PART II

1901

Never again have I visited Pierrefonds or the woods of Compiègne. They lie an hour or so from Paris by the rail, but still to me they seem as inaccessible as fairyland. Sometimes, on a fine morning at Eastertide, a longing goes through me to start for those tall glades of oak, with the road that runs right through them to the lovely Vieux Moulin. But, to tell the truth, I have not dared; I doubt not, at the back of my heart, that village, forest, hill, and lake, have long since crumbled into ashes.

Years later, it was my fate, however, to return to Chantilly. The time was midwinter; January wrapped the earth in a shroud of snow and ice. But even in midwinter there still beats in copse and wold a heart of life too deep and sound for any frost to touch it. Not a flower, not a leaf, enlivened the forest; but how large and frequent seemed the forest-birds relieved against that dazzling steppe! The green woodpeckers, hopping about, two or three of them together, appeared (although, in fact, not more than fourteen inches long) as large and bright as parrots. This fine bird, the _pivert_ of France where it is common, ever excites my admiration, so graceful is its shape, from the long bill to the slender somewhat drooping tail, so bright is its colouring--a mantle of moss green, a breast of greenish yellow, some yellow feathers in a tail of chequered brown and white, and a coif like a jewel, ruby-red, blood-red, drawn close over head and neck. In England I have never seen him, though I believe the bird exists with us; nor, though I sometimes find him in my Cantal orchards, have I ever seen the _pivert_ so much to his advantage as during that cold week in January, relieved against a vast expanse of snow. The winter that year was unusually hard. The pools of Commelle were all fast bound in ice; the snow lay heaped beneath the lacy boughs of the beech roots twisted on their banks. Silent and deserted stood the castle of Queen Blanche. On every twig and branch of the woods glittered a spray of diamond dewdrops frozen hard. Brilliant, still, and white, the great forest stretched all round us, like an enchanted place where no one lived but we, until, as we reached the third pool of the chain, we suddenly found that we were not alone: a company of wild ducks had alighted on the ice, still disposed, as when they fly, in a long straggling V, and stood shuffling incessantly their webbed feet as if to warm them on that bitter floor.

One other day, too, I remember. It was warmer; a thaw had set in; a light white mist enveloped everything. We walked on the common as in a world of cotton-wool. Suddenly, a few feet away, a pack of hounds, in full cry, broke out of the moist damp mist; we saw them for a yard or two, and then the fog engulphed them anew. The bright coats of the _piqueurs_, in a vision of horses, kept appearing and disappearing. It was the Duke of Chartres’ meet. Chantilly is a cheerful place in winter. The Orleans princes, the Barons de Rothschild, with a bevy of local nobility and gentry, are bent on the pleasures of the chase. It is a land of races, too. In many a corner of the woods you may come upon a set of training stables with, hard by, a queer little sham-Gothic villa, which looks as if it came from Leamington, emblazoned with its English name--Rose Cottage or Ivy Lodge. In every lane you come across the pale, stunted English jockeys, pacing their thoroughbreds. More than once as they rode by, I saw the stalwart peasants in their blouses glance up with a jest from their work at the saw-mill or the woodpile, half contemptuous of the jockeys’ wizened youth, half content that their money should enrich the country-side. And I thought of that long-forgotten France where, for so many decades, the English lads rode by, slim and haughty, and the French peasants chuckled “_Levez votre queue, levez!_” being persuaded that the English had tails like monkeys, in those sad old times of the Hundred Years’ War.

On the fourth day the sun rose dazzling. We walked in the _taillis_ where the wood-cutters were hard at work. The forest of Chantilly is almost all planted in _taillis composé_ with hornbeam, elm, and oak--three species which, however often you may fell them, will rise again from the roots, apparently immortal. Each tree in the coppice as it reaches thirty years is marked for the axe, with the exception of a reserve, drawn from the finest subjects, which is permitted to fulfil its natural growth, and affords a permanent covert for the rest. Such is a _taillis composé_ or _taillis sous futaie_--perhaps the most profitable crop that can be drawn from a soil too stiff or too light for the ordinary purposes of agriculture. The hornbeam and the beech are the best of all woods for burning; the oak is their rival, and commands several markets as ship-timber, building-wood, cabinetmaker’s oak, props for mines, or logs for burning. The leaves, too, are a source of profit; for dead leaves in France serve almost all the purposes of straw, and stuff a mattress, or litter a stable, or manure the kitchen garden.

I love these feathery woods and coppices of France. A long, low, cliff-like hill, with a landslip at the foot; a pasture sloping to the river; a spinny or _taillis_ in the middle distance:--there is a landscape which you may see on any day in any part of France; and I ever find it full of a delicate yet homely grace. But, for beauty and wonder, the _haute futaie_ is incomparably finer than the copse. In the _futaie_ the trees are left to grow to their natural shape, the axe serving only to weed out the misshapen trunks, or to eliminate the intrusive birch and poplar which push unbidden among the better sort. Here, at least, the oak and beech, adult, with a century and a half behind them, fall only in their prime, the rich prize of the woodman’s axe, which still respects the elect reserve. Compiègne, Fontainebleau, St. Germain, have all their _futaies_; but few private owners can afford to wait a hundred and fifty years for their reward (which, indeed, is princely when it comes due), or have so vast a property that, during more than a century, some part of it may fall every winter to the axe in due rotation. For who can boast a hundred and fifty groves, duly planted and tended year after year? Perhaps the State alone. A third system, much used in parks and woods round houses, as combining use and ornament, is that of _jardinage_. Here, as in an earthly paradise, trees of all ages grow together, and every year the axe takes its toll of young and old alike: yon great fir may boast two centuries, and here is yesterday’s sapling at its feet. The fir and the beech are generally grown _en jardinage_.

Hark, the sharp tang of the axe! Let us go and see. There is an art in wood-cutting, especially in felling a _taillis_; for if the wound be not clear and sharp, if the least uneven crevice or hollow let the rain sojourn and sodden in the stump, the root will lose its virtue. But the woodman knows his trade. He was born in our woods, most likely; if not, ten to one he comes from the Belgian Ardennes, perhaps from Bavaria: be sure he is a sylvan; mixed with his blood is the sap of the forest. There, under that spreading oak, he has built his hut of tree-trunks: long perches of young oaks covered by sods of earth, with the grass turned inwards. Let us peep in. A pile of dead bracken occupies one corner. Three stout poles, planted in the beaten earth which forms the floor, are tied together at the top, and support a great iron soup-pot, swinging over a fire of braise, under the hole in the roof. There is no window, hardly a door. Evidently our woodman is a bachelor.

For in the forest of St. Germains I know another hut which is the very pride and pink of neatness. The woodman’s wife used to sit there, on a deep bench of turf built against her rustic house, mending the week’s wash, while her children played at her feet. The hut itself, though built, as usual, of trunks and sods, was pleasant to look at, with a neat white-curtained window in a frame of deal set in the wall of logs; a door of the same pattern swung on a pole passed through a double set of iron loops. Door and window were evidently portable, and had been used on many a clearing. Within, a folding table, a stool or two, and even some canvas folding chairs such as are used in gardens, gave the rough place a look of comfort. A wide truckle-bed supported a mattress of sacking, stuffed, no doubt, with forest leaves; a red blanket covered the whole. A stock-pot simmered above a portable iron stove. Sometimes the good woman would do her cooking, as she always did her week’s washing, out-of-doors, and then--ye sylvan deities!--what savoury fumes would rise from that huge _marmite_! It was, no doubt (for so she said), a jay or so, perhaps a squirrel (the peasants here account them dainty eating), which so tickled our

appetite in passing. And yet I could have sworn to the aroma of a hare, a pheasant, some piece of good wild game. Since no trade is warranted to breed perfection, let me admit that my friends the woodmen are nearly always past-masters in the noble art of poaching. How should it be otherwise? Only on Sundays can they tramp to the nearest village to buy, with their scanty pence, their flitch of bacon and their bag of meal. The cow, which their children lead to pasture in the glades, affords them milk, but that is all. And meanwhile the woodland teems with life. So poor, remote from all society, cognizant of the ways of bird and beast, shall they mark unmoved the traces of the hare, note with a disinterested eye the break a fawn has made in yonder brushwood, or that thick splash of mud on the ridgy pine-trunks, where the wild boar last night stopped to scratch his miry flanks, on his road to the nearest turnip-field? Meanwhile the man hungers, and the children need their daily bread.

Who does not remember a charming page of Gustave Droz, which tells how a young couple, surprised by a thunderstorm in the forest, took shelter in the charcoal-burner’s hut, and shared their savoury mess? Such luck has never been mine. It was one of the things for which I envied my revered and admirable friend, M. Taine, whose childhood, spent on the edge of a great forest, made him familiar with every sylvan thing.

“In these old forests,” he writes, in an essay on the Ardennes, “there lingers a race of men still half savage; they are the woodcutters. They scarcely know the taste of bread; a side of bacon, some potatoes, a little milk, compose their daily fare. I have spent the night with them in huts without a window. The large, low, open chimney let in the daylight and let out the smoke. There the meat was hung to dry. The children spoke scarce a word of French, expressing themselves in a rude _patois_; wild as young colts, they roamed the forest all day long; when they reached their twelfth year, their father put an axe in their hands, and they chopped the branches of the fallen trees; a few years later, they felled an oak like him. A mute animal life, full of legends and strange beliefs, was theirs.”

But all this was sixty years ago. Nowadays the children are supposed to go, at least sometimes and when convenient, to the nearest village school (for education is compulsory in France); the young men inevitably serve their time at the regiment; the girls enter domestic service. And so difficult is it to find recruits for the woodman’s free but rough and lonely life, that the lack of woodcutters is becoming a grave question among foresters in France.

When March is well out, and the trees are felled, when the wood is piled in stacks, the woodman consults the sky, and, on the first soft mild and sappy morning, he begins to bark his oaks, or at least such of them as are devoted to that tragic end. It is a nice and delicate business, which must be undertaken before the leaves are green. For, while the sap is springing, the bark and the wood are separated by a layer of viscuous vegetable tissue, the cambium, but so soon as the foliage is full-formed, this cambium turns hard and welds the two together. Yet the weather must be warm; a blast of cold wind, the shadow of too black a cloud, by suddenly lowering the temperature, may at any moment interrupt the operation: the bark will not strip from the oak. The woodman (who knows nothing of this capricious cambium, worse than a woman for yielding only at its pleasure) swears that a herd of sheep must have passed to his windward, and throws down his axe, well aware, despite his false premises, that no more stripping will be done that day. He must wait on sun and zephyr. The next warm day he returns, cuts a sharp ring round the foot of the tree, another at his right arm’s topmost reach, and rips the bark in long ribbons, which he lays in the sun to dry, face downward, for a day and a night, ere he stack them for the tanner. That is the prime bark, flayed from the living trunk; having taken this, he fells the oak, and strips as best he can the upper branches.

Woodcutter, bark-stripper, he turns planter next, and, where the natural fruit of the trees has not sufficiently renewed the glade, he hoes the earth, relieves it from the stifling moss and turf, digs a deep hole, and plants a sapling. By early autumn he must change his trade anew; in September the woodman becomes a charcoal-burner. The suns of August have dried last winter’s logs; they are ready for the next metamorphosis. The woodcutter, who knows by heart each glade and clearing and coppice of the forest, selects some open space, far from the century-old revered Reserve, and cuts the turf from a chosen circle. Having beaten hard the ground, he plants in the middle three or four stout stakes and swathes them together; round these he sets some light inflammable brushwood; beyond this centre--which will serve as a chimney--he places his logs in close rings, standing straight on end in the middle, then slantwise more and more, till they are almost flat at the edge. And now the stack takes on the shape of a great flattish cake or pie. Thereon he packs a layer of dead leaves, four inches thick, and over that again a layer of sand and sods, till, save for a small open space in the middle, the whole is tightly roofed. At last he casts a flaming brand into the brushwood at the core, and waits: in an instant the faggots crackle, the smoke rises up thick and yellow, the sand and earth of the crust begin to ooze and “sweat,” as they say, from the sap and moisture of the buried logs. Now let the woodman look to the wind, lest too strong a blast cause the pile to burn too quickly, ruin the charcoal, and endanger the forest. If a sudden gale should rise, he will build a screen of branches and break the force of its impact; and all this while the fire burns steadily, smoking and sweating, until--on the third day, as a rule--a faint wreath alone of bluish vapour curls lightly from the exhausted pile. After a few days more the mound may be unpacked; if all be well, the charcoal is ready for sale. The sylvan year has run its course. Our woodman is a woodcutter again.

Forestry in France is not only an art, a science, an industry, and a passion. Several generations of savants such as M. Bouquet de la Grye--to whom, with all who love the woods, I owe a debt, here gladly acknowledged--have reduced the rule of forestry to a method. Thanks to them, the returns are as sure, the cultivation as regular, as in any other branch of agriculture. If I had been a man, I would, I think, have been a forester; not a woodman, but an inspector of woods and waters, like Jean de la Fontaine, riding all day long under the green and musical covert, among the fresh scents of herb and leaf and resin, sleeping at night in the forest-warden’s lodge, deciding the destinies of oak and beech and pine. At Nancy there is an _Ecole Forestière_, which forms to this kindly calling the pupils of the Agronomic Institute. Thence sometimes, or else from Stuttgard, we used to draw our foresters for the vast woods of India, until, in 1884, a School of Forestry was established at Cooper’s Hill.

The last years of the nineteenth century, the first of this, have brought the youth of France back, with a sort of passion, to the land. In Shakespeare’s time, as we know,

“Young gentlemen in France Were wont to sigh and look as black as night From very wantonness.”

I am glad to think that in our days they are at once more cheerful and more practical. Cheesemaking, cattle-farming, wine-growing, farming, forestry, are all enterprises which a young gentleman may pursue with credit, and even with enthusiasm. And forestry, at least, is cultivated as it never was before. Until the last hundred years, more or less, a forest was just a wood-mine, to be worked until the vein should be exhausted. But now we sow and tend even more than we destroy. We are like provident children who seek to repair the ruin wrought by a generation of prodigals. I have before my eyes the statistics for the expense which the forests of France have cost the State between 1882 and 1902: they average some three and a half million of francs per annum. The foresters of France find such a sum the miserable pension of a miser, and men of science bid us plough, and plant, and fence in our hillsides, unless we be prepared to see their rocky flanks ravined by headlong torrents, and the plains at their feet alternately a quagmire and a Sahara. The course of rivers, the distribution of rains, the maintenance of mountains in their magnificent integrity, all depend upon the deep-draining roots, the rain-absorbing foliage of our woods. The French Revolution, in order to supply the peasants with a great expanse of arable land, set the axe in the forests of France. Liancourt wrote in 1802, on his return from exile, that, all round his estates, the great woods which covered that portion of the Oise had been cut down or rooted up--an excess of deforestation which had already produced disastrous effects upon the climate. He preached in the desert; content with their new fields of corn and beet (astonishingly productive, like all virgin soil), the peasants of the Oise would not hear of replanting; where the woods had been merely felled and not uprooted, the shepherds drove their flocks of sheep and goats, fattening them on the young shoots which should have renewed the forest. But to-day we are wiser: we plant. Sandy moors and heaths, desolate stretches of barren chalk, are planted with the hardy sylvan pine, and shortly become things of use and beauty in themselves, no less than happy influences on the local climate. The pine gives deal and resin, and grows in any soil. Clays too stiff and damp for corn or turnip will rear the glorious and profitable oak; the steepest flanks and scaurs of the fell-side are sufficient for the beech; the elm and the ash spring in small spinnies on almost any sterile field, and their leaves afford a delicious food for cattle, a crop as regular and as nourishing as hay. Any wood, treated with care and method through a space of years, will yield a good return for careful husbandry.

And this, I think, is the special beauty of France--her great and increasing stretches of woodland. Be they the merest coppices of scrub oak and horn-beam, yet are they haunted by the birds, starred in spring with primroses and dog-violets, oxlips and white wood-strawberries. And what tongue shall declare the majesty of the forest? I love the great freedom of the wild high mountain-pastures, I admire the rich harvest of the lowland plain; but something deeper and more secret--dating from the days before our ancestors were nomad shepherds or farmers on a forest-clearing--a thrill primæval, is awakened in me by the rustle of the woods.

A LITTLE TOUR IN PROVENCE A LITTLE TOUR IN PROVENCE

1892

I

Our first impression of Provence struck us just beyond Mondragon. For some miles we had traversed the romantic valley of the Rhone, which at this point might almost be the valley of the Rhine. The river is hedged in by tall cliffs covered with ruins as steep and as uninhabitable as the granite which supports them. Every mountain bears its castle and tells of feudal rule, of brigand oppression, with all the violence and picturesqueness of a mediæval tale by Sir Walter Scott. The train carried us through a narrow gully, with barely room in it, above the strangled river, for the ledge on which the rails are laid. Suddenly, at the other end of the gorge, the climate changes: the air is milder, the plain more fertile, the country widens into a great amphitheatre enclosed between the Alps of Dauphiné and the rounder hills of the Cévennes. And here, with the suddenness of magic, the first olives begin--no stripling trees, but gnarled and branching orchards, sunning their ancient limbs on every southern slope. In the twinkling of an eye we have come into the kingdom of the South. With a deep breath of the sharp-scented sunny air, we inhale the beauty of it, and understand--how intimately!--that horror of high mountains which has distinguished every race capable of appreciating beauty. Our recollection of the black gorge, the barren peaks, the swirling torrent, renders still keener our feeling for the fertile plain where the blood-red boughs of the Judas-tree make their deep southern blots of colour against the blue of the delicate, serrated hills behind. Among the fields the pollard mulberries gleam like baskets of golden filigree, in the splendour of their early April leaf. The tall pastures are white with starry jonquils, bending all one way in the wind. The hedges are sweet with hawthorn, great southern bloom, almost as big and plump as apple-blossom. And the same delicious contrast of delicacy and abundance which strikes us in the plain, surrounded by its peaks and barren hills, is repeated in the difference between this riot of blossom and the austerity of the foliage, much less green than in the north. The ilex spreads its cool grey shadow at the homestead door. Every little red-tiled farm, every vineyard, is screened by its tall hedge of cypress, a sheer wall of blackish green, planted invariably north-west of the building. For through those narrow gorges of Mondragon, where there seemed scarcely room for the train and the river, the Mistral also passes, like a blast from a giant’s bellows--the Mistral, the terrible north-western wind, that devastates these plains of Paradise.

II

Our first halting-place is Orange, a white and charming little town, filling up its ancient girdle with many an ample space of green garden and lush meadow. Few towns appear more provincial than this charming Orange, which gave William the Silent to the cause of the Reform, a dynasty to Holland, and a king to England. There were princes in Orange long before the Nassau: there was the House of Baux, with its pretensions to the Empire of the East; there was the House of Adhémar, which brought forth the noble Guillaume d’Orange, the peer of Charlemagne. Of all their glory naught remains save one meagre wall, one tumbling buttress surmounting the hill above the city. Compared with the beautiful amphitheatre beneath, still important and majestic as in the days of the Roman occupation, these remains of chivalry appear little more venerable than the ruins of the jerry-built villas of some demolished London suburb. Yet as we look at them an emotion awakes in our heart and a mist comes before our eyes that Roman antiquity does not evoke. For the monuments of the Middle Ages are other than of stone.

And we remember how, in the beautiful old romance of _Guillaume d’Orange_, the unhappy hero comes home to his castle wounded, after Roncesvalles, the only living knight of all his host, and sounds the horn that hangs before the castle gate. But the porter will not admit him: none may enter in the absence of the master, and no man of all his garrison recognizes the hero in this poor man, suddenly aged and pinched and grey, seated on a varlet’s nag, with nothing martial in his mien. Their discussion brings the Countess on to the battlements: “_That_--my husband! My husband is young and valiant. My husband would come a conqueror, leading tribes of captives, covered with glory and honour.” Then, seated still on his poor nag, outside his inaccessible castle, the Count of Orange tells the story of Roncesvalles, and how he alone escaped the carnage of that day. “Less than ever my husband!” cries the Countess. “My husband would not have lived when all those heroes died.” But at last he persuades her that he is in very truth himself, and she consents to take him and tend his wounds on his promise that, so soon as he can ride to battle, he will set forth again, to avenge the death of all his comrades.

