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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Burgelman, Robert A., author. | McKinney, Webb, author. | Meza, Philip E., author.
Title: Becoming Hewlett Packard : why strategic leadership matters / Robert A. Burgelman, Webb McKinney, Philip E. Meza.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2017] | Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016017258 | ISBN 9780190640446 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780190640460 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Hewlett-Packard Company—Management. | Computer industry—United States. | Electronic industries—United States. Classification: LCC HD9696.2.U64 H4938 2017 | DDC 338.7/610040973—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016017258
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
CONTENTS
Foreword
Modesto A. Maidique vii
Acknowledgments ix
Preface
Robert A. Burgelman xiii
Part I: Corporate Becoming: An Integral Strategic Leadership Process
Robert A. Burgelman
1. Corporate Becoming and Strategic Leadership 3
2. HP’s History of Becoming, 1939–2016: An Integral Process Overview 50
Part II: HP’s History of Becoming: Differential Successive CEO Contributions
Robert A. Burgelman, Webb McKinney, and Philip E. Meza
3. Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard Build a Great Test and Measurement Instruments Company 85
4. John Young Doubles Down on Computing 116
5. Lew Platt Pivots HP Toward Commodity Business 149
6. Carly Fiorina Drives HP Toward Scale and Scope 185
7. Mark Hurd Relentlessly Manages for Results 225
8. Léo Apotheker Intends to Revolutionalize HP 266
Part III: Corporate Becoming and Strategic Leadership: Harnessing the Past and Driving the Future
Robert A. Burgelman
9. Meg Whitman Resolves Strategic Integration Challenges, from Better Together to Splitting HP in Two 293
Becoming Hewlett Packard represents a tour de force through the strategic evolution of one of America’s iconic companies. Born in Silicon Valley, a few blocks from Stanford University, Hewlett Packard (HP) has come to symbolize the rise of both Silicon Valley and the great university that anchors it. In this superb and expansive tome, Stanford Professor Robert Burgelman and his co-authors guide us through the multiple stages of HP’s growth and development.
For business scholars, the critical role of strategic choice in HP’s storied history shines through. For students of leadership, the central role of the seven main actors in HP’s history is dynamically profiled.
Throughout this must-read corporate biography for HP observers and analysts, Burgelman integrates both new and traditional tools of strategic analysis in a way that enables us to understand and analyze the full depth of the complex HP story.
For instance, the initial conditions an incoming CEO faces impact his or her choices for the future. It is not clear whether Burgelman intended to underscore this point, but the concept of “initial conditions” is critical to the analysis of the functioning of the electronic circuits that underpin HP products. This point will be especially impactful for engineers, specifically electrical engineers, as they will appreciate this implied metaphor. In that vein, former HP CEO Carly Fiorina reminds us that CEOs should consider the implications of their decisions well beyond their tenure. This interlinking of initial conditions left behind by outgoing CEOs represents a critical factor in the strategic option set that the new CEO encounters.
Prominent choices—such as the acquisitions of Electronic Data Systems and Compaq—have had long-term consequences for HP, spanning multiple CEOs. During its nearly 80-year history, HP has gone through seven phases of evolution and seven CEOs—though not necessarily in corresponding sets.
Bill Hewlett and David Packard presided over three of these transitions, and they left a durable legacy. In the fast-changing world of high technology industries, periodic shifts in strategy are absolutely critical for corporate survival. The point here is not that companies that succeed are built to last. Rather, they are built to evolve, or in Burgelman’s words, they are built to become. And nowhere has the process of “becoming” been more clearly analyzed and examined in its full complexity than in this splendid book.
For me, the great story of HP is quite personal. I first encountered Hewlett Packard upon entering the freshman electronics laboratory at MIT, where I discovered an
HP-200C audio oscillator and a Tektronix 503 oscilloscope on my lab bench. These two instruments would remain my dependable companions for some time to come. HP soon emerged as a recurring presence in my life, most notably when HP became a major customer of a company I later cofounded, Analog Devices Semiconductor, and we became customers for HP’s waveform generators and oscilloscopes.
As a professor at the Harvard Business School, and later at Stanford, I would integrate David Packard’s book, The HP Way, and cases about HP, into my courses. More so, as a junior professor at Stanford in the early 1980s, I had the audacity to cold call and question David Packard directly. He not only welcomed my inquiry, but he agreed to address my class on the Management of High Technology Companies and to answer the students’ many questions. As I reminisce about David Packard’s most enjoyable visit, I am reminded how I always walked a few blocks to class from my office. I must say, however, walking alongside the 6’5” David Packard was more like running. I will always remember the most poignant question put forth by one of the participants in the aftermath of David Packard’s 1982 lecture: “Mr. Packard, how come Hewlett-Packard has been so successful?”
Without missing a beat, David Packard said, “I guess we just found a way to make a better product.”
This book explores how HP—sometimes through excellent strategic choices, and sometimes by stumbling—found a way to make the “better product” Mr. Packard described.
Once again, I am pleased and honored to reencounter this iconic firm, a firm I grew up with—as a student, as an electrical engineer, a professor, and now through a superb book by my friend and colleague Robert Burgelman and his co-authors. Becoming Hewlett Packard will surely endure as the defining strategic analysis of HP, a uniquely American technology giant.
Modesto A. Maidique, President Emeritus, Florida International University
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Robert A. Burgelman
Having completed research about Intel Corporation’s transformation from a semiconductor memory company to a microprocessor company in the early to mid-1980s, Andy Grove and I had become deeply interested in corporate longevity in turbulent environments. We quickly realized that right in Stanford University’s backyard, Hewlett Packard (HP) had been able to transform itself multiple times by the mid1990s. When Carly Fiorina was hired as the company’s first externally recruited CEO in 1999, Andy made contact with her to suggest we do a case study tracking her tenure and she accepted. No words suffice to express the good fortune of having had the opportunity to engage with Andy Grove in joint writing and teaching at the Stanford Business School for some twenty-four years.
The case studies about Fiorina’s tenure as CEO started the seventeen-year research effort of studying the role of strategic leadership in HP’s evolution that led to the writing of this book. Over the years, many busy HP executives and outside management experts have participated in the research. I’d like to thank all of them for providing the data on which the book is based. In particular, I’d like to thank John Young, Joan Platt (Lew Platt’s widow, who provided interesting and poignant insights into Lew’s CEO tenure), Carly Fiorina, Mark Hurd, Léo Apotheker, and Meg Whitman for their willingness to make time to participate in interviews and provide the CEO perspectives that form the foundation for the book’s chapters.
Stanford Business School has for thirty-five years provided an exceptionally stimulating and supportive environment for conducting the longitudinal qualitative research that informs my academic writing. I am grateful that the school’s leadership has seemed comfortable with the fact that this type of research usually led to answering the “What are you working on?” with “I don’t know (until it is finished).” The long time taken by the completion of this book is testimony to the importance of this trusting support. I am also grateful for having been named the School’s BP Faculty Fellow in Global Management in 2012–2013 and 2015–2016 while I was working on the book’s conceptual framing and its completion. In addition, during the last dozen or so years I have been in some ways a one-man strategic management subgroup within the school’s large organizational behavior group, and I’d like to thank my Organizational Behavior colleagues for making me feel like I belong.
I would also like to thank the Judge Business School, University of Cambridge, for inviting me for a brief stay as a visiting professor in early 2009, and Sydney Sussex College for inducting me as a visiting fellow. As I naively suggested at one Friday night’s
High Table dinner that I was beginning to understand the functioning of the colleges in the university’s eight-hundred-year history, one of the dons sitting across from me replied in a mildly sarcastic tone, “Sir, you must be the only man in Cambridge who does.” Slightly humiliated, I realized there was important truth implied in this reply: no single theoretical framework can account for the longevity of institutions. Hence, while this book uses the research lens of strategic leadership, there are other research lenses that can throw different light on organizational longevity.
The book’s strategic leadership frameworks and research findings were presented in friendly Stanford Business School alumni meetings in Hong Kong (2013), Copenhagen (2014), Zurich (2015), London (2015), Stanford (2013 Stanford Executive Program 1998 reunion and 2015), and Stockholm (2016), and I thank the local alumni representatives for making this possible. I also thank Professor Wang Yi of Tsinghua University (Beijing), Professor Christophe Midler of the Ecole Polytechnique (Paris), and Professor Richard Whittington of the Said Business School (University of Oxford) for inviting me to give seminars in 2013, 2014, and 2015, respectively, which gave me the opportunity to test with academic colleagues the progress I was making.
As the lead author, I want to thank my two coauthors for excellently collaborating on this book. As a research associate from the late 1990s till 2007 at Stanford, Philip helped write several cases documenting the CEO tenure of Carly Fiorina, the HP–Compaq merger, the Innovation Program Office of HP’s Personal Systems Group, and the historical development of HP’s networking business. He also put together materials for the early drafts of most of the chapters of this book and helped with the final editing of these. Webb McKinney was a major protagonist in the HP– Compaq merger case, coauthored an academic article based on the strategic integration of the merger, and also coauthored the HP networking case. Webb was instrumental in convincing many of his senior executive acquaintances at HP to participate in the interviewing process and provided important data and input for the chapters that would have been impossible to get otherwise. He also provided helpful edits for these chapters. The task of developing the conceptual frameworks for the book, however, remained with the academic member of the research team, and so I should be held solely responsible for all the remaining theoretical and conceptual shortcomings of this book.
