The English Utopia. A L Morton 1952
O see ye not yon narrow road,
So thick beset wi’ thorns and briers?
That is the Path of Righteousness,
Though after it but few inquires.
And see ye not yon braid, braid road,
That lies across the lily leven?
That is the Path of Wickedness,
Though some call it the Road to Heaven.
And see ye not yon bonny road
That winds about the fernie brae?
That is the Road to fair Elfland,
Where thou and I this night maun gae. – Old Ballad: Thomas the Rhymer.
In the beginning Utopia is an image of desire. Later it grows more complex and various, and may become an elaborate means of expressing social criticism and satire, but it will always be based on something that somebody actually wants. The history of Utopia, therefore, will reflect the conditions of life and the social aspirations of classes and individuals at different times. The specific character of the land is reported varyingly according to the taste of the individual writer, but behind these variations is a continued modification that follows the normal course of historical development: the English Utopia is, as it were, a mirror image, more or less distorted, of the historical England. Poets, prophets and philosophers have made it a vehicle for delight and instruction, but before the poets, the prophets and the philosophers there were the common people, with their wrongs and their pleasures, their memories and their hopes. It is just, therefore, that the first chapter of this book should be given to the Utopia of the folk. It is the first in time, the most universally current and the most enduring, and it gives us a standard of values against which all its successors can be judged.
The Utopia of the folk has many names and disguises. It is the English Cokaygne and the French Coquaigne. It is Pomona and Hy Brasil, Venusberg and the Country of the Young. It is Lubberland and Schlaraffenland, Poor Man’s Heaven and the Rock Candy Mountains. Brueghel, who of all the world’s great artists comes nearest to the common mind, has even painted it in a picture that has many of the most characteristic features: the roof of cakes, the roast pig running round with a knife in its side, the mountain of dumpling and the citizens who lie at their ease waiting for all good things to drop into their mouths. The gingerbread house which Hansel and Gretel find in the enchanted wood belongs to the same country, and so, at the other end of the scale, does Rabelais’ Abbaye de Thélème, whose motto is, ‘Do what you will.’ It reaches back into myth, it colours romance, there is hardly a corner of Europe in which it does not appear. It would be idle, therefore, to attempt to look for its origins in any single place or period, much less in any one poem or story. Instead, I propose to discuss one version, the early fourteenth-century English poem The Land of Cokaygne, and to work backwards and forwards from that point, finding parallels in myth and romance, and tracing the development of the Cokaygne theme towards our own time.
This treatment is all the more suitable because this folk Utopia has preserved through the ages a remarkably constant character and all its main features are to be found at their clearest in The Land of Cokaygne. It is a poem of nearly two hundred lines which describes an earthly and earthy paradise, an island of magical abundance, of eternal youth and eternal summer, of joy, fellowship and peace.
Literary textbooks, when they mention this poem at all, treat it either as an anti-clerical satire or as a pleasant joke at the expense of those who want everything for nothing. Anti-clerical it certainly is, and no doubt it does intend to ridicule monastic gluttony and evil-living. Perhaps it may even be that the writer set out to use a familiar theme as a means of attacking current abuses. But if so, the theme quickly got out of hand, and the satire was swallowed up in the Utopia. After opening with a comparison between Cokaygne and Paradise very much to the advantage of the former –
Though Paradis be miri and bright,
Cokaygne is of fairir sight.
What is ther in Paradis
Bot grasse and flure and grene ris? ...
Ther nis halle, bure, no benche,
Bot watir, manis thurst to quenche.
Though Paradise is merry and bright,
Cokaygne is yet more beautiful.
What is there in Paradise
But grass and flowers and green boughs? ...
There is neither hall nor chamber nor bench,
And nothing but water to quench man’s thirst.
– whereas in Cokaygne –
Watir servith ther to no thing
Bot to sight and to waiissing.
Water serves there for no purpose
Except sight and washing.
– the poet is quickly carried away with the delights to be found. Only towards the end does he appear to remember his ostensible subject, in an amusing passage describing monastic sports, and even here one feels that condemnation is considerably tempered with something like admiration.
The first point of interest is the situation of the island:
Fur in see bi west of Spayngne
Is a lond ihote Cokaygne.
Far in the sea, to the West of Spain,
Is a land called Cokaygne.
This westward placing clearly connects Cokaygne with the earthly paradise of Celtic mythology. Throughout the Middle Ages the existence of such a paradise was firmly believed in, but the church always placed its paradise in the East and strongly opposed the belief in a western paradise as a heathen superstition. In spite of this ecclesiastical opposition the belief persisted, kept alive by the frequent washing ashore on the Atlantic coasts of foreign wood, nuts and even, in a few cases, of canoes of Indian or Esquimau construction, driven to sea by unfavourable weather. So strong were these beliefs that in the form of St Branden’s Isle the western paradise had to be Christianised and adopted by the Church itself, and a number of expeditions were sent out from Ireland and elsewhere in search of the Isle. Nevertheless, the fact that Cokaygne is a western island is an indication that the Cokaygne theme is of popular and pre-Christian character, and the western placing may in itself be taken as one of the specifically anti-clerical features.
Further, Cokaygne has many of the characteristics of the pagan Island of Apples, or Pomona, where, as Baring-Gould says:
... all is plenty and the golden age ever lasts. Cows give their milk in such abundance that they fill large ponds in milking. There, too, is a palace all of glass, floating in the air and receiving within its transparent walls the souls of the blessed.
