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The palsie plague these pounces,
When I prig your pigs or pullen;
Your culvers take
Or mateless make
Your chanticleer and sullen;
When I want provant with Humphrey I sup,
And when benighted,
To repose in Paul’s,
With waking souls
I never am affrighted.

I know more than Apollo;
For, oft when he lies sleeping,
I behold the stars
At mortal wars,
And the rounded welkin weeping.
The moon embraces her shepherd,
And the Queen of Love her warrior;
While the first does horn
The stars of the morn,
And the next the heavenly farrier.

With a heart of furious fancies,
Whereof I am commander:
With a burning spear,
And a horse of air,
To the wilderness I wander;
With a knight of ghosts and shadows,
I summoned am to Tourney:
Ten leagues beyond
The wide world’s end;
Methinks it is no journey!

The last stanza of this Bedlam song contains the seeds of exquisite romance; a stanza worth many an admired poem.

[Footnote 1:
The establishment could originally accommodate no more than six lunatics. In 1644, the number had only increased to forty-four; and the building had nearly perished for want of funds, when the city raised a subscription and repaired it. After the great fire, it was re-established on a much larger scale in Moorfields. ]

[Footnote 2:
Stowe’s “Survey of London,” Book i. ]

[Footnote 3:
“The Academy of Armory,” Book ii. c. 3, p. 161. This is a singular work, where the writer has contrived to turn the barren subjects of heraldry into an entertaining Encyclopaedia, containing much curious knowledge on almost every subject; but this folio more particularly exhibits the most copious vocabulary of old English terms. It has been said that there are not more than twelve copies extant of this very rare work, which is probably not true. [It is certainly not correct; the work is, however, rare and valuable. ]

[Footnote 4:
In that curious source of our domestic history, the “English Villanies” of Decker, we find a lively description of the “Abram cove,” or Abram man, the impostor who personated a Tom o’ Bedlam. He was terribly disguised with his grotesque rags, his staff, his knotted hair, and with the more disgusting contrivances to excite pity, still practised among a class of our mendicants, who, in their cant language, are still said “to sham Abraham.” This impostor was, therefore, as suited his purpose and the place, capable of working on the sympathy, by uttering a silly maunding, or demanding of charity, or terrifying the easy fears of women, children, and domestics, as he wandered up and down the country: they refused nothing to a being who was as terrific to them as “Robin Good-fellow,” or “Raw-head and Bloody-bones.” Thus, as Edgar expresses it, “sometimes with lunatic bans, sometimes with prayers,” the gestures of this impostor were “a counterfeit puppet-play: they came with a hollow noise, whooping, leaping, gambolling, wildly dancing, with a fierce or distracted look.” These sturdy mendicants were called “Tom of Bedlam’s band of mad-caps,” or “Poor Tom’s flock of wild geese.” Decker has preserved their “Maund,” or begging–“Good worship master, bestow your reward on a poor man that hath been in Bedlam without Bishopsgate, three years, four months, and nine days, and bestow one piece of small silver towards his fees, which he is indebted there, of 3l. 13s. 71/2d.” (or to such effect).

Or, “Now dame, well and wisely, what will you give poor Tom? One pound of your sheep’s-feathers to make poor Tom a blanket? or one cutting of your sow’s side, no bigger than my arm; or one piece of your salt meat to make poor Tom a sharing-horn; or one cross of your small silver, towards a pair of shoes; well and wisely, give poor Tom an old sheet to keep him from the cold; or an old doublet and jerkin of my master’s; well and wisely, God save the king and his council.” Such is a history drawn from the very archives of mendicity and imposture; and written perhaps as far back as the reign of James the First: but which prevailed in that of Elizabeth, as Shakspeare has so finely shown in his Edgar. This Maund, and these assumed manners and costume, I should not have preserved from their utter penury, but such was the rude material which Shakspeare has worked up into that most fanciful and richest vein of native poetry, which pervades the character of the wandering Edgar, tormented by “the foul fiend” when he
—- bethought
To take the basest and most poorest shape
That ever penury, in contempt of man,
Brought near to beast.

And the poet proceeds with a minute picture of “Bedlam beggars.” See Lear, Act ii. Sc. 3.
]

[Footnote 5:
Aubrey’s information is perfectly correct; for those impostors who assumed the character of Tom o’ Bedlams for their own nefarious purposes used to have a mark burnt in their arms, which they showed as the mark of Bedlam. “The English Villanies” of Decker, c 17. 1648. ]

[Footnote 6:
I discovered the present in a very scarce collection, entitled “Wit and Drollery,” 1661; an edition, however, which is not the earliest of this once fashionable miscellany. ]

[Footnote 7:
Harman, in his curious “Caveat, a warning for Common Cursitors, vulgarly called Vagabones,” 1566, describes the “Abraham Man” as a pretended lunatic, who wandered the country over, soliciting food or charity at farm-houses, or frightening and bullying the peasantry for the same. They described themselves as cruelly treated in Bedlam, and nearly in the words of Shakspeare’s Edgar. ]