Oxford University Press agreed to publish this book, and I am grateful to David Musson, OUP editor based in Oxford, who in early 2015 recruited four anonymous reviewers of the book’s prospectus and provided edits for most of the chapters. After David’s retirement in fall 2015, Scott Parris, OUP editor based in New York, took over and has offered important additional editorial guidance. I thank Scott for his patience and gentle encouragement of the final drive to complete the manuscript. And also thanks to OUP’s Cathryn Vaulman for helping with the administrative and operational issues involved in getting the manuscript ready for production. Upon Scott’s retirement, Anne Dellinger took over as OUP editor and later David Pervin as senior OUP editor, and I like to thank Anne and David for seeing the book through to production and publication.
A special thanks also to Nanci Moore, my long-time administrative assistant, who has helped with rendering the figures and tables in electronic form and obtaining
permissions for copyrighted material. She also has made the entire manuscript ready for publication.
Finally, for me writing is a solitary and consuming activity. As on previous occasions, I am grateful that my wife Rita has granted me the time and space, especially during the last three years, to pursue yet another intellectual odyssey. However, she also did again not allow me to completely forget that there are other important things in life: in particular, the wonderful joy of becoming a grandparent of two grandsons and participating in their early “becoming.” It is to 4 year old Jasper and 1.5 year old Remy that I dedicate my personal contributions to this book.
Webb McKinney
Thank you, Robert and Philip, for asking me to join you in the creation of this book about HP. I spent my entire thirty-four-year career at HP, and helping to write this book was a very satisfying way for me to look back at what made HP great, and why it began to struggle in more recent years.
I would also like to thank my many friends and colleagues at HP who agreed to be interviewed for this book. Your candor, trust, and willingness to share your views openly—typical of the way we worked together at HP—played a major role in making this book so accurate and insightful.
Although they are both no longer with us, I must thank Bill and Dave for creating such a great and strongly values-driven company. I was very fortunate to have started my career at HP when Bill and Dave were still on the scene and active in their company, and to have worked under so many great leaders trained directly or indirectly by Bill and Dave. Thanks also to all the great people I worked with at HP for teaching me so much. For all of us who spent a significant amount of time at the company, the HP Way is real. It became our way of leading and stayed with us wherever we went after HP. Because of this, the HP Way is still alive and well in many companies in Silicon Valley.
Foremost, I want to thank my wife Chris for patiently discussing all aspects of this book over the many years it took to research and complete. Her influence and support have shaped me, and can be found in this book too. Thanks also to my daughters Megan and Sarah, who experienced HP through me, and whose opinions I value highly. I, too, would like to dedicate my work on this book to my grandchildren Ryann, Luca, and Charlie (on the way), in hopes that they will have the great satisfaction of working for outstanding companies.
Philip E. Meza
This book is the product of academic research and real-life strategy and business practice. My coauthors are masters of these. It has been enlightening for me to work with Robert and Webb on this book.
My association with Robert began many years ago when I joined him and Andy Grove in their then already long-running and popular class on strategy at Stanford. I owe many intellectual debts to Andy for what he taught me about strategy, and philanthropy as well. While writing this book, and in my consulting work too, I hear Andy’s
bass-baritone voice in my head exhorting me to think harder and deeper and to always question assumptions.
Silicon Valley can seem like a land of giants, because the combination of talent, money, and desire to change the world is so strong here. Sometimes the giants are really just regular people on stilts. They usually tumble quickly. Sometimes they are real. Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard really were giants. Of course they were not perfect, but they built a long-lived company that generated value over decades and inspired others, including Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.
Not least, Bill and Dave instructed and inspirited the many HP executives who participated in our research for this book. I thank them all for sharing their insights with Robert, Webb, and me.
Authors shape books but families shape authors, or at least mine has shaped me. I owe much to my wife, Marjorie, who makes me better. I owe much to my parents, Edward and Grace, who were my initial inspirations, and to Robert, Sara, Robbie, Juliana, Caitlin, Kristen, Scarlett, Tara, and Reid, who each in their own ways are reflected in my work.
ELUCIDATING THE PROCESS OF CORPORATE BECOMING: AN INTELLECTUAL ODYSSEY
Robert A. Burgelman
Half a century ago the out-of-the-mainstream economist John Kenneth Galbraith published The New Industrial State (1967),1 in which he describes how the developed economies—socialist as well as capitalist—were inexorably bifurcating. He observed that one part of the economy continued to consist of the traditional mass of atomistic entrepreneurial firms still controlled by the market (and therefore, at the time, favored by the mainstream economic textbooks), and that the other part increasingly comprised a relatively small number (in the hundreds) of massively large corporations that formed a new “industrial system.” These corporations were able to wrest control away from the market (and therefore were largely ignored by the mainstream economics textbooks). They did so with long-term planning, strong reliance on technological innovation, control of the demand for their products and services through marketing expertise, and self-funding of their large capital investment, research and development (R&D), and growth through retained earnings.
Associated with the rise of these giant corporations, Galbraith saw the development of a “technostructure” that “embraces all who bring specialized knowledge, talent or experience to group decision-making. This, not the management, is the guiding intelligence— the brain—of the enterprise” (71). By implication, the rise of the technostructure indicated that the role of management basically had changed from substantive decisionmaking to ratification. Related to this, Galbraith noted that the great late nineteenthcentury entrepreneurial industry consolidators—Rockefeller, Morgan, Duke, Harriman, Guggenheim, Durant, du Pont, Chrysler, Hartford, Hilton—were able to unite control of capital with unquestioned authority in the enterprise. By the mid-twentieth century, however, “no one of equal notoriety ever followed these pioneers. The names of the successors in office are lost to history or were never known” (88). Concomitant with these developments, Galbraith also pointed at the radical decline in the power of the shareholders of these large, complex, and technologically sophisticated corporations.
While providing a compelling theoretical synthesis of various fragmented insights into the evolution of the industrialized world, the thesis of The New Industrial State turned out to be only partially correct.
First, as Andy Grove and I have reported,2 of the largest one hundred companies in the United States in 1965, only nineteen remained on that list in 2005. In other words, the “gale of creative destruction,” and the more recently identified force of “disruptive
technology,”3 did not spare many of the most famous large US-based corporations that existed at the time of the writing of The New Industrial State. Also not anticipated, but clearly a force that has shaped the survival of some and the disappearance of many other large corporations, is the emergence of relatively powerful agents of shareholder activism. These have introduced—to use another of Galbraith’s influential phrases— a new level of “countervailing power” in the relationship with entrenched corporate management.4
Furthermore, Galbraith’s analysis was very much influenced by Schumpeter’s later work Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942),5, which had posited a shift in the engine of innovation from the individual entrepreneur to the large corporation, and therefore also that the latter needed to control market uncertainty as much as possible to continue to bear the risks associated with innovation and survive the gale of creative destruction. Galbraith, however, did not quite anticipate that Schumpeter’s earlier work, The Theory of Economic Development (1911, 1934),6 which had posited the central role of the individual entrepreneur in creating new companies, had not quite faded away into historical obscurity. Instead, it was soon going to resurge in relevance with the emergence of a new wave of radically new technological innovation in electronics (transistor, integrated circuit, semiconductor memory, microprocessor), computer science (hardware and software), molecular biology (gene splicing, genome sequencing), and other areas (such as mobile communications).
Sure enough, in the decades since The New Industrial State a new set of names of entrepreneurial CEOs have entered into the public consciousness: Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, Andrew Grove, Michael Dell, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Marc Benioff, and Mark Zuckerberg are only some of the most recent famous ones in the information technology industry. As the older Schumpeter and Galbraith would have predicted, however, these new-generation entrepreneurs have created very large, complex, technologically sophisticated, mostly self-funding enterprises with significant market power that rely on an extensive technostructure (no longer known as such). And, as with the previous generation of captains of industry, the followers of these well-known entrepreneurs in the CEO position do not usually command the same level of notoriety and interest.
I believe that these historical observations are useful to help put in sharper perspective the contributions to knowledge that Becoming Hewlett Packard: Why Strategic Leadership Matters intends to make. On the one hand, while today’s business media (and business schools) are much enamored with Silicon Valley-style start-up entrepreneurship, it really is only those start-ups (HP in 1939) that are able to grow into large, complex enterprises (HP in 2016) that materially impact the evolution of the global industrial system. Hence, documenting the evolution and growth of Hewlett Packard in this book provides some further empirical evidence of the continuation of the development of the industrial system as theoretically sketched by Galbraith. On the other hand, however, by using the research lens of strategic management, this book is also able to illuminate and reaffirm the importance of the role of top management and the CEO in HP’s evolution. In other words, the research findings presented in
Becoming Hewlett Packard clearly show that Galbraith too heavily discounted the role of the CEO’s (and top management’s) strategic leadership.