Or, to quote from an Irish description:
... milk flows from some of the rivulets, others gush with wine; undoubtedly there are also streams of whisky and porter.
These descriptions may be compared not only with the abundance to be found in Cokaygne, but also with the pillars that –
Beth i-turned of cristale,
With har bas and capitale
Of grene jaspe and rede corale
The pillars are fashioned of crystal,
With their bases and capitals
Of green jasper and red coral.
– with the richness of precious stones and the windows of glass which turn into crystal whenever they are needed. The palace or hill of glass, is, indeed, a regular feature of the earthly paradise in all mythologies.
Above all else, however, Cokaygne is the land where everything comes true. It is the Utopia of the hard-driven serf, the man for whom things are too difficult, for whom the getting of a bare living is a constant struggle. If this aspect predominates to the exclusion, with one exception to which I shall come presently, of any clear sense of the class struggle, this is not unnatural considering the circumstances of the time. Of course there was a class struggle in the Middle Ages. There was oppression and exploitation, of an extremely harsh and naked character. There was a glaring contrast between the lives of the serfs and the lives of the gentry and rich clergy, and it is quite possible that part of the object of this poem was to point the contrast between serf and monk. Nevertheless we have also to remember the general poverty of the Middle Ages, the result of an extremely poor technique of production, which made available only a relatively small surplus after the bare needs had been provided for the working population.
Consequently, men were much more directly aware than they are today of the tyranny of necessity, the essential hardness in the nature of things. Man was so far from being the master of his environment that he was always prone to feel that it was his master. He depended on the weather not only because bad weather is unpleasant, but because a bad season might mean absolute famine. And, under the very best conditions, long hours and a bare living were still a necessity from which he could see no possible way of escape. Even the overthrow of his masters, supposing that to have been possible, would not have released the serf from this compulsion to any appreciable extent. It was probably an advance that by the fourteenth century men were becoming conscious of this burden. By this time the period of migration and invasions, with its consequent breaking of society into small, self-contained units, was well over. Cooperation and the division of labour were extending to wider areas, and, with the growth of trade, towns were also growing and were winning a measure of local self-government. There was a slow but in the aggregate quite considerable advance in technique, and, in England at any rate, serfdom was in decline and its harsher features were becoming modified. As a result, what had formerly been so universally endured without question or hope was at last beginning to be felt as a burden: the serf was becoming aware of his servitude and the fourteenth century was the great period of peasant insurrection.
Out of this situation, this beginning of hope, springs The Land of Cokaygne. Without the hope it could scarcely have arisen at all. If the hope had been stronger or better grounded it would not have taken shape as a fantasy, a grotesque dream of a society wished for but not seen as an actual possibility. It is this fantastic quality which has led to its being regarded as a clumsy joke, and, indeed, it is easy enough to ridicule the vision of the great abbey –
Fleuren cakes beth the schingles alle,
Of cherche, cloister, boure, and halle.
The pinnes beth fat podinges,
Rich met to princez and to kings.
All the shingles
Of the church, the cloister, the chamber and hall
Are made of flour cakes.
The pinnacles are of fat puddings,
Grand food for princes and kings.
– or the –
rivers gret and fine
Of oile, melk, honi, and wine
Great and splendid rivers of
Oil, milk, honey and wine.
– the –
gees irostid on the spitte
Fleez to that abbai, God hit wot
And gredith, ‘Gees al hote, al hot!’
Roasted geese on spits,
By God’s truth, fly to that abbey
Crying out, ‘Geese all hot, all hot.’
– and –
The leverokes that beth cuth,
Lightith adun to manis muth,
Idight in stu ful swithe wel,
Pudrid with gilofre and canel.
Tasty larks fly down
Into men’s mouths
Dressed in most excellent stew
And sprinkled with gillyflower and cinnamon.
But is this, apart from the simplicity of its language, any more laughable than Malory’s account of the first appearance of the Grail:
Then there entered into the hall the Holy Grail covered with white samite, and there was none might see it, nor who bare it. And there was all the hall fulfilled with good odours, and every knight had such meats and drinks as he best loved in the world.
In fact, in this side of Cokaygne we can see the fusion of the pre-Christian nature cults of abundance with the very practical needs and desires of the people, into a picture of a land whose happiness is none the less material and earthy for the grotesque form in which it is presented.
An especially interesting aspect of this abundance is the spice tree:
The rote is gingevir and galingale
The siouns beth al sedwale
Trie maces beth the flure,
The rind, canel of swet odur,
The frute, gilofre of gode smakke.
The root is ginger and sweet cyperus,
The shoots are valerian,
The flowers choice nutmegs,
The bark odorous cinnamon
And the fruit sweet scented gillyflower.
This is not merely a pretty fancy. Spices were specially prized in the Middle Ages and even later because of the monotonous and unpalatable diet, especially in the winter. Owing to the difficulties of trade with the East they fetched prices which put them out of the reach of all but the rich, so that a plentiful supply of spices growing ready to hand would be a most desirable object to find in the Land of Cokaygne.