“Le monde est vide depuis les Romains,” said St. Just. Beneath the ruins of that castle on the hill there stands, erect, eternal, built into the very frame-work of the cliff, the immense theatre of the Romans, still fit for service, resonant to every tone. Frequently, of late years, many thousands of people have gathered in the Amphitheatre, which serves on all great municipal occasions. But I prefer it as we saw it yesterday--its sweep of steps graciously mantled in long grass growing for hay, and full of innumerable flowers; its stage tenanted by bushes of red roses and white guelder roses; the blue empty circles of its wall-space outlined serenely against the flame-blue sky. Never have I seen the huge strength of Roman antiquity appear more sweetly venerable, more assimilable to the unshaken granite structure of the globe itself, than thus, decked and garlanded with the transitory blossoms of its eighteen-hundredth spring.

The front wall of the theatre is about one hundred feet in height, thirteen feet thick, and more than three hundred feet in length. The colony of Arausio was an important colony, remembered only now by the monuments of its pleasures and its triumph. When we shall have disappeared for near two thousand years, what will remain to tell our story? Our Gothic churches are immense and beautiful, but already, in their infancy of nine or seven centuries, they are falling into ruin. Our castles will go the way of the Castle of Orange; and of our pleasure-houses the oldest that I remember is the little flimsy seventeenth-century theatre of Parma, already quite a miracle of cardboard antiquity. We have built too high, or too thin, or too delicately. We have read too long in our prayer-books that here we have no abiding city. Our souls have no capacity to imitate that great solid souvenir of civic use, of pleasure, of triumph, which the Romans have left behind them in all their provinces. About ten minutes’ walk from the theatre, on the other side of Orange, stands the Roman Arch of Triumph, the most beautiful in Gaul. It is perfect in its great perspective, as it rises from the meadow-grass at the end of a shadowy avenue. On its sculptured sides the trophies of ancient battle are still clear, and on its frieze the violent struggle of men in battle--

“Et tristis summo captivus in arcu.”

The Romans have left behind them in Provence not only a series of unalterable monuments, but the type of their race. Up country, in the little farms, a Celtic strain prevails, but in every town we find the square-built Roman frame and classic features.

We end our afternoon by a long drive through the fertile plain of Orange, all the brighter for the severeness of its setting, for the spires and hedges of cypress, for the gaunt dim blue of the distant mountains. The spring is luxuriant and ample here. The hedges toss their fragrant boughs of may: the Japanese peonies are pink in every garden, the quince-orchards seem a bower of tiny roses, the purple flags are out by all the watercourses: but the prettiest sight of all is on the grass. Even in Italy I have never seen such hay-meadows, with their great golden trails of buttercups, their sheets of snow-white narcissus, springing innumerable and very tall above the grass. There are little children and boys, and tall young girls, grown women and men of all ages, in the fields gathering great posies of the delicious flowers. Never have I seen so bright a picture of the sheer joy of living, the mere gladness of the spring’s revival. It seems to us that we have driven by some happy byway into the Golden Age, into some idyl of old Greece.

III

Here the towns are set as close together as the jewels in a crown. We have scarcely left Orange before we see, beyond the green belt of the Rhone, the mediæval outline of the Palace of the Popes. _L’Ile Sonnante_, as Rabelais called it, rises out of the plain and the water like an island indeed, much as our own little Rye stands up out of the Sussex marshes. With its steeples and convents, its towers and buttresses, massed round the tremendous fortress on the central rock, girdled by an outer circle of crenelated ramparts, this fair town of Avignon appears the very sanctuary of the Middle Ages.

The great interest of Avignon is that it appears a town of one time--a flower of the fourteenth century still full of life and vigour. The tower of Philippe le Bel at Villeneuve dates from 1307; the great Palace of the Popes, the fortifications of the town, with their battlements and machicolations, and the vast round yellow fortress of St. André, massive against its background of olive-coloured hills--all these, and many smaller relics, belong to the second half of the fourteenth century. Even here in the South, few cities can show so many or such pure examples of the military architecture of the time.

The city wall of Avignon, since in part destroyed, had, when I saw it, a circumference of about fifteen thousand

feet. It stood twelve metres in height. It had thirty-five towers, many turrets, was crowned with battlements, and pierced with machicolations. These last, as every one knows, are open spaces left between the wall and the frieze of arcades which supports the balcony intended for the garrison (the _chemin de ronde_), spaces which form great oblong holes in the flooring of the balcony, and through which boiling water, flaming tow, lighted oil, arrows, stones, and other missiles might be poured down on assailants engaged in undermining the foot of the wall. The walls of Avignon, substantial as they appeared, would have been but a phantasmal protection against a good mitrailleuse: the modern town wore them as an ornament, and not as armour. The gates, dismantled of their old portcullises, served for the collection of the toll, and the officials of the _octroi_ lodged in the romantic gatehouses. One of these guardians, moved by our interest in his unusual dwelling, led us up through his kitchen and bedroom in the gate-tower, on to the balcony that crowns the wall. He left us there in company with his wife and several babies, whom I expected, at every instant, to tumble through the holes of the machicoulis; they showed, however, the address and ingenuity of true mediæval babyhood in avoiding these pitfalls, and appeared to find the superannuated battlements an admirable playground. Less adroit, we found the _chemin de ronde_ very dizzy walking; and our interest in this relic of military architecture was chequered by the fear of being precipitated into space.

The walls of Avignon were less interesting than its vast central fortress. It is difficult to imagine a monument so irregular, so labyrinthine, such a mere sombre maze of towers and walls, of corridors and staircases. Not a tower is absolutely square, not an angle true, not a communication simple or direct. All is unexpected, dædal, disconcerting, in this gigantic relic of an era of confusion.

For the Palace of the Popes was not only a palace, but a stronghold. It was a necessary answer to the fortress which, in 1307, the King of France had built at Villeneuve across the Rhone; it was necessary also for defence against the troops of marauders who infested France after Crécy and after Poitiers. We remember how, in 1357, a knight, by name Sir Reynold of Cervole, commonly known as the Archpriest, scoured all Provence with a company of men-at-arms of all countries, who, since the King of France was captive and their arrears unpaid, turned brigands, and made a good thing of escalading castles, and ransoming rich and timid cities. Froissart has told us how the Archpriest and his men laid siege to Avignon, striking terror into the hearts of Innocent VI. and his cardinals. At last, the Papal Court agreed to pay forty thousand crowns to the company, as an inducement towards its withdrawal. The brigand-chief came to terms as regards the money, but he demanded certain small additions to the contract, for he remembered that he was not a mere marauder, but a person of good family, with other claims to consideration. He exacted, therefore, a free pardon for all his sins, and several invitations to dinner. The Pope and his cardinals “received him as reverently as if he had been the son of the King of France himself.” Then he consented to lead his followers elsewhere; and after his departure the Pope considerably improved the fortifications of Avignon.

By 1370 the city was strong enough to set such besiegers at defiance, and the palace had grown into the fortress we admire to-day. It is composed of seven huge _corps de logis_, separated by courts or quadrangles; and these are riveted to each other by seven immense and sombre towers. The whole forms a parallelogram of over twelve thousand square yards. It is an imposing, a tremendous pile--not beautiful, but unforgettable; conspicuous by the rare height of its walls and towers, and by the extraordinary upleap of its buttresses, which shoot right up the wall to the balcony, and form the great arcade which masks the largest _machicoulis_ that I have ever seen. Not only pitch and Greek fire, but great beams and boulders could pass through these openings to crush the assailant underneath. Such a fortress appears impregnable to the eye: the height of the walls renders an escalade impossible; the garrison on the balcony atop is out of bowshot, and the huge buttresses defend the base against the sapper. At one-third of its height the wall supports a second balcony, whence the besieged could deal deadly damage on their assailants.

Within, the palace is disfigured by its present use as a barracks. The vast halls are ceiled over at mid-height and turned into dormitories. Nearly all the frescoes, painted in the melancholy, elegant manner of Simone Memmi and the Sienese, have been disfigured within this century. There is a party in Avignon naturally indignant at this defacement, which is all for buying the palace from the Government and turning it into a museum. This, however, would cost a great deal of money. And, as a mere impression, the great bare dædal building, gay with the crowded life of these youths of twenty, who race up and down stairs in noisy troops, or sit in the shadowy window-seats (picturesque figures in their white undress, black haversacks and deep-red caps), or fill the sombre quads with march and drill--yes, as a mere impression, it is certainly more appropriate as it is.

IV

“Sur le pont d’Avignon Tout le monde danse, danse; Sur le pont d’Avignon Tout le monde danse en rond.”

Many generations of children have doubtless wondered why. Make an effort to cross the Rhone when the wind is blowing, and you will arrive, at any rate, at _one_ explanation. O masterly wind! _Vent magistral_, or _mistral_. With what a round, boisterous, over-mastering force you blow from the north-west! How you send the poor passengers of Avignon-bridge whirling in all directions, dancing to all tunes, battling comically and ineffectually against you! Men used to say that beautiful Provence were a Paradise, had it not suffered from three scourges: the Parliament, the Durance and the Mistral. The local Parliament exists no more (and we regret it), the Durance is no longer a curse, but a blessing, and serves to irrigate a thousand parched and fruitful southern fields. But the _mistral_ remains. We ourselves were nearly blown from the hill-top at Villeneuve; yet I can cherish no rancour against the _mistral_, the tyrant, who sweeps us all out of his way as he rushes, wreathed in dust, towards the sea. ’Tis a good honest wind, like our west-country sou’-wester, and quite devoid of the sharp, thin, exasperating quality of the east wind of our isles. And, but for the _mistral_, they never would have planted those dark long screens of soaring cypress which streak so picturesquely the wide blue prospects of Provence.

V

There is something Athenian in the little literary class of Avignon, and in the evident pride and joy which all the citizens take in it. Our cabman stopped us in the street: “Look at that monsieur! Look at him. He’s a poet!” cried the good man in great excitement. It was M. Félix Gras. People waylay you to point out the name of Aubanel or Roumanille written over a bookshop. Every person of every degree treasures some little speech or anecdote concerning M. Mistral, the hero of the place. Doubtless the Félibrige, with the little extra romance and importance which it has given to the South, has much to do with this literary enthusiasm. In Provence, a taste for poetry is a form of patriotism, even as it was in Ireland in the days of the “Spirit of the Nation”--as it is again to-day. The sentiment, which is pretty and touching, appears quite genuine.

We had forgotten that Roumanille was dead (as was natural, since poets never die), and so we made a pilgrimage to his bookshop. We were greeted by a dark-eyed little lady; when we asked for the poet, the tears started into her fine black eyes, and we realized, with a tightening of the heart, the cruel carelessness of our question. But Mademoiselle Roumanille (for it was she), with the beautiful courtesy of her nation, would not let us depart in this unhappy mood. She talked sweetly and seriously of her brother’s latter days and of his death-bed, cheerful and courageous as the last pages of the “Phædo”: these Provençal poets have a classic temper in their souls! He would not let them wear a mournful face. “Life is a good thing,” said he; “chequered, no doubt, with melancholy moments, but none the less bright and excellent as a whole. We have come now to one of these melancholy passages, but, believe me, my friends, the sadness of death is greatly overrated! There is nothing cruel or tragic to lament about. Life has been very good, and now--at the end of it--death comes in its place, not unkind.”

So the good Félibre passed away, mindful, no doubt, of that passage in one of his poems where he says--but I have forgotten the words--

“Now let me depart in peace, For I have planted in Provence A tree that shall endure.”

If even the gay, the cordial Roumanille gave out at the last this savour of antique philosophy, the likeness of Mistral to the elder poets is far more striking. He is the Provençal Theocritus, and his poems, with their delightful literalness of touch, their unforced picturesqueness and natural simplicity, will probably endure when more striking monuments of our nineteenth-century literature are less read than remembered. We cannot imagine, at any distance of time, a Provence in which some posy of Mistral’s verses will not be treasured. He will be to the great province what Joachim du Bellay has been to Anjou. True, he has written too much, but posterity is an excellent editor, and reduces the most voluminous among us to a compendious handful. Mistral is the greatest of the Félibres, and perhaps the only one whose works will survive the charming _Davidsbund_ of poets and patriots which so loudly fills the public ear to-day.

We went more than once to see the great man in his garden at Maillane, a pleasant place surrounding a cool, quiet villa, where the poet lives with his young wife. It is the only house of any pretensions in Maillane, and to the good people of the commune Monsieur Mistral is both the poet and the squire. He comes out to receive you--a strikingly handsome man with a beautiful voice; so much like the once-famous Buffalo Bill in his appearance that one day, when the two celebrities met by accident in a Parisian café, they stared at each other, bewildered for one moment, and then, rising, each advanced towards the other and shook hands! We talked of many things, and among others, of course, of Félibrige. I ventured to ask him the meaning of the name, which is a puzzle not to philologists alone. He confessed that it had no particular meaning; that on that day in May, in 1854, when he and Roumanille and the other five discussed their projected Provençal renaissance, one of them reminded the others of a quaint old song, still sung in out-of-the-way Provençal villages: a canticle in honour of certain prophets or wise men dimly spoken of as

“Les félibres de la Loi.”

No one knew precisely what the word designed--so much the greater its charm, its suggestiveness! The name was adopted by acclamation; and henceforth, at any rate, the meaning of Félibre is clear.

VI

We went the next day, in company with Mistral and his charming, intelligent wife, to see the races at St. Remy. “Regardez nos fillettes!” said the poet. “On dirait des statues Grecques.” A Greek statue is severer in its beauty; but certainly the girls of St. Remy might be the sisters of the statuettes of Tanagra: so dignified, so graceful, do they appear in the beautiful costumes of Arles. They were the great adornment of these mild provincial sports, as we watched them come in troops from Maillane and Tarascon, from Avignon, from Arles, all dressed in the plain-falling skirt, the fichu of pure fresh tulle, and the long pointed shawl, or “Provençale,” which recalls the graceful garb of the Venetian women. Sometimes the skirt is pale pink or apricot, with a dove-coloured shawl, or green with a lilac shawl; but, as a rule, the skirt and shawl alike are black, relieved only by the narrow muslin apron, which reaches to the hem of the skirt before, and by the abundant fulness of the white fichu across the breast. Every one who has been to a fancy ball recalls the charming coiffure which surmounts this costume--the thick wavy black tresses, parted in the middle of the brow, taken down either side of the face loosely, then suddenly raised from the nape of the neck high at the back of the head, coiled round there and fixed under a tiny band of white lace, and a large bow or sash of black ribbon. Few head-dresses are at once so irresistible and so dignified, and none could be better suited to the regular features, ample beauty, and melting eyes of the daughters of Provence.

We fell in love with St. Remy: we stayed there for a week, in the Hotel du Cheval Blanc, where the long dark convent-like corridors and the cypress-screens behind the house give one already, as it were, a waft of Italy. St. Remy is a delightful little place. All its streets are avenues of great zebra-trunked century-old plane-trees, garlanded in April with quaint little hanging balls, or else of wychelms, gay with pinkish-buff blossoms, and yet so gnarled and hollow that they might almost be those famous elms which Sully planted about the towns of France. “La Ville Verte” the people call it, and never was name better chosen. Even as at Orange, the town has shrunk within its ancient girdle, and has filled out its space with gardens, with

orchards, with hay-meadows. The gardens of St. Remy are the fortune of the place, and owe to their happy situation behind the range of the Alpines an earlier harvest of flowers and fruit than elsewhere, even in the sunny South. An acre of carnations of St. Remy is a fortune to a man, as profitable as an acre of asparagus at Monteuil or early peas at Plougastel. If the mountains behind us, so lovely in their lilac bareness, were duly forested and covered to the crown with pine and ilex, we could imagine no happier situation. But the hills of Provence are as unthrifty as they are beautiful. They absorb and retain no salutary moisture from the rare torrential rains of autumn, which dash down their ravined sides, ruining and tearing the friable soil, with not a kindly root to stay and store them. This reforesting of mountains is a great question, nothing being more important to a climate than its supply of woods and the distribution of its rains; the future of agriculture depends on it, especially in Provence, where, even more than elsewhere, the struggle for water is the struggle for life. In 1860, and for some years after, much planting was done; but then, alas! there came a slackening of zeal. Farmers everywhere think of the present rather than the future, and a plantation remains unproductive for a score of years; whereas these barren mountains serve as winter quarters to endless herds of sheep, who browse their rocky perfumed sides. In the year 1902 more than three hundred thousand sheep were pastured on the territory of Arles. Flocks of three thousand and four thousand beasts are common. In summer, when the native sheep are sent to feed upon the high fields of the Alps, the shepherds of Algeria bring their flocks across the sea to Arles; the patient Africans find sufficient pasturage in the rare but succulent plants that defy the ardours of the summer sun among the pebbles of Camargue and Crau, or on those rocky heights which, arid though they be, prove not unprofitable to the farmer who lets them out for hire. Talk to him of replanting! He fears to trouble a certain source of gain, and, knowing the span of life, prefers a small profit to-day to riches for to-morrow. But he sacrifices all the countryside. A forest has no enemy so deadly as the shepherd. It is he who burns the young wood, in order to have more grass; it is he who leads the sheep among the tender saplings, whose juicy shoots are dear to all the tribe of ovines, as the bird and the mouse to the cat, or the poultry-yard to the fox. The sheep must disappear if woods are to grow.

And unless the woods are planted, the climate of Provence will year by year turn harsher, dryer, more subject to the mistral. The delicate Alpilles will be worn by the force of torrents to a range of hillocks; the rivers will ruin the plains. From this, and more, the woods may deliver us. When men think of their children rather than of themselves--but when will that be?--the woods will be planted, and a generation will grow up to call these sheltered and sunny fields a Paradise. Even as it is, they are fertile and precocious in a rare degree. In the roomy inn-garden we wondered at the luxuriance of the spring, as we sat in the shadow of the blossoming guelder-rose bush, or picked great trails of rose and syringa. We gathered our first dish of strawberries on the 23rd of April. There are but two openings at St. Remy--miller or market-gardener: the two prettiest trades, suitable to this greenest, most pastoral of cities.

St. Remy is but gently raised above the plains; still low enough to nestle among the white-flowered hawthorn hedges by the runnels bordered with flowers. But, scarce two miles beyond, there rise the scarred, fantastic, sun-baked crags of the Alpille range--the Alpines, in modern guide-book parlance--a furthest prolongation of the Alps. These are true southern hills, barren and elegant, grey, lilac, blue, pink even, or purple against the sky; but never green. Walk thither along the upward road till, at the mountain’s feet, you come to a round knoll of fine turf, fringed with stone-pines, with, under every tree, a marble sarcophagus for a seat. Hence the view is beautiful across the wide blue valley to the snow-streaked pyramid of Mont Ventoux. But you will turn your back upon the view, for placed on the middle of this grassy mound is the pride of St. Remy: the Antiquities, sole relic of the prosperous town of Glanum Livii. Nowhere in Provence have we seen so beautiful a setting to monuments so perfect in their small proportions as the Triumphal Arch and the Mausoleum. Time has much ruined, it is true, the decorations of the Arch: the winged Victories are bruised and battered; only the feet of one warrior remain, the head and fighting arm of another; the chains of the slaves have fallen into pieces. But nothing has marred the style, the grace, the purity of the exquisite outline, Greek rather than Roman in its simple elegance. The Mausoleum is less correct in style, but more picturesque, more suggestive. A flight of steps leads to a sculptured pediment, from which there arises a crossed double arch, itself supporting a small round temple, roofed, but enclosed merely by a ring of columns, in the style of the Temple of Fortune at Rome. Within these columns stand two tall figures, robed in the ample toga of the Consul; they seem to lean forward as though they gazed across the valley to some ancient battlefield. Standing so high, and screened behind their wall of columns, the statues do not show the trace of the modern restorer. The opinion of archæologists is still, I believe, divided as to their identity, but the peasants have views of their own on the matter. Some of them aver the figures to be the portraits of those twin emperors, Julius and Cæsar; but most of them, with some show of reason, consider that they commemorate the victories of Caius Marius, the hero of all this countryside. The figures are twain, so the peasants have doubled the General; Caius and Marius look out towards the Fosses Mariennes. Others, aware of the individuality of their hero, have solved the difficulty by giving him his wife as a companion! One shepherd, however, offered me the best explanations.

“Those two figures,” said he, “represent the great Caius Marius and the Prophetess Martha, the sister of Lazarus, and the patroness of our Provence. They were, as you may say, a pair of friends.”