To briefly elaborate, Bill Hewlett and David Packard were among the first of the new breed of entrepreneurs based in Silicon Valley (until the early 1960s a mostly rural area in Northern California with a small town, Palo Alto, bordering on Stanford University, itself the former site of the farm of Senator Leland Stanford) whose company, founded in the late 1930s, was still relatively small in the early 1960s and did not appear on Galbraith’s research radar screen as part of the set of industrial giants at the time of his writing of The New Industrial State. Yet from the 1960s on, HP would grow to become very large, develop a novel type of technostructure (much less hierarchical), be intensely technology-driven, and able to manage the demand for its products and mostly self-fund its growth. Hence, the research efforts to elucidate the dynamics of HP’s seventy-seven-year long integral process of becoming have the potential to deepen our understanding of the forces that affect the longevity and the role of the large, complex enterprise in today’s highly developed economic system. Also, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard have become viewed by many as the founding fathers of Silicon Valley and will maintain, probably forever, their place among the iconic entrepreneurial CEOs of the high-technology industry. With the use of the strategic management research lens it was possible, however, to put in greater relief the indispensable role of successive CEOs following the founders in differentially contributing to the integral process of the company’s becoming, and thereby securing its longevity.
Reflecting the intellectual efforts to develop these potential contributions, Becoming Hewlett Packard: Why Strategic Leadership Matters is really two books in one. The first one presents the frameworks that guide the analysis of the data (Part I) and the substantive insights gained in the role of strategic leadership in corporate becoming (Part III). The second one reports the use of the frameworks to shed light on the differential strategic leadership approach and contributions of HP’s successive CEOs to the company’s integral process of becoming (Part II).
The remainder of this preface provides a brief recapitulation of Becoming Hewlett Packard’s long period of gestation, from genesis to completion.
The first idea of writing a book about HP started in 2004. Having completed several case studies and interviews with then CEO Carly Fiorina and other top-level HP executives, Philip Meza, my research associate at the time, and I tentatively planned to put together these materials in a book preliminarily called Reinventing HP. While considering how to move that project forward, however, CEO Fiorina was replaced with Mark Hurd in early 2005. During the 2005–2010 period, Hurd was a yearly guest speaker in the six-week Stanford Executive Program that I then directed, which generated a great amount of data about the strategic challenges HP was facing and how the new CEO was dealing with these. In the meantime, however, Philip had left Stanford and I was involved in several new research projects with Andy Grove, my coteacher at Stanford at the time. As a result, the HP book project was put on ice.
By the time Mark Hurd was replaced with Léo Apotheker in 2010, Philip and I again had begun to think about resuming work on the HP book, but to take a different tack by focusing it on how each of HP’s CEOs, from Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett on,
had dealt with the strategic leadership challenges of the rapidly evolving information processing industry. To get better access to many retired former top-level HP executives and further insight into the strategic challenges HP faced during the tenures of past CEOs, we invited long-time HP senior executive Webb McKinney, who had been one of the protagonists and coauthor of case studies we had written about the HP–Compaq merger, to join the research effort. With Webb accepting, it became possible in the period 2010–2013 to get interviews with many top-level executives who had served under Dave Packard, Bill Hewlett, John Young, and his successor Lew Platt, as well as with former CEO John Young himself and also again with Carly Fiorina. I, in turn, was able to secure interviews with Mark Hurd and Léo Apotheker and, in early 2015, with Meg Whitman, who had succeeded Apotheker as HP’s CEO in September 2011 and who had been a guest speaker in the Stanford Executive Program in 2014. Webb, Philip, and I collected lots of rich, interesting interview data between 2010 and early 2012. Several metaphors were tried to create a preliminary conceptual framework for our findings, but unfortunately all soon ended up losing their capacity to make progress. As a result, by early 2012 I was still struggling to clearly and incisively state what the book based on this material was going to be about and what would set it apart from other books about HP, in particular Charles H. House and Raymond L. Price’s excellent and exhaustive The HP Phenomenon: Innovation and Business Transformation (2009). Studying House and Price’s book had actually helped me to discover the three crucial “HP success principles” that Dave Packard had formulated in a speech to company executives late in his career.7
Webb McKinney had mentioned another speech to HP executives in which Dave Packard, in his last address to the company, and not long before he passed away, recited a poem by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. called “The Deacon’s Masterpiece: Or The Wonderful One-Hoss- Shay.”8 Holmes’s poem recounts the efforts of a fictional deacon to craft a horse-drawn carriage (one-hoss shay) “in such a logical way” that it could endure for exactly one hundred years. On its one-hundredth anniversary the shay collapses all at once, as planned.At the time many in the audience did not understand the significance and poignancy of the poem Packard chose to recite. This story helped me, however, make a link to my previous research that had revealed how a company can become locked in with the product-market environment in which its great strategic success makes it dominant, but also the difficulties of breaking out of the lock-in.9 I realized that this had not happened to HP so far. While Packard’s three success principles and the one-hoss shay metaphor were useful to evaluate the differential contributions made by each of HP’s successive CEOs, these elements did not yet clearly define a novel concept for framing the book’s potential contribution.
Then serendipity gave a helping hand. While convalescing from a brief illness in early in 2012, it suddenly occurred to me that the data we had collected about HP’s evolution could be synthesized in the concept of a “built to become” type of company, and that the study of successive CEOs could serve to inform the role of strategic leadership in the phenomenon of “corporate becoming.”10 This insight was inspired by Ilya Prigogine’s research in the physical sciences that had suggested a shift in focus from phenomena of “being” to phenomena of “becoming.”11 Prigogine’s research had had a
big impact on my earlier efforts to create a conceptual framework that integrates corporate entrepreneurship with strategic management.12 I also had begun to revisit and research more exhaustively Prigogine’s work during a brief stay as a visiting professor at Cambridge University in 2009.13 In the process of doing this research, I discovered that other scholars also had begun using Prigogine’s work to explore the idea of organizational becoming.14
Throughout 2013–2014, I developed the conceptual foundation for linking the CEO’s strategic leadership to the phenomenon of corporate becoming. This involved using some previously developed frameworks to define the key strategic leadership tasks of the CEO,15 as well as developing several new ones to examine four key aspects of how the CEO can develop the company’s strategic leadership capability. Part I (chapters 1 and 2) presents my efforts to create the book’s conceptual foundation. These conceptual frameworks were used to restructure the book’s chapters. With the new chapter structure in place, Webb, Philip, and I used our data to document for each of HP’s successive CEOs how they discharged the key strategic leadership tasks and how they developed the company’s strategic leadership capability during their tenure. Writing these chapters involved multiple revisions. The final versions are presented in Part II of the book (chapters 3–8).
Then in October 2014, potential disaster struck when CEO Meg Whitman announced that she and the board of directors had decided to split HP in two. How could such a radical reduction in the size of the company be squared with corporate becoming? This created a major theoretical conundrum.
Fortunately, serendipity again helped. Struggling with the potential threat of irrelevance drove me to realize that this theoretical conundrum could be resolved by going back to the inchoate key idea of my undergraduate thesis composed almost half a century ago on the topic of “optimal firm size.”16 Inspired by Galbraith’s ideas about The New Industrial State, I had stumbled onto Alfred Chandler’s analysis of how major US-based firms adapted their organization structure to implement their external opportunity-driven diversification strategies, Edith Penrose’s analysis of firms’ internal entrepreneurial impulse to grow, and Igor Ansoff’s analytical corporate strategy framework.17 Integrating these novel perspectives had made me realize that a firm’s size at any given time could be viewed as the byproduct of its growth trajectory and that even if a firm’s optimal size could be determined at a particular moment in time, it would most likely be a fleeting optimum because of continuously changing external and internal conditions. This led me to propose that a better way to think about optimal firm size was for top management to be concerned with optimally matching strategy and structure at each point along the firm’s growth trajectory, which would then produce optimal size as a byproduct. That is where I had left it in 1969.
More than four decades later, this insight turned out to be relevant for the theoretical framing of Becoming Hewlett Packard. Thinking more deeply about Whitman’s strategic decision to split HP in two made me realize that a firm’s growth trajectory does not necessarily have to incessantly move upward. In fact, it might make strategic sense at some points along the growth trajectory to change the firm’s corporate strategy and structure to reduce its size and thereby put it onto a new, more adaptive
growth trajectory. Working out the implications of this insight during most of 2015 led to developing a framework that helps explain the conditions under which top management may decide to split off certain businesses from the corporate portfolio and thereby reduce the size of the firm. The two key drivers highlighted in the new framework are (1) changes in interbusiness complementarity; and (2) changes in intrabusiness complexity. This led to rewriting parts of chapters 1 and 2 of the book, and to using the new framework in chapter 9 to explain why Whitman’s decision to split HP in two is consistent with HP’s continued process of becoming, and why most investors liked this move in 2014 whereas they disliked the prospect of it in 2011.18
Having resolved the theoretical conundrum created by the strategic decision to split HP in two, the book’s final chapter served to summarize key findings about (1) the paradox of the integral process of corporate becoming and the conditions that govern it; (2) the differential strategic leadership contributions of successive CEOs in sustaining a company’s integral process of becoming; (3) the existential situation facing a company’s successive CEOs that justified the book’s adopting an empathic approach; and (4) the crucial role of these successive CEOs in harnessing the company’s past and driving its future during their tenure. These findings could then be combined to propose an evolutionary conceptual framework of the role of strategic leadership in the process of corporate becoming. Part III of the book (chapters 9 and 10) presents these integrating conceptual efforts and their implications for strategic leadership.
If all is well that ends well, it remains nevertheless important to acknowledge that the insights into the role of strategic leadership in corporate becoming presented in this book are only what Stuart Firestein in his examination of the role of “failure” in scientific progress calls “a series of provisional findings that iteratively moves us closer and closer to a truth that may never be fully attained.”19 Like Firestein, I hope that these insights may be valuable stepping-stones for further research even if they end up being shown to be more wrong than right.
