Part 5 (1/2)
A great deal of light is thrown upon the manners and thought of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries by a body of literature which arose during those centuries. The estimation in which the cla.s.ses of society were held is indicated by one of these _fabliaux_. A party of knights pa.s.sed through a pleasant and shady meadow, in the midst of exquisite scenery; they were enchanted by the spot, and wished for meat and wine that they might tarry there and dine on the gra.s.s. There followed them a party of clerks, whose feelings were also aroused by the beauty of the place; and, in accord with the frivolous character given them throughout the _fabliaux_, they exclaimed: ”Had we fair maidens here, how pleasant a spot for play!” After they had pa.s.sed on, there came a party of villains, who, with their grosser ideas, thought not of the beauty of the place at all, but proceeded to indulge themselves in carnal pleasures and to use it for mean purposes.
These _fabliaux_ show us that Cupid disdained conventional restraint then as now; for in them the marriage of persons in different cla.s.ses often furnishes a theme for the story--this, too, notwithstanding the sharp caste distinctions which existed. Usually, the maiden is possessed of more beauty than wealth and belongs to the poor-knight cla.s.s; she is wedded to a peasant or villain who has become wealthy.
The husband turns out to be a brute; the lady is crafty and cunning.
He beats and abuses her, according to the instincts of his boorish nature; she, on the other hand, proves faithless as often as opportunity presents. The writers never visit condemnation upon her, for her husband is considered as undeserving of the possession of such a prize. It is a curious commentary on the manner of the times that upon the same ma.n.u.script, written by the same person, appear _fabliaux_ of this sort and stories of holy women dying in defence of their chast.i.ty. This contradiction runs throughout the literature of the period--the praise of virtue and the narration of gross immorality without an effort to condemn it. One of the most peculiar facts of the age is the extreme to which was carried the adoration of the Virgin and the strange things she is made to do and to countenance, in the mythology of the Middle Ages--for so we must cla.s.s most of the mediaeval stories of the saints and of the Virgin--to ardent and imaginative temperaments the Virgin took the character of Venus, and is frequently represented as the patroness of love. One of the religious stories tells us that some young men, while playing ball in front of a church, approached the porch of the edifice, upon which was a beautiful statue of Our Lady. One of them laid down his ring, which he had received from his lady-love. Then, to his amazement, he saw the image, which was ”fresh and new,” fix its eyes upon the ring. He became enamored of it, and, after due obeisance, he addressed Our Lady thus:
”I promise duly, That all my life I'll serve thee truly; For never saw I maiden fair Whose beauty could with thine compare, So courtly and so debonaire: And she who gave this ring to me, Though fair and sweet herself, than thee A hundred times less fair, I trow, Shall yield to thee her empire now.
'Tis true I've loved her long and well, As many a fond caress can tell; But now, forgotten and neglected, Her meaner charms for thine rejected, I give her ring--a lasting token Of faith which never shall be broken, Nor shared with maid or wife shall be The love I proffer unto thee.'”
With this address, he placed the ring upon the finger of the image.
Our Lady appeared flattered by the conquest she had made, and bent the finger on which the ring had been placed in order that it might not be withdrawn. The lover was astounded by the miracle, and was advised by his friends to retire from the world and to devote himself to the adoration and service of the Blessed Virgin. Neglecting this advice, he allowed love to resume its place and led to the altar the maiden who had given him the ring. But Our Lady was not to be deprived of her adorer, and when he laid himself upon the nuptial couch she immediately threw him into a profound slumber, and when he awoke he found her lying between him and his bride:
”She showed him straight her finger, where Was still the ring he'd given her; And well became her hand that ring Upon her soft skin glittering.
'Instead of love, thou'st shown,' said she, 'But falseness and disloyalty.
And ill hast kept thy faith to me.
Behold the ring thou gavest, for token And pledge of love fore'er unbroken, And call'd me a hundred times more fair Than ever earthly maidens were.
I have been ever true, but thou Hast taken a meaner leman now; Hast left for stinking nettle the rose, Sweet eglantine for flower more gross.'”
In the end, Our Lady forces him to leave his wife that he may dedicate himself entirely to her service. In other _fabliaux_ and in the chronicles, Mary is represented under the guise of the Lady Venus, who often appears in these romances. In this adoration of the Virgin as a maiden impelled by the same loves and hates as any mortal woman, it is not difficult to see the spirit of chivalry in its sensual expression.
Surely, if every lady had her knight, the Blessed Virgin, also, must have her devoted admirers; and by the height of her position and greater worthiness as the Queen of Heaven, by so much should she rise above any other woman in her right to command such adorers.
When we pa.s.s from the status of woman in the Middle Ages to her occupations, the subject becomes narrowed, not only by the lesser importance of the facts which merely ill.u.s.trate rather than demonstrate her position, but also because we shall exclude from our general consideration the women of the manors, the nuns, and, in their industrial capacities, the women of the guilds. These important cla.s.ses demand separate treatment.
After the middle of the twelfth century, it is easier to study the domestic manners of the people. We can, for instance, obtain very precise information as to the style of the dwellings in which they lived. There was a general uniformity in the houses, however they might vary in particulars. In the twelfth century, the hall continued to be the main part of the dwelling. Adjoining it at one end was the chamber, while at the other end might be found the stable. The whole building stood in an enclosure consisting of a yard in front and a garden in the rear, surrounded by a hedge and ditch. The house had a door in the front, and within, one door led to the chamber, and another to the stable. The chamber, also, frequently had a door leading out to the garden. There were usually windows in the hall, the stable and the chamber being lighted by openings in the part.i.tions between them and the hall, as well as by slits in the outer walls.
The windows themselves were commonly merely openings, which might be closed by wooden shutters. There was usually one such window in the chamber, besides those in the hall, so that it was better lighted than the stable.