“Dear me!” said I. “I thought there was a hundred years or so between them.”

“Maybe,” said the good man; “that well may be, madame; but, none the less, they remained an excellent pair of friends.”

The facts of these good people were, as you see, a little incoherent. Yet, indistinct and fallacious though it be, their vision of a distant glorious past gives their spirit a horizon, their minds a culture, which I have never met in the provinces of the North, where ancient history begins with the French Revolution. Every ploughman, every shepherd, in the kingdom of Arles is aware that their country was to Rome, two thousand years ago, much what Nice and Cannes are to the Parisians of to-day. Their inheritance of so ancient a civilization, their contemplation of the vast and beautiful monuments of Latin triumph, have given them a certain dignity and sense of importance which may degenerate here and there into the noisy boastfulness of a Tartarin, but which far more frequently remain within the limits of an honest proper pride. Those whom I met, the peasants and shepherds at St. Remy and Les Baux, had each a theory of his own concerning the great campaign of Marius, and pointed me out--at varying quarters of the horizon--the line of the retreat of the barbarians. If I sometimes was made to feel that, from the height of their ancient glories, they looked down on me as on one of that defeated horde, yet their attitude was always that of the kindest, the most courteous superiority. They are citizens of Arles or Avignon, as one was a citizen of Rome when the greatest honour was to boast _Civis Romanus sum_.

VII

One day we drove across the plain to Tarascon, a cheerful little town beside a yellow river, overshadowed by a great yellow castle, the Château du Roi René, the painter-king. On the other bank of the river rises the Castle of Beaucaire, and the two old fortresses, whose enmity was once so cruel, glare at each other as harmlessly in our days as two china dogs across a village mantelpiece. Tarascon possesses a fine old church, whose porch would seem still finer were it not so near a neighbour of St. Trophime at Arles. We descended into the crypt to pay our reverence to the wonder-working tomb of St. Martha, sister of Lazarus, who, as every one (south of the Loire) is well aware, was cast ashore upon the coasts of Provence in company with the two holy Maries. She founded the city of Marseilles, and is buried under the church at Tarascon. As we picked our way underground we perceived in a dark recess of the staircase a second tomb, unvisited of pilgrims, but far more interesting to our eyes. A marble youth lies along the sarcophagus, dead. It is Jean de Calabre, the son and heir of King René, an old friend of ours, for we have followed him in many a Neapolitan campaign. But after all he did not gain his crown of Naples, the brilliant young pretender. He lies here, forgotten, in the mouldy vault of St. Martha.

When we emerged to the outer air from this underground sanctuary of saint and hero, we remembered modern times, and asked our guide for the latest news of M. Tartarin. She protested her ignorance, but with a certain subdued irritation (or so we thought), as of one weary of a _scie_ that has lost its edge. We were more fortunate, however, when we asked for the Tarasque. She ran with us along a narrow street in great impatience until we reached a large stable. The door swung open, and we beheld a sort of huge long-tailed cardboard whale, green, with scarlet scales stuck all over with yellow spikes, like the almonds in a plum pudding. The creature has a half-human head with goggle eyes, a vulgar good-natured smile, and a drooping black moustache, with a long horsehair mane depending from its neck. It suggests a cavalry “sous-off” who has in some way got mixed up with his charger.

The eponymic monster of Tarascon is no longer led along the streets in glory once a year, accompanied by men and maidens, in commemoration of the day when St. Martha tamed the dragon by a prayer, and led him along in fraternal peace, tied in a leash of her slender neck ribbon. The recent law against processions has stopped all that. ’Tis a pity, for the monster is a pleasant, vivid, childish-looking monster, no more terrible than a devil by Fra Angelico. He made us remember the horrible Tarasque which is to be seen in Avignon Museum. This noble monster was excavated under the foundations of an Early-Christian chapel in the Church of Mondragon. He is a panther-like person; his fore-claws are dug deep into two half-scalped human heads. A portion of a human arm remains between his gruesome jaws. Flaxman himself never imagined a more hideous devil. “Progress is not an illusion, after all!” we sighed, as we looked at the amiable if vulgar Tarasque of Tarascon.

VIII

When people come to stay at St. Remy, it is nearly always in order to make the excursion to Les Baux; a more desolate one cannot well be imagined, nor one that places in stronger relief the contrast between the sane and beautiful relics of antiquity and the misery, the squalor of mediæval ruins. Who was the misguided man who first made it fashionable to admire barren mountains and ruins, and other such dismal monstrosities? I should like to quarter him to all eternity in a palace at Les Baux.

The road thither quits the lovely flowery plain, to rise among arid limestone mountains. Flocks of sheep are grazing there, but there are more herbs than grass, and as the poor beasts climb ever in search of a more succulent blade, they send out beneath their feet the exquisite fragrance of mountain thyme and lavender and myrtle. On the steeper scaurs, the pale mountain roses of the cystus are all a-flower, and shed a spring-like beauty about the desolate scene.

It soon becomes more desolate. We wind higher and higher up the barren flanks of the Alpilles. The wind-eaten crags of white friable stone defy even the mountain herbs. It is melancholy cinder-grey lunar landscape.

This white stone is the sole harvest of these regions. As we advance we find the mountain scarred and hacked into countless quarries. Here and there, the great pale slabs are piled into a tomb-like dwelling for the quarrymen. Far off, on the very crest of the mountain, we see, above all this desolation, an orchard of almond-trees, the only thing that betokens a human presence more happy than the slave-like labours of the quarry. Behind these trees there rises, as it seems, an uttermost wall of crags, yet more jagged, more desolate than the others. They are, as a matter of fact, the ruins of churches and palaces, the residue of the once princely city of Les Baux.

When at last we jog into the tiny _Place_ of the city, we find a squalid village nestling in the centre of the former capital, like a rat in the heart of a dead princess. About three or four hundred poor creatures live here: God only knows what they find to live on! Slices of white stone, I suppose, and almond-shells.

They are, at any rate, eager for pence and human society. The carriage has not stopped before a guide pounces out upon us, and carries us up through a steep unspeakable wilderness of dead houses, deserted these three hundred years, and all falling most lamentably into dissolution. There is a poor Protestant temple, with its elegant delicate sixteenth-century carvings all in ruin. “Post tenebras Lux” is proudly carved above the dilapidated portals. All these ruins, varying over some two-and-twenty centuries, appear of the same age, the same dead-level of abjection. The “baums” of the cave-dweller, their cupboards and door-holes still perceptible, appear but little older than this or that mediæval palace. Ah, the place is terribly changed since I came here last with Jean Lefèvre, in 1382, to purchase for the Duke of Anjou the rights of the Seigneurs des Baux to the Empire of the East!

Under the crag-like tower of the castle there is a windswept mountain-top, whence you look down on the vast level of Camargue and Crau. From these coast-like summits the sad-coloured salt-marsh appears infinite; it is treeless, melancholy beyond words. Were these spendthrift, sterile mountains planted with kindly woods; were yonder brown morasses drained and irrigated--(and indeed this latter labour is very fairly begun)--on what a different and happy scene might we look down, in barely a score of years! That blue streak on the horizon is the Mediterranean. There the three Maries landed, and began their inland march. Their three effigies, carved by their own hands, are still perceptible yonder, on a stone at the very foot of the mountain where we stand. Apparently they were wise enough not to seek the inhospitable summits of Les Baux.

There was one thing I should like to have seen in the dead city, but when we were there the relic had departed to a barber’s shop at Aigues Mortes. Some time ago, the landlord of the tavern at Les Baux, digging in his garden, came on a slab which, being removed, exposed a mediæval princess, still young and, to all appearance, living. A moment after, she had crumbled into dust, all save her wonderful golden hair--yards of it, crisp, silky, and shining--which filled the stone coffin with its splendour. In this poetic treasure-trove the landlord saw an excellent opportunity. He changed the name of his inn, which forthwith became The Sign of the Golden Hair; and there, sure enough, on the parlour table, in a coffin of glass and plush, lay the thousand-year-old tresses of the dead princess. The curiosity attracted custom, and having made his fortune, the landlord sold his tavern of Les Baux and retired to shave the inhabitants of Aigues Mortes “at the sign of the Capello d’Or.”

The villagers of Les Baux spend most of their time in delving for similar treasure. No one else has found a coffin full of golden hair; but skeletons, coins of all periods, and armour, are every-day occurrences. I made a mistake in thinking that these people lived off freestone and almond-husks. They dine on Gaulish tibias, skulls of Roman soldiers, dead cats of the Stone Period, and a miscellaneous assortment of rusty iron. Not one of them but will sell you a human bone from a desecrated sepulchre as a souvenir of your visit to Les Baux.

IX

Les Baux is on the way to Arles, and you cannot do better than push on to that delicious city. Among our impressions of Provence, Orange gave us an exquisite sense of ancient peace, of dignity not uncheerful in its seemly ruin; and St. Remy, with its flowery paths, its lilac mountain scaurs towering above the Roman arch and temple on the pine-fringed knoll, has left in our memory as it were a perfume of poetry and grace. But for a profound and melancholy beauty we saw no place like Arles. In that tiny city every step calls up a new picture, an unforgettable recollection. How many of them arise before me as I write! The lovely ruined theatre, so perfect even in its abandonment, two columns still supporting the fragment of an antique _fronton_; the great arena where the bulls still fight on Sundays before an eager audience of stalwart Provençal men and large-eyed women in the solemn dress of Arles; St. Trophime, with its wonderfully living portal crowded with saints and prophets, with enigmatic Tarasques and dragons, with strange cat-like wild animals creeping stealthily about the basement. There is a poem of Mistral’s, called the _Communion des Saints_, telling the adventure of a little country

girl who, arriving too late at Arles to hear the mass at St. Trophime, cried herself to sleep in the porch. When she awoke it was moonlight, and lo! in order to console her, the carved saints came down out of the portal and said the mass for her. They are so living, those saints, that the fable seems the most natural thing in the world.

And the cloisters within, how melancholy in their peace! And then, across the way, the Museum, with its unparalleled sarcophagi. The finest was discovered--I think in 1890--in digging the new railway across the Camargue. Never have I felt so strongly as in this Museum, as rich in Early Christian as in Classic monuments, the difference between the Pagan and the Christian conception of death. The Roman tombs are carved all over with beautiful and cheerful images, some scene of daily life, some vine-gathering or olive-harvest, perfectly human and natural, as though they would have placed between the sealed eyes of the dead an abiding memory of the pleasantest things on earth. The figures on the Christian coffins have lost their early grace; but these large-headed, large-handed, awkward saints and mourners have an intensity of expression, a pathetic conviction in the reality of a Beyond, which we have not seen before. The Roman mourners look back, the Christian look forward; the vision of the one is all regret and beauty, the other is exalted by an ardent and a yearning faith.

We have not yet done with the tombs of Arles. It was the first of May when we walked through the Alyscamps, and the latest hawthorn bushes were abloom about the Sacred Way. To tell the truth, we were disappointed with the Alyscamps. The railway has come too near to these Elysian fields, sadly narrowing their proportions. The most beautiful sarcophagi are all in the Museum or in St. Trophime. The tombs no longer chequer all the fields beyond, as when Dante wandered among them and thought of Hell; no longer--

“ad Arli ove ’l Rodano stagna ... Fanno i sepolcri tutto ’l loco varo.”

There is left but one long alley, borders with antique tombs, mostly lidless, obviously empty, shaded by a fringe of plane trees which leads to the ancient church of St. Honorat. This is a quaint, damp, melancholy place, with the raised quire built over the crypt, as at San Miniato. Its round, short pillars, five feet thick, wear an air of sturdy age. Itself appears a tomb. There is a charm in this mouldering old Romanesque church, with its illustrious perspective of the Alyscamps. Yet for a last impression of Arles we would fain go a little further up the hill, through the lovely Public Gardens to the Roman Theatre. Here we will sit on the marble steps awhile, and gaze on the unchangeable elegance of its proportions, serene in ruin, unabated of their dignity, and no less beautiful in their decay.

Adieu, beautiful city! _Gallula Roma_ of the ancients! How different had been the fate of all our western world if Constantine had realised his dream, making of Arles the centre of the Roman empire!

HOW THE POOR LIVED IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY HOW THE POOR LIVED IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY

I

During the Middle Ages the country was inhabited, much as it is to-day, by three distinct classes of persons--the nobles, the yeomanry, and peasants; classes distinct but capable of interfusion. Then as now many a noble, impoverished by warfare or mismanagement, sold the fattest acres of his lands to the wealthy merchant from the county town.[3] Then as now many a frugal shepherd laid by a penny here, a farthing there, till, with the trifling profits of his wage, he bought a plot of ground, a barn, a cabin; continuing meanwhile his earlier service; until his repeated and accumulated savings, enriched by the harvests of his rood of land, were sufficient to purchase a little farm.[4] Then as now the son of many such a peasant farmer, migrating to the town, became a wealthy merchant,[5] a man who lived in greater luxury and spent with greater profusion than the nobles, and who, on account of the services he could render them, in an age conspicuous for its lack of ready money, mixed with them almost on equal terms. Finally, in those, as in these days, the King knighted[6] many and many an eminent citizen, endowed him with an escutcheon, and married his sons into the oldest families of France. Thus the burgher class was a sort of omnibus by which the serf jolted on through several generations, towards the peerage; only, the journey being long, and demanding not merely talent and perseverance, but rare qualities of endurance, it was undertaken with success only by exceptional persons.

These exceptional persons are beyond the narrow limits of this paper: some other time, perhaps, we may examine the interesting question of the transition from class to class at the end of the Middle Ages; but to-day our business is with the humbler rural folk, the yeoman farmer, the tenant on the estate, the day labourer. What were the wages they earned and the pence they saved? What was the food they ate and the raiment they wore? The schools they sent their children to, and the drugs they brewed for themselves or bought in time of sickness? In examining this, we examine the sum of continuous inglorious effort which, in a time of unexampled disaster, helped France to bear up against an untoward fate, and sent her down to future ages, prosperous and free.

The yeoman farmer, or vavassour, was the aristocrat of his condition; his ancestors were freemen, and he himself, though less than noble, had certain of a noble’s privileges: he was free to quit or sell his estates at will, free to marry whom he would; there were even vavassours who held their land by military service. But as a class they paid a rent to their lord, were constrained to till a portion of his lands, and to furnish him yearly with a draught-horse for his stable; differing in this from the noble, who held his lands by faith, by homage, and by military service, paid no rent, and owed no _corvée_. Nevertheless a wealthy vavassour was, as we should say, a country gentleman of the humbler sort: a “half-sir,” as they say in Ireland. In time of peace he lived with a certain state and order; in time of war he carried a lance and rode to battle on horseback, with his men behind him. There were, of course, poor vavassours, who paid less rent and performed a more considerable _corvée_, and (for the limits of class were little less elastic then than now) if some among the yeoman-farmers rose almost to equality with the noble, there were also unthrifty and ruined vavassours[7] who were merely the equals of the saving cottager or the tenant on the estate.

The vavassour, or yeoman, with the colon or rich farmer, formed an upper class among the rural population. Immediately below them came the tenants-on-the-estate, men who were not wholly free, who might not, for instance, sell their lands or marry without the express permission of their feudal lord, and who, should their seigneur be taken in battle, might be taxed to the verge of ruin in order to raise his ransom. These men, in fact, were serfs; but there were degrees in servage. In the meaning that we attach to the word, servage was extinct by the end of the fourteenth century. There was no acknowledged exercise of arbitrary power. The relations of the peasant to the lord of the manor were as well defined as those of the lord himself towards his feudal suzerain. In theory, the peasant might not sell his lands or marry without leave; but, in practice, this meant merely that he paid his landlord a slight tax on these occasions, even as we pay the death-dues to the State on coming into an inheritance. Certainly he was, in theory, “_taillable et corvéable à volonté_;” but these dues and _corvées_ were almost invariable; they were attached rather to the land than to the lessee. A certain property carried with it a certain tax and _corvée_, let who would be the tenant. That is to say, that in an age when ready money was locked up in the hands of the merchants or in the excommunicated treasury of the Jews, rent was paid, not only in cash, but also in kind and in labour. For instance, a farmer renting an estate worth £20 a-year, would agree to pay £5 in cash, £10 in corn and poultry, and the remaining £5 in a certain number of days’ labour spent in performing certain tasks, always rigorously determined beforehand. These were the _corvée_. It was left for later centuries to abuse a custom which, in its origin, was at least as convenient to the tenant as to the proprietor of the estate. The tenant on the estate--serf as he was, and object of our hereditary pity--occupied, in fact, a situation not unlike that which Mr. Chamberlain once wished to assure to every cottager in his kingdom. In Normandy the cottage and outhouses of the tenant covered a square of eighty feet, the paddock and garden adjoining measured two Norman acres--nearly six acres of to-day. These dimensions appear to have been invariable, but the amount of income derived from the farm varied naturally with the quality of the soil and the character of the tenant. A rich tenant-farmer was the equal of an unthrifty yeoman. Nor was it uncommon for the same person to be a tenant-farmer in the country and a provision-merchant in the market-town, so that the tenants furnished many thriving and adventurous recruits to the burgher class. They were often men of means, living very simply, and amassing year by year the greater part of the profits of their farm. The names of many among them are registered as the donators of the abbeys and churches of their countryside. Below this solid, thriving, and generous class, whose serfdom in the fourteenth century was merely the matter of a traditionary tax or two, came the real children of the soil, the _peasants_, _villains_, or _rustics_, renters of a tiny holding, for which they paid with little money and much service; and, lower still, the _cottars_, or _labourers_, holders of a mere hut and patch of garden--men who seldom, if ever, handled coin, who paid for their bread with the sweat of their brow, and for whom the heaviest _corvées_ were reserved.

I have never yet met in mediæval documents with anything resembling the refined and fantastic _corvées_ of the eighteenth century: no mediæval peasants that I know of were stationed by the moat all night to beat the water with their flails and keep the frogs from croaking. The first and most essential _corvée_ of the fourteenth century--which cottars, tenants, yeomen, were all alike compelled to perform in due degree--was the service of transport.

We can scarcely realize the difficulties of agriculture in an age when each countryside was constrained to live almost exclusively upon its own resources. The roads were so few, so bad, and so unsafe, that rarely any product, however unnecessary in its immediate district, and however urgently needed a hundred miles away, could be conveyed to the best market. Thus, while more than half of Normandy was under forest, the monks on the marshes of the Norman Cotentin had to cook their meals and warm their chill refectories in winter-time by a brief blaze of straw and cow-dung. Corn, it is true, when thrashed and ground, was sent from place to place; but bulkier crops, such as fodder, hay, and wood, were rarely carried any distance. When the hay harvest was ended, the farmer would calculate how many head of cattle he could provide for through the winter months, and at Martinmas he killed for salting as many as exceeded his means of sustenance. There was, moreover, a certain amount of carrying indispensable on every great estate: such as the transport of manure and marl and lime, for dressing the soil; the carrying of the master’s corn and wine to and from the winepress and the mill; and especially the carting from the forest of the wood necessary for fuel and repairs. For this first and typical _corvée_, the yeoman gave a draught-horse, the tenant lent his team and cart, the cottar furnished the strength of his thews and sinews. But this, like every other form of _corvée_, might always be transmuted into a sum of money. For the _corvée_, as we have said already, was merely one of the forms of rent. With the service of transport, the yeoman’s duties usually ended. Yet he sometimes, and the tenant-farmer always, was responsible for the tilling of a certain specified number of his master’s acres. The full _corvée_, exacted of rustics and cottars, comprised not only the service of carrying and ploughing, but the duties of cleaning out the manorial stables and outhouses, of digging for marl and lime, of gathering manure for the fields, of cutting thatch for the roof, besides thrashing the corn, making the hay, cleaning the moat, washing and shearing the sheep, and helping in the vintage. It must be remembered that, although men on _corvée_ received no pay, they were very amply fed throughout the term of their labours. We may therefore look upon the cottar--the man who gave no money, but so many days a week in all seasons to his master--as having signed a contract to work a certain portion of his landlord’s estate in return for the usage of a smaller portion of that same estate. He received as payment for his service, and in addition to his plot of ground, a house to cover him, tools to work with, and his full keep for every day spent about his master’s business. Despite all abuses, the Normandy of the fourteenth century was, after all, a place in which a humble honest man might earn his bread, lay by thriftily, watch the market, purchase wisely, and rise from class to class much as he may to-day.