NOTES
1. J. K. Galbraith, The New Industrial State (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1967).
2. R. A. Burgelman and A. S. Grove, “Let Chaos Reign, Then Rein-in Chaos—Repeatedly: Managing Strategic Dynamics for Corporate Longevity,” Strategic Management Journal 28, no. 10 (2007): 965-979.
3. C. M. Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1997).
4. See, for instance, J. Gramm, Dear Chairman: Boardroom Battles and the Rise of Shareholder Activism (New York: Harper, 2016).
5. J. A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York: Harper, 1942).
6. J. A. Schumpeter, The Theory of Economic Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934).
7. Charles H. House and Raymond L. Price, The HP Phenomenon: Innovation and Business Transformation (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 530.
8. The poem was originally published in The Atlantic Monthly, September 1858, in Holmes’s regular “The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table” column for that magazine.
9. R. A. Burgelman, “Strategy as Vector and the Inertia of Co-evolutionary Lock-in,” Administrative Science Quarterly 47 (2002): 325–357.
10. I thought that the idea of built to become could be usefully distinguished from built to last (see James Collins and Jerry Porras, Built to Last [New York, Harper Books, 1994]) because becoming refers to a dynamic process that is not driven by an ex ante teleological vision and leaves open the possibility that even a company’s core values may have to change to make adaptation to radical environmental change possible. (It had always struck me, for instance, that thousands of tribes that stuck to their core values had nevertheless disappeared in the course of history.) To avoid potentially confusing readers, however, the editors wisely suggested dropping “built to become” and keeping the book focused on “corporate becoming.”
11. I. Prigogine, From Being to Becoming: Time and Complexity in the Physical Sciences (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman and Company, 1980).
12. R. A. Burgelman, “Corporate Entrepreneurship and Strategic Management: Insights from a Process Study,” Management Science 29, no. 12 (1983): 1349–1364.
13. R. A. Burgelman, “Prigogine’s Theory of the Dynamics of Far-from-Equilibrium Systems Informs the Role of Strategic Entrepreneurship and Innovation in Organizational Evolution,” in C. E. Shalley, M. A. Hitt, and J. Zhou (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Creativity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 433–444.
14. H. Tsoukas and R. Chia, “On Organizational Becoming: Rethinking Organizational Change,” Organization Science 13, no. 5 (2002): 1.
15. R. A. Burgelman, Strategy is Destiny: How Strategy-Making Shapes a Company’s Future (New York: Free Press, 2002).
16. R. A. Burgelman, Optimale Grootte in Bedrijfseconomisch Perpspectief, unpublished licenciate thesis, Antwerp University, Faculty of Applied Economics (UFSIA), 1969.
17. A. D. ChandlerJr., Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of the American Industrial Enterprise (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1962); E. T. Penrose, The Theory of the Growth of the Firm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959); H. I. Ansoff, Corporate Strategy: An Analytic Approach to Business Policy for Growth and Expansion (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965).
18. See D. Gelles, “Breaking Up Is the New Thing to Do in Silicon Valley,” New York Times, October 6, 2014. Interestingly, beyond HP, the split-off phenomenon seemed to be asserting itself with great force during 2015 and 2016. IBM’s split-off of its semiconductor business (it even paid the acquirer), eBay’s split-off of PayPal, the pressure on EMC to split off VMWare (now alleviated by EMC having been acquired by Dell), and Xerox’s decision (in January 2016) to split its enterprise equipment business from its services business are some of the most prominent examples.
19. S. Firestein, Failure: Why Science is so Successful (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2016), 174.
PART I
Corporate Becoming
An Integral Strategic Leadership Process
Robert A. Burgelman
Becoming is the process of incorporating earlier stages into later; or when this is impossible, of handling the conflict between early and late stages as well as one can.
Gordon W. Allport, Becoming, 1955 (28)
1
CORPORATE BECOMING AND STRATEGIC LEADERSHIP
A THOUGHT EXPERIMENT
Suppose Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard came back from the Elysian fields today and visited the two new corporations that bear their names: HP Inc. and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. How would they feel about how HP has evolved and what it has become since their departures?
Chances are that the founders would hardly recognize the two new companies. For one thing, gone are the original core test and measurement (T&M) businesses— the direct descendants of the products the two engineer-entrepreneurs developed and manufactured in that famed garage. Those assets were already spun off from HP in 1999 and owned by a public company called Agilent, and some were spun off again by Agilent in 2014 (in particular, the core T&M business that the founders started in the garage so that Agilent could focus on life sciences). Hewlett and Packard might ask why HP’s corporate management did not continue to capitalize on these leading-edge technology-based T&M businesses that dominated their segments and ended up generating far greater return on investment than most of HP’s other businesses.1
The founders, however, probably would be favorably impressed that HP’s gigantic size of yesterday (before 2015) had been cut in half to form the two new companies. And while they might be somewhat disappointed to find that the consumer-oriented new HP Inc. company is now positioned in mostly commodity-type businesses, they would be encouraged by its leadership’s intent to re-energize its capacity to innovate. They would probably also be impressed by the enterprise-oriented new company Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s efforts to become a leading player in the new computing paradigm called “cloud.”
Poignantly, it is easy to imagine the founders one more time attempting to get a feel for the culture of the new HP companies by “walking around,” as they did regularly at company plants and offices all over the world. They would probably be disappointed to find that transaction-oriented values, imported from acquisitions and leaders from outside of HP, have largely replaced the relationship and innovation-oriented values of the old “HP Way,” and that the old culture of solidarity and meritocracy they built over decades has too often given way to opportunism and careerism. Hewlett and Packard would surely wonder what they could have done differently to preserve
more of their values at the company they created. Flipping through HP’s annual reports and news clippings, they might think about the kind of boards of directors they assembled and the impact these had on the company and its culture after they retired. They would probably also wonder what they could have done differently to not make it necessary for the company to go outside the company for CEO leadership four times in a row.
And yet, hard-headed businessmen and solid engineers that they were, they probably would be impressed that HP is still around in the form of two new independent companies. Moreover, they would probably be gratified to see that while these new HP companies are struggling to get back to growth, they are still profitable, still attract excellent people, still have a bedrock of very strong technological competence and human capital, and still evoke in many in Silicon Valley the feeling that they have the potential to continue to be great companies.
The founders would probably admit that it does not really matter what they think and feel about the company that was once theirs. What really matters is that HP’s longevity be preserved in two new companies that continue to offer employees highly valued jobs and are a source of innovation and contribution that makes the country and the world a better place. Rooted in science and engineering, as their thinking always had been, they would probably return to the Elysian fields with fresh questions about the forces that drive the evolution of long-lived companies, shape them in ways not anticipatable by their founders, and about new ways to think about what makes such companies great.
Inspired by the idea of Hewlett and Packard returning to visit their long-lived company, this book addresses several questions that they probably would take back with them: Why do some companies survive over long periods of time while others do not? What makes some long-living companies great, and what does “great” really mean? What is the role of strategy and culture in helping a company live for many decades over the tenures of successive CEOs? How does top management of long-lived companies balance strategic resource allocation between exploiting existing business opportunities and generating new ones? What is the role of the board of directors in helping top management secure the future of the company? And, in light of recent developments at HP, when does it make strategic sense for a company to secure its continued longevity by reducing its size through splitting itself into multiple companies?
CORPORATE LONGEVITY AND GREATNESS
Few companies survive as independent entities for very long periods of time. Of the top one hundred US-based industrial companies listed in Fortune magazine in 1983, the year HP first cracked into that elite group, only twenty-one of those companies remained in the top one hundred in 2013, the rest having been acquired, dropping in relative size, or going out of business. But not HP; it continued to rise. This is shown in Figure 1.1.
1983–2013.
Source:
The rapid turnover in the Fortune 100 list shows the highly dynamic external environments that most large corporations face. It is a tough world out there, especially for tech companies. This dynamism results from industry players, sometimes incumbents but more often upstart new entrants, changing the rules of the game. Whether implicit or explicit, these rules of the game usually remain unchallenged for extended periods of time, giving leading companies enough room to get comfortable and set in their strategies until their worlds are turned upside down.2
The rapid turnover in the Fortune 100 shows how short life can be for even very large companies. Contrast this with religious, political, and educational institutions, which often are imbued with time-transcending values, and sustained by the faithful efforts of successive generations of members who want them to continue to exist, for rational and emotional reasons, beyond their stewards’ own lifespans. This is also true in many family-owned companies.3 Corporate longevity for its own sake, however, can feel out of step in publicly owned companies that focus on maximizing shareholder value, particularly in our time of global competitive dynamics, transient corporate relationships, and transaction-motivated interactions between employers and employees that have lost much appreciation of the value of loyalty.4 (It should be noted, however, that finance scholars have begun to develop the idea of “loyalty shares” to reward long-term investors and to counter the short-term financial performance pressures that cause corporate underinvestment.5)
If longevity is hard to achieve; what about enduring corporate greatness? The bestselling book Good to Great defined “great” companies as those eleven that for a period of fifteen years after a major transition were able to achieve average cumulative stock returns at least three times those of the overall stock market.6 The book concluded that such enduring greatness depends on a certain type of leadership style. Corporate greatness, however, appears to be even more fleeting than corporate longevity. By 2007, only three of the eleven great companies profiled in Good to Great remained great, with the eight others either no longer existing as independent institutions or now performing at levels below greatness.7 This seems consistent with the fact that some companies get lucky for an extended period of time.8 But even companies that are identifiable as great through the statistical analysis of sustained superior
Figure 1.1 HP’s Progression in Fortune 100 between
Created by R. A. Burgelman and P. E. Meza.
performance still face the question of whether their success is based on superior capabilities or on benefiting from a process of cumulative advantage (e.g., increasing returns to adoption, or network effects, that create nonlinear winner-take-all strategic dynamics).9
This raises the question of what “greatness” really means. In the end greatness is unavoidably subjective, since the objective measures used to demonstrate it are a matter of choice. Corporate greatness should perhaps always be considered in terms of performance measured against the best relevant competitors along multiple dimensions, such as stock price performance, market share, profitability, customer and employee satisfaction, and the like. A company only lives long enough to become great if it continues to be able to satisfy its customers to generate the resources necessary for staying afloat, and can only remain independent if the majority of its shareholders want it that way.