From the _fabliaux_ we can obtain very precise ideas of the distribution of the rooms in the houses of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Thus, in one of the _fabliaux_, an old woman of mean condition of life is represented as visiting a burgher's wife, who, from a feeling of vanity, takes her into the chamber to show her the new bed, a very handsome affair. Afterward, when this lady takes refuge with the old dame, the latter conducts her from the hall to the chamber adjoining. The outer door of the chamber, by which egress could be had from the house without going through the hall, often figures in the stories as aiding the escape of the lovers of guilty wives, on the unexpected entrance of the husbands into the hall. It was in the chamber that fireplaces and chimneys were first introduced into mediaeval houses.
As the grouping of the rooms upon the ground floor made the house less compact and more susceptible to successful attack, the custom arose of having upper chambers. The upper room was called the solar, because it received much light from the sun. At first it was but a small chamber, approached from the outside. These outer stairs are often referred to in the _fabliaux_, as in the _fabliau_ of D'Estourmi, where a burgher and his wife deceive three monks of a neighboring abbey, who make love to the lady; she conceals her husband in the upper chamber, to which he goes by an outer staircase. The monks enter the hall, and the husband sees from the upper room, through a lattice, all that happens.
In another _fabliau_, a lady uses the solar as a hiding place for her husband, who has disguised himself as a gallant in order to test his wife's faithfulness. She penetrates his disguise, and, after closing the door of the solar upon him, sends a servant to give him a good beating, as an importunate suitor whom she desires to cure of his annoying pa.s.sion. The husband, too mortified to reveal his ident.i.ty and disclose his doubts as to his wife, has no redress but to sustain his a.s.sumed character and to escape down the outer stairs, pursued by the servants. The chamber soon came to be the most important part of the house, and frequently its name was given to the whole dwelling, a house with a solar being called an upper-storied chamber. The more considerable manors and castles differed from the ordinary houses only in having a greater a.s.semblage of rooms and more details than were found in the smaller dwellings.
Toward the fourteenth century, the rooms of houses generally began to be numerous, and the houses were often built around a court, the additions being chiefly to the number of offices and chambers. Wood continued to be the usual material for their construction. A new apartment was added to the house--the parlor, so called because it was the talking room. It was derived from the religious houses, in which the parlor was the reception room. As furniture was scanty, the rooms of the mediaeval house were almost bare. Chairs were very few, and seats in the masonry of the wall continued for centuries to be the princ.i.p.al accommodation of the kind; benches for seats and places of deposit of personal or household articles were usually made of a few boards laid across trestles. In the thirteenth century, the beds in the chamber came to be part.i.tioned off by curtains, which showed an advance in modesty, as it was customary to sleep wholly undressed.
Throughout the Middle Ages, the comforts of the houses were quite primitive; even the houses themselves were generally without architectural grace and frequently very unsubstantial. When watchmen were appointed in the towns, they were provided with a ”hook” with which to pull down a house when on fire, if its proximity to others threatened their destruction. As there was an absence of luxury in the houses and their furnis.h.i.+ngs, much value was placed on plate, which came to be a sign of wealth and social distinction. Dress, also, aided in marking distinctions between the wealthy and those in less fortunate circ.u.mstances, as did the luxuries found upon the tables of the former.
This fact of the general character of the discomforts of living, without regard to rank or condition, gave occasion for sumptuary laws--”the toe of the peasant pressed closely on the heel of the lord, and the gulf that parted them was the number of dishes upon their table, the quality of the cloth they put on, and the kind of fur they might wear to keep off the cold.”
Gla.s.s began to be introduced into dwelling houses in the time of Henry III., but was regarded as a great luxury. Pipes for carrying the refuse water and slops from the houses to sewers or cesspools were one of the great sanitary reforms of the reign of Edward I. The same able monarch made the use of baths popular among his people. The floors of the houses continued to be covered with an armful of hay, or a bundle of birch boughs or of rushes, although during the fourteenth century some of the wealthier farmers and persons of the trading cla.s.ses and the n.o.bility had begun to use imported carpets and hangings. Table linen and napkins were also coming into service. The use of forks was confined to royalty.
When the fine ladies went abroad in their vehicles or were carried in their chairs, they had to plow through streets deep with mire and filth; so much so, that it was not unusual for coaches to stick fast and depend upon the aid of some friendly teamster to extricate them.
The sanitation of the dwellings was little better than that of the streets. The stench of the houses of the poor was so great that the priests made it an excuse for failure to pay parochial visits to them.
The better cla.s.s of houses were, of course, kept much cleaner.
The impression that food in the Middle Ages was coa.r.s.e and not elaborate is not borne out, as we have seen, by the facts; for, from Anglo-Saxon times down, the people were very fond of the table, and in the higher circles elaborate banquets stood as one of the most usual resources of a hospitality which had to make up for its barrenness in other ways by the bounties of elaborate feasts, so that we are quite prepared for Alexander Neckam's list of kitchen requisites. This ecclesiastic of the latter half of the twelfth century has left us a list of the things to be found in a well-ordered kitchen. Besides his list, we have the testimony of cookbooks of the time, which give directions for making dishes that are both complicated and toothsome.
Indeed, the position of cook was one of importance, and upon him often rested, in great houses, the honor of the establishment.
In this connection may be given some of the curious injunctions of the Anglo-Saxon penitentials, which continued to be quoted throughout the Middle Ages, becoming superst.i.tious beliefs after they had lost their ecclesiastical character and undergone the changes which, with the lapse of time, develop folklore. One of the oddest prescribed that in case a ”mouse fall into liquor, let it be taken out, and sprinkle the liquor with holy-water, and if it be alive, the liquor may be used, but if it be dead, throw the liquor out and cleanse the vessel.”