II

France in the Middle Ages, and even in the earlier half of the fourteenth century, was still a vast agglomeration of heterogeneous races, each with different customs and different traditions. Aquitaine was as English as Surrey was French; Brittany was still a separate and generally an inimical country; Burgundy, Provence, and even Périgord, were petty sovereignties independent of the crown of France. These different districts had each their different manner of letting land and providing for its tillage.

But, in almost all of them, French agriculture was already remarkable; far superior, for instance, to that of our own England, notwithstanding her temperate winters and rich soil. The land, ploughed four times a year in the south of France,[8] was ploughed only once in England,[9] and there is no record of any harrowing or rolling. The crops chiefly grown in England were wheat, barley, oats, peas, beans, and vetches; hemp, so abundant a crop in France, was less frequently harvested. The English kitchen-garden was then, as now, singularly deficient. We, who to-day, as a rule, possess neither chicory, cardoon, scarole, and hardly any sorrel in our borders, who seldom stew or stuff a cucumber, who are unaware what excellent soup may be made from a cabbage with a little butter, or even from the water in which green peas have been boiled,--we were still poorer in our invention during the Middle Ages; though, at least, in those days our dinners were not saddened and soddened by the boiled potato. “Onions, nettles, mustard, leeks, and peas were the only esculent vegetables,” according to Mr. Thorold Rogers. “We probably also possessed cabbage, but I have never found either seed or plants quoted.”[10]

Meanwhile, across the Channel, brussels-sprouts (or _pommes-de-choux_), three other kinds of cabbage, wintergreens, spinach and sorrel, beetroot, carrots, parsnips, turnips, beans and peas, watercress, lettuce and even the larger kind known as Romaine (introduced into France from Avignon by Bureau de la Rivière), sweet basil, with every kind of herb, no less than cucumbers, garlic, leeks and onions, rhubarb and fennel, pumpkins, borage, raddish, were in daily and abundant cultivation. France in those days had even dishes of which she has lost the trick to-day, such as violet leaves, cooked like spinach or served as a salad, the green ears of wheat boiled with melted butter, and the young burgeons of the vine, dressed with a _sauce piquante_; additions to the table of which, for some reason, we have disused the habit.[11]

The fruit-garden in England was as behindhand as the kitchen-garden. “We read of no plums, except once of damsons.” Fancy, choosing damsons! We had not yet invented our famous William pear, which we have sent over to France, and which to-day, in the gardens of Touraine, rivals the more ancient Bon Chrétien, already common there, and celebrated in the fourteenth century. But, across the Channel, the peaches of Anjou, the plums of Orleans, the figs of Poitiers, the French grapes and almonds, had nothing to fear from any competition. As far north as Caen and Dieppe, apples and pears of many sorts, grapes (grown for dessert on a trellis in a sheltered place), plums (purple and golden), cherries, gooseberries, green figs, almonds, and walnuts were commonly sold in the public market (the town’s headsman had a right to a handful out of every basket), while peaches and raspberries, though rarer, ripened in private gardens. Apples were about equally abundant in France and in the kingdom of King Edward; and we may suppose that the wild fruits of the cherry and strawberry, domesticated in every French _potager_, could not have been quite utterly unknown in England.

* * * * *

If the English, then as now, were little acquainted with the charm and cheapness of a vegetable diet, then as now their meat was better and less expensive than in France; and English wool was quite unrivalled. The chief wealth of the Anglo-Saxon farmer grew on the curly backs of his flock. Wool from the fat meadows of England was exported in exchange for wine from the dry and sunny slopes of France. Another national industry had begun to develop: English hops and English beer were already widely known, and compensated the acidity of English wine. The vine, grown round many a monastery in the south of our island, never received--and, owing to our watery sunshine, never could receive--any extensive culture. It is most unlikely, in an age when the wines of Gascony and English Bordeaux were continually introduced into the mother country, that English wine was at any time grown for drinking. It was probably cultivated for the service of the Mass, in small quantities round every abbey, as in Normandy. The accidents of warfare might intercept the vessels that brought the wines of Gascony to English shores; and thus, but for the humble vineyards of Kent and Middlesex, an unimportant incident of the Hundred Years’ War might practically, at any moment, have placed the English people under ban of excommunication.

III

We have seen that in Normandy, as in England, the farmer paid his landlord partly in money and partly in labour; but more in money and in labour than in kind. In the south of France the system was somewhat different; the tenant paid his proprietor chiefly in the produce of the land. Owing to the kindness of Madame Marcel Dieulafoy I have been able to look through several leases of farms near Toulouse at the present time; and I have been interested, and even surprised, to see how little the leases of the farms round Montauban, in 1350, published by M. Forestier in the Accounts of the Brothers Bonis, differ from the actual leases in use to-day for farms let _en métayage_ in the south of France.

The mediæval farmer in Aquitaine and Gascony was simply a partner of the proprietor, for the exploitation of his lands and stock--a ‘bouman,’ as I believe they still say in Scotland. The one furnished the land, the cattle, and even the implements, as well as the seed for the first sowing. The other supplied his time, his labour, the keep of cattle, and the repair of instruments. The increase was generally divided equally between the two partners, save in the case of wheat and wine, of which the landlord usually reserved himself a larger share. This is the system of _métayage_ still in use in the south of France to-day. Here is a lease for the year 1351, drawn up between the merchant Bonis, of Montauban, and two of his “gasaillers,” or farmers.

“Montauban.

2nd October, 1351.

“The Second October, 1351, we agreed for the lease with R. Picard and Rochelle, our Gasaillers. And we agreed that I shall sow or give the seed. We shall share the harvest in the field _au tiers et à la moitie_ [a third for wheat and half for other grains], the largest half being mine. The meadows and other lands are to remain as before: _i.e._ Picard and Rochelle are to pay me an annual rent of two livres [let us say, £8 sterling].”

In another lease, for the year 1353, the farmer takes the arable land and cedes half its produce; but for the house, the garden, and as much meadow-land as a man would take two days to mow, he pays a yearly rental in money of forty sols, and a quit-rent of ten brace of capons. The same leases give us particulars as to the wages of farm-servants in the south of France. In 1358 a cowherd received nine livres a year and a pair of shoes. Now, historians are pretty generally agreed that the fourteenth-century livre represents about a hundred francs of our money. At this valuation, our Gascon neatherd received the equivalent of nine hundred francs in modern currency: that is to say, £36. A swineherd was paid four livres a year and his shoes; a shepherd, six livres a year (£24) and his shoes; an old woman-servant, two livres a year (about £8), her shoes and a warm petticoat; for in those days, as in these, the servants on a Gascon farm were housed and fed at the expense of the farmer. Thus the rate of rustic wages was sensibly higher than it is to-day, when twenty pounds a year are considered excellent wages for a labourer on a farm. It is true that a modern shepherd or a head-cowboy has certain perquisites which raise his wage to very nearly the amount paid in the fourteenth century. But we cannot talk of progress.

There were several ways of hiring stock. On most farms the cattle were supplied by the landlord, the tenant being bound, at the expiry of his lease, to restore the flock and herds in the same condition as he found them. They were also let out on hire. Rochelle, the farmer of Bonis, hires from his landlord a pair of oxen worth twelve livres; for the use of them he pays every year a rent of three septiers of wheat (about 650 litres), but for every septier of wheat he is accounted to have acquired a right to one-twelfth part of the cattle, so that at the end of four years the team was to become the property of Rochelle. This system (not unlike the three years’ hire system, by which many people of the modern middle class acquire their more expensive furniture) was very widely spread throughout the southern provinces.

The ploughs, carts, reaping-hooks, rakes, flails, scythes, spades, shovels, winepresses, benches, taps, and barrels, etc., necessary on every estate, were let with the land upon a repairing lease.

The Hundred Years’ War, with its train of ruin and depopulation, introduced the disastrous fashion of mortgaging the cattle on a farm. The unhappy tenant, at his wits’ end for ready money to pay the taxes and to defray the expenses of his farm, sold his herds to some farmer a little less wretched than himself, with the proviso that, for a stipulated number of years, he was to keep on using the cattle with a right to half their produce. Thus one Colin Bois du Mesnil-Patri, near Caen, sells to Guillaume le Paumier, of St. Pierre, nine and twenty sheep, two red cows, two calves, a two-year-old steer, and a mare for the trifling sum of eight livres fifteen sols (say £35), reserving the use of them and half their produce during the three years next ensuing,[12] after which time the entire stock was to become the property of the buyer. In three years, therefore, such unwary farmers would find themselves deprived of the only manner in which they could work their land; it was certain ruin unless, in the breathing-space assured them by the mortgage, some unusual harvest or happy turn of their affairs should enable them to lay aside a sum sufficient to stock the farm afresh.

Sheep in those days cost, as a rule, ten sols per head (say £2), alive and unshorn,[13] though when dead and skinned a sheep could be had for a tenth the price.[14] (At the present time in Gascony the normal price for a live sheep is two and thirty francs.) A fourteenth-century ox cost from two to six livres, a cow about three livres (£12). Pigs were dear, valued each between two and three livres, a price apparently in excess of modern values. The horse was less esteemed than the ox for agricultural purposes; he cost as much, or more, to buy, and a great deal more to keep; you could not eat him, he has no horns, and his skin was far less valuable as hide. Still, the horse was indispensable to travel. We give a list of the prices that he fetched in the Comté d’Eu between 1382 and 1388:--

Livres. Sols. Deniers. 1 horse. 2 10 0 1 hackney. 2 10 0 1 tall grey horse 1 10 0 The horse called Rage-en-tête 2 10 0 The roan hackney. 2 10 0[15]

And in Picardy, in 1389--

Livres. Sols. Deniers A bay hackney 1 10 0 A black horse 7 0 0 A grey nag 5 0 0 A pair of greys 10 0 0[16]

The inventories published in the _Accounts of Bonis_ show us that, on a small farm, at any rate, a pair of oxen, one horse, one ass, two pigs and a sow, a good deal of poultry, and a swarm of bees were usually kept. (In my chapter on Touraine, you will see that this is about the stock of a similar holding to-day.) We cannot estimate the price of these animals at less than twenty livres; so that few small landowners could hope to stock their farm out of their savings. Therefore, in districts where the hire-and-purchase system did not obtain, it was customary for the large farmer to let out his beasts to the poorer one; the oxen at a rate of from five to six sols per year, the sheep at about one sol per annum and per head; the milk and the young belonging to the tenant.

IV

As a rule, then as now, the person who made the largest profit on his land was the very small landowner. Many circumstances combined to favour him in the end of the Middle Ages. The cost of labour was high; he with his family could run the farm without paid assistance. The raising of cattle is nearly always more profitable than the growing of crops, and the man with little land might yet possess considerable herds. A very slight tax, paid either in labour or in kind to the lord of the manor, secured him the right to pasture his cattle on the wide grassy borders of the lanes and in the interminable forests that still covered half of France; the sheep were driven to pasture in the salt-marshes, one in every flock being yielded, as a sort of tithe or rent, to the owner of the land; while in winter-time the right of pasture in stubble or aftermath was common to all the cattle of a commune. The tenant who owned all these flocks of swine and sheep, which fattened on the acorns and grasses of the manor, had probably round his humble cabin nothing more than a few acres of harvest-land for his own use. He possessed neither draught oxen nor horses for ploughing, but paid one of his wealthier neighbours to perform this service. Over and over again we find the records of similar transactions; the price given varying naturally according to the extent and quality of the fields to be furrowed.[17]

At harvest-time, then as now, the peasant farmer could engage a man by the day to help him in the stress of work; the labourer usually received his meals and about one sol per day,[18]--say five francs--which is much what he would receive at the present time.

We have now a fair idea of the expenses of farming. The profits then as now were mainly the sale of wool and hides, of beasts, of corn, of wine or cider. The price of these articles, due proportion being guarded, has not varied in any surprising fashion. The average price of corn (which in the terrible years that followed Poitiers rose to thirty sols) was fifteen sols the septier, let us say thirty shillings the hectolitre; owing to the quantity of foreign corn imported, it does not fetch more than half as much to-day, but on the other hand, owing to our improvement in agriculture, an acre nowadays yields twice as large a harvest, so that the profit to the farmer is about the same. The commonest _vin ordinaire_ appears to have been worth thirty-two deniers the septier--a little more than a halfpenny the litre; but the wine usually served in country taverns cost four deniers the pint[19] (about 1_s._ 3_d._ the bottle, shall we say)--which is more than a “Gladstone claret” commands in France to-day. (That used in our kitchen, the common household wine of France in 1903, costs, if bought by the barrel, a little more than fourpence a litre; but were it not for the extravagant tax paid to the State, it should cost no more than two-pence, at most.) To return to our fourteenth century: In 1371 a butcher at Evreux values two small oxen at four livres five sols; while a large ox of Tallevaude, in 1383, is worth six livres--about four and twenty pounds--which is just five pounds less than the average price given by French country butchers for a fine full-grown beast to-day.

The houses of the farmers and the country people differed (then as now) according to their rank and prosperity, and also according to the district they inhabited. The yeoman farmer, and even the well-to-do husbandman, dwelt in a solid house of brick or stone, tiled or slated, with a paved yard separating it from the barns, the outhouses, the dairy, and cattle-pens. The farm-house--which, in England, was always constructed with a southern aspect--as invariably faced the east in Aquitaine, while to the rear, well open to the west, was a long tiled verandah, where, in winter afternoons, the hemp-picking, the wool-carding, the threshing, &c., was done.[20] Within, the vast kitchen glowed in the light of the fire--almost as unextinguishable as the vestal virgin’s; peat, coal, and wood were each abundantly employed; and for a trifling rent, generally paid in kind or labour, the lord of the manor would permit the farmers on his land to cut their turfs from his bog, or their boughs from his forest. Fuel was not only actually, but relatively cheaper in the Middle Ages than to-day; for the bogs were not drained in those days, the forests covered great expanses, and the cost of carriage made it almost impossible to transport their produce. In nearly every part of France and England the supply of fuel was in excess of the demand.

This hospitable fire flared up a chimney proportioned to its size, lighting the huge brick oven, the iron fire-dogs, the bellows, shovel, gridiron, ladles, cauldrons, saucepans, mortar, tin pails, and other utensils that stood on the brackets of the hearth; and irradiating the brass and copper pots, the metal candlesticks, the lamp, the lantern, the not unfrequent silver beaker, and the glass drinking-cups, that were ranged on the chests and cupboards round the walls.[21] Near this fire stood a high-backed settle, the master’s ingle corner; and under the great mantel of the chimney narrower benches were set in the brick. Within easy reach of the hearth, a deep oak chest held the logs for burning. It was generally matched by a handsome wedding-chest with carved or painted front, long enough to contain a grown person full-length (as the readers of _Ginevra_ will mournfully remember), but more usually filled, it must be admitted, with the best clothes, the trinkets, and the savings of the household. The _Registers of the Châtelet_ record no crime so common as the breaking open of such wedding-chests; and it is surprising how many clasps or jewels, girdles of pearls, golden head-dresses and rings, and purses full of gold, were stolen from quite humble households. Our forefathers lived in times when the letting out of money at interest was insecure and considered a deadly sin, so they invested their capital in cups or trinkets of precious metal, pretty to look at, easy to hide, and readily converted into cash when necessity demanded a sacrifice.

The windows of this great kitchen were almost always small and rarely glazed: conceive it as a great stone cavern lit up by an undying fire that played on glittering surfaces. The light came chiefly from the hearth, or from the home-made rushlights of the north, the flaring pine-torches of the south, which lit the spinning wives and maidens, when at close of day they clustered round the fire. In the daytime the kitchen was a dusky place, as indeed it is still in most French country places, where its aspect has singularly little altered. Sometimes the only aperture, besides the door and chimney, was such a small square window as may be seen to-day in the cottages of Savoy, pasted over with a piece of oiled linen, impervious to the air. Often a heavy shutter, made of one slab of polished oak, protected a small uncovered lattice, shutting with a spring. These houses, so hygienically built to face the rising or the mid-day sun, could receive scarce a ray of its purifying light. Doubtless the vast chimney and the day-long fire sufficed to ventilate their dark recesses.

In one of the deepest of these recesses, well out of the way, was placed the bed--a bed such as we can barely imagine, a family four-poster! Here reposed the father and the mother, several of the children, and--(readers of the _Heptameron_ will remember this striking custom, which continued into the sixteenth century)--and the stranger within their gates.[22] A share of this ample couch was considered a special honour offered to a guest of note. The bed, if little private, was generally comfortable. The invoice of a day-labourer’s widow, taken at Montauban in 1345,[23] proves her to possess two feather-beds, with pillows, fifteen linen sheets, four striped yellow counterpanes. In much poorer households the bed was sometimes stuffed with straw,[24] but nearly every mention we have of the bedding of the time proves it to have been no less ample, comfortable (nor, indeed, less cleanly) than in country places at the present day. In this respect the French were, and are to-day, far before the English, whom Mr. Thorold Rogers shows us sleeping on a rude and sheetless bed, covered by night with the garments in daily wear.[25]

Such was the house-place of the well-to-do: one room, but well furnished and spacious. Yet in 1417, Petit Pas and Isabel his wife, labourers of Vaux (Oise), have two rooms in their “ostel” (our Cantal _ostiau_), a “foyer” and a “chambre” (a but and a ben, as we might say), separated by an earthen wall. The rich yeoman was more amply lodged; and the manor-house contained, as a rule, three rooms: the hall, the dormitory, and the parlour.[26] But the cottars dwelt in far humbler habitations. The small thatched cabins of Normandy were replaced in the centre of France by mere huts, generally built of plastered wattle, but sometimes no more than a rude lattice, of which the interstices were bunged with straw or hay; such a refuge as Nicolette built for herself in the forest, weaving it of boughs in their green leaves; such as to-day the summering shepherds construct, in an hour or two, on any down. Three such huts--one for the peasant, one for his cattle, one for his crops--stood round a paven yard.[27] The door of the hut in which the cottar lived with his family was divided laterally at about six feet from the ground, so that, while the lower part was closed, the upper door or shutter might remain open to admit the air and let out the smoke. For in these cabins there was frequently no other window. There was often no chimney, save a hole in the roof. The food was cooked over a brazier of charcoal, a _scaldino_, such as the poor people use to-day in Italy; but owing to the rising of the fumes, save in very windy weather, there was little smoke.

The people who lived so simply had better tools and more numerous implements than we suppose. Most countrymen possessed a ladder, a hand-mill, an axe, a crowbar, nails, a gimlet, hedge-clippers, a branding iron, a wheelbarrow, and often a light cart, a plough, harness, reaping-hooks, scythes, a hoe, spade, rake, flail, sieve, bushel, knife, hammer, a long ferruled staff, a bow; many owned a lance, and some a sword and buckler.[28] The Gascon labourer’s widow already mentioned possessed a corn-mill, a tin washtub, a metal warming-pan, two brass water-jugs, two pint pots, a metal bowl, two metal pots, four bottles, a cauldron, a pestle and mortar, a salt-box, a pail, two iron tripods, a copper box, two large chests, a cupboard, a box, four trestle-tables, a bench, a carpenter’s bench and tools, two baking-tubs, one kneading-trough, two corn-chests, and a large table, besides two axes, four lances, a crossbow, a scythe, and other arms and tools. We doubt if she would be better off to-day. The inventory of a farmer’s stock of the same date and place (Montauban, 1345) contains four kneading-troughs, a large funnel, one winepress with screws, four tuns, eight casks, three barrels, and two kegs; a lead alembic for distilling, a cauldron, two metal water-jugs, cooking utensils; two wool-cards, three carding-combs for hemp, two spades, two flails, three reaping-hooks, one scythe, one crossbar, two carpenters’ benches and tools, one shovel, two iron goads; a cart and harness; two oxen, one horse, one ass, two pigs, two sows, and a swarm of bees. Probably many a squatter’s ranch is little better stocked.

