CHAPTER XVI

HUSBANDS AT THE CHURCH DOOR

"Io ho uno grandissimo dubbio di voi, ch'io mi credo che se ne salvino tanti pochi di quegli che sono in istato di matrimonio, che de' mille, novecento novantanove credo che sia matrimonio del diavolo."--ST. BERNARDINO OF SIENA, Sermon xix

But we have as yet considered only one side of chivalry. While blushing, like Gibbon, to unite such discordant names, let us yet remember that the knight was "the champion of God _and the ladies_," and may therefore fairly claim to be judged in this latter capacity also.

Even here, however, we find him in practice just as far below either his avowed ideal or the too favourable pictures of later romance. The feudal system, with which knighthood was in fact bound up, precluded chivalry to women in its full modern sense. Land was necessarily held by personal service; therefore the woman, useless in war, must necessarily be given with her land to some man able to defend it and her. As even Gautier admits, the woman was too often a mere appendage of the fief; and he quotes from a _chanson de geste_, in which the emperor says to a favoured knight--

"Un de ces jours mourra un de mes pairs; Toute la terre vous en voudrai donner, Et la moiller, si prendre la voulez." [femme

Though he is perhaps right in pleading that, as time went on, the compulsion was rather less barefaced than this, he is still compelled sadly to acknowledge of the average medieval match in high life that "after all, whatever may be said, those are not the conditions of a truly free marriage, or, to speak plainly, of a truly Christian one." From this initial defect two others followed almost as a matter of course: the extreme haste with which marriages were concluded, and the indecently early age at which children were bound for life to partners whom they had very likely never seen. Gautier quotes from another _chanson de geste_, where a heroine, within a month of her first husband's death, remarries again on the very day on which her second bridegroom is proposed and introduced to her for the first time; and the poet adds, "Great was the joy and laughter that day!" The extreme promptitude with which the Wife of Bath provided herself with a new husband--or, for the matter of that, Chaucer's own mother--is characteristically medieval.

But child-marriages were the real curse of medieval home-life in high society. The immaturity of the parents could not fail to tell often upon the children; and when Berthold of Regensburg pointed out how brief was the average of life among the 13th-century nobility, and ascribed this to God's vengeance for their heartlessness towards the poor, he might more truly have traced the cause much further back. "In days of old," wrote a _trouvère_ of the 12th century, "nobles married at a mature age; faith and loyalty then reigned everywhere. But nowadays avarice and luxury are rampant, and two infants of twelve years old are wedded together: take heed lest they breed children!"[198] The Church did, indeed, refuse to recognize the bond of marriage if contracted before both parties had turned seven; and she further forbade the making of such contracts until the age of twelve for the girl and fifteen for the boy, though without daring, in this case, to impugn the validity of the marriage once contracted. That the weaker should be allowed to marry three years earlier than the stronger sex is justified by at least one great canon lawyer on the principle that "ill weeds grow apace"; a decision on which one would gladly have heard the comments of the Wife of Bath.[199] But "people let the Church protest, and married at any age they pleased"; for it was seldom indeed that the ecclesiastical prohibition was enforced against influence or wealth, and the Church herself, theory apart, was directly responsible for many of the worst abuses in this matter. Her determination to keep the whole marriage-law in her own hands, combined with her readiness to sell dispensations from her own regulations, resulted in a state of things almost incredible. On the one hand, a marriage was nullified by cousinship to the fourth degree, and even by the fact of the contracting parties having ever stood as sponsors to the same child, unless a papal dispensation had been bought; and this absurd severity not only nullified in theory half the peasants' marriages (since nearly everybody is more or less related in a small village), but gave rise to all sorts of tricks for obtaining fraudulent divorces. To quote again from Gautier, who tries all through to put the best possible face on the matter: "After a few years of marriage, a husband who had wearied of his wife could suddenly discover that they were related ... and here was a revival, under canonical and pious forms, of the ancient practice of divorce." It is the greatest mistake to suppose that divorce was a difficult matter in the Middle Ages; it was simply a question of money, as honest men frequently complained. The Church courts were ready to "make and unmake matrimony for money"; and "for a mantle of miniver" a man might get rid of his lawful wife.[200] An actual instance is worth many generalities. In the first quarter of the 14th century a Pope allowed the King and Queen of France to separate because they had _once_ been godparents to the same child; and at the same time sold a dispensation to a rich citizen who had _twice_ contracted the same relationship to the lady whom he now wished to marry. The collocation, in this case, was piquant enough to beget a clever pasquinade, which was chalked up at street corners in Paris. John XXII. probably laughed with the rest, and went on as before.

