kat came back on the Monday, because the quills would not wind themselves, and sat on her stool in the corner with the quill wheel, and for a long time neither of them said anything. Margery wove. The kersey went on at a hand's breadth an hour. Across the room the broadloom stood with its oatmeal warp, waiting for a second weaver who was doing his own penance at Paul's Cross, or had done it, or was still in the bishop's prison; nobody had said.

"Say the one about love," said Kat.

Margery threw the shuttle and caught it and beat the weft up. It was the thing she had promised not to do, and the child knew it, and the child had asked anyway, which is what children are for.

"Love suffereth long," Margery said, "and is courteous." She threw the shuttle back. "Charity is patient, Master Gage says. It is benign."

"But which is it?"

"Both were said."

"But which did it say?"

Margery stopped the loom. She looked at the girl, and at the warp, and at her own sleeve, where the small brown faggot lay against the brown cloth.

"I don't know," she said. "There's a word in a book in Basel that's neither. I never saw it. Nor did you. When somebody brings it, we'll know." She held out her hand. "Until then you say them both, and you don't say yours. Give me a quill."

Kat gave her the quill. Margery fitted it into the shuttle, drew the weft through the eye with her lips, as weavers do, and threw.

---

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem quārtum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (19 October 2026), ab Erasmō Roterodamō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Erasmus of Rotterdam, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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