This abundance of spices also, together with the four wells of ‘triacle and halwai, of baum and ek piement’ – triacle is medicine, halwei is healing water and piement is a kind of wine – connect Cokaygne with yet another mythological feature, the Well of Youth or of Life, which flows through so many Earthly Paradises, eastern as well as western, and of which Sir John Mandeville writes:
And under that citie is an hyll that men call Polombe [Colombo] and thereof taketh the citie his name. And so at the fote of the same hill is a right faire and clere well, that hath a full good and sweete savoure, and it smelleth of all manner of sortes of spyce, and also at eche houre of the daye it changeth his savour diversely, and who drinketh on the daye of that well, he is made hole of all manner sickness that he hathe. I have sometime dronke of that well, and methinketh yet that I fare the better; some call it the well of youth, for they that drinke thereof seme to be yong alway, and live without great sicknesse, and they say this well cometh from Paradise terreste, for it is so vertuous, and in this land groweth ginger, and thither come many good merchaunts for spyces.
Not only is Cokaygne a land of plenty, it is a land where this plenty can be enjoyed without effort, and it is perhaps this characteristic more than any other which has infuriated the moralist and which was responsible for the disrepute into which Cokaygne presently fell. Yet it is clear that in a world where endless and almost unrewarded labour was the lot of the overwhelming majority, a Utopia which did not promise rest and idleness would be sadly imperfect. Idleness is, indeed, rather less stressed in The Land of Cokaygne than in some other versions, that of Brueghel, for example, and the modern Rock Candy Mountain. While, indeed, the larks alight ready dressed in the mouth, what is really insisted upon is that meat and drink can be had ‘withoute care, how, and swink’, that is, without the grinding and excessive labour that filled the whole life of the medieval serf.
And there is very much more in Cokaygne than gluttony and idleness. What is specially insisted on and most morally impressive is that it is a land of peace, happiness and social justice:
Al is dai, nis ther no nighte,
Ther nis baret nother strif,
Nis ther no deth, ac ever lif;
Ther nis lac of met no cloth,
Ther nis man no womman wroth...
Al is commune to yung and old,
To stoute and sterne, mek and bold.
All is day, there is no night there,
There is neither quarrelling nor strife,
There is no death, but eternal life;
There is no lack of food and clothes,
And neither man nor woman is angry...
All is common to young and old,
To strong and stern, to meek and bold.
It is this social feeling, this sense of fellowship, which lifts Cokaygne out of the realm of the grotesque, or, rather, makes it one of those rare yet characteristic popular testaments in which the grotesque and the sublime unite to give a true and living picture of the mind of the common man. One is conscious here, as elsewhere, that the class feeling that is never directly voiced lies only just below the surface.
This feeling is strengthened by the curious and ironical closing lines:
Whose wyl com that lond to,
Ful gret penance he mot do:
Seven yere in swin-is dritte
He mote wade, wol ye i-witte,
Al anon up to the chynne
So he schal the londe winne.
Lordinges gode and hende
Mot ye never of world wend
Fort ye stond to yure cheance,
And fulfil that penance,
That ye mote that lond ise
And never more turne a-ghe.
Pray ye God, so mote it be
Amen, per seinte charite.
The man who wishes to come to that land
Must do very great penance.
He must wade for seven years,
No doubt about it, right up to the chin
In swine’s dirt to win his way there.
My good, kind Lords,
You will never go from the world
Unless you are prepared to endure and
To fulfil that penance,
So that you may see that land
And never more return.
Pray to God that it may be so,
By holy charity.
The meaning is clear enough: Cokaygne is, like the Kingdom of Heaven, harder for a rich man to enter than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle. Only by seven years spent up to the chin in swine’s dirt – only, that is, by living the life of the most wretched and exploited serf, can a man find his way thither. And the specific address to the ‘Lordinges gode and hende’, though such dedications were, of course, common form, gives the point additional emphasis.
This linking of social justice with abundance in Cokaygne suggests an interesting parallel with the ancient tradition of classical stoicism, the most radical philosophy of the Greek and Roman world. Benjamin Farrington, in his essay on Diodorus Siculus, a Greek historian of the first century BC, cites the passage in his Universal History which contains an account of the Stoic Utopia, ‘The Islands of the Sun’, a Utopia which certainly influenced Campanella’s City of the Sun (1623) and most probably More’s Utopia.
Farrington points out that the sun ‘who dispenses his light and warmth equally upon all’, was closely connected in classical thought with the conception of justice:
There is abundant evidence that in many circles, where the religion of the stars had blended with aspirations after a juster society, the sun was looked upon in a special sense as the dispenser of justice, the guarantor of fair-play, the redresser of grievances, the one who held the balance straight... In the third century BC, the sun had become the centre of the millennial aspirations of the dispossessed among mankind. It was believed that at recurrent periods the sun-king would descend from heaven to earth to re-establish justice and make all men participators in a happiness without alloy.
Such beliefs were especially encouraged by the Stoics. In the account of their Islands of the Sun given by Diodorus, apparently in the belief that he was describing a real country, we can recognise a number of the features we have already found to be characteristic of Cokaygne. There is the magical abundance and perfect climate:
The air of their land is perfectly tempered, for they live on the equinoctial line and are troubled neither by heat nor cold. Their fruits are in season all the year... Their life is passed in the meadows, the land supplying abundant sustenance; for by reason of the excellence of the soil and the temperate air crops spring up of themselves beyond their needs.