V

The food of country people in the fourteenth century was little different to that they use to-day, save that potatoes and buckwheat (so frequent in French rural diet) were then conspicuous by their absence. Then, as now, their meat was chiefly pork, in all its forms of bacon, ham, brawn, or blood-pudding; and pork was relatively little cheaper than it is in many a remote and rural place to-day. Butter, cheese, eggs were very plentiful; herrings were an article of almost daily diet (they cost a sol the hundred, about a halfpenny apiece), and in the north of France people consumed freely a kind of salted whale called _craspois_, a truly Viking dish, of which the popularity has wholly vanished.[29] In Normandy pea-soup was then, as now, a favourite food.[30] Wine, beer, and mead were drunk by all classes. In 1392, a homeless pin-maker on the tramp breakfasts off wine and fish;[31] workmen out of employment dine at the village inn off bread, meat, and red wine at fourpence the pint.[32] In the same year the provisions left in the house of the wife of the Duke of Bourbon’s minstrel were: bacon to the value of four sous or shillings, six large loaves of bread, a great pot full of green peas, two penn’orth of onions, and a shilling’s worth of salt.[33] But the best criterion we get of the daily food of the rural population is the record preserved in the accounts of manors and monasteries of the dinners afforded to labourers on _corvée_, or, doled out day by day in return for some bounden service. Thus, the smith of the monastery of Jumièges received in return for his occasional services a daily ration of two small loaves, a measure of wine of medium quality, and either six eggs, four herrings, or some equivalent dish.[34] A vintager of St. Ouen, on _corvée_, was supplied every day with two rolls and a mess of peas and bacon with salt.[35] A tenant of the monks of Bayeux, during his _corvée_, was entitled to a daily meal of a white loaf, a brown loaf, five eggs, or three herrings, with a gallon of beer.[H] The monks of Montebourg gave each of their men a loaf, a mess of pea-soup, three eggs, and the quarter of a cheese, or, if they chose, six eggs, and no cheese; on fast days they made shift with three herrings and some nuts: they washed down this ample meal with as much beer as they chose to drink.[36] A tenant of the monks of St. Ouen received, in return for his _corvée_, not only bread and wine, pea-soup and bacon, but fresh or salt beef and poultry. All this is in Normandy. In Anjou, the men on _corvée_ dine more sparely off wine and bread and garlic; but the carpenters on a farm receive in addition to a daily wage of one sol eight deniers, five penn’orth of meat per person; the hedgers and ditchers also dine off bread and meat.[37] In almost every one of the numerous records that we have of the daily fare of the labouring class in fourteenth-century France, we find a dish of eggs, a mess of peas and bacon, half a chicken, a few herrings, or a generous slice of meat, added to the modern labourer’s too scanty nuncheon of bread and cheese and beer.

Our rural ancestors of every class went well and warmly clad. The farm labourers of the fourteenth century wore better garments than our ploughmen use to-day. Men of every class appear to have possessed linen shirts and linen drawers, hose of strong cloth, and leather shoes; a coat of warm russet or fustian, an ample cloak resembling the _Limousin_ of Auvergne, or Tuscan _Ferraiuolo_, and (sometimes attached to this garment, sometimes separate) a long-tailed hood of cloth. Masons, labourers, workmen of every class, completed this costume by a pair of gloves: London gloves were held in high esteem. Bonis, the merchant of Montauban, sold them to his country clients at seven sols the dozen.

* * * * *

The women were as sensible in their attire. They all wore a long chemise of linen, and over this a garment called a doublet, in form resembling the linen bodice sewn to a white petticoat, which is still used in dressing little girls. The wedding doublet of the butcher’s daughter of Montauban took about five yards of fine white linen of Paris, costing fifteen sols the ell--a measure which exceeded the modern metre by about two nails. The butcher was evidently a man of means; for we find his wife ordering some doublets for herself at £3 10_s._ apiece, while a neighbouring noble’s wife spends not quite half as much on those selected for her wardrobe. The wife of another burgher chooses three and twenty doublets, delicate in quality and of a vermeil colour. Over this garment the women of the fourteenth century put a tight long bodice of strong cloth, to which they attached, by hooks or lacets, a pair of tight long sleeves, generally of some costly material, silk being used on great occasions even by the poorer classes. Over this, again, they slipped a very long dress, touching the ground on all sides, tight in the bodice, but sleeveless, or with loose hanging sleeves; it was generally much trimmed with silk and braid. A farm-servant buys a piece of red silk to trim her gonella, another chooses one of blue cloth worth one livre: the simplest that we find, which is made of a coarse pale cloth called blanket, comes, with the trimmings, to nearly fourteen sols. The gown was surmounted by a heavy girdle, richly ornamented, from which the purse and keys of the house-wife dangled. Out-of-doors a long draped mantle, trimmed to match the gonella, was usually worn.

The women of the later fourteenth century were fastidious in dressing their hair. We all know the _hennin_, the tall slender sugar-loaf of buckram, from which floated a gauzy veil. The peasants naturally did not wear this inconvenient and romantic head-dress. They braided their hair with ribbons and galoons intertwined in every plait. A woman with long hair would use about seven yards of ribbon; over this she placed a strong net of silk or thread; the whole was enveloped in a veil or mantilla of thin silk, the favourite ornament of country-women, and frequently given as a wedding-present. A very handsome veil of German silk would cost as much as seventeen sols; a commoner one, of good Aleppo silk, from five to ten sols; still a mantilla quite presentable in appearance, of a rougher silk, could be had as low as three sols (we may suppose about twelve shillings of our money). Almost every peasant in well-to-do circumstances afforded his wife and daughter this piece of elegance, probably only worn on great occasions. The artisans, small farmers, and farm servants of the fourteenth century were less economical in ornament than their descendants. The butcher of the little country town of Montauban gives his daughter, for her wedding day, a silver necklace, a purse, a girdle of silk, a string of amber beads, a pair of embroidered gloves, a veil or mantilla of German silk, two silk nets for her hair, and many-coloured silks and threads for the embroidery of her wedding-gown. An artisan affords his child a veil of German silk, a net to match, a string of amber, a purse and girdle, the whole expense coming to £1 6_s._, or about five guineas of our currency. A servant on one of Bonis’ farms buys for his wife a silk wimple; gloves, hair-ribbons, and ornamented hair-nets are common fairings.

We see all these good people, arrayed soberly or splendidly according to their rank, but almost always comfortably dressed, as we turn the pages of the _Accounts of Bonis_ or the palpitating _Registers of the Châtelet_ (the Newgate Calendar of an earlier age). Along the country roads the notary jogs on business, dressed in violet cloth richly furred, solidly seated on his ample cob. He passes the country squire (the grandchild of the last rich semi-noble vavassour) hooded in black parti-coloured russet, and wrapped in a houppelande of English green, furred with squirrel, the long end of his cloak thrown over the left shoulder. The shepherd on the hill drives his flock; he is warmly clad in strong brown woollen. The thatcher, as he steps across the fields from his daughter’s churching, is dressed all in his best in a large check of brown and white and blue. There stands the farmer, all in sombre russet, with an elegant hood striped black and yellow; there are gold rings on his hand, worn over his gloves; there are gold clasps to his girdle. At the little village inn, the serving-maid comes out, dressed in iron-grey, with a bunch of pink roses in her hands. The mason of the hamlet stands at his gate, chatting with a fellow of his craft, and with a tramp in search of work; the home-staying workman is well clad in whitish-grey, with darker grey hose and grey-blue hood; the traveller has a long brown _cottehardie_, lined with an old coat, a brown hood buckled under the chin, brown hose, and strong leather shoes with steel buckles. At the corner of the road a wandering beggar waits for alms, dressed in a mantle of faded russet patched with an older light-blue garment, and a hood of Heaven knows what colour, not worth two deniers. His wife squats beside him, slovenly dressed in an old patched cassock tied round her waist with a reed. She has no hair, and a strip of dirty cloth tied round her head but half conceals her baldness. They are the only really shabby people that we meet (save the wandering friars, who make a virtue of it); but few are so magnificent as the drover, a person of importance, it would appear, from the quality and the quantity of his purchases. The goat-herd and the shepherd are all in russet; but see the drover as he comes home from market resplendent in his mantle checked with black and green: he sports a hood striped with grey and yellow; hood and cloak are in accordance with the most fashionable standard of the day. Here out in the fields we seldom use such brilliant colours: russet, blanket, grey, blue, and English green are our usual wear. It is only when the knight, the doctor, or the merchant from the town is drawn this way that we see the real taste of the _bon ton_: the parti-coloured green and vermeil, white and blue, _vert perdu_ and slate colour, yellow and black, white and vermeil, that are, with the universal black and green, the last cry of the _mode_. Both check and stripe are popular alike in town and country.

VI

If not in every village, at least in every _châtellerie_, there was a doctor, a surgeon or a barber surgeon;[38] the labourers appear to have used their services freely and to have rewarded them with liberality. One of Bonis’ day-labourers falling ill, sends to Montauban for the physician of the place, and pays him for several visits the sum of 4 sols 2 deniers--which we may compare to nearly £1 15_s._ of our money. Another pays his doctor as much as 18 sols, say £3 12_s._ And in the _Accounts of Bonis_ we find frequent mentions of drugs and medicinal spices of an expensive sort, sold to the agricultural labourers of the district.

The doctors of the Middle Ages and later, even so late as the middle of the fifteenth century, were chiefly inspired by the theories of the Arabs. Louis XI., as we know, ordered the Paris University to copy _in extenso_ the great work of Aboo Bekr ibn Zacaria er Razi, the famous physician of the tenth century, whose masterpiece, _El Mansoori_, is a compendium of Arabian therapeutics. This book, commonly known as “Razi,” was very popular throughout the fourteenth century. A copy of it, bought by Bonis for four livres, assisted him in the preparation of his drugs, and of the plasters, unguents, electuaries and tisanes especially in request among a fourteenth-century rural population.

It may be interesting to examine a few of the remedies employed. Rheumatism, that special misery of those that work in the wintry fields, was treated externally by the application of a plaster of cordials and aromatic gums spread on a thin piece of silk. The part affected was also rubbed with an ointment (costing seven sols) made of four ounces of turpentine and two ounces of white wax, one ounce of resin, one ounce of myrrh, two ounces of _bol d’Arménie_, and two ounces of oil of roses;[39] it was then covered with a sheet of wadding. Complaints of the skin were treated by an unguent composed of a quarter of a pound of marsh-mallow, a quarter of a pound of white wax, a quarter of a pound of olive oil, an ounce of incense, and an ounce of turpentine; medicated baths were also recommended. Sulphur was freely used. Aniseed was given as a specific against indigestion, with camomile, _Quassia amara_, camphor, and essence of cinnamon. Coughs and colds were cured by a sudorific tea of rose and camomile; by a milk of almonds mixed with starch and sugar, almost exactly resembling the delicious _looch_ of modern France: by an infusion of pectoral flowers (mallow, violet, &c.), as well as by lozenges of gum arabic and barley sugar[40]. In severe cases the physicians of the Middle Ages administered the famous theriac of Nero, the _Theriacus Andromachi_, composed of opium powdered with some tannic bitter substance, together with sulphate of iron, and some two and forty active aromatic essences, such as turpentine, Cingalese cinnamon, valerian, citron, rose, etc.[41] A labourer at Bloxham, in Oxfordshire, was treated for bronchitis in 1387, with a syrup of oxymel and squills[42]. Disorders of the intestines were pretty generally combated by starch water, alum, and the astringent _bol d’Arménie_. Senna tea was also an ingredient in the humblest medicine chest. Besides the remedies we have mentioned, cordials of cinnamon, camphor, resin, and oil of pinks, electuaries of liquorice, dried prunes, and honey of roses were constantly employed. Oxide of zinc mixed with camphor[43] was also given, but I do not know in what especial case. The hot bath and the vapour bath were highly esteemed, though less frequent, perhaps, than in the earlier Middle Ages, when hot baths were hourly cried through all the streets of Paris. Still, in the fourteenth century there was no town in any way considerable without at least one _établissement de bains_. We find in the _Registers of the Châtelet_ that a hot bath was a somewhat expensive luxury, costing several sols. The prolonged warm baths in honour at the Court of Charles VI. were a scandal to the Church, and are denounced in a famous sermon of Jacques le Grand.

Besides the remedies we have quoted, it must be allowed that others more fantastic were occasionally used. Last week, at Aris, a little boy informed me that I need never suffer from migraine, for I could tie a live pigeon on my head, and let it depose its excrement on my hair: a certain remedy. He assured me also that his sister, whom the doctor from Vic had declared to be dying from congestion of the lungs, had been saved by the presence of mind of his mother: she slit up a live cat, placed half the palpitating creature on the back, half on the breast of the patient, who immediately recovered. Doubtless these medicines were known in the fourteenth century. An equally absurd but more elaborate sort were used especially at court and in the treatment of great personages. But our agricultural labourers, who thought twice before they changed their silver sou, though they may have split up a cat, were not accessible to fashionable quackery. In all the _Accounts of Bonis_, we find only two receipts that are patently unreasonable; and these are the most expensive. One of them is a powder of ground seed-pearls, the other an ointment of honey of roses, olive oil, white wax, pounded with “half an ounce of mummy.” But the cold creams and cosmetics of the present day are not always conspicuous for science; we might find nostrums as inefficacious on the shelves of Madame Georgine Champbaron. And, indeed, it may be doubted whether the most fantastic remedies of the Middle Ages were not sometimes as successful against the nervous maladies in which they were most often used, as the Lourdes water, the hypnotising-mirrors, and the various patent medicines so capriciously infallible in our century. The poor and needy, with their humble, painful, everyday disorders, knew, then as now, the virtues of friction and wadding against lumbago; the peppermint tea that calms the colic; the plaster of boiled poppy-heads applied against the raging tooth. The old man, struggling with his asthma, had almost as good an opiate; the feverish child, tossing under its doubled blanket, a potion almost as sudorific, as we should find in any country place to-day.

Apart from their special virtues, the medicines of the Middle Ages had a very high hygienic value. They were unusually powerful prophylactics. In an article on the “Workmen of Paris,” published some years ago in the _Fortnightly Review_, I quoted from the Annales of the Institut-Pasteur a series of experiments made by MM. Cadiac and Meunier establishing the microbicide effect of Cingalese cinnamon; while the oil of pinks, the essences of valerian, thyme, citron, rose, etc., employed in almost every mediæval recipe, are each and all more hostile to the microbe than the iodoform treatment employed against typhoid fever in the Paris hospitals to-day. I advance this assertion with all due discretion, since I have never made any single experiment, and am not in a position to control the opinion of experts; but since the vanguard of science admits so high a value in the drugs employed by our benighted ancestors, we may allow that the pleasantries in vogue on the subject are possibly overstated or misplaced.

VII

If the fourteenth-century village was less ill off than we are apt to imagine it in regard to the medicines of the body, it appears that the training of the mind was less absolutely non-existent in the rural class than it has been our habit to assert. Many of the labourers on the farms of Bonis could sign their names, though probably their science in writing ended there. But every tenant-farmer, in an age when the accounts of tenant and landlord were peculiarly complicated, was obliged to know a certain amount of book-keeping: doubtless the steward was often more learned than his lord. Hedge-schools were common;[44] in every considerable village, if not in every hamlet, there was a schoolmaster, appointed generally by the patron of the village living. There was a certain regulated number of parish schools in every county, and this number might not be exceeded: our ancestors never could be brought to recognize the advantages of competition. Certain texts, however, prove the existence of unauthorized hedge-schools, promptly quashed as soon as they came to the knowledge of the authorities.

The Great Plague, which so changed the face of Europe, diminished education by carrying off the schoolmasters. The Continuator of Guillaume de Nangis remarks that, after the epidemic of 1348, there were not enough teachers for the requirements of the houses, hamlets, and castles of his country. Thus the sons of the men who fought at Crecy grew up, though richer, more ignorant than their fathers.

The schools of the fourteenth century were not entirely free; and as a certain proportion of their profits went to the patron, he filled up the gaps as soon as possible. The village priest was often the schoolmaster, and the instruction was always chiefly religious; but the boys were also taught the rudiments of Latin grammar. The ideal of every peasant was to have a son in the Church--a son who might become abbot, bishop, chancellor, cardinal. It was their one great chance of rising in the world. But in the kingdom of the Mind, many are called, few chosen. Of the dozen or so boys who went to every village school (each with a dim idea that perhaps by-and-by he might become a parish priest, or enter some religious order) a fair proportion grew up as stewards or labourers.[45] Some, no doubt, persevered in their original intention; some went to the town, or, tiring of grammar, ‘listed for a soldier; but, alas! we meet with a good many of them in the _Registers of the Châtelet_. Perhaps--who knows?--these ne’er-do-wells were the most useful of them all, for their depositions in the Court of Justice throw many curious lights on mediæval education. Thus, for example, one Jehannin de la Montaigne, a wandering mason accused of horse-stealing, invokes the privilege of clergy, asserting that he was tonsured at the age of eight years old when he went to school and learned his psalter--“car auparavant qu’il aprenist son dit métier de maçon, il avait esté avec plusieurs enfans d’icelle ville de Château Regnault à l’escole de la dite ville et avoit aprins jusqu’à son _Donnet_ et _Catonnet_; et lors il savait bien lire.”[46] This _Donnet_ or _Donat_ was the grammatical treatise of the learned Ælius Donatus, that glory of the fourth century, whose vigilant elucubrations were very popular throughout a thousand years. _Catonnet_, a school-book equally universal, was one century older: it was a paraphrase of the distiches of Dionysius Cato, once a famous philologist. These were both great doctors. To-day, as you see, we scarcely know their names.

The names of these two guides to knowledge were known to Jehannin de la Montaigne, but his science went no further. After a judicious course of torture, he was taken to the kitchen (as was the custom of that guileful age), placed in a comfortable chair before a cosy fire, with a warm mantle round his shoulders and a glass of wine in his hand. Many criminals, obstinate to screw and pulley, succumbed to these more deceiving influences, especially as they succeeded the chill and dismal hour of execution (the torture of the fourteenth century was far less diabolic than that of ages more refined, but it was uncomfortable and rheumatic--pails of icy water being dashed from time to time upon the dislocated patient). Well, to return to Jehannin, whom we choose as an example from a crowd of fellow-sinners--he confessed, as he sat by the kitchen fire, that he was no more a priest than the cook. “But,” added he, “a tonsure is convenient in judicial circumstances. Many of my companion masons had tonsures, and it was they who advised me to get one also, which they said I could do without prejudice, as I have really been to school and could read and write well enough when I left it. Therefore I went to the village and had myself tonsured _par un barbier, et non aultrement_.” That confession was the end of friend Jehannin; having no longer any claim to the jurisdiction of the Church, he swung forthwith from the neighbouring gallows. “Il n’avoit aucuns biens.”

The courts of the Châtelet were literally encumbered with these sham clerks, who impeded the course of justice by asserting a non-existent benefit of clergy. Not one of them when confronted in the courts of justice with a psalter and a primer could read, write, spell a Pater, or say by heart a Latin prayer. This, however, proves nothing against the system of education, which was probably excellent. The School Board manager of the present day, in an age of unexampled science, knows how easily a boy may pass through half a dozen years of reading, writing, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, botany, physics, chemistry, Biblical exegesis, and all the other necessaries that no modern ploughboy is complete without; and he emerges no less ignorant than he went in. Yet the boys nowadays stay at school till twelve, or sometimes till fourteen; in those days they left at eight or ten. It is probable that _Donnet_ and _Catonnet_ did not penetrate far into the average inner consciousness. But all were not as ignorant as the good-for-nothings who came before the courts of law for purse-slitting and horse-lifting; these we may probably take as a natural selection of the unfittest. M. Delisle, in his _Agriculture Normande au Moyen Age_, gives some delicious examples of the demi-Latinity of the learned peasant, which unfortunately I have not got by heart.

VIII

The population of the rural districts of fourteenth-century France varied terribly according to the progress of the Hundred Years’ War. It is difficult to frame a clear idea of then and now. But from the size of the churches remaining from the thirteenth century, which are almost always in accordance with the actual population, we may suppose that the inhabitants have not increased by more than half: we must allow about that proportion, since mediæval churches, built for sanctuary, were obliged to be large enough to shelter not only all the villagers, but also their valuables, in war time. The villages which have come down to us are not immensely larger, but numerous new communes have arisen on land that was covered then by bog or forest.