On the one hand, then, the marriage law was theoretically of the utmost strictness, though only to the poor man; but, on the other hand, it was of the most incredible laxity. A boy of fifteen and a girl of twelve might, at any time and in any place, not only without leave of parents, but against all their wishes, contract an indissoluble marriage by mere verbal promise, without any priestly intervention whatever. In other words, the whole world in Chaucer's time was a vaster and more commodious Gretna Green.[201] Moreover, not only the civil power, but apparently even the Church, sometimes hesitated to enforce even such legal precautions as existed against scandalous child-marriages. A stock case is quoted at length in the contemporary "Life of St. Hugh of Lincoln" (R.S., pp. 170-177), and fully corroborated by official documents. A wretched child who had just turned four was believed to be an heiress; a great noble took her to wife. He died two years later; she was at once snapped up by a second noble; and on his death, when she was apparently still only eleven, and certainly not much older, she was bought for 300 marks by a third knightly bridegroom. The bishop, though he excommunicated the first husband, and deprived the priest who had openly married him "in the face of the church," apparently made no attempt to declare the marriage null; and the third husband was still enjoying her estate twenty years after his wedding-day. In the face of instances like this (for another, scarcely less startling, may be found in Luce's "Du Guesclin," p. 139), we need no longer wonder that our poet's father was carried off in his earliest teens to be married by force to some girl perhaps even younger; or that in Chaucer's own time, when the middle classes were rapidly gaining more power in the state, Parliament legislated expressly against the frequent offences of this kind.

But the real root of the evil remained; so long as two children might, in a moment and without any religious ceremony whatever, pledge their persons and their properties for life, no legislation could be permanently effectual. From the moral side, we find Church councils fulminating desperately against the celebration of marriages in private houses or taverns, sometimes even after midnight, and with the natural concomitants of riot and excess. From the purely civil side, again, apart from runaway or irregular matches, there was also the scandalous frequency of formal child-marriages which were often the only security for the transmission of property; and here even the Church admitted the thin end of the wedge by permitting espousals "of children in their cradles," by way of exception, "for the sake of peace."[202] Let me quote here again from Smyth's "Lives of the Berkeleys." We there find, between 1288 and 1500, five marriages in which the ten contracting parties averaged less than eleven years. Maurice the Third, born in 1281, was only eight years old when he married a wife apparently of the same age; their eldest child was born before the father was fifteen; and the loyal Smyth comforts himself by reciting from Holy Scripture the still more precocious examples of Josiah and Solomon. It would be idle to multiply instances of so notorious a fact; but let us take one more case which touched all England, and must have come directly under Chaucer's notice. When the good Queen Anne of Bohemia was dead, for whose sake Richard II. would never afterwards live in his palace of Shene, it was yet necessary for his policy to take another wife. He chose the little daughter of the French King, then only seven years old, in spite of the remonstrances of his subjects. The pair were affianced by proxy in 1395; "and then (as I have been told) it was pretty to see her, young as she was; for she very well knew already how to play the queen." Next year, the two Kings met personally between Guines and Ardres, the later "Field of the Cloth of Gold," and sat down to meat together. "Then said the Duc de Bourbon many joyous and merry words to make the kings laugh.... And he spake aloud, addressing himself to the King of England, 'My Lord King of England, you should make good cheer; you have all that you desire and ask; you have your wife, or shall have; she shall be delivered to you!' Then said the King of France, 'Cousin of Bourbon, we would that our daughter were as old as our cousin the lady de St. Pol. She would bear the more love to our son the King of England, and it would have cost us a heavy dowry.' The King of England heard and understood this speech; wherefore he answered, inclining himself towards the King of France (though, indeed, the word had been addressed to the Duke, since the King had made the comparison of the daughter of the Comte de St. Pol), 'Fair father, we are well pleased with the present age of our wife, and we love not so much that she should be of great age as we take account of the love and alliance of our own selves and our kingdoms; for when we shall be at one accord and alliance together, there is no king in Christendom or elsewhere who could gainsay us.'"[203] The Royal pair proceeded at once to Calais, and the formal wedding took place three days later in the old church of St. Nicholas, which to Ruskin was a perpetual type of "the links unbroken between the past and present."

What kings were obliged to do at one time for political purposes, they would do at other times for money; and their subjects followed suit. As one of the authors of "Piers Plowman" puts it, the marriage choice should depend on personal qualities, and Christ will then bless it with sufficient prosperity.