The sea round the islands is sweet to the taste, thus recalling the sweet springs of Cokaygne, and:
The water of their hot springs, which is sweet and wholesome, keeps its heat and never grows cold, unless cold water or wine is added.
The element of magical healing is present, too, in the form of an animal whose blood:
... has a wonderful property. It immediately glues together a cut in any living body, and a hand or other part that has been cut off can be fastened on again by it while the cut is fresh.
All this is combined with an unbreakable social solidarity:
Since there is no jealousy among them there is no civil strife, and they keep their love of unity and concord throughout life.
What I am suggesting is not, of course, any direct or conscious borrowing by the medieval folk-poets, but the persistence of a tradition, and, perhaps, of a common stock of legend upon which they and the Stoics all ultimately drew.
In the same stream of thought were the political theories widely held in the earlier Middle Ages, even by those in authority, that a right society was one with goods held in common and without classes or oppressive state apparatus. Government and private property was considered to have been the inevitable result of the Fall and of man’s sinful state. Such ideas were related to those about a Golden Age and perhaps embody memories of primitive communism. After the thirteenth century, and with the growing influence of Aquinas, the official theorists began to argue that private property and class divisions were a natural feature of human society. Nevertheless, the old ideas about communism being the true form of society persisted, and, among the masses, took a form very different from those official theories which had placed upon the sinfulness of man the blame for his inability to realise the ideal. We can see something of this in the preaching of John Ball and in the social character of the Land of Cokaygne.
There is a further development in the Cokaygne theme, not found in this particular version, though possibly hinted at in its closing lines, which is of peculiar sociological interest. This feature, pointed out by RJE Tiddy in The Mummers’ Play, is the regular juxtaposition of the abundance theme with the theme of the reversal of the normal, of topsy-turveydom, as he calls it. This topsy-turveydom is another familiar topic of medieval popular art and literature, which delighted in such situations as the hawk being pursued by the heron, the sack dragging the ass to the mill or the fish hooking the fisherman. Often, too, it takes the form of rough verbal nonsense. In the Western-sub-Edge Mummers’ Play, for example, Beelzebub makes a long speech of this kind:
I went up a straight crooked lane. I met a bark and he dogged at me. I went to the stick and cut a hedge... I went of the morroe about nine days after, picks up this jeid (dead) dog, romes my arm down his throat, turned him inside outwards, sent him down Buckle Street barking ninety yards long, and I followed after him.
He is followed immediately by Jack Finney who proceeds:
Now my lads we come to the land of plenty, rost stones, plum puddings, houses thatched with pancakes, and little pigs running about with knives and forks stuck in their backs crying, ‘Who'll eat me?’
Similarly in the Ampleford Sword Dance:
I've travelled all the way from Itti Titti, where there’s neither town nor city, wooden chimes, leather bells, black puddings for bell ropes, little pigs running up and down the streets, knives and forks stuck in their backsides crying, ‘God save the King.’
Once again, the essentially significant point has to be looked for beneath the jest, and we have a clue that leads straight to the rebellious core of the popular thought of the time. Two strands, formally opposed but in practice complementary, run through the revolutionary thought of the Middle Ages. One is that of equality: ‘When Adam delved and Eve span, who then was the gentleman?’ The other is that of upheaval and reversal, of the world turned upside down: ‘He hath put down the mighty from their seats and hath exalted the humble and meek.’ It is the second of these strands which historically has naturalised itself in the Land of Cokaygne.
The connection here shows itself in the various popular festivals of which the Feast of Fools may be taken as the type. Strictly, the Feast of Fools was a religious affair in which the subdeacons and others in minor orders in certain churches took control of the ceremonies for a day, while the usual authorities were relegated to a subordinate position. There can be no doubt, however, that this was also a time of more general licence and merry-making, and that there were other similar festivals of a more exclusively secular nature like the crowning of the Lord of Misrule, referred to by Philip Stubbes in his Anatomie of Abuses (1583). Usually the Feast of Fools began on the eve of the Feast of the Circumcision (New Year’s Day – in itself a significant detail, since the New Year has always been a time when the idea of making a change or a new start is powerful). [1] The signal was the reaching at evensong of the verse from the Magnificat already quoted: ‘He hath put down the mighty.’ At this point the choir and the minor orders would take the bit between their teeth. The verse, always a slogan of revolt, was repeated over and over again. A master of ceremonies, known by varying titles such as the King of Fools, the Lord of Misrule or the Boy Bishop, was elected. Mass was celebrated with all sorts of ludicrous additions: an ass would be led into the church with a rider facing its tail, and braying take the place of the responses at the most solemn parts: censing was parodied with black puddings: the clergy turned their garments inside out, changed garments with women or adopted animal disguises: soon the excitement and licence would spread beyond the church throughout the town or city.
The higher ecclesiastical authorities tried for centuries without great success to suppress or even tone down these proceedings. Professor EK Chambers quotes a letter from the Theological Faculty of the University of Paris which both expresses the official view and gives a lively picture of what happened:
Priests and clerks may be seen wearing masks and monstrous visages at the hours of office. They dance in the choir, dressed as women, pandars or minstrels. They sing wanton songs. They eat black puddings at the horn of the altar while the celebrant is saying mass. They play at dice there. They cense with stinking smoke from the soles of old shoes. They run and leap through the church without shame. Finally they drive about the town and its theatres in shabby traps and carts; and rouse the laughter of their fellows and the bystanders in infamous performances, with indecent gestures and verses scurrilous and unchaste.