On the other hand, many villages called into life by the plenty and peace that followed the last Crusade of Saint Louis disappeared utterly in the long disaster of the Hundred Years’ War. The King’s tax-gatherers jolted through the country collecting the hearth-tax; again and again they found, beside the ruined steeple, a few tumbling beams, an empty stock-yard still paven; nothing more. Another village had vanished. The ordonnances of the Kings of France during the first twenty years of Charles V. are painfully eloquent of this continuous depopulation of the country. The wars against the English on the frontiers of Normandy and Gascony accomplished the same end as the cruel repression of the Peasants’ Revolt in the centre, or the sackings and plunderings of the Captains of Adventure round Rheims, round Orleans, and on the borders of Provence. I have dismissed many tragedies in a single phrase; but how in a few lines shall I indicate the terrible position of the peasants? Their grandfathers had dwelt in little hamlets almost under shelter of the town, to whose palisaded suburbs every winter they, with their families, their harvest and their furniture, thronged for asylum. Moreover, in that earlier age, ruled by firm principles still confidently trusted, the peasant was little less sacred than the priest. All classes recognized the holiness, the authority, of him who sows and reaps the grain that is the life of all. No usurer might take in pledge the ploughshare, the beasts that draw it, nor the corn as yet unthrashed. Four days a week, in war time as in peace time, from every Wednesday night till Monday at sunrise, the _Truce of God_ forbade the men-at-arms to traverse field or sheep-walk; moreover, at any time the peasant, threatened by marauders, was safe if he fled to his plough and laid his hand upon it; the man who touched the iron that furrowed the earth was inviolable, and the plough was as sure a sanctuary as the church.[47] But in the thirteenth century the rural populations, overcrowded round their district towns, pushed further and yet further out into the outlying area of moor and forest, till their clearings, far afield, were beyond reach of their earlier centre. In their new home they clustered all year long round the church which they had raised, under protection of the nearest manor. And the years of peace continued and the population swelled. Thus from each _Châtellerie_ sprang new off-shoots; distant hamlets that had forgotten the necessity of a sword-arm to shelter them, paying tribute to their feudal lord, but too far from his fortress to receive any efficient aid in wartime. When the great English war broke out and the long years of invasion, these peasants learned to feel their loneliness. True, their neighbours round the manor-house were little better off; for after Crecy, and after Poictiers, the greater part of the Seigneurs of France were either dead or in the hands of the English. The ransom they had to raise was all their tenants knew of them; bitter songs and proverbs began to fly from mouth to mouth. “Ten of our Seigneurs will cry surrender to the sound of an Englishman’s voice a mile away!” cried Hodge, indignant. Poor Hodge, other miseries were in store for him! The Great Plague, which had emptied the country after Crecy (“la tierce partie du monde mourust”), came again, following Poictiers. When at last the epidemic passed away (having doubled the rate of wage in less than ten years), when the farmer prepared himself to face new economic conditions, he found himself confronted with new dangers. The truce that had followed Poictiers had brought indeed a momentary peace, so that hope began to flourish with the primroses. But the peace that came in the wake of the battles of the fourteenth century was crueller than battle.... The engagements were no longer fought solely by the armed chivalry of a kingdom; the system of regular armies was as yet unknown. In this bitter time of transition, war was chiefly made by mercenary Captains, who led their troops of adventurers in the pay of the highest bidder.

When the war was over, the men who had fought in it could not vanish into air. The nobles rode home to their castles, the peasants to their farms; but the bulk of the army, these bands of mercenaries, remained hovering with the vultures round the battlefield of yesterday. They were hungry and must eat; they must find a lodging somewhere; and their habit was to plunder. So east and west, north and south, the Companies went, riding as to a tourney; but chiefly they made their way to the rich unravaged Centre; there they soon took thirteen towns, with many fortresses and castles.... Readers who remember the terrible chapters in which Froissart describes the depredations of the Captains of Adventure throughout the centre of France, and down through Gascony to Provence, must very often have dissented from my cheerful picture of the life of fourteenth-century villagers. They remember the despair of the Jacques of Brie, and their extermination; they count up the villages marked in some Royal ordnance as having disappeared; they recall the ballads of Eustache Deschamps describing the sack of Vertus, and think how many a flourishing little town and what innumerable hamlets shared its fate:

“If you wish to see poverty, a ruined country-side, a deserted town, tottering walls where the fire has been, miserable homes, and a more miserable population--go to Vertus! The English have left everything in flames. There you can have at your good pleasure a horse all skin and bone, a broken bed with foul sheets, and, when you take your walks abroad, the amusement of the ruined housetops tumbling round your ears.

“Henceforth the farms round Vertus shall be abandoned; the vineyards are neglected and no man tends the plants. This first year after the sack there will be few wages paid and those uncertain. The man who was wont to speak loud will learn to speak low. Our town exists no more, and ’twill be long before her walls are built again.”[48]

All this is true; and we shall never know in how many villages the sleeping peasants awoke one night to the dreaded tramp of armed horsemen, to the blare of trump and fife, to the sheen of moonlit armour, and the presence of the redoubtable Company in their midst.... Bretons axe in hand, Gascons armed with lances, the Genoese crossbow-men, the English with their bows and arrows, the Lombards with their knives; they were all as well known as the French--all prayed against and watched for throughout the land of France. The sharpest-sighted villager would stand for days in the steeple on the look-out, in order to alarm his fellows when the first of the horsemen should ride up from the horizon. In a moment, women, children, men, would throng to the appointed hiding-place in the brake, bringing with them such treasure as still was left unburied. Happy those who could thus escape in time, and for whom no crueller fate was in store than to find on the morrow a heap of red ashes where once their village stood!

Yet, how shall we believe it? Though all this was true, the countrysides retained their astonishing vitality. Although in many districts most of the young men went off to the wars (“Nous aymons mieux faire le gallin-gallant que labourer sans rien avoir,” as Gerson heard them say), with a natural preference for plundering over being plundered, yet they only pushed a little further the work begun by the Great Plague. The wages of the few remaining labourers became so high that it was easy for them to recover in a little while more than their old well-being. True, the wattled cottage was razed to the ground, but the paved yard remained. The peasant knew that his treasure was safe in the keeping of some man of trust--some merchant of the walled city--when it was not buried in a box or a glove some three feet to the west of the wild cherry-tree, far enough from home to remain unsuspected by the Company. If most of the harvest was destroyed, the remainder sold for an extravagant price; and the hunger of the poor in town was at least the farmers’ gain.[49] Then Charles V., the unparalleled king, sent off the Companies to Spain, to Lombardy, well out of the way. In 1375 our good Master Eustache takes heart and makes an ironical ballad, in which the Companies are supposed to lament the prosperity and good order of the kingdom.

“Le plat pays s’en sent déjà bien Car on n’y ose piller rien;

* * * * *

Nul n’y va courrer sur les champs, Ne n’y rançonne par puissance. L’on n’y prend chevaux ni juments Linges, draps, robes, ni finance, Poulaille, moutons ... violence Ne s’y fait.... ... et le commun bien Y règne en grande autorité. On fait labours en abondance. Honorés sont les anciens.... _Chacun dist quz c’est grand pitié._”[50]

So the wars ended.

But the rate of wage remained fairly high throughout all the fifteenth century. The peasants ate more and of better food, drank more freely of wine and cider (a good deal too freely, and they have not lost the habit), wore more costly and more comfortable garments, afforded their wives and daughters richer ornaments and trinkets than, in the same rank and class, they can afford to-day. In all times, in France, the poorest have contrived to hoard; mediæval accounts and registers reveal the amount of saving effected by all classes, and record the lands and herds constantly acquired by farm labourers and domestic servants. They and their kind prospered, laid by their savings, and bought, rood by rood, the lands of the diminished noble, whom the long wars had left penniless and threadbare. The lords were glad to sell here a croft and there a spinny, for in very many cases they could no longer afford to work their immense estates. And thus the rise in the rate of wages, brought about by battle and plague, not only retrieved the ravage of the English wars, but even prepared insidiously the final ruin of the Feudal system.

THE MEDIÆVAL COUNTRY-HOUSE

_Solos aio bene vivere, quorum_ _Conspicitur nitidis fundata pecunia villis._ HORACE, _Epistolæ_.

I

One of my friends, by race a Persian, a native of the Russian Caucasus, was used to come and see me on his home-sick days, to talk about the castle he had left at home. It is a great, strong castle, with stone towers and wooden balconies, and a vast hall within where my lord sits in state by the cavernous hearth and listens to the wandering minstrels, who sing long ballads to their instruments. Not only singers come there, but itinerant pedlars, the acrobats of the fair, pilgrims to some distant shrine, travellers of many sorts who bring to this high-perched castle news of the outer world. If my lord Aga should wish to see that world at closer quarters, in the nearest city he has his “hostel” in some wealthy burgher’s house, and thither sometimes he repairs during the dead weeks of the winter. But with the first bud or sprout on the topmost sprig, he is back in the castle. For now the real life of the noble begins--the season of the chase! My lord is more or less of a scholar, and in the winter time he fingers amorously his rare collection of illuminated manuscripts (we possess one, for which his nephew offers us a village in Karabag!), brought together at an infinite expense and trouble. But how far he prefers the summer morning, when, hawk in hand, the noble hunters troop forth on their gay-caparisoned horses to chase eagle or heron on the mountain heights! Deep down in the dungeon underground perchance some penitent wonders if the spring will ever come--for there are dungeons still in the castles of Karabag, though the lords there have no longer the right of life and death. Here the nobles live a merry life, united among themselves and seeing few who are not of their order, save the Emperor’s hated tax-collector or the Jew doctor who comes upon his rounds, a quantity of little powders sewn into the sash about his waist.... Could we but be spirited to Karabag, we should find the Middle Ages there in flesh and blood, alive!

Who knows? Yet we who wish to visit the mediæval country-house, we will take a humbler way. We will mount pillion behind some solid, clerkly person: Maistre Jehan Froissart or Maistre Eustache Deschamps, sure of his road and garrulous about his masters. Thus we will jog along, gossiping, from place to place, alighting here and there at some stately castle, where the lord, like that Count of Foix who sent for Froissart from his inn--“est le seigneur du monde qui plus volontiers voit estrangers pour ouyr nouvelles;” or we will turn in at some pleasant manor, such as that Manor of Cachant, dear to Master Eustace, where there are gardens sweet with rose, gladiolus, and mint--where there are meadows, vineyards, and “a noble willow-wood,” with baths of all kinds to refresh the weary traveller: “bains et estuves et le ruissel courant.”

If the countryside afford a good granite rock surmounting a hill or mound of any height, that situation has generally been chosen for the castle, encircled by its protecting precipice. But in some parts of Northern France such sites are few; and, contrasted with the German or Italian fortress on the hill, we find more frequently the manor “emmy estangs,” so often sung of old poets--the castle built like Rochester, or Melun, on the brink or island of a river, isolated by moats and defended by encircling towers. Such was, for example, the Castle of Bièvre, commended by Deschamps in his 454th Ballad--

“La place est forte et de noble cloison. Emmy l’estang où le donjon se lance Trois tours y a de pierre et de moellon.”

Each tower is three stories high, and each stands well in advance of the castle wall, the entry defended by a “puissant pont-levis.” By the fourteenth century, the castles were no longer built with a sole view to refuge and defence; the nobles no longer dwelt there as a last resort in war time, living in the guardroom with their garrison, and directing the defence amid the treasure. The castles of that time of transition were very habitable palaces; and Master Eustace passes from the military architecture to belaud the “noble aqueduct,” which carried water into the interior of the castle, and to praise the rich device of the halls and chambers, the excellent _vivarium_, the well-stocked preserves of game, the baths, the gardens, the rowing-boats, the shady park. “’Tis,” he finishes, “the pleasantest house I know--_pour demourer la nouvelle saison_.”

This is not the strain in which a thirteenth-century minstrel would have sung the praise of Coucy--the castle has become a country-house. The great square tower, flanked with turrets at the angles, which has succeeded to the round tower of defence, is spacious enough for luxurious habitation. Every story contains a large hall, a moderate-sized room and a smaller one, beside the four cabinets in the corner turrets. Generally, the gallery, the chapel, the dining-hall, and the lord’s private room or “retrait” occupied the first story; above came my lady’s chamber, her tiring-room, her oratory, and the “garde-robe,” where her dresses lay folded in spice and lavender, and where her maidens sewed by day and slept by night. The upper stories were occupied by the children and by the guests; and the castle was crowned by several tiers of “machicoulis,” or crenelated battlements, pierced by loopholes and communicating by a “chemin de ronde.”

The ground floor was still dark and difficult of access, lighted only by a few rare lancet-windows, and given over to store-rooms, bath-rooms, ice-houses, and suchlike uses. It communicated, by means of trap-doors, with the cellars and dungeons underneath. Philippe de Vigneulles, in his chronicle, has left us an unforgettable account of his imprisonment, well on in the fifteenth century, in a dungeon of this kind. There were no kitchens within the house, for the cooking was done in a round high-roofed building, like a baptistry, in an outer court, near the servants’ quarters; but sometimes the sick-chambers were situate on this dark, quiet, unfrequented ground floor, which preserved the tradition of its inaccessibility by the absence of any entrance on a level with the ground. A broad double flight of marble steps led from the court to the portal on the first floor. In any London suburb we still may see modest villas thus entered by a flight of steps raised above a high basement, which are, doubtless, quite unconscious of their direct descent from the keep of the twelfth century, entered only by a ladder reared against the front, or by knotted ropes let down from the first-floor window! By the 14th century, however, the _Perron_ of the country-house was an object of great architectural dignity. It generally opened into a long gallery, or _loggia_, or verandah, occupying all one side of the keep: a sort of first-floor cloister, with clustered ogival windows looking on the court below; in fact, the lineal descendant of the Gallo-Roman peristyle or diambulatorium. I believe that in America it is still common. Here the squires and dames used to loiter, “regardant bas en la cour les joueurs de paume jouer.” Half the action of the novel of John of Saintré passes “ès galleries;” and no portion of the castle is more frequently cited by early poets. The Count of Foix received Master Jehan Froissart as he was walking after dinner in his gallery. In fact, the chief use of these _loggia_, _loges_, or _laube_, appears to have been as a promenade or loitering-place when it was too hot or too wet to meet in the orchard just beyond the walls. A very beautiful gallery of the Middle Ages is still preserved in the castle of Wartburg.

In the larger castles this gallery or _loggia_ was sometimes distinct from the keep. Together with the great dining-hall (“sänger-saal” or “mandement”), where the lord sat in justice and received his guests, it formed a lower church-like building, in style much like an Oxford chapel, placed beside the keep and less strongly fortified. These separate halls were only used in time of peace. They were already well known in the thirteenth century, for in the palace of Percival--

“La sale fu devant la tour Et les loges devant la sale.”

And we read in the _Lai de Lautrec_--

“Prochaines eurent leurs maisons Et leurs sales et leurs donjons.”

But the sole square tower with its corner turrets remains, even in the fourteenth century, the type of the castle keep. The chateau of Vincennes, built by Charles V., is an admirable example of the kind.

II

It was not easy to enter the castle keep. It stood encircled by a strongly fortified enclosure, isolated by moat or precipice, and defended, not only by outworks of palisading, but by a barbican and several smaller towers. Having run the gauntlet of all this, having passed down the narrow winding path between the palisades, the visitor arrived at the moat, and blew a horn hung there for the purpose. After parley with porter and watchman, the drawbridge was let down; and after further parley, perchance, the great gate may have swung back on its hinges. In this case, the stranger found himself in a long hollow archway, protected by a series of portcullises, with a perforated roof, through which boiling pitch, molten lead, Greek fire, or simple scalding water could be poured down from an upper chamber. In time of peace, however, the visitor passed unscathed through the gate into a vast courtyard enclosed by huge battlemented walls or towers; a courtyard that is almost a village, for it contains the church, the knights’ quarters, the squires’ house, the lodgings for pages and servants, the barracks, the cottages of the artisans and labourers on the estate, the bake-house, the kitchen, the walled and gated fish-pond, the fountain, the washing-place, the stables, the barns, etc. A second gate, a second portcullis, lead to a smaller court, where--huge, swart, and sombre--towers the keep. It is immense, it is impregnable, and always opposite to the weakest point of the defence, with a postern of its own leading to the orchard, and a subterranean way into the open country. Those who have admired the black majesty of Loches will admit the grandeur of the mediæval keep.

Built against the castle’s outer wall, looking from its upper windows across the open country, the keep sometimes has pleasant views. An island castle, defended by a wide expanse of water, or lifted high above the plain upon a granite needle, could afford the luxury of light and air, could indulge in large windows, grouped three or four together in a space of dead wall, on which they make a lacework of pointed arch and separating columns. But the huge moated castle of the plain was less fortunate. The windows were rare, narrow, far apart. The walls, ten feet thick, made a deep and dark recess for the long lancet holes, more often closed with oiled and painted linen than with glass, and placed very high for the sake of safety. Sometimes they were as much as five feet above the floor. A few years ago in Florence, at the Palazzo Alessandri, I remember seeing windows of this sort, high-perched recesses, the size and shape of an opera-box, reached by a staircase cut in the stone of the wall. On the granite window-benches, heap embroidered cushions; lay a Saracen carpet on the floor; and set in this narrow shrine some fair young woman, lily-slender in her tight brocaded gown. She is playing chess with a squire still younger than herself. Or perhaps she is alone, singing to her lute some ballad of the Round Table--

“La reine chante doucement, La voix accorde à l’estrument, Les mains sont belles, li laiz bons, Douce la voix et bas li tons.”

III

Even nobles of some pretensions used in their daily life little more than the great hall of justice (where the movable trestle-tables were brought in at dinner-time), the gallery which answered to our modern drawing-room, the chapel, the chamber, and the garde-robe, where the young maids-of-honour learned to embroider amid their waiting-women.

These halls and chambers were furnished with some splendour. By the middle of the fourteenth century, the walls were no longer ornamented with the mere stencil-pattern in white and yellow ochre, which sufficed for the princely keep of Coucy. There is a frieze painted, with knights and goddesses, with “Vénus la Dieuesse d’Amour,” or else adorned in fresco or mosaic by “generations of Christians and Saracens painted in battle,” such as the Seigneur de Caumont admired on the walls of Mazières.[51] Lower down, the walls were often wainscotted like that--

“Rice sale à lambres Et d’or musique painturée Et de fin or tout listée”--

where Percival found the Damosel. If the walls were left bare, they were furnished just below the frieze with an iron rod, whence depended hangings of warm stuff or tapestry. Every castle possessed several sets for each apartment, and the noble on his travels had at least one set of chamber-hangings strapped among his baggage. Nothing was easier than to suspend these stuffs, already provided with their hooks, to the rod and rings prepared to hold them. “One thousand hooks for tapestry,” is a common item in fourteenth-century accounts.[52]

The hangings were of plain serge, of worked silk cloth of gold, or “tapisserie de haute lisse,” according to the wealth of the noble or the splendour of the occasion they adorned. In times of mourning the hangings were all black. Such a “chamber,” consisting of wall-hangings, bed-furniture, chair-coverings, cushions, etc., in striped serge, with cord and fringe to match, was supplied to the Lady de la Trémoille in 1396, at a cost of fifty-nine livres--about £240 of our money. As the appearance of the hall could be changed at an hour’s notice on the occasion of mourning or festivities, even the greatest castles had ordinary hangings for common use. King Charles V. possessed no less than sixty-four “chambers,” or complete sets of hangings, in silk, velvet, cloth of silver, leather, embroidery, etc.[53] When Valentine Visconti, Duchess of Orleans, prepared to leave Paris in 1408, a few months before her death, a few months after her husband’s murder, she caused her chamberlain to draw up a list of her furniture, which still exists in the Bibliothèque Nationale. This document (pathetically marked by faded crosses against the names of such objects as Valentine desired to carry with her to Touraine) enumerates more than sixty sets of hangings. In the embroidered curtains, some of the subjects appear astonishingly modern, and indicate a complete mastery of the human figure on the part of the designers. As few persons, I believe, have had the privilege of reading this unpublished manuscript (communicated to me by the late Comte Albert de Circourt). I proceed to quote a few of the more interesting descriptions:--

“2. Bed-furniture of green; the baldaquin is worked with a design of angels; the long curtain depending from the tester behind the pillows represents shepherds and shepherdesses feasting on cherries and walnuts; the counterpane shows a shepherd and a shepherdess within a park; the whole is embroidered with gold thread and with coloured wools. Item, wall-hangings to match. Item, curtains for the walls, without gold, and three smaller curtains of green serge.