Company greatness is also somewhat similar to optimal firm size; that is, it is basically a static measure that is determined at a particular moment in time and is ephemeral because in the next moment, as the data suggests, any given firm can (and often will) fall from greatness. It may therefore be more useful to view company greatness, like optimal firm size, as the byproduct of a dynamic process.10 Similarly, corporate greatness can be viewed as the byproduct of a company’s continued strategic efforts to remain—in the words of Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella—relevant to customers and investors.11 Remaining relevant to customers and shareholders can then be viewed as the necessary and sufficient condition for corporate longevity.
With this in mind, greatness—admittedly subjectively—is redefined in this book as a company’s capacity to transform itself throughout its lifetime so as to remain relevant by being able to make fundamental contributions that are highly valued by its evolving customer base, and that in turn generate sufficient value for its shareholders to want to support the company’s continued independence. Later in this chapter, we will see that Dave Packard had deeply grasped this strategic imperative and tirelessly communicated it to his executives.
A TYPOLOGY OF COMPANY FOUNDING
Company-building efforts can be characterized in terms of two dimensions. The first dimension concerns the initial founders’ purpose: whether the venture’s initial purpose is short-term instrumental (primarily serving the financial objectives of the founders and early employees) or long-term institutional (primarily geared toward building a long-living company). It is important to note here that a founder’s initial purpose may of course change over time. For instance, it is reasonable to assume that most founders probably start with high hopes of building a company for the long term, but end up cashing out simply because it does not work out the way they had envisaged.12 The second dimension concerns adaptive capability: whether the venture relatively quickly succumbs to the pressures of the external environment or is able to stay ahead of these pressures (stay relevant) and survives for the long term. This is shown in Figure 1.2.
Adaptive Capability
High Low
Founder’s Purpose
Short-term Financial
Short-lived Company (Built for Exit)
Failed Company
Figure 1.2 A Typology of Company Founding.
Source: Created by R. A. Burgelman.
Long-term Institutional
Long-lived Company (Built to Become)
Live-to-be Acquired Company (or fail)
Figure 1.2 shows four generic types of company-building efforts. Failing companies are ventures that serve (or end up serving) an instrumental purpose but have low adaptive capability. The vast majority of start-up companies, unfortunately, fall into this category. Short-lived companies are ventures that serve an instrumental purpose but have sufficiently high adaptive capability that they can survive long enough to secure a successful exit for the founders and investors. A fairly recent example is Instagram, a start-up company with thirteen employees that was sold to Facebook in 2011 for $1 billion.13
Live-to-be-acquired companies originate with an institution-building purpose but over time lose the adaptive capability necessary to sustain their independence in the long run, and eventually get acquired (or fail and disband). HP’s acquisition of Compaq in 2002 remains a major example. Long-lived companies originate from an institution-building purpose and are able to continue to develop the adaptive capability necessary to sustain themselves as independent economic institutions for the long term, sometimes hundreds of years.14 These long-lived companies are able to transform themselves multiple times to weather the turbulence of environmental change and often absorb some of the short-lived ventures and live-to-be-acquired companies, which add diversity and growth opportunities and increase their ability to survive. These long-lived companies and their process of “corporate becoming” is the phenomenon of interest of this book.
This book focuses on HP’s process of becoming. By 2016, HP had existed as an independent company for seventy-seven years and had been able to acquire major companies such as Compaq, which previously had absorbed large companies such as Tandem Computers and DEC, and EDS. Also, by 2015 HP had been able to transform itself six times and in 2016,15 was working through a seventh, truly watershed transformation.
CONTEXT DYNAMICS AND CORPORATE BECOMING
Looking at a company’s history involves understanding the continuities, contingencies, and changes in external and internal contexts that the company faces over time.
Continuities are patterns that extend for a long time; by contrast, contingencies are events that do not form a pattern.16 External continuities (e.g., technological forces, regulatory laws) as well as internal ones (e.g., the imprint of founders’ values and approaches beyond their own tenures, the unresolved issues and challenges left to a successor CEO by his or her predecessor) extend beyond the tenure of any CEO in the evolution of the firm. Contingencies—unexpected good luck or bad luck events—unavoidably confront CEOs during their tenures.
Context is formed by the set of changing external and internal forces within which strategic leadership must operate. Context does not cause events, but determines its consequences; for instance, slipping on a path in a flat field may result in a strained ankle or broken leg, but slipping on a path along a hundred-foot cliff may result in death.17 As the statesman and historian Henry Kissinger has insightfully observed:
Leaders cannot create the context in which they operate. Their distinctive contribution consists in operating at the limit of what the given situation permits. If they exceed these limits, they crash; if they fall short of what is necessary, their policies stagnate. If they build soundly, they may create a new set of relationships that sustains itself over a historical period because all parties consider it in their own interest.18
Kissinger’s view about context could be interpreted to imply that leaders must always take the context as unalterably given, but this would of course be too limited an interpretation.19 Also, leaders must be able to simultaneously take into account and deal with both the internal and external dimensions of context. Once a leader takes strategic actions that change the context, however, the consequences, as is widely understood, usually cannot be fully anticipated.20
One important implication of the importance of context is that strategic leadership must be able to operate in unstructured, or at best ill-structured, situations.21 The corporate environment is messy: key executives often undertake strategic actions that may not be well aligned; a company’s most threatening competitor may not be apparent in advance; the players in any industry can make a multitude of strategic moves; and the results of competitive interaction between industry competitors are not always predictable. The functioning of the strategic leadership in large, complex organizations is therefore likely to be relatively untidy, and difficult to capture in relatively simple analytical models.
Changes in internal and external context make useful milestones for studying the role of strategic leadership in the evolution of a company over time. The changes can be subtle and hard to perceive as they occur, or they can be glaringly obvious. They are usually caused by changes to the rules of the game that govern the context in which firms operate. There are several different types of rules that shape the context dynamics over time.
Normative rules are based on law, cultural norms, ethics, and administrative principles. For instance, consider the rule of “fair use” that governed the way in which consumers could copy and share their copyrighted material such as music. Technological rules are based on the available technical solutions at a particular moment in time.
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power of creating atmosphere.—R B , Masters of the English Novel.
Not until 1877, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s first published narrative, does any Englishman of real caliber show both desire and ability to do something new with the short story. This narrative was “A Lodging for the Night,” published in Temple Bar for October.... “A Lodging for the Night” is as clearly and consciously an impressionistic short story as George Meredith’s contemporary novelettes are not of that category; the two stories which followed (“Will o’ the Mill” and “The Sire de Malétroit’s Door”) would assure the most timid critic of our generation that here was a master in this department of fiction.... There is “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” that short story thrown over into the form of a detective romance.... Or there is “Markheim,” a story less powerful in execution, but more excellent in workmanship, and an almost ideal example of the impressionistic short story. Flaubert might have written the description of the curiosity shop as the murderer saw it, with its accusing clock-voices, its wavering shadows, from the inner door “a long slit of daylight like a pointing finger.” And Flaubert would have praised the skilful gradation of incident and description, whereby conscience gains and gains in the struggle for Markheim’s mind. But Hawthorne would have been prouder still of the plot—a weak man with a remnant of high ideals suddenly realizing that his curve is plotted and can lead him only downwards.... How like to Hawthorne’s usual way is Stevenson’s determination to make, at all costs, a moral issue the outcome of his story!... “Will o’ the Mill” is like a twice-told tale not only in theme; its whole effect is Hawthornesque. “A Lodging for the Night” has for its kernel a question of ethics.—H. S. C , The Short Story in English.
FURTHER REFERENCES FOR READING ON STEVENSON
Mr Stevenson’s Methods in Fiction, A. Conan Doyle (1890); Robert Louis Stevenson, An Elegy, Richard Le Gallienne (1895); Robert Louis Stevenson, Walter Raleigh (1895); Vailima Letters, to Sidney Colvin (1895); Adventures in Criticism, A. T. Quiller-Couch (1896); Critical Kit-Kats, Edmund W. Gosse (1896); Studies in Two Literatures, Arthur Symons (1897); Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, Graham Balfour (1901); Stevenson’s Attitude to Life, J. F. Genung (1901); Memories of Vailima, Isobel Strong and Lloyd Osbourne (1903); Robert Louis Stevenson, W. R. Nicoll and G. K. Chesterton.