Professor Chambers summarises the general character of the Festival by saying:
The ruling idea of the feast is the inversion of status, and the performance, invariably burlesque, by the inferior clergy of functions properly belonging to their betters... Now I would point out that this inversion of status so characteristic of the Feast of Fools is equally characteristic of folk festivals. What is Dr Frazer’s mock king but one of the meanest of the people chosen out to represent the real king as the priest victim of a divine sacrifice, and surrounded for the period of the feast in a naive attempt to outwit heaven, with all the paraphernalia of kingship?
When we remember that these folk-rites were planned to ensure favourable weather and an abundance of food, their connection with the Cokaygne theme is easily explained. They link similarly with the Roman Kalends and Saturnalia, [2] themselves relics of the pre-classical religious practices of the country people, in which there was in the same way a time of general licence, and whose most striking feature was the temporary equality of slaves with their masters. Once more, rites and customs possibly prehistoric survive because they still correspond to existing realities, and supply the mould in which the revolutionary feeling of a later age expresses itself.
It may be argued that in these fantasies, Cokaygne dreams and symbolic festivals, this revolutionary feeling was canalised, diverted and rendered harmless. It would be truer to say that this was a period in which revolution was not objectively possible though popular riots were, of course, frequent, and that they were the means of keeping alive hopes and aspirations that might otherwise have died away, and which at a later date would prove of immense value. The same may be said about the closely-related witch cult. Here, also, we have a surviving pre-Christian religion, driven underground and forced to exist secretly, yet claiming countless adherents. The cult appears to have been highly organised and at times to have served as a focus for movements of political revolt, though, in the nature of things, the direct evidence here must be extremely meagre. What is certain is that periodical meetings or Sabbats were held, at which the main features were an elaborate and lavish, if rude, feast and ceremonies that were a deliberate reversal of the normal, as, for example, in the dances performed anti-clockwise and in the inverted mimicry of Christian ritual.
It should be remembered, also, that dancing of any kind was discouraged by the priests as something devilish and pagan, and but for the wide diffusion of the witch cult might have been stamped out altogether. It is by no means impossible that the account of Cokaygne may be in part at any rate a veiled description of the Sabbat, which was probably not, in the earlier times at least, the horrific and diabolical affair which it was represented as being by ecclesiastical writers. Such speculations lead us far into the land of conjecture, however. We must remember that nothing survives to give us the point of view of the witches except a few chance answers in cross-examination which have found their way into the accounts of their trials.
Summing up the account given in the last section, we can say that the Land of Cokaygne embodies the profoundest feelings of the masses, expresses them in an extremely concrete and earthy fashion, and is related to the main theme of popular mythology on the one hand and the main stream of popular revolt on the other. It is really quite central, and could hardly have failed to receive much more attention than has been given to it, if it had not from the start been constantly ridiculed or ignored by the learned and respectable. The literary references to it are few and indirect, and always it is treated as something too childish or too disgusting to be worthy of serious attention. Even Shakespeare, whose broad human understanding brings him so close to the mind of the people, and who puts into the mouth of Gonzalo (Tempest, Act II, Scene i) what appears to be a sympathetic if rather classicised account of Cokaygne, hardly treats it as a serious matter and allows Gonzalo to be laughed out of countenance for a pedlar of old wives’ tales. Ben Jonson in Bartholomew Fair is openly contemptuous: and we should note that Cokaygne has now become Lubberland – the country of idle good-for-nothings – an attitude that may be connected with the new respect for diligence and the accumulation of wealth that accompanied the rise of the bourgeoisie. Dame Purecraft, in the authentic accents of Mr Bumble, rebukes Littlewit for wanting pork, to which he replies:
Good Mother, how shall we find a pig if we don’t look about for’t? Will it run off o’ the spit into our mouths, think you? as in Lubberland and cry we we?
Two other examples of this contemptuous attitude may be given from the utopian writers of the seventeenth century. The first is from Mundus Alter et Idem, written by Bishop Hall, probably about 1600, and published in 1607. Though in Latin, it was a popular work which had more than one imitator and which was translated by John Heeley in 1608. It is from this translation that I shall quote. The book itself is of interest as being the first of the negative or satirical utopias, books in which the social criticism takes the form of describing in imaginary countries those vices and follies the author would have us avoid. It describes a voyage to Terra Australia and the discovery there of Crapulia, the land of excess. It is divided into five provinces: Pamphagoia, or Gluttons’ Land, Yvronia, or Drunkards’ Land, Viraginia, where women rule, Moronia, or Fools’ Land – said to be the largest, the least cultivated and the most populous of all – and Lavernia, the Land of Rogues, most of whose inhabitants find a dishonest living at the expense of their neighbours the Moronians. Nearby is situated Terra Sancta, marked on the accompanying map as ‘non adhuc satis cognita’.