"But few folk now follow this; for they give their children For covetise of chattels and cunning chapmen; Of kin nor of kindred account men but little ... Let her be unlovely, unlovesome abed, A bastard, a bondmaid, a beggar's daughter, That no courtesy can; but let her be known For rich or well-rented, though she be wrinkled for elde, There is no squire nor knight in country about, But will bow to that bondmaid, to bid her an husband, And wedden her for her wealth; and wish on the morrow That his wife were wax, or a wallet-full of nobles!"[204]

Moreover, this picture is abundantly borne out by plain facts and plain speech from other quarters. Richard II.'s first marriage, which turned out so happily when the boy of sixteen and the girl of fifteen had grown to know each other, was, in its essence, a bargain of pounds, shillings, and pence. A contemporary chronicler, recording how Richard offered an immense sum for her in order to outbid his Royal brother of France, heads his whole account of the transaction with the plain words, "The king buys himself a wife."[205] Gaston, Count of Foix, whom Froissart celebrates as a mirror of courtesy among contemporary princes, had a little ward of twelve whose hand was coveted by the great Duc de Berri, verging on his fiftieth year. But Gaston came most unwillingly to the point: "Yet was he not unwilling to suffer that the marriage should take place, but he intended to have a good sum of florins; not that he put forward that he meant to sell the lady, but he wished to be rewarded for his wardship, since he had had and nourished her for some nine years and a half, wherefore he required thirty thousand francs for her."[206] Dr. Gairdner has cited equally plain language used in the following century by a member of the noble family of Scrope, whose estate had become much impoverished. "'For very need,' he writes, 'I was fain to sell a little daughter I have for much less than I should have done by possibility'--a considerable point in his complaint being evidently the lowness of the price he got for his own child." Down to the very lowest rung of the social ladder, marriage was to a great extent a matter of money; and if we could look into the manor-rolls of Chaucer's perfect gentle Knight, we should find that one source of his income was a tax on each poor serf for leave to take a fellow-bondmaid to his bosom.[207] If, on the other hand, the pair dispensed with any marriage ceremony, then they must pay a heavy fine to the archdeacon. Yet, even so, marriage was not business-like enough for some satirists. Chaucer's fellow-poet, Eustache Deschamps, echoes the complaint, already voiced in the "Roman de la Rose," that one never buys a horse or other beast without full knowledge of all its points, whereas one takes a wife like a pig in a poke.[208] The complaint has, of course, been made before and since; but Bishop Stapledon's register may testify that it was seldom less justified than in Chaucer's time.

Such was one side of marriage in the days of chivalry. A woman could inherit property, but seldom defend it. The situation was too tempting to man's cupidity; and no less temptation was offered by the equally helpless class of orphans. A wardship, which in our days is generally an honourable and thankless burden, was in Chaucer's time a lucrative and coveted windfall. In London the city customs granted a guardian, for his trouble, ten per cent. of the ward's property every year.[209] This was an open bargain which, in the hands of an honourable citizen, restored to the ward his patrimony with increase, but gave the guardian enough profit to make such wardships a coveted privilege even among well-to-do citizens. Elsewhere, where the customs were probably less precisely marked--and certainly the legal checks were fewer--wardships were treated even more definitely as profitable windfalls. We have seen how the Baron of Berkeley paid £10,000 in modern money for a single ward; Chaucer, as we know from a contemporary document, made some £1500 out of his, and Gaston de Foix a proportionately greater sum. Moreover, even great persons did not blush to buy and sell wardships, from the King downwards. The above-quoted Stephen Scrope, who sold his own daughter as a matter of course, is indignant with his guardian, Sir John Fastolf, who had sold him to the virtuous Chief Justice Gascoigne for 500 marks, "through which sale I took a sickness that kept me a thirteen or fourteen years ensuing; whereby I am disfigured in my person, and shall be whilst I live." Gascoigne had purchased Scrope for one of his own daughters. Fastolf bought him back again to avoid such a _mésalliance_; but the costs of each transfer, and something more, came out of the hapless ward's estate. "He bought and sold me as a beast, against all right and law, to mine own hurt more than a thousand marks." Moreover, the means that were taken to avoid such disastrous wardships became themselves one of the most active of the many forces which undermined the strict code of chivalry. A knight, in theory, was capable of looking after himself; therefore careful and influential parents like the Berkeleys sought to protect their heirs by knighthood from falling into wardships as minors, in defiance of the rule which placed the earliest limit at twenty-one. Thus Maurice de Berkeley (IV.) was knighted in 1339 at the age of seven, and one of his descendants in 1476 at the age of five; and Eustache Deschamps complains of the practice as one of the open sores of contemporary chivalry--

"Et encore plus me confond, Ce que Chevaliers se font Plusieurs trop petitement, Qui dix ou qui sept ans n'ont."[210]

The practice shows equally clearly how hollow the dignity was becoming, and how little an unprotected child could count upon chivalric consideration, in the proper sense of the word.

