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Shortly afterwards, numbers who came for recreation and amusement made their appearance, and before ten o'clock, Paul's Walk, as the nave was termed, was thronged, by apprentices, rufflers, porters, water-carriers, higglers, with baskets on their heads, or under their arms, fish-wives, quack-doctors, cutpurses, bonarobas, merchants, lawyers, and serving-men, who came to be hired, and who stationed themselves near an oaken block attached to one of the pillars, and which was denominated, from the use it was put to, the "serving-man's log."
It was not long therefore before a band of rufflers swung round a corner arm-in-arm, taking the whole breadth of the narrow causeway with them as they came. It chanced that their leader espied the four Scots standing in the wide doorway of the house opposite the Hotel de Pornic.
Now these Rufflers, the outcasts of serving-men, when begging or craving fails them, they pick and pilfer from other inferior beggars that they meet by the way, as rogues, palliards, morts, and doxes. Yea, if they meet with a woman alone riding to the market, either old man or boy, that he kneweth well will not resist, such they fetch and spoil.
Sedley and Etherege are not a whit worse, but only more stupid, than Fletcher or Shirley; and Monsieur Thomas is the spiritual father of all Angry lads, Rufflers, Blades, Bullies, Mohocks, Corinthians, and Dandies, down to the last drunken clerk who wrenched off a knocker, or robbed his master's till to pay his losses at a betting-office.
And, la, as to yonder base rufflers, think ye they have not their fill, but yet desire more?" "Well, then, what are they waiting for? Why don't they leave? Nobody's hindering. Good land, I'm willing to let bygones be bygones, I'm sure." "Leave, is it? Oh, give thyself easement as to that. They dream not of it, no, not they. They wait to yield them."
And under the other tree four rufflers played at cards and quarrelled, and no word sans oath; and of these lewd gamblers one had cockles in his hat and was my reverend pilgrim. And a female, young and comely, and dressed like a butterfly, sat and mended a heap of dirty rags.
The voyageurs or boatmen were the rank and file in the service of the trader, and even the hardy "men of the north," those great rufflers and game birds, were fain to be paddled from point to point of their migrations.
This was not at all true, but she was not going to admit as much to Mistress Satchell, or, for that matter, to herself. Mistress Satchell snorted fiercely, like an offended war-horse. "Because he has not clipped you round the waist, pinched you in the cheek, kissed you on the lips such liberties as our rufflers use. But he is a man for my money." She spoke with vehemence.
One or two of them are already beginning to cast eyes at her, so that I dare not let her help me carry home my basket, far less go alone. 'Tis not the wench's fault. She shrinks from men's eyes more than any maid I ever saw, but if she bide long with me, I wot not what may come of it. There be rufflers there who would not stick to carry her off!"
Another statute against sturdy vagabonds and "rufflers found idling after being assigned to labor," and already having their ears so slit, are punishable with death. This year Wales was joined to England; and we see the first act for the suppression of monasteries; the next year came the statute extinguishing the authority of the Bishop of Rome.
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