“3. Item, a ‘chamber’[54] in gold, silk, and wool, with a device of little children on a river bank, with birds flying overhead. There are three hangings to match, bed-furniture and sofa-cover. The counterpane is embroidered with a group of children, their heads meeting in the middle. Item, three other hangings, with a cherry-tree, and a dame and a squire gathering cherries in a basket--which go with the aforesaid chamber-hangings to make up (_pour fournir_).

“4. Item, another ‘chamber,’ of a brownish green, _sans_ gold, with a lady holding a harp; and there are six hangings to match, with bed-furniture, and a quilt for the couch.

“17. Item, a great tapestry, with the history of the destruction of Troy the Great.

“Item, two wall hangings, with the victories of Theseus.

“Item, a green velvet cover for a couch, and a long cushion covered with green velvet, and two chair cushions, also of green velvet.

“19. Item, a white ‘chamber,’ sown with gladiolus; bed-furniture, quilt for couch, and four rugs.

“20. Item, a set of green tapestries de haute lisse, with the Fountain of Youth and several personages; with bed-hangings, counterpanes, sofa-covers, and six wall-hangings, all worked with gold, without guards (linen coverings or _housses_).

“Item, a ‘chamber,’ representing a lady playing with a knight at the game of chess.

“Item, a set of hangings of cloth of gold, including bed-curtains, counterpane, and two large cushions.”

These tapestries must have been as marvellous as those exquisite rose-grey hangings which still adorn the upper gallery of the Musée Cluny. The smaller curtains were stretched over screens of wicker, or served to drape the great roofed and cushioned settle near the fire, while cloths of gold and silver curtained the throne-like faldestuil reserved for the master of the house. Mats of plaited rushes, not unlike our India matting, were laid in winter on the floors under the delicate rugs of wool, imitated from the industry of the East; but in summer a strew of fresh rushes, mint, and gladiolus (that flower so dear to mediæval eyes), covered the pavement with a cool fragrance, while a bough of some green tree or flowering bush filled the hearth.[55] Great soft cushions, “carreaux” or “couettes,” were placed, sometimes on the chairs and benches, sometimes on the floor itself, according to their size. They served, like the tabourets of Saint Simon, for people of lesser dignity, seated on occasions of ceremony, in presence of their lord. There were also _bankers_, or stuffed backless benches (divans, as we should say), placed against the wall; _dossiers_, a sort of short sofa with a back and cushions; and armchairs provided with _pavilions_, or tester and curtains to keep off the draughts. There were always carpets in rich halls or chambers; long, narrow ones in front of the bankers and the settle, and larger thicker “tapis velus” in the middle of the room. Rugs of embroidered Hungarian leather, and skins of leopard or tiger were sometimes laid upon the hearth.[56]

IV

All these cushions, curtains, carpets, did not suffice to keep the cold from the great deep halls of our forerunners. A shiver runs through the literature of the age.

“Telz froid y fait en yver que c’est raige!”

says Eustache Deschamps in his 805th Ballad, describing the Castle of Compiègne. Even in the house one must arm one’s self with good furry hose, furred pourpoints, warm fur-lined cloaks and hoods. In winter, men and women alike wore a long tunic of fur, quilted between two pieces of stuff, underneath their outer garments. But to be slender was the ideal, the supreme elegance of the later Middle Ages. In vain the Knight of La Tour warns his daughters of the fate of sundry very comely maidens, who, wishing to appear in their true slimness before their lovers, discarded their furred tunics despite the blast of winter, and turned the young men’s hearts against them by the chicken-flesh of their cheeks and the blueness of their noses! In vain he draws a salutary picture of lovers, at last united, dying of cold in the arms of one another, victims to the too chilly elegance of their figures! The furred tunic was all very well for gouty Master Eustace and the elderly knight: young beauties and trim gallants often preferred the risk of mortal illness, and let them grumble.

“Sy est cy bon exemple comment l’en ne se doit mie si lingement ne sy joliettement vestir, pour soy greslir et faire le beau corps en temps d’yver, que l’on en perde sa manière et sa couleur.”[57]

“Do not be shaved,” interrupts Master Eustace, who must decidedly have been an ill-dressed, slovenly old poet, “neither have your hair cut, nor take a bath this bitter weather.” The young people might reply that the _Roman de la Rose_ prescribes the hot bath as a sovereign remedy against winter. The bath-room, with its warm pipes, its great wooden tubs, with the carved gilt garlands round them, its lounges for cooling, its little tables spread with a dainty supper, still preserved a _souvenir_ of Roman luxury. People used to bathe in company, sometimes men and women together (as we still do at the sea-side), their heads beautifully dressed and adorned with flowers, their bodies hidden up to the neck in their great cask-like baths, where the water was often thickened with scented bran or strewn with a dust of salutary herbs.

“Quand viendroit la froide saison,”

sings Maistre Jehan de Meung--

“Quand l’air verroient forcenez Et jeter pierres et tempestes Que tuassent ès champs les bestes Et grands fleuves prendre et glacer....

“On feroient chaudes estuves S’y pourroient tuit nuz demourer Se baignant entr’eus ès cuves.”

In a German poem, _Der nakte Bote_ quoted by Herr Alwin Schulz, a messenger arrives at a distant castle, and proceeds, as was the custom, to strip and take a bath after his dusty journey before presenting himself before the lord of the castle. What was his surprise on opening the door of the bath-room to behold my lord, my lady, and all their olive-branches disporting themselves in steaming tubs! It was, they explained, the only way they could keep themselves from freezing.

Master Eustace prefers a warm chamber, “nattée sus et jus,” with all the windows shut, a fur-lined dressing-gown, a bowl of old Beaune:

“Le chaud civet et bonne espicerie.”

Contest of youth and age! But which, Master Eustace, would be better for your gout?

V

The hearth none the less was deep and ample. Sometimes several fireplaces, grouped together on a raised daïs, occupied all the upper end of the hall with their blazing hearths and shadowy overmantels. A magnificent example still exists at Bourges. In houses of less pretension the hall could boast but one chimney, but that at least was vast. A whole tree could be laid across the gigantic fire-dogs, whence the great blaze radiated warmth and light into the church-like frigidity of the hall. Those who know the Salle de Garde at Langeais, will remember its beautiful chimney-piece representing the Castle’s own crenelated _chemin-de-ronde_, carved with mimic soldiers and stooping watchers, who lean over the battlements to look at the blaze below; few objects are more stately than the monumental fourteenth-century fireplace. If the heat did not penetrate very far, if the humbler fry in the lower hall were grateful for their furs--at least, under the huge overmantel, where the curtained settles stood, there was a cosy ingle-nook for the master of the house, his wife, his children, his guests, his chief retainers.

In such noble houses as could not boast a resident physician, or a master of requests, or a staff of notaries and secretaries, there was, at least, invariably, a chaplain. Immediately below that reverend clerk came the seneschal who was constable, governor, or simple steward, according to the standing of the castle. When no separate dispenser was employed, the seneschal was dispenser, master of the household, and governor of the pages. Next to him came the butler; then, the chamberlain, to whom were entrusted the jewels, art treasures, and furniture of the castle; the marshal, or master of the horse, and the head falconer. All these were persons of importance, to be treated with a certain ceremony; they were frequently of noble blood; they accompanied their master on many of his journeys, and were rather his ministers than his servants. Next to them in order of rank stood the housekeeper or governess, often a beguine or Tertiary nun, who supervised the ordering of the house, engaged and controlled the servants, and governed the young girls of noble family serving in the castle as maids of honour. Under her came a swarm of chambermaids and housemaids, cooks and tailors, page-boys and varlets. Let us not forget from the list of our retainers that person of consideration, the fool: the ancestor of the modern diner-out. Fools and dwarfs were not to be found under every noble roof. The smaller country-houses were sometimes condemned to a distressing sanity, and depended for their amusement on wandering minstrels and the acrobats of the fair.

We have not counted in our list the knights and squires of the keep, nor yet the garrison with its captain, nor the artisans and labourers on the estate. For the moment we are occupied merely with the interior of the castle. And the chief thing that strikes us in it is the abundance of young people--the troops of boys and girls.

VI

Every castle was, in fact, a school--a seminary of polite education. From the king to the pettiest baron, every noble received at his court the children of his principal vassals; and thus every noble child was educated to the standard of the sphere immediately above his own. In their homes, from the age of seven, boys and girls alike had learned to spell, to ride, to know that they were Christians. At the age of ten or twelve they were generally sent to court. Here they learned, above all, the duties and behaviour of gentlepeople.

Great care was taken that they should be well-bred, chivalrous, courteous, neatly clad, and clean. Along with this, the boys learned to fence, shoot, fight with sword and shield, joust, play quintaine, tennis, palm-play, chess, draughts, and tric-trac. They were taught to ride, climb, leap, swim, and to perform all these feats in heavy armour and handicapped by difficult conditions. In a word, they were trained to amuse themselves, to exert themselves, and to endure. The _Livre des Faiz de Jean Bouciquaut_ shows the great stress laid upon physical education; but it also shows that physical education was not all. Boys who would grow into knights, and pass through many courts and countries, had to learn several languages. French, of a sort, was taught in all European countries--often, no doubt, it was of the kind of Stratford-atte-Bowe--for French then, as now, was the language of diplomacy and courts. And some lads then, as now, acquired a little Greek and Latin; but so much learning was rarely encouraged save in the future Churchman. All noble children, boys and girls, learned to read and write, though frequently in after-life the warrior’s remembrance of these arts was no more precise than the knowledge possessed by our average country squire of the _Iliad_ he used to parse at school. The women kept up their accomplishments: most noble women in England and Italy, as in France, could read, play some musical instrument, embroider, speak a little French, bind a wound and tend a fever, if comparatively few could wield the pen.

At twelve years old the page was sent to court. Here he was to finish his education, to win, if possible, his suzerain’s favour, and to lay the beginnings of his fortune. But at first he saw little of his lord. He was entirely under the control of the seneschal, the chamberlain, and the first equerry, for, as the name denotes, the young squire’s quarters were situate in the _écuries_. After a few years’ apprenticeship his opportunity might come. A chance might make him a page-messenger, and so he might earn the confidence of his Seigneur. He might, by his good manners and courtesy, awaken the attention of some noble dame. He might even accompany his suzerain to some superior court, attract the notice of the over-lord, and be adopted to that higher sphere. Thus the little Jehan de Saintré, a young lad in the household of his father’s suzerain in Touraine, was taken by that gallant knight to Paris, where the king took a fancy to the child--“tellement que il le voulut avoir en sa cour à estre son paige, pour après lui chevaucher, et au sourplus servir en salle, comme ses aultres paiges et enffans d’honneur.” But the natural course of things was for the lad to remain a page among his fellow-pages till the age of fifteen or sixteen, when he was ripe for the office of messenger or carver at the lord’s table. These offices entailed squireship. In this condition he remained until about the age of twenty, when, generally on the occasion of some princely wedding, some outbreak of war, some tournament or other great occasion, he was dubbed knight, and set forth on his adventures.

While all these lads from twelve to twenty were fencing, riding, or playing palm-play in the court, their sisters were employed in my lady’s company. They seldom came together with the men of the castle, save on holidays and feast-days. At other times they spent their time in my lady’s chamber or tiring-room, or walked with her in the country, for it was held unseemly that ladies of noble birth should be met walking alone. They were, in fact, much in the position of “girls still in the schoolroom” in a modern country-house. They learned their lessons with their governess, practised their lute, went to church every morning, embroidered chasubles and altar-cloths, and worked wonderful hangings for the cold stone walls. And there were from seventy to a hundred yards of needlework in a set of hangings! They could also spin fine silk and linen, and ornament with needlework their feast-day veils and dresses. (The less interesting forms of sewing were left to the army of tire-women and waiting-women who attended on the noble maidens and their lady.) They all knew how to ride and how to fly a hawk, to make wreaths and posies, to sing, to play, to beguile the long hours with chess, tric-trac, draughts; and the youngest of them began to deal and shuffle the new-invented “naypes,” or “naibi”--the first playing-cards. They could pluck or brew virtuous simples, bind a broken limb, or nurse a fever. They could amuse the convalescent with endless tales of the Round Table, with the legends of Charlemagne, and with lives of the saints no less interesting and romantic. Most of them could read aloud some novel: _Cléomadès_ or _Mélusine_. They must, I think, have been blithe, charming, capable companions in the long winter of a lonely country-house. On the whole, with its constant undercurrent of chivalry and religion, theirs was an education which left its women delightful, tender of heart, and generous, if, perhaps, with little moral strength to resist the illusions of the heart.

VII

From December till the end of March, life in the castle was perforce an idle one. War was rarely made in winter; there were no tourneys in the bitter weather, too cold for combatant or spectator; and in heavy snow time there was perforce a truce to hunting of the more vigorous kind. It would have been extravagant to rise before candlelight, so that it was after seven when knights and ladies left their curtained beds, washed their hands and face in rose-water, heard the Mass, and took their morning broth. Dinner, which in the summer was sometimes as early as nine, was sometimes in winter put as late as noon. And after dinner there was the siesta--the apparently inevitable siesta, sensible enough in summer heats after a morning already seven or eight hours old, but inexplicable during the best part of a winter’s day. Still, in all the novels and chronicles of the fourteenth century, I am bound to admit that, at all seasons of the year, after the principal meal, both men and women retire to sleep for at least a couple of hours. It is true the meal was long and heavy, and highly spiced. Still, in our visions of mediæval heroes we cannot imagine Charlemagne nodding after dinner every day, despite the assurance of Philippe Mouskes “that he always undressed himself and slept for two hours after the midday meal, holding the practice for a very wholesome one.”[58] We do not evoke Knight Percival and his companions as sleeping half the afternoon away. Yet--

“après le disner Se couchièrent ... à dormir Jusqu’al vespre sans nul espir.

* * * * *

Endroit vespre sont reveillé Le souper ont appareillié.”[59]

Joinville mentions, as the most natural thing in the world, that St. Louis went to bed every day after the midday dinner until vespers; while the child Jehan de Saintré, Damp Abbez, the Dame des Belles Cousines, Pero Niño, the Dame de Sérifontaines, the Lady of Fayel, the Chastelain de Coucy, all the brood of fourteenth-century heroes and heroines, follow, in this respect, the example of their elders.

Towards three o’clock, our dames and knights aroused themselves, took a slender meal of bread dipped in wine or hypocras, and preserved fruits, and then set out to vespers. We still are faithful to the afternoon-tea, but we have dropped the daily church service. After vespers the winter evening had closed in--the fourteenth-century evening ill-lit by flaring torches. It was fortunate if pedlar or pilgrim, minstrel or acrobat, knocked at the castle gate and demanded hospitality. Otherwise, despite the well-worn _facetiæ_ of Master Hausselicoq, the fool, the evening was apt to prove a trifle long.

The accounts of fourteenth-century barons abound in mention of minstrels, acrobats, “joueurs d’espertise,” “joueurs de la corde,” “chanteurs et chanteresses,” and all the motley crew.[60] Every castle was glad to extend its hospitality to wayfarers of every kind, for they brought news and amusement, and renewed the worn-out stock of gossip. Two little pictures of people of this sort occur to me as I am writing. One is a sketch of the Welsh or Breton harper, from the poem of Renart. When Renart, disguised as a jongleur, offered to sing to Isengrin his lays of the Round Table, he put on a strange jargon, and proceeded to tell his story in almost unintelligible French--

“‘Je fot saver bon lai Breton Et di Merlin et di Foucon Del Roi Artus, et de Tristan Del Chievrefoil, et Saint Brandan.’ ... ‘Et sais-tu le Lai Dan Iset?’.... ‘Ya-ia!’ dit il. ‘Godistouët!’” (God is to wit?)

Wrapped in their weather-beaten mantle, shaggy, ridiculous, singing much as sings Hans Breitmann to-day, it is thus (according to M. Joseph Bédier[61]) that we must picture the minstrels who sang of Tristan and Yseult. Probably they used their strange, absurd prose merely as a medium to explain the story to their hearers in much such a _chante-fable_ as “Aucassin et Nicolette,” while they sang their lyrics in their Celtic tongue to the music of their harps. And if the voice is sweet, after all, the language is of little consequence.

Our other tiny idyl is drawn from the arrival of the pedlar at the castle of the Lady of Fayel. That hapless and guilty lady, desirous at all risks to meet her noble lover, bids the Chastelain de Coucy don the pedlar’s garb in order to approach her. He puts on rough laced boots and a coat of coarse cloth, on his head a torn and battered hat, a stick in his hand, a pack upon his back. He comes to the castle and undoes his wares:

“car mercier Porte en tous lieus son panier Et en salles et en maisons S’ebate en toutes saisons.”

The lady and her maidens stand round and pick and choose, praise this, bargain for that, choose and discard in true feminine fashion.

“Ont maintes choses barguigné Et li aucuns ont acheté Ce que leur vint à volonté.”

But when the pack is strapped again, the pedlar murmurs that it is late. “And it rains!” cries the Dame de Fayel. So the packman stays all night at the castle, and my lady finds means to get speech with her lover.

In the summer, when there were tourneys and weddings and other festivities in the countryside, not only packmen passed and minstrels, but acrobats, conjurers who swallowed knives and lighted candles, keepers of learned pigs and clever dogs, owners of puppet-shows, dancers and jongleurs in plenty. They travelled from place to place, lodging in the castle or the village inn, always welcome guests in the monotony of country life. But all these visitors were rarer birds in winter. Then the long days were passed in chess-playing and tric-trac; heavy bets were laid and taken, and in the cumber of their idleness many a knight was ruined out of sheer _ennui_.

Gambling was the curse of the noble, as it has always been the curse of every class trained to win and to desire, but with scant outlets for its energies. The knights in winter gambled pretty nearly all day long. We remember how the Servitor of Milun, entering a castle in the morning, finds in the great hall two knights playing chess, so absorbed that they do not see him.... “When Easter comes,” say the knights to Milun, “we will recommence our tournaments,” but until Easter there is no rival to their games of chance, except the eternal game of love. Chess was the baccarat, the bridge of the Middle Ages. In vain the king forbade it in 1369, in 1393, and both before and after, with every other game of hazard. But who was to enter the snowed-up country castle, to tell tales of knights and ladies playing the forbidden game? The women were almost as bad as the men. “Never play chess, save for love,” says the Knight de la Tour to his daughters: “ne soyez jamais grant jouaresses de tables.” And he proceeds to tell them melancholy tales of land, of money, and of women’s honour spent over the too enticing board. But, alas, good knight, the days are ill to pass in winter time!

VIII

So there was great joy when the trees began to redden:

“Betweene Mersh and Averil When spray beginth to spring.”

The poets of the Middle Ages, all intoxicate with May-dew, did but express the hearts of their whole generation. The long dull months, shut in cold and ill-lit draughty houses, with, for nourishment, the same eternal salt meat and shipboard food, were now delightfully over-past. The voice of the stock-dove was heard in the land, and the almond-boughs began to blossom in the orchard. Spring meant a free life out of doors in the sunlight; spring meant the hunt, delicious days spent in the fresh green wood in healthy sport that made the pulses beat. Spring meant the game-bag full; a varied table spread in bower or garden. Spring meant a hundred little intimate festivities waking to mirth the numerous young people of every fourteenth-century castle. Sometimes the whole company go out to hunt for several days in the forest, knights and ladies, pages, maidens, carrying with them tents, provisions. The girls wash their hands and faces in the dew of flowers to get a good complexion, as they still used to do in Warwickshire when I was a little child. Every hunter has a horn to sound if he gets lost in the forest. How they laugh over all the little hardships and adventures of the picnic! In one old poem--old even in the days of Valentine Visconti--the knights have forgotten their towels and have to dry their faces on the ladies’ skirts.[62]

Generally these great hunts were made with hounds, and the game was deer or bear, wild boar, hare, or otter. But the most fashionable sport was hawking. Every castle had its knight-falconer, who was a great person with onerous duties. The royal falconer was paid as much as twenty-four sols a day--three times the daily due of the physician; and even a varlet falconer was given three sols _per diem_--a very respectable salary.[63] But he was not paid for doing nothing; the hawk was hard to catch, and when caught difficult to train. Night and day the falconer, with the bird, hooded and fasting, on his hand, must pace up and down, up and down, like a mother with her teething child. When at last the bird was fit for use, perched lightly on his lady’s wrist, or soaring after swan, pheasant, or wild duck through the upper air, he was one of the most precious and beautiful possessions of a noble. The best esteemed was the Irish or Norwegian ger-falcon. What pet name was more endearing than that of “Gay Goshawk”? His clear eye, a pure grey, neither greenish nor bluish, is the inevitable standard to which the mediæval lover compares his lady’s glance--falcon-keen, falcon-swift, falcon-bright, and grey as the hawk’s eye. In the evening, invigorated rather than fatigued by the long day in the forest, knights and ladies would fall to dancing. The country neighbours would come for miles; even the burghers of the richest sort were now and then invited. “Il est accoustumé en esté de veiller à dances jusqu’au jour,” writes the Knight of La Tour, but he condemns the practice, being past his youth, and asserts that strange things happen when some band of practical jokers contrives to extinguish all the lights. Let us hope that such accidents did not frequently occur, and that the knight’s three daughters were not kept at home too often “pour le péril de mauvaises langues.”