FOR ANALYSIS
A LODGING FOR THE NIGHT
BY ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
It was late in November, 1456. The snow fell over Paris with rigorous, relentless persistence; sometimes the wind made a sally and scattered it in flying vortices; sometimes there was a lull, and flake after flake descended out of the black night air, silent, circuitous, interminable. To poor people, looking up under moist eyebrows, it seemed a wonder where it all came from. Master Francis Villon had propounded an alternative that afternoon, at a tavern window; was it only Pagan Jupiter plucking geese upon Olympus? or were the holy angels moulting? He was only a poor master of arts, he went on; and as the question somewhat touched upon divinity, he durst not venture to conclude. A silly old priest from Montargis, who was among the company, treated the young rascal to a bottle of wine in honor of the jest and grimaces with which it was accompanied, and swore on his own white beard that he had been just such another irreverent dog when he was Villon’s age.
2. The air was raw and pointed, but not far below freezing; and the flakes were large, damp, and adhesive. The whole city was sheeted up. An army might have marched from end to end and not a footfall given the alarm. If there were any belated birds in heaven, they saw the island like a large white patch, and the bridges like slim white spars, on the black ground of the river High up overhead the snow settled among the tracery of the cathedral towers. Many a niche was drifted full; many a statue wore a long white bonnet on its grotesque or sainted head. The gargoyles had been transformed into
great false noses, drooping toward the point. The crockets were like upright pillows swollen on one side. In the intervals of the wind, there was a dull sound of dripping about the precincts of the church.
3. The cemetery of St. John had taken its own share of the snow. All the graves were decently covered; tall white housetops stood around in grave array; worthy burghers were long ago in bed, be-nightcapped like their domiciles; there was no light in all the neighborhood but a little peep from a lamp that hung swinging in the church choir, and tossed the shadows to and fro in time to its oscillations. The clock was hard on ten when the patrol went by with halberds and a lantern, beating their hands; and they saw nothing suspicious about the cemetery of St. John.
4. Yet there was a small house, backed up against the cemetery wall, which was still awake, and awake to evil purpose, in that snoring district. There was not much to betray it from without; only a stream of warm vapor from the chimney-top, a patch where the snow melted on the roof, and a few half-obliterated footprints at the door. But within, behind the shuttered windows, Master Francis Villon, the poet, and some of the thievish crew with whom he consorted, were keeping the night alive and passing round the bottle.
5. A great pile of living embers diffused a strong and ruddy glow from the arched chimney. Before this straddled Dom Nicolas, the Picardy monk, with his skirts picked up and his fat legs bared to the comfortable warmth. His dilated shadow cut the room in half; and the firelight only escaped on either side of his broad person, and in a little pool between his outspread feet. His face had the beery, bruised appearance of the continual drinker’s; it was covered with a network of congested veins, purple in ordinary circumstances, but now pale violet, for even with his back to the fire the cold pinched him on the other side. His cowl had half fallen back, and made a strange excrescence on either side of his bull neck.
So he straddled, grumbling, and cut the room in half with the shadow of his portly frame.
6. On the right, Villon and Guy Tabary were huddled together over a scrap of parchment; Villon making a ballad which he was to call the “Ballad of Roast Fish,” and Tabary spluttering admiration at his shoulder. The poet was a rag of a man, dark, little, and lean, with hollow cheeks and thin black locks. He carried his four-and-twenty years with feverish animation. Greed had made folds about his eyes, evil smiles had puckered his mouth. The wolf and pig struggled together in his face. It was an eloquent, sharp, ugly, earthly countenance. His hands were small and prehensile, with fingers knotted like a cord; and they were continually flickering in front of him in violent and expressive pantomime. As for Tabary, a broad, complacent, admiring imbecility breathed from his squash nose and slobbering lips: he had become a thief, just as he might have become the most decent of burgesses, by the imperious chance that rules the lives of human geese and human donkeys.
7. At the monk’s other hand, Montigny and Thevenin Pensete played a game of chance. About the first there clung some flavor of good birth and training, as about a fallen angel; something long, lithe, and courtly in the person; something aquiline and darkling in the face. Thevenin, poor soul, was in great feather: he had done a good stroke of knavery that afternoon in the Faubourg St. Jacques, and all night he had been gaining from Montigny. A flat smile illuminated his face; his bald head shone rosily in a garland of red curls; his little protuberant stomach shook with silent chucklings as he swept in his gains.
8. “Doubles or quits?” said Thevenin.
9. Montigny nodded grimly
10. “Some may prefer to dine in state,” wrote Villon, “On bread and cheese on silver plate. Or, or—help me out, Guido!”
11. Tabary giggled.
12. “Or parsley on a golden dish,” scribbled the poet.
13. The wind was freshening without; it drove the snow before it, and sometimes raised its voice in a victorious whoop, and made sepulchral grumblings in the chimney. The cold was growing sharper as the night went on. Villon, protruding his lips, imitated the gust with something between a whistle and a groan. It was an eerie, uncomfortable talent of the poet’s, much detested by the Picardy monk.
14. “Can’t you hear it rattle in the gibbet?” said Villon. “They are all dancing the devil’s jig on nothing, up there. You may dance, my gallants, you’ll be none the warmer! Whew! what a gust! Down went somebody just now! A medlar the fewer on the three-legged medlar-tree!—I say, Dom Nicolas, it’ll be cold to-night on the St. Denis Road?” he asked.
15. Dom Nicolas winked both his big eyes, and seemed to choke upon his Adam’s apple. Montfaucon, the great grisly Paris gibbet, stood hard by the St. Denis Road, and the pleasantry touched him on the raw. As for Tabary, he laughed immoderately over the medlars; he had never heard anything more light-hearted; and he held his sides and crowed. Villon fetched him a fillip on the nose, which turned his mirth into an attack of coughing.
16. “Oh, stop that row,” said Villon, “and think of rhymes to ‘fish.’”
17. “Doubles or quits,” said Montigny, doggedly.
18. “With all my heart,” quoth Thevenin.
19. “Is there any more in that bottle?” asked the monk.
20. “Open another,” said Villon. “How do you ever hope to fill that big hogshead, your body, with little things like bottles? And how do you expect to get to heaven? How many angels, do you fancy, can be spared to carry up a single monk from
Picardy? Or do you think yourself another Elias—and they’ll send the coach for you?”
21. “Hominibus impossible,” replied the monk, as he filled his glass.
22. Tabary was in ecstasies.
23. Villon filliped his nose again.
24. “Laugh at my jokes, if you like,” he said.
25. “It was very good,” objected Tabary.
26. Villon made a face at him. “Think of rhymes to ‘fish,’” he said. “What have you to do with Latin? You’ll wish you knew none of it at the great assizes, when the devil calls for Guido Tabary, clericus—the devil with the humpback and red-hot finger-nails. Talking of the devil,” he added, in a whisper, “look at Montigny!”
27. All three peered covertly at the gamester. He did not seem to be enjoying his luck. His mouth was a little to a side; one nostril nearly shut, and the other much inflated. The black dog was on his back, as people say in terrifying nursery metaphor; and he breathed hard under the grewsome burden.
28. “He looks as if he could knife him,” whispered Tabary, with round eyes.
29. The monk shuddered, and turned his face and spread his open hands to the red embers. It was the cold that thus affected Dom Nicolas, and not any excess of moral sensibility.
30. “Come, now,” said Villon—“about this ballad. How does it run so far?” And beating time with his hand he read it aloud to Tabary.
31. They were interrupted at the fourth rhyme by a brief and fatal movement among the gamesters. The round was completed, and Thevenin was just opening his mouth to claim another victory, when Montigny leaped up, swift as an adder, and stabbed him to the heart. The blow took effect before he
had time to move. A tremor or two convulsed his frame; his hands opened and shut, his heels rattled on the floor; then his head rolled backward over one shoulder with the eyes wide open; and Thevenin Pensete’s spirit had returned to Him who gave it.
32. Everyone sprung to his feet; but the business was over in two twos. The four living fellows looked at each other in rather a ghastly fashion; the dead man contemplating a corner of the roof with a singular and ugly leer.
33. “My God!” said Tabary; and he began to pray in Latin.
34. Villon broke out into hysterical laughter. He came a step forward and ducked a ridiculous bow at Thevenin, and laughed still louder. Then he sat down suddenly, all of a heap, upon a stool, and continued laughing bitterly as though he would shake himself to pieces.
35. Montigny recovered his composure first.
36. “Let’s see what he has about him,” he remarked; and he picked the dead man’s pockets with a practiced hand, and divided the money into four equal portions on the table. “There’s for you,” he said.
37. The monk received his share with a deep sigh, and a single stealthy glance at the dead Thevenin, who was beginning to sink himself and topple sideways off the chair.
38. “We’re all in for it,” cried Villon, swallowing his mirth. “It’s a hanging job for every man jack of us that’s here—not to speak of those who aren’t.” He made a shocking gesture in the air with his raised right hand, and put out his tongue and threw his head on one side, so as to counterfeit the appearance of one who has been hanged. Then he pocketed his share of the spoil, and executed a shuffle with his feet as if to restore the circulation.
39. Tabary was the last to help himself; he made a dash at the money, and retired to the other end of the apartment.
40. Montigny stuck Thevenin upright in the chair, and drew out a dagger, which was followed by a jet of blood.
41. “You fellows had better be moving,” he said, as he wiped the blade on his victim’s doublet.
