Squele, a Cotswold man, and Robert Shallow from Gloucestershire. Four
of these were such swinge-bucklers as were not to be found again in
all the Inns o' Court, and we have it on the authority of Justice
Shallow that Falstaff was a good backswordsman, and that before he had
done growing he broke the head of Skogan at the Court gate. This
Skogan appears to have been Court-jester to Edward III. No doubt the
natural rivalry between the amateur and the professional caused the
quarrel, and Skogan must have been a good man if he escaped with a
broken head only, and without damage to his reputation as a
professional wit. The same day that Falstaff did this deed of daring--
the only one of the kind recorded of him--Shallow fought with Sampson
Stockfish, a fruiterer, behind Gray's Inn. Shallow was a gay dog in
his youth, according to his own account: he was called Mad Shallow,
Lusty Shallow--indeed, he was called anything. He played Sir Dagonet
in Arthur's show at Mile End Green; and no doubt Falstaff and the rest
of the set were cast for other parts in the same pageant. These tall
fellows of Clement's Inn kept well together, for they liked each
other's company, and they needed each other's help in a row in
Turnbull Street or elsewhere. Their watchword was 'Hem, boys!' and
they made the old Strand ring with their songs as they strolled home
to their chambers of an evening. They heard the chimes at midnight--
which, it must be confessed, does not seem to us a desperately
dissipated entertainment. But midnight was a late hour in those days.
The paralytic masher of the present day, who is most alive at
midnight, rises at noon. _Then_ the day began earlier with a long
morning, followed by a pleasant period called the forenoon. Under
modern conditions we spend the morning in bed, and to palliate our
sloth call the forenoon and most of the rest of the day, the morning.
These young men of Clement's Inn were a lively, not to say a rowdy,
set. They would do anything that led to mirth or mischief. What passed