IX

It would be pleasant to spend a day or two in some fourteenth-century country-house during the early summer. Let us attach ourselves to the suite of a certain Spanish hidalgo, Don Pero Niño, a noble adventurer, who, landing at Harfleur in 1405, went to visit Renaud de Trie, Admiral of France, at his country seat of Sérifontaines. Don Pero Niño, fresh as we to France, sets forth, by means of his gifted secretary and chronicler, all the details of that memorable visit. We remember no page in Froissart at once so bright and so precise.

The Admiral de Trie was an aged knight, ill in health. In his day he had been a famous fighter, but in 1405, broken down by many battles, he lived retired on his estate in Normandy.[64]

“There dwelt he in great comfort in a castle, strong, although situate in a plain, and furnished as well as it had been in Paris. He had about him young gentlemen in pageship, and all kind of servitors, as befits so great a lord.

“In his house there was a great chapel, where Mass was said every morning to the sound of trumpets and divers instruments, played by his minstrels in a way that was a marvel. Before the house a river flowed; orchards and gracious gardens bordered it. On the other side of the castle was a pond for fish, enclosed by walls, and guarded by gates well-locked; whence, every day, the steward might furnish food for three hundred persons.... There was a pack of fifty hounds; twenty horses were kept for the service of the lord of the castle. There were plenty of falcons-gentle. There was all that heart can wish for in the way of hunting--the otter, the roe, the wild boar, small game, or waterfowl.”

The old knight had a young wife, “the fairest lady that was at that time in France.” She was a woman of great sense and order, and, as was in those days the custom, she was almost entirely responsible for the management of her husband’s estates.

“All things were arranged or decided by my lady. She alone governed everything both within and without. My lord the Admiral was a rich man, lord of many lands; but he had to take thought for none of these things, my lady being sufficient unto all.”

“My lady had her noble lodging apart from the mansion of her lord. They dwelt within the self-same moat, but divided the one from the other by a drawbridge. It would be long to set forth the number and the magnificence of the furniture that there was in this lodging. Here lived my lady, surrounded by ten maids of honour, very richly clad and accoutred all of them, who had nought to do save keep their lady company, for beneath them there were many waiting-women.

“Now will I tell you the rule and order of my lady’s life. Of a morning, so soon as she was dressed, forth she went with her damsels to a spring hard by, where each one told her rosary, and read her book of _Hours_ in silent prayer, sitting a little apart from her fellows. Next, plucking flowers and violets upon their way, they hied them home to the palace, and gathered in the chapel, where they heard a low Mass. As they came out of church their servants handed them a silver tray, furnished with larks, chickens, and other roast fowl, of which they took or left what they would, and drank a little wine. My lady ate but rarely of a morning, or trifled with some morsel to humour those about her. Their fast broken, lady and damsels mounted their noble hackneys, and then, met in company with such knights and squires as were of their party, they went riding through the lanes and open country for some while, weaving garlands of flowers as they went. Then might you hear such singing, by voices well-tuned and timed together, of virelays, lays, rondeaux, songs, complaints, ballads, and other verses, such as the French know featly how to finish, that, I declare you, could it last for ever, you would have thought yourself in Paradise.”

With this company rode the Captain Pero Niño, the occasion of all this festival. With them at dinner-time he rode home to the castle, dismounted, and strode into the hall, where the portable trestle-tables had been already spread. The Admiral could no longer ride afield, but he welcomed home his guests with a marvellous good grace. My lady and Pero Niño were placed at the Admiral’s table, while the seneschal presided over the other, and saw that every damsel sat between a squire and a knight. There were meats of all manner in great number and marvellous well cooked. During the meal whosoever knew how to speak with courtesy and measure of arms and love was sure to find a hearing and an answer. Meanwhile the jongleurs made low music on divers instruments. Dinner over, grace was said, the tables removed, and then the minstrels came; my lady danced with Pero Niño, and every damsel with her squire. This dance lasted an hour; when it was over, my lady gave the kiss of peace to Pero Niño, and every lady to her cavalier. Then wine and spices were handed round, and all alike dispersed to their siesta. Pero Niño, happy knight, had his lodging in my lady’s tower.

Later in the afternoon the horses were brought round, and the pages stood ready bearing falcons: a huntsman had already tracked the heron’s course:

“Then would you have seen a noble sport and fair amusement, with swimming of hounds, beating of drums, whirring and wheeling of falcons, with knights and ladies riding along the river-bank as many as you can imagine them. That sport ended, my lady and her company would seat themselves to rest in some green meadow, while the pages unpacked cold fowl and game, and divers fruit. All eat and drank, twining garlands. Then, singing glees and songs, they returned to the castle.”

Supper came at nightfall if it were winter-time. In summer the meal was earlier, and afterwards my lady would set off on foot to wander up and down the countryside till dark, while some would accompany her, and some would stay to play at bowls. Then the torches flared in the great hall, the minstrels gathered in, and there was dancing until far into the night. And this is the order which was followed every day, according to the seasons and the quality of the guests, whenever there was holiday at Sérifontaines. But now, ’tis late. Hand round the wine and spices, and to bed!

X

During these long days, when my lady danced, sang, and rode with Pero Niño, she and he discovered that the Admiral was old. “En tout honneur,” they fell in love with one another. Like the woman of order that she was, instead of keeping Pero Niño as her lover, Madame de Trie sent him to her father to see if he would do for her second husband, while she stayed at Sérifontaines and nursed the Admiral. The father apparently consented, for we hear that they “se tinrent pour amoureux.” Meanwhile the Admiral died. My lady and Don Pero exchanged keepsakes, and he promised to return to France and marry her at the expiry of her mourning. But having met in Spain a certain Doña Beátriz, he married her instead; and perhaps in later years Madame de Trie thought more kindly of the good old Admiral.

Neither the knights nor the ladies of these old chronicles surprise us by the delicacy of their heart. With the _Roman de la Rose_, the still unpurified passions of those ages held that--

“Nous sommes faiz, beau filz, sans doutes, Toutes pour tous et tous pour toutes.”

Adultery is as common in their chronicles as it has always been in fiction--and perhaps in fact. And when the lovers are tired of each other, it is difficult to veil the case less kindly than the Dame des Belles-Cousines, in her behaviour to Jehan de Saintré, or the Chastelain de Coucy when he punishes the Lady of Vermandois. Moreover, the very first beginnings of love were contaminated by a thought of utility, of “subsidy,” as one of our authors does not fear to state. Even in that pure and charming chronicle, the _Livre des Faiz de Jehan Bouciquaut_, we read that on account of her influence and her prestige, “it is much better to love a lady of a station superior to one’s own.” Listen to the counsels which a lady of great position, the Dame des Belles-Cousines, gives to Jehan de Saintré! The lad, a child of thirteen, has refused to tell her the name of his sweetheart:

“The tears came into the lad’s eyes, for never in his days had he given thought to such a thing as love or lady-loves. His heart fell, his face turned pale.... He sat a long while in silence, twirling the loose end of his girdle round his thumbs.... At last he cried out in his despair, for all the maids of honour fell to questioning him together and at once: ‘What can I tell her? I have no lady-love! If I had one, I would tell you soon enough!’

“‘Well, whom do you love the best of all in the world?’ asked the maidens.

“‘My mother,’ said little Saintré, ‘and after her my sister Jacqueline.’

“Then said my lady:

“‘But of them that are nothing to ye, which love ye the best?’

“‘I love none of them,’ said Saintré.

“‘What! none of them?’ quoth my lady. ‘Ha! false gentleman! You love none of them? Then by that token I prophesy that you will come to nothing. Faint heart that ye are! whence sprang all noble enterprises, all great achievements and valorous deeds of Launcelot, of Gawain, of Tristan, of the courteous Giron, and the other knights of the Round Table? Also of Ponthus,[65] and innumerable other heroes? What else but love-service? What else but the desire to keep the favour of their much-desired dame? And I myself have known many men who, through their love affairs, have reached the highest possible honours, of whom, but for these, no more talk had been made than of so many simple soldiers.’”

Little Saintré left the lady’s presence shamefaced, and when the door was shut, “he ran down the gallery as fast as if he had fifty wolves behind him.” But one day, as he waited at table on the maids of honour, these ladies made him vow to give the promised answer that afternoon. Therefore, when the king and queen retired for their noonday siesta, my lady sought young Saintré in the gallery, and took him to her chamber with her; and there, surrounded by her ladies, she seated him at the foot of her couch and summoned him for a reply.

“At last the poor lad bethought him of one of the noble maidens sent to court, who was ten years of age.

“‘My lady,’ quoth he, ’tis Matheline de Courcy!’

“‘Ah, coward!’ cried my lady, ‘to choose a child like Matheline. Not that she be not a very fair maiden, and of an excellent house, better than thine. But what good, what profit, what honour, what comfort, what advantage, _what subsidy_, what aid and counsel can you find in the love of Matheline? She is but a lassie yet. Nay, you should choose a lady of high and noble birth, wise, and _with the wherewithal to help your fortunes_, and set you above necessity; and her should you love with perfect service, loyally and well, and in all honour. Be sure that in the end she will have mercy upon you, “et par ainsy deviendrez homme de bien.”’”[66]

When we think that this harangue (and especially all that follows it) was penned by an ecclesiastic for the education of a prince, we perceive that our code of morals has changed. Young Saintré received large sums of money from his mistress, with no loss of honour, and the lady herself enters on her mission as on a sacred calling. “Although so young, she had, in her virtue, formed a Roman resolution never to remarry; but often she wished that her work in the world might be to train some young knight or squire and make him a pattern of chivalry.” It is with this high intention that she becomes the mistress of young Saintré; that she bestows her wealth upon him, and keeps him in due splendour of steed and apparel; that she preaches to him, with a sublime lack of logic, “how to flee the seven mortal sins”; that she finds him books to read, and stuffs him with quotation from Thales of Miletus, Chilon of Lacedemonia, Avicenna, Valerius Maximus, and Pittacus of Mitylene. To this end she persuades herself to a cruel separation, and sends him on his travels as knight-errant. She is, in fact, his mundane Beatrice. Her love for him is in truth a liberal education, and one that seems delightful and legitimate to her contemporaries. But our eyes see in her an ugly likeness to Madame de Warens, and we should say, in downright English, that she corrupts the lad.

XI

Virtuous or frail, the ladies of the Trecento, as of the two preceding centuries, were all alike as sisters in their loveliness. Or rather, we may say that only one type of beauty was recognized as such, all mediæval heroines were required to conform to that absolute standard.

In our eyes the dark-eyed beauties of Murillo, the warm blondes of Titian and Palma, the slender angels of Perugino, the powdered _espiègle_ ladies of Gainsborough and Reynolds; the majestic form of the Venus of Milo, and the somewhat mannered elegance of Tanagra, are all, in their kind, types of accomplished beauty. Many different ideals have enlarged and exercised our taste. But, of all the candidates on our list, the Middle Ages would have admitted only the Perugino angel and the Tanagra statuette.

This lessens, at any rate, the difficulty of description. The mediæval beauty was _always_ golden-haired, either naturally or by the aid of art. Her hair was very fine, rippling in long curves above a fair broad forehead. One of her distinctive charms was the large space between the brows, the “plaisant entr’euil” so often sung of early poets; very few things seemed more hideous to our forefathers than shaggy eyebrows meeting in the middle. It was also a great disadvantage for the eyebrows to be fair. They should be several shades darker than the hair, narrow, pencilled, delicately arched; Burns’--

“Eyebrows of a darker hue Bewitchingly o’erarching.”

Eyes, not blue, but “grey as glass,” “plus vairs que cristal,” not over-large, somewhat deeply set, and always bright, keen, and shining as a falcon’s.

Below these brilliant eyes, a small straight nose, rather long than short, but above all “traitis”--that is to say, neat and straight--divided two oval cheeks, with dimples that appear at the bidding of a smile. A fresh, faint pink-and-white colour, like the first apple-blossom, must flourish in these little cheeks. The lips are much redder, slightly pursed over the tiny pearly teeth; “la bouche petite et grossette,” says the prosaic _Roman de la Rose_; but Ulrich von Lichtenstein expressed his meaning better in his “kleinvelhitzerôter munt,” his “little, very fire-red mouth;” or the author of _Guillaume le Faucon_, who likens his heroine’s lips to a scarlet poppy-bud:

“Tant estoit vermeille et close.”

Sometimes the small mouth was only half shut, as if about to speak:

“Les lèvres jointes en itel guise C’un poi i lessa ouverture Selonc réson et par mesure,”

says the author of _Narcisse_.[67]

The cleft chin and the ears must be small and round and white, above a long neck, with a full white throat. The fairness of this throat, its delicacy and transparence, was the _sine quâ non_ of feminine loveliness. “When she drank red wine, one saw the rosy fluid through her throat,” say the poets.

The beauty of the Middle Ages was invariably slender, slim, and round as a willow-wand. The shoulders are small, the whole figure “greslette et alignie”; long-drawn out in slenderness, with slim, round, long limbs, and slim, round, long fingers, that show no joints, and terminate in trim, shining nails, cut very close. The bust is high, with neat, round, well-divided breasts, and a slim, round waist. When Eustache Deschamps, in his 960th Ballad, sings the charms of a lady quite correctly like this portrait, he ends with saying:

“Mais sur toutes portez bien vos habiz Plus que nulle dame ne damoiselle Qui soit vivante en terre n’en paÿs.”[68]

Poets in every century have laid great store by that

“something i’ the gait Gars ony dress look weel.”

The _Roman de la Rose_, that manual of the fourteenth century, devotes a score or so of verses to this doctrine of deportment.

“‘Marche joliettement,’ walk prettily, mincingly, showing your pretty little shoes, so well made they fit without a wrinkle.... And if your dress trail behind on the pavement, yet take thought to lift it a little towards the front, as if the wind had caught it, so that every one who passes you may notice the dainty well-shod slimness of your feet.

“And if you have a long mantle--one of those long, full cloaks that almost entirely hide your charming figure--with your two hands and your two arms manage to open it wide in front, whether the day be fair or foul, even as a peacock spreads his tail.”

XII

Let us not think that the fourteenth-century castle was entirely peopled by men and women in the bloom of idle youth. There were charitable widows whose conversation was in heaven; there were knights strong and resolute in their absolute religion. In spite of all its mediocrity, alongside of its frivolity, its often criminal looseness of the marriage tie, the fourteenth century was an age of piety and honour. Every gentleman had two religions, for either of which he would have died; and the briefest record of life in the castle must find a place for the observances of the Church and the duties of chivalry. We cannot lay too great a stress upon the austerity, upon the charity, inherent in the ideal woman of a period whose great ladies were so often purely worldly and emotional. We should leave our readers under a false conception if we let them suppose that the women of a fourteenth-century castle were invariably after the pattern of the sprightly Dame des Belles-Cousines, or of the sweeter Lady of Fayel. “Even in a palace life can be lived well.” No saint in her cloister was purer than Madame Olive de Belleville, “la plus courtoise dame et la plus humble;” stern to herself, fasting daily, wearing the hair-shirt on her tender flesh, but to all others most pitiful and gentle, visiting the sick, helping poor women in childbirth, praying on the graves of poor or aged people who had few to mourn them. And, by a rare virtue, she was charitable not only to the unhappy; she knew no less how to welcome and honour the well-to-do, the honourable, the unpathetic; she knew how to deck with fair, white raiment the smiling daughters of ruined gentle-folk, who else would have gone to their bridegrooms without a jewel or a wedding garment. She was hospitable, and even lavish, to the careless minstrel folk, so that they made a “Ballad of Regret” when at last she left them. Above all, she would never hear ill of anybody. And when the ugly story went round in whispers, and the worldly and the sceptical smiled half-content, this good woman, who denied herself the simplest pleasures, would hasten to excuse the sinner, to doubt if the tale were true; or, were it proven, then she would say that God would amend it, and that His judgments and His mercy alike were marvellous, and would one day astound us all. So that in her neighbourhood none went undefended in the hour of slander, unsaluted in prosperity, unvisited in sickness or sorrow, unholpen in poverty, or unprayed for in the hour of death. Few sweeter eulogies could be given to any woman. “In truth,” says the Knight of La Tour, “though I was only nine years old when I knew her, I still remember many a wise thing she said and did, that I would set down here had I the time and space.”

Madame Olive de Belleville was as frequent a type as the Lady des Belles-Cousines and her kind. More frequent than either, and between the two extremes of saint and sinner, is the wise and prudent Lady of La Tour, the careful mother of growing daughters, “très gentille et preude femme,” who, beautiful still, and often subject to temptation, is skilful as Portia or Beatrice in the witty answer, the brilliant, inviolable smile, which serves to turn aside the insinuation of evil. Nor let us forget that noble wife of a nobler husband, Madame Antoinette de Turenne, “who scarce lived in her husband’s absence, with so great love did they love each other,” who had refused the hand of a Royal prince in order to marry Sir John Bouciquaut. There were then, as now, in every class, countless women of purest honour, of staunchest virtue, wise in counsel, true of heart. And, in the highest rank, if the absence of daily cares produced many frail and thoughtless beauties, the same cause added to the souls of its saints a singular aloofness, a dazzling lustre of unworldliness, and a penetrating grace of meditation. The long empty hours of the mediæval donjon, if they fostered the loves of a Tristan and an Yseult, also brought forth many a radiant spiritual flower.

XIII

In the castles of the fourteenth century, the men no less than the women were religious. The middle class, and especially the respectable bourgeois man of letters, affected a certain freedom of thought: he was already the father of Voltaire and the grandfather of the speech-making Jacobins of the French Revolution. But all that was changed among the nobility. There it was essential (even as it is among the nobles of France to-day), however light of life, to be grave of thought. The education of every knight made him instinctively religious. Even the scapegrace Louis of Orleans would pass weeks together in the Convent of the Celestines, praying, fasting with the monks before the altar. And a perfect knight was habitually not only pious, but austere.

The _Livre des Faiz de Messire Jehan Bouciquaut_ gives us an admirable picture of a pattern of chivalry. The great Governor of Genoa (whom the documents of the Florentine archives reveal to us as an insupportable martinet, dogmatic, obstinate, and tyrannical, despite his virtues) appears in these pages in the inner splendour of a noble soul. Every morning he rose at dawn, “that the first-fruits of his day might be consecrate to God,” and we learn with some surprise that this poet of courtly ballads, this soldier, this statesman, gave every morning of his life three consecutive hours to his “œuvre d’oraison,” as infallibly renewed at night. At table, while his household were served in gold and silver, he ate and drank from pewter, glass, or wood; however rich the banquet, he partook but of one dish, the first served, with one glass of wine and water.

“He loves to read the fair books of God, the lives of the saints, the deeds of the Romans, and ancient history; but he talks little and will listen to no slander.... Marvellously hateth he liars and flatterers, and driveth them from him.... Marvellously hateth he also all games of chance and fortune, and never consenteth to them.... Those virtues which be contrary to lubricity are steadfast in him.... He is stern and to the point in justice, yet faileth he not in mercy and compassion.... He is very piteous to the ancient men-at-arms who can no longer help themselves, who have been good blades in their time, but have laid by nothing, and so are sore distressed in their old age.... And with all his heart loveth he those who are of good life, fearing and serving our Lord Jesus Christ.... He oweth no debts.... He never lies; and all that he promiseth, so much doth he perform.”

We are content to end our studies with the portrait of so true a knight.

THE END

PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BECCLES.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] “Flour de Brousso,” par Arsène Vermenouze. [Imprimerie Moderne. Aurillac. 1896.]

[2] _Pages Libres_, No. 103