Nor can these bargains in women and orphans be treated as a mere accident; they formed an integral part of medieval life, and influenced deeply all social relations. The men who bought their wives like chattels were only too likely to treat them accordingly. Take from the 14th and early 15th centuries two well-known instances, which would be utterly inconceivable in this unchivalrous age of ours. Edward I. hung up the Countess of Buchan in a wooden cage on the walls of Berwick "that passers-by might gaze on her"; and when a woman accused a Franciscan friar of treasonable speeches, the King's justiciar decided that the two should proceed to wager of battle, the friar having one hand tied behind his back. At the best, the knight's oath provided no greater safeguard for women than the unsworn but inbred courtesy of a modern gentleman. When the peasant rebels of 1381 broke into the Tower, and some miscreants invited the Queen Mother to kiss them, "yet (strange to relate) the many knights and squires dared not rebuke one of the rioters for acts so indecent, or lay hold of them to stop them, or even murmur under their breath."[211]

But the strangest fact to modern minds is the prevalence of wife-beating, sister-beating, daughter-beating. The full evidence would fill a volume; but no picture of medieval life can be even approximately complete without more quotations than are commonly given on this subject. In the great epics, when the hero loses his temper, the ladies of his house too often suffer in face or limb. Gautier, in a chapter already referred to, quotes a large number of instances; but the words of contemporary law-givers and moralists are even more significant. The theory was based, of course, on Biblical texts; if God had meant woman for a position of superiority, he would have taken her from Adam's head rather than from his side.[212] Her inferiority is thus proclaimed almost on the first page of Holy Scripture; and inferiority, in an age of violence, necessarily involves subjection to corporal punishment. Gautier admits that it was already a real forward step when the 13th-century "Coutumes du Beauvoisis" enacted that a man must beat his wife "only in reason." A very interesting theological dictionary of early 14th century date, preserved in the British Museum (6 E. VI. 214A), expresses the ordinary views of cultured ecclesiastics. "Moreover a man may chastise his wife and beat her by way of correction, for she forms part of his household; so that he, the master, may chastise that which is his, as it is written in the Gloss [to Canon Law]." Not long after Chaucer's death, St. Bernardino of Siena grants the same permission, even while rebuking the immoderate abuse of marital authority. "There are men who can bear more patiently with a hen that lays a fresh egg every day, than with their own wives; and sometimes when the hen breaks a pipkin or a cup he will spare it a beating, simply for love of the fresh egg which he is unwilling to lose. O raving madmen! who cannot bear a word from their own wives, though they bear them such fair fruit; but when the woman speaks a word more than they like, then they catch up a stick and begin to cudgel her; while the hen, that cackles all day and gives you no rest, you take patience with her for the sake of her miserable egg--and sometimes she will break more in your house than she herself is worth, yet you bear it in patience for the egg's sake! Many fidgetty fellows who sometimes see their wives turn out less neat and dainty than they would like, smite them forthwith; and meanwhile the hen may make a mess on the table, and you suffer her.... Don't you see the pig too, always squeaking and squealing and making your house filthy; yet you suffer him until the time for slaughtering, and your patience is only for the sake of his flesh to eat! Consider, rascal, consider the noble fruit of thy wife, and have patience; it is not right to beat her for every cause, no!" In another sermon, speaking of the extravagant and sometimes immodest fashions of the day, he says to the over-dressed woman in his congregation, "Oh, if it were my business, if I were your husband, I would give you such a drubbing with feet and fists, that I would make you remember for a while!"[213] Lastly, let us take the manual which Chaucer's contemporary, the Knight of La Tour Landry, wrote for the education of his daughters, and which became at once one of the most popular books of the Middle Ages.[214] The good knight relates quite naturally several cases of assault and battery, of which the first may suffice. A man had a scolding wife, who railed ungovernably upon him before strangers. "And he, that was angry of her governance, smote her with his fist down to the earth; and then with his foot he struck her in the visage and brake her nose, and all her life after she had her nose crooked, the which shent and disfigured her visage after, that she might not for shame show her visage, it was so foul blemished: [for the nose is the fairest member that man or woman hath, and sitteth in the middle of the visage]. And this she had for her evil and great language that she was wont to say to her husband. And therefore the wife ought to suffer and let the husband have the words, and to be master...."

What was sauce for women was, of course, sauce for children also. Uppingham is far from being the only English school which has for its seal a picture of the pedagogue dominating with his enormous birch over a group of tiny urchins. At the Universities, when a student took a degree in grammar, he "received as a symbol of his office, not a book like Masters of the other Faculties, but two to him far more important academical instruments--a 'palmer' and a birch, and thereupon entered upon the discharge of the most fundamental and characteristic part of his official duties by flogging a boy 'openlye in the Scolys.' Having paid a groat to the Bedel for the birch, and a similar sum to the boy 'for hys labour,' the Inceptor became a fully accredited Master in Grammar."[215] At home, girls and boys were beaten indiscriminately. One of the earliest books of household conduct, "How the Good Wife taught her Daughter," puts the matter in a nutshell--

"And if thy children be rebèl, and will not them low, If any of them misdoeth, neither ban them nor blow [curse nor cuff But take a smart rod, and beat them on a row Till they cry mercy, and be of their guilt aknow." [acknowledge