42. “I think we had,” returned Villon, with a great gulp. “Damn his fat head!” he broke out. “It sticks in my throat like phlegm. What right has a man to have red hair when he is dead?” And he fell all of a heap again upon the stool, and fairly covered his face with his hands.
43. Montigny and Dom Nicolas laughed aloud, even Tabary feebly chiming in.
44. “Cry baby,” said the monk.
45. “I always said he was a woman,” added Montigny, with a sneer. “Sit up, can’t you?” he went on, giving another shake to the murdered body. “Tread out that fire, Nick!”
46. But Nick was better employed; he was quietly taking Villon’s purse, as the poet sat, limp and trembling, on the stool where he had been making a ballad not three minutes before. Montigny and Tabary dumbly demanded a share of the booty, which the monk silently promised as he passed the little bag into the bosom of his gown. In many ways an artistic nature unfits a man for practical existence.
47. No sooner had the theft been accomplished than Villon shook himself, jumped to his feet, and began helping to scatter and extinguish the embers. Meanwhile Montigny opened the door and cautiously peered into the street. The coast was clear; there was no meddlesome patrol in sight. Still it was judged wiser to slip out severally; and as Villon was himself in a hurry to escape from the neighborhood of the dead Thevenin, and the rest were in a still greater hurry to get rid of him before he should discover the loss of his money, he was the first by general consent to issue forth into the street.
48. The wind had triumphed and swept all the clouds from heaven. Only a few vapors, as thin as moonlight, fleeted
rapidly across the stars. It was bitter cold; and by a common optical effect, things seemed almost more definite than in the broadest daylight. The sleeping city was absolutely still; a company of white hoods, a field full of little alps, below the twinkling stars. Villon cursed his fortune. Would it were still snowing! Now, wherever he went, he left an indelible trail behind him on the glittering streets; wherever he went he was still tethered to the house by the cemetery of St. John; wherever he went he must weave, with his own plodding feet, the rope that bound him to the crime and would bind him to the gallows. The leer of the dead man came back to him with a new significance. He snapped his fingers as if to pluck up his own spirits, and choosing a street at random, stepped boldly forward in the snow.
49. Two things preoccupied him as he went; the aspect of the gallows at Montfaucon in this bright, windy phase of the night’s existence, for one; and for another, the look of the dead man with his bald head and garland of red curls. Both struck cold upon his heart, and he kept quickening his pace as if he could escape from unpleasant thoughts by mere fleetness of foot. Sometimes he looked back over his shoulder with a sudden nervous jerk; but he was the only moving thing in the white streets, except when the wind swooped round a corner and threw up the snow, which was beginning to freeze, in spouts of glittering dust.
50. Suddenly he saw, a long way before him, a black clump and a couple of lanterns. The clump was in motion, and the lanterns swung as though carried by men walking. It was a patrol. And though it was merely crossing his line of march, he judged it wiser to get out of eyeshot as speedily as he could. He was not in the humor to be challenged, and he was conscious of making a very conspicuous mark upon the snow. Just on his left hand there stood a great hotel, with some turrets and a large porch before the door; it was half-ruinous, he remembered, and had long stood empty; and so he made three steps of it, and jumped into the shelter of the porch. It
was pretty dark inside, after the glimmer of the snowy streets, and he was groping forward with outspread hands, when he stumbled over some substance which offered an indescribable mixture of resistances, hard and soft, firm and loose. His heart gave a leap, and he sprung two steps back and stared dreadfully at the obstacle. Then he gave a little laugh of relief. It was only a woman, and she dead. He knelt beside her to make sure upon this latter point. She was freezing cold, and rigid like a stick. A little ragged finery fluttered in the wind about her hair, and her cheeks had been heavily rouged that same afternoon. Her pockets were quite empty; but in her stocking, underneath the garter, Villon found two of the small coins that went by the name of whites. It was little enough, but it was always something, and the poet was moved with a deep sense of pathos that she should have died before she had spent her money. That seemed to him a dark and pitiful mystery; and he looked from the coins in his hand to the dead woman, and back again to the coins, shaking his head over the riddle of man’s life.
51. Henry V. of England, dying at Vincennes just after he had conquered France, and this poor jade cut off by a cold draught in a great man’s doorway, before she had time to spend her couple of whites—it seemed a cruel way to carry on the world. Two whites would have taken such a little while to squander; and yet it would have been one more good taste in the mouth, one more smack of the lips, before the devil got the soul, and the body was left to birds and vermin. He would like to use all his tallow before the light was blown out and the lantern broken.
52. While these thoughts were passing through his mind, he was feeling, half mechanically, for his purse. Suddenly his heart stopped beating; a feeling of cold scales passed up the back of his legs, and a cold blow seemed to fall upon his scalp. He stood petrified for a moment; then he felt again with one feverish movement; and then his loss burst upon him, and he was covered at once with perspiration. To spend-thrifts
money is so living and actual—it is such a thin veil between them and their pleasures! There is only one limit to their fortune—that of time; and a spendthrift with only a few crowns is the Emperor of Rome until they are spent. For such a person to lose his money is to suffer the most shocking reverse, and fall from heaven to hell, from all to nothing, in a breath. And all the more if he has put his head in the halter for it; if he may be hanged to-morrow for that same purse, so dearly earned, so foolishly departed! Villon stood and cursed; he threw the two whites into the street; he shook his fist at heaven; he stamped, and was not horrified to find himself trampling the poor corpse. Then he began rapidly to retrace his steps toward the house beside the cemetery. He had forgotten all fear of the patrol, which was long gone by at any rate, and had no idea but that of his lost purse. It was in vain that he looked right and left upon the snow; nothing was to be seen. He had not dropped it in the streets. Had it fallen in the house? He would have liked dearly to go in and see; but the idea of the grisly occupant unmanned him. And he saw besides, as he drew near, that their efforts to put out the fire had been unsuccessful; on the contrary, it had broken into a blaze, and a changeful light played in the chinks of door and window, and revived his terror for the authorities and Paris gibbet.
53. He returned to the hotel with the porch, and groped about upon the snow for the money he had thrown away in his childish passion. But he could only find one white; the other had probably struck sideways and sunk deeply in. With a single white in his pocket, all his projects for a rousing night in some wild tavern vanished utterly away. And it was not only pleasure that fled laughing from his grasp; positive discomfort, positive pain, attacked him as he stood ruefully before the porch. His perspiration had dried upon him, and although the wind had now fallen, a binding frost was setting in stronger with every hour, and he felt benumbed and sick at heart. What was to be done? Late as was the hour, improbable as was
success, he would try the house of his adopted father, the chaplain of St. Benoit.
54. He ran there all the way, and knocked timidly There was no answer. He knocked again and again, taking heart with every stroke; and at last steps were heard approaching from within. A barred wicket fell open in the iron-studded door, and emitted a gush of yellow light.
55. “Hold up your face to the wicket,” said the chaplain, from within.
56. “It’s only me,” whimpered Villon.
57. “Oh, it’s only you, is it?” returned the chaplain; and he cursed him with foul unpriestly oaths for disturbing him at such an hour, and bade him be off to hell, where he came from.
58. “My hands are blue to the wrist,” pleaded Villon; “my feet are dead and full of twinges; my nose aches with the sharp air; the cold lies at my heart. I may be dead before morning. Only this once, father, and before God, I will never ask again!”
59. “You should have come earlier,” said the ecclesiastic coolly. “Young men require a lesson now and then.” He shut the wicket and retired deliberately into the interior of the house.
60. Villon was beside himself; he beat upon the door with his hands and feet, and shouted hoarsely after the chaplain.
61. “Wormy old fox!” he cried. “If I had my hand under your twist, I would send you flying headlong into the bottomless pit.”
62. A door shut in the interior, faintly audible to the poet down long passages. He passed his hand over his mouth with an oath. And then the humor of the situation struck him, and he laughed and looked lightly up to heaven, where the stars seemed to be winking over his discomfiture.
63. What was to be done? It looked very like a night in the frosty streets. The idea of the dead woman popped into his imagination, and gave him a hearty fright; what had happened to her in the early night might very well happen to him before morning. And he so young! and with such immense possibilities of disorderly amusement before him! He felt quite pathetic over the notion of his own fate, as if it had been some one else’s, and made a little imaginative vignette of the scene in the morning when they should find his body.
64. He passed all his chances under review, turning the white between his thumb and forefinger. Unfortunately he was on bad terms with some old friends who would once have taken pity on him in such a plight. He had lampooned them in verses; he had beaten and cheated them; and yet now, when he was in so close a pinch, he thought there was at least one who might perhaps relent. It was a chance. It was worth trying at least, and he would go and see.
65. On the way two little accidents happened to him which colored his musings in a very different manner For, first he fell in with the track of a patrol, and walked in it for some hundred yards, although it lay out of his direction. And this spirited him up; at least he had confused his trail; for he was still possessed with the idea of people tracking him all about Paris over the snow, and collaring him next morning before he was awake. The other matter affected him quite differently. He passed a street corner, where, not so long before, a woman and her child had been devoured by wolves. This was just the kind of weather, he reflected, when wolves might take it into their heads to enter Paris again; and a lone man in these deserted streets would run the chance of something worse than a mere scare. He stopped and looked upon the place with an unpleasant interest—it was a center where several lanes intersected each other; and he looked down them all, one after another, and held his breath to listen, lest he should detect some galloping black things on the snow or hear the sound of howling between him and the river. He remembered
his mother telling him the story and pointing out the spot, while he was yet a child. His mother! If he only knew where she lived, he might make sure at least of shelter. He determined he would inquire upon the morrow; nay, he would go and see her too, poor old girl! So thinking, he arrived at his destination—his last hope for the night.