In the main no doubt, Bishop Hall intended to satirise the failings of his age, but there are also clear indications that a part of his intention was to portray a sort of anti-Cokaygne, to express the disgust felt by the cultivated mind of the comfortable churchman at the grossness of popular delusions. This is evident in the chapters describing Pamphagoia, whose god is the great Omasius Gorgut or Gorbelly. Here:
There are certaine creatures grown out of the earth in the shape of Lambes, which, being fast joyned unto the stalke they grow upon do notwithstanding eat up all the grasse about them... the fishes... are naturally so ravenous and greedy that you can no sooner cast out your angle-hook among them but immediately... you shall have hundreds about the line, some hanging on the hooke, and some on the string besides it, such is their pleasure to goe to the pot, such their delight to march in pompe from the dresser.
There follows a series of revolting descriptions of the manners of the people, and the condition to which they are brought by over-indulgence. So in Idleberg, which is but another name for Lubberland:
The richest sort have attendants: one to open the master’s eyes gently when he awaketh: one to fanne a coole ayre whilest he eateth, a third to put in his viands when he gapeth, a fourth to girdle his belly as it riseth and falleth, the master onley exerciseth but eating, digesting and laying out.
And there is a real touch of horror in the account of the city of Marchpane, which:
... hath but very few inhabitants of any years that have any teeth left: but all, from 18 to the grave, are the naturale heirs of stinking breaths.
Mundus Alter et Idem is a vigorous and entertaining work which ranks quite high in the peculiarly English genre of the satirical utopia. Samuel Gott’s Nova Solyma, on the other hand, is perhaps the most dreary and repellent utopia ever written. [3] Yet it does contain one passage that is really striking, the fable of Philomela. It describes a palace of pleasure, where guests are invited to a perpetual banquet, in the midst of which they are suddenly precipitated into a sewer:
There the remains of the banquets and the vomit of overcharged stomachs and other filthy excrements lay rotting, and with them the skeletons of those who by violence or disease had come to an untimely end or by hunger and cold had been the victims of the cruellest usage. There was a horrid noise, too, of rattling chains, and the roar of wild beasts seizing their prey, and at your feet was a great, steep precipice, and below that a huge, impassable river, into which many of the wretched captives willingly drowned themselves, rather than suffer the prolonged torture of so horrible a fate, and the lacerations of the wild beasts.
So, for the middle-class Puritan, ends the Earthly Paradise, in disgust, in unspeakable misery and in death.
This kind of moral reprobation can be seen, too, at a much later date in Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies (1863). He tells of the sad fate of the Doasyoulikes, who lived in the land of Readymade at the foot of the Happy-go-lucky Mountains:
They sat under the flapdoodle-trees, and let the flap-doodle drop into their mouths; and under the vines, and squeezed the grape-juice down their throats; and, if any little pigs ran about ready roasted, crying, ‘Come and eat me’, as was their fashion in that country, they waited till the pigs ran against their mouths, and then took a bite, and were content, just as so many oysters would have been.
For which shameful disregard of the Victorian Gospel of Work they are visited with a progressive series of catastrophes and with ultimate extinction.
The people themselves have never shared these opinions. Whatever their betters might say they have continued to cherish the dream of Cokaygne. In song, in story and in play, the theme persisted, breaking only rarely into printed literature and then only in broadsheets and chapbooks circulating among the half-literate. The frequent references in the folk plays have been mentioned already. Another appearance, for knowledge of which I am indebted to Jack Lindsay, is in a volume of Songs of the Bards of the Tyne, published in 1849 but containing poems written considerably earlier and sometimes employing themes obviously traditional. One poem has the following passage:
Aw gat in to see Robin Hood,
Had two or three quairts wi John Nipes, man;
And Wesley, that yence preached sae good,
Sat smokin’ and praisin’ the swipes, man:
Legs of mutton here grows on each tree,
Jack Nipes said, and wasn’t mistaken –
When rainin’ there’s such a bit spree,
For there comes down great fat sides o’ bacon.
Whether Wesley had reached Cokaygne because or in spite of the excellence of his preaching is by no means clear. Another poem from the same collection says:
As aw cam doon, aw passed the meun,
An’ her greet burning mountains –
Her turnpike roads aw found out seun,
Strang beer runs there in fountains.
It is interesting to note that both these poems have as their subject the theme of the magical cure, especially since it is always in the part of the folk-plays dealing with the cure and the restoration to life of the dead hero that the Cokaygne passages occur. Here once more we find the link between the Cokaygne of popular tradition and the mythological Fortunate Isles with their fountain or well of perpetual youth. The same connection can be seen in one of the very few modern literary Cokaygne references, WB Yeats’ poem The Happy Townland:
Boughs have their fruit and blossom
At all times of the year;
Rivers are running over
With red beer and brown beer.
And, while the inhabitants enjoy themselves by fighting, every night:
All that are killed in battle
Awaken to life again.
It is lucky that their story
Is not known among men,
For O, the strong farmers
That would let the spade lie,
Their hearts would be like a cup
That somebody had drunk dry.
Yeats, who commonly looked for subject-matter to his native mythology, naturally approaches Cokaygne indirectly through the Celtic Earthly Paradise. Far more direct and definitely working-class in origin, and for both reasons more important for our purpose, are the numerous references in modern American folk songs and tales. The most complete Cokaygne pictures are in two songs, The Big Rock Candy Mountains and Poor Man’s Heaven. Superficially similar, these songs contain most of the usual Cokaygne features: the abundance of food, the miraculous streams, the eternal summer and the delight of idleness. Thus:
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
All the cops have wooden legs,
And the bulldogs all have rubber teeth,
And the hens lay soft boiled eggs. [4]
The farmers’ trees are full of fruit
And the barns are full of hay,
Oh I'm bound to go, where there ain’t no snow,
Where the rain don’t fall, where the wind don’t blow.
