carry coals,
to put up with insults, to submit to any degradation (
“Il a du feu en la teste. Hee is
very chollericke, furious, or couragious; he will carrie no coales.”
Cotgrave's Fr. and Engl. Dict.
sub “Teste”
):
“the men would carry coals,”
HENRY V., iii. 2. 45
;
“we'll not carry coals,”
ROMEO AND JULIET, i. 1. 1.
“From the mean nature of this occupation, it seems to have
been somewhat hastily concluded, that a man who would carry
coals would submit to any indignity. Hence, to carry coals, in the sense of tamely putting up with an affront, occurs
perpetually in our old writers, both serious and comic.” . . . “In all great
houses, but particularly in the royal residences, there were a number of mean and dirty
dependents, whose office it was to attend the wood-yard, sculleries, etc. Of these (for in
the lowest deep there was a lower still) the most forlorn wretches seem to have been
selected to carry coals to the kitchens, halls, etc. To this smutty regiment, who attended
the progresses, and rode in the carts with the pots and kettles, which, with every other
article of furniture, were then moved from palace to palace, the people, in derision, gave
the name of black guards, a term since become
sufficiently familiar, and never properly explained.”
Gifford's notes on Jonson's
Works, vol. ii. pp. 169, 179.
(In Lyly's Midas mention is made of
“one of the Cole house,”
sig. F 4, ed. 1592,
that is, one of the drudges about the palace of King Midas.)