66. The house was quite dark, like its neighbors; and yet after a few taps, he heard a movement overhead, a door opening, and a cautious voice asking who was there. The poet named himself in a loud whisper, and waited, not without some trepidation, the result. Nor had he to wait long. A window was suddenly opened, and a pailful of slops splashed down upon the doorstep. Villon had not been unprepared for something of the sort, and had put himself as much in shelter as the nature of the porch admitted; but for all that, he was deplorably drenched below the waist. His hose began to freeze almost at once. Death from cold and exposure stared him in the face; he remembered he was of phthisical tendency, and began coughing tentatively. But the gravity of the danger steadied his nerves. He stopped a few hundred yards from the door where he had been so rudely used, and reflected with his nose. He could only see one way of getting a lodging, and that was to take it. He had noticed a house not far away, which looked as if it might be easily broken into, and thither he betook himself promptly, entertaining himself on the way with the idea of a room still hot, with a table still loaded with the remains of supper, where he might pass the rest of the black hours and whence he should issue, on the morrow, with an armful of valuable plate. He even considered on what viands and what wines he should prefer; and as he was calling the roll of his favorite dainties, roast fish presented itself to his mind with an odd mixture of amusement and horror.
67. “I shall never finish that ballad,” he thought to himself; and then, with another shudder at the recollection, “Oh, damn his fat head!” he repeated fervently, and spat upon the snow.
68. The house in question looked dark at first sight; but as Villon made a preliminary inspection in search of the handiest point of attack, a little twinkle of light caught his eye from behind a curtained window.
69. “The devil!” he thought. “People awake! Some student or some saint, confound the crew! Can’t they get drunk and lie in bed snoring like their neighbors! What’s the good of curfew, and poor devils of bellringers jumping at a rope’s end in belltowers? What’s the use of day, if people sit up all night! The gripes to them!” He grinned as he saw where his logic was leading him. “Every man to his business, after all,” added he, “and if they’re awake, by the Lord, I may come by a supper honestly for once, and cheat the devil.”
70. He went boldly to the door and knocked with an assured hand. On both previous occasions, he had knocked timidly and with some dread of attracting notice; but now, when he had just discarded the thought of a burglarious entry, knocking at a door seemed a mighty simple and innocent proceeding. The sound of his blows echoed through the house with thin, phantasmal reverberations, as though the house were empty; but these had scarcely died away before a measured tread drew near, a couple of bolts were withdrawn, and one wing was opened broadly, as though no guile or fear of guile were known to those within. A tall figure of a man, muscular and spare, but a little bent, confronted Villon. The head was massive in bulk, but finely sculptured; the nose blunt at the bottom, but refining upward to where it joined a pair of strong and honest eyebrows; the mouth and eyes surrounded with delicate markings, and the whole face based upon a thick white beard, boldly and squarely trimmed. Seen as it was by the light of a flickering hand-lamp, it looked, perhaps, nobler than it had a right to do; but it was a fine face, honorable rather than intelligent, strong, simple, and righteous.
71. “You knock late, sir,” said the old man, in resonant, courteous tones.
72. Villon cringed, and brought up many servile words of apology; at a crisis of this sort, the beggar was uppermost in him, and the man of genius hid his head with confusion.
73. “You are cold,” repeated the old man, “and hungry? Well, step in.” And he ordered him into the house with a noble enough gesture.
74. “Some great seigneur,” thought Villon, as his host, setting down the lamp on the flagged pavement of the entry, shot the bolts once more into their places.
75. “You will pardon me if I go in front,” he said, when this was done; and he preceded the poet up-stairs into a large apartment, warmed with a pan of charcoal and lit by a great lamp hanging from the roof. It was very bare of furniture; only some gold plate on a sideboard; some folios; and a stand of armor between the windows. Some smart tapestry hung upon the walls, representing the crucifixion of our Lord in one piece, and in another a scene of shepherds and shepherdesses by a running stream. Over the chimney was a shield of arms.
76. “Will you seat yourself,” said the old man, “and forgive me if I leave you? I am alone in my house to-night, and if you are to eat I must forage for you myself.”
77. No sooner was his host gone than Villon leaped from the chair on which he had just seated himself, and began examining the room, with the stealth and passion of a cat. He weighed the gold flagons in his hand, opened all the folios, and investigated the arms upon the shield, and the stuff with which the seats were lined. He raised the window curtains, and saw that the windows were set with rich stained glass in figures, so far as he could see, of martial import. Then he stood in the middle of the room, drew a long breath, and, retaining it with puffed cheeks, looked round and round him, turning on his heels, as if to impress every feature of the apartment on his memory.
78. “Seven pieces of plate,” he said. “If there had been ten, I would have risked it. A fine house, and a fine old master, so help me all the saints!”
79. And just then, hearing the old man’s tread returning along the corridor, he stole back to his chair, and began humbly toasting his wet legs before the charcoal pan.
80. His entertainer had a plate of meat in one hand and a jug of wine in the other. He sat down the plate upon the table, motioning Villon to draw in his chair, and, going to the sideboard, brought back two goblets, which he filled.
81. “I drink your better fortune,” he said, gravely touching Villon’s cup with his own.
82. “To our better acquaintance,” said the poet, growing bold. A mere man of the people would have been awed by the courtesy of the old seigneur, but Villon was hardened in that matter; he had made mirth for great lords before now, and found them as black rascals as himself. And so he devoted himself to the viands with a ravenous gusto, while the old man, leaning backward, watched him with steady, curious eyes.
83. “You have blood on your shoulder, my man,” he said.
84. Montigny must have laid his wet right hand upon him as he left the house. He cursed Montigny in his heart.
85. “It was none of my shedding,” he stammered.
86. “I had not supposed so,” returned his host, quietly. “A brawl?”
87. “Well, something of that sort,” Villon admitted with a quaver.
88. “Perhaps a fellow murdered?”
89. “Oh, no, not murdered,” said the poet, more and more confused. “It was all fair play—murdered by accident. I had no hand in it, God strike me dead!” he added, fervently.
90. “One rogue the fewer, I dare say,” observed the master of the house.
91. “You may dare to say that,” agreed Villon, infinitely relieved. “As big a rogue as there is between here and Jerusalem. He turned up his toes like a lamb. But it was a nasty thing to look at. I dare say you’ve seen dead men in your time, my lord?” he added, glancing at the armor.
92. “Many,” said the old man. “I have followed the wars, as you imagine.”
93. Villon laid down his knife and fork, which he had just taken up again.
94. “Were any of them bald?” he asked.
95. “Oh, yes, and with hair as white as mine.”
96. “I don’t think I should mind the white so much,” said Villon. “His was red.” And he had a return of his shuddering and tendency to laughter, which he drowned with a great draught of wine. “I’m a little put out when I think of it,” he went on. “I knew him—damn him! And then the cold gives a man fancies —or the fancies give a man cold, I don’t know which.”
97. “Have you any money?” asked the old man.
98. “I have one white,” returned the poet, laughing. “I got it out of a dead jade’s stocking in a porch. She was as dead as Cæsar, poor wench, and as cold as a church, with bits of ribbon sticking in her hair. This is a hard world in winter for wolves and wenches and poor rogues like me.”
99. “I,” said the old man, “am Enguerrand de la Feuillee, seigneur de Brisetout, bailly du Patatrac. Who and what may you be?”
100. Villon rose and made a suitable reverence. “I am called Francis Villon,” he said, “a poor master of arts in this university I know some Latin, and a deal of vice. I can make chansons, ballads, lais, virelais, and roundels and I am very fond of wine. I was born in a garret and I shall not improbably
die upon the gallows. I may add, my lord, that from this night forward I am your lordship’s very obsequious servant to command.”
101. “No servant of mine,” said the knight; “my guest for this evening, and no more.”
102. “A very grateful guest,” said Villon, politely, and he drank in dumb show to his entertainer.
103. “You are shrewd,” began the old man, tapping his forehead, “very shrewd; you have learning; you are a clerk; and yet you take a small piece of money off a dead woman in the street. Is it not a kind of theft?”
104. “It is a kind of theft much practiced in the wars, my lord.”
105. “The wars are the field of honor,” returned the old man, proudly. “There a man plays his life upon the cast; he fights in the name of his lord the king, his Lord God, and all their lordships the holy saints and angels.”
106. “Put it,” said Villon, “that I were really a thief, should I not play my life also, and against heavier odds?”
107. “For gain, but not for honor.”
108. “Gain?” repeated Villon, with a shrug. “Gain! The poor fellow wants supper, and takes it. So does the soldier in a campaign. Why, what are all these requisitions we hear so much about? If they are not gain to those who take them, they are loss enough to the others. The men-at-arms drink by a good fire, while the burgher bites his nails to buy them wine and wood. I have seen a good many plowmen swinging on trees about the country; ay, I have seen thirty on one elm, and a very poor figure they made; and when I asked some one how all these came to be hanged, I was told it was because they could not scrape together enough crowns to satisfy the men-at-arms.”
109. “These things are a necessity of war, which the low-born must endure with constancy. It is true that some captains