There –
The little streams of alcohol
Come a-trickling down the rocks...
There’s a lake of stew and of whisky too...
– and –
There ain’t no short-handled shovels,
No axes, saws or picks,
I'm bound to stay where they sleep all day,
Where they hung the Turk that invented work,
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.
Similarly:
In Poor Man’s heaven we'll have our own way,
There’s nothing up there but good luck,
There’s strawberry pie
That’s twenty feet high
And whipped cream they bring in a truck...
We'll eat all we please
Off ham and egg trees,
That grow by the lake full of beer.
The Cokaygne theme crops up in a variety of other forms and places. Among the Negroes, for example in one of the stories about John Henry, that mythological hero of so many legends in which the bounds of human possibility are miraculously enlarged. In this one he finds a tree made of honey and another of flitterjacks:
Well, John Henry set there an’ et honey an’ flitterjacks, an’ after while when he went to git up to go, button pop off'n his pants an’ kill a rabbit mo’ ‘n hundred ya'ds on other side o’ de tree. An’ so up jumped brown baked pig wid sack o’ biscuits on his back, an’ John Henry et him too.
So John Henry gits up to go through woods to camp for supper, ‘cause he ‘bout to be late an’ he mighty hongry for his supper. John Henry sees lake down hill an’ thinks he'll git him a drink o’ water, ‘cause he’s thirsty, too, after eatin’ honey an’ flitterjacks an’ brown roast pig an’ biscuits, still he’s hungry yet. An’ so he goes down to git drink water an’ finds lake ain’t nothin’ but lake o’ honey, an’ out in middle dat lake ain’t nothin’ but tree full o’ biscuits too.
Again, there is the story of Jack’s Hunting Trips, a version made by Richard Chase from the narrations of a number of mountain story-tellers in Virginia. In the course of the tale, Jack (who is indeed our old friend Jack of the Beanstalk) goes hunting along a river of honey, shaded by fritter trees, and little pigs come out of the brush with a knife and fork stuck in their backs, squealing be eaten. [5]
Here, I think, we can see something of the kind of way in which the Cokaygne theme crossed the Atlantic, and AL Lloyd, to whom I am heavily indebted for information about its American versions, has suggested that the immediate ancestor of The Big Rock Candy Mountains is a popular Norwegian song, with a very similar tune, which first appeared in print in 1853 and became a popular classic throughout Norway. In it the legendary character Ole Bull invites one and all to leave their miserable lives for the freedom of Oleana. Some of the verses of this song run roughly as follows:
In Oleana, that’s where I'd like to be, and not dragging the chains of slavery in Norway.
In Oleana they give you land for nothing, and the grain just pops out of the ground – it’s money for jam!
The grain threshes itself in the granary, while I stretch at ease in my bunk.
And Munich beer, as good as Yetteborg can brew, runs in the creeks for the poor man’s delight.
And brown roasted pigs leap about so prettily, asking politely if anyone would like ham.
To the Norwegian peasant and fisherman the Earthly Paradise lay in America, to which thousands were emigrating throughout the nineteenth century: when the emigrant arrived he quickly found that this Utopia had existed only in the imagination. In life it was something that had to be fought for or pushed away into a distant, fantastic Never-never Land. [6]
It is startling to find the same thoughts and desires expressed in almost the same words in a new continent and after six centuries, in fourteenth-century England and in the United States of the early twentieth, or, more probably in the late nineteenth century, the one feudal, decentralised and almost entirely agricultural, the other a highly organised, industrial country with an advanced technique and with capitalism already reaching the stage of monopoly. Nevertheless, the USA, although the Frontier in the old sense had disappeared by the last decades of the nineteenth century, [7] still contained vast areas incompletely opened up. Consequently there was a mass of migratory, unskilled labour, building railways and roads, digging canals and irrigation works, attached to no particular job but prepared to leave at short notice for any point in the Union where there were reports of good wages and plenty of work. And, at the same time, the battle with nature had not yet been won. While there was intense class exploitation, it was still often possible to feel, in the primitive hardness of the conditions of life, that the mass of the people were not only up against the rule of the rich but also against the inevitable oppression of natural forces. This is the common factor which may account for the reappearance in so many new forms of the Cokaygne theme.
Nevertheless, time does not stand still, and the theme reappears with significant modifications, which account not only for the differences between both Poor Man’s Heaven and The Big Rock Candy Mountains and the medieval Land of Cokaygne, but between these two songs themselves. The Big Rock Candy Mountains is closer in feeling to the original. It is fantastic and passive, and, indeed, for all its surface gaiety, has an underlying weariness and cynicism born of a fuller realisation that Cokaygne under modern conditions is no more than a dream. It is a song of the bum, the more demoralised element among the migratory workers. It is a decadent Utopia, as any Utopia must be in our time which turns away from the class struggle.
Poor Man’s Heaven is active and positive where The Big Rock Candy Mountains is passive and negative. It is Cokaygne with some of the old fantastic elements, but with the addition to them of the class struggle, even if in a somewhat anarchist form. Thus, for example, whereas –
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
The jails are made of tin,
And you can walk right out again
As soon as you are in.
– in Poor Man’s Heaven –
We'll take an iron rail
And open the jail,
And let all the poor men out quick.
And again, while in the first case –
The brakemen have to tip their caps
And the railroad bulls are blind.
– in the second –
We'll ride in a train,
And sleep in a Pullman at night,
And if someone should dare to ask for our fare
We'll hold up and put out his light.
In Poor Man’s Heaven, also, the conception of idleness takes a new and more revolutionary form with the addition of the idea of class reversal:
And we will be fed
With breakfast in bed,
And served by a fat millionaire.
Most striking of all is the contrast of the concluding lines, where in place of the rather pathetic jauntiness of –
I'll see you all this coming Fall,
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.
– we have –
In Poor Man’s Heaven we'll own our own homes
And we won’t have to sweat like a slave,
But we will be proud to sing right out loud,
The land of the free and the brave.
Whereas in the hand of the bum, the idea of Cokaygne loses even the implication of class revolt which it originally had, among the genuine migratory workers, the men who built up the IWW with its unsurpassed record of fearless militancy, these implications, always present, are developed and enriched by their contact with modern socialism.
And, indeed, fantastic as its form may have been, Cokaygne does anticipate some of the most fundamental conceptions of modern socialism. Socialism, if it is to be anything but an academic fabrication of blueprints, must take its rise from the desires and hopes of the people. It is from this that it derives its life, its actuality and its assurance of final victory. The classless society is Cokaygne made practical by scientific knowledge. Socialism is in agreement with Cokaygne, above all, in the belief that abundance is possible without the burden of unending and soul-destroying toil: the naive and pictorial expression in which this perfectly correct belief found expression in the Cokaygne literature was a result of the impossibility of finding any practical realisation in view of the low level of the technique of production in the Middle Ages. The conquest of nature was then only beginning, and so the final triumph of man over nature could only be expressed magically and symbolically. In this way The Land of Cokaygne is the beginning of a dialectical growth of the conception of Utopia, which has its culmination in the greatest and the most fully socialist work of this type, William Morris’ News From Nowhere, a book which gathers up all the riches and experiences of the philosophical Utopias of the intervening period and relates them once again to the neglected but undying hopes of the people. It is the tracing of this basic pattern in the history of the English Utopia which is one of the main objects of this book.
There is one other important point that must be touched on: the conception in Cokaygne of the relation between man and nature. Medieval man was, as we have seen, strongly aware of his struggle against his environment. He felt deeply the hostility of the world, the briefness and uncertainty of life. Man was a stranger and a sojourner, passing from darkness to twilight and thence into darkness again, a darkness only slightly alleviated by the church’s promises of heaven and rendered even more impenetrable and horrifying by its threats of hell. This was the source of the sense of the limitation of man which found its theological expression in the dogma of original sin. The church saw man and nature as separate and opposed forces, and the duty of man to resist both the world and the worldly within himself. The struggle between man and the world was the only means of avoiding a collapse into brutishness, and, the nature of man being what it was, the mere avoidance of such a collapse, and the salvation of the individual soul, was the very most that could reasonably be looked for.
In Cokaygne there is implicit the rejection of this pessimistic and reactionary outlook. Here, happiness and the enjoyment of plenty in fellowship is the outcome of the establishment of a harmony between man and his surroundings, of the conquest of nature by man, but a conquest possible because man is a part of nature instead of being in opposition to it. In this way, Cokaygne can be seen as a rough and early foreshadowing of Humanism, the philosophy of the bourgeois revolution. About Humanism more will have to be said in relation to More and Bacon; what must be noted here is that, in spite of its narrow and mechanical conception of the nature of progress, Humanism was a necessary and valuable belief with its insistence on the possibility and fact of progress, as against the static world picture of Medieval philosophy, and on the goodness and dignity rather than on the sinfulness and helplessness of man. Humanism made it possible to believe that man could mould the world in accordance with his desires, whereas the church taught him that he could only save himself from the world. Without such a belief the very conception of Utopia is impossible, and this is why we find no conscious and fully developed utopian thought between the philosophers of the classical world and those of the dawn of the bourgeois revolution.
1. It is worth noting that the official New Year at this time – 25 March – brings us close to another similar Festival, that of All Fools’ Day.
2. Saturn was the ancient ruler of the Gods, whose reign was a time of peace and universal abundance before the development of classes.
3. See Part III, Chapter II.
4. In Brueghel’s Schlaraffenland there is a boiled egg in a cup, running about ready opened, with a spoon sticking out of the top. Obviously the makers of this song knew nothing of Brueghel, but the persistence of all these minute details is an indication of a clear and continuous verbal tradition of which we have only accidental and disconnected evidence.
5. Honey: another echo of the Middle Ages, when sugar was almost unknown and honey greatly prized as the one substance available for sweetening. Perhaps the same kind of conditions were found in outlying parts of the USA where the pioneers were largely self-supporting and imported sugar would also be a luxury.
6. Lloyd suggests that Oleana may have suggested to Ibsen the Utopia of Gyntiana, in Act IV of Peer Gynt. Ibsen is perhaps an even more unexpected person than Wesley to meet in the Land of Cokaygne!
7. Like most folk songs and tales these are hard to date, but there seems to be a reference in Poor Man’s Heaven to the Populist anti-trust and cheap money agitation that culminated in Bryan’s election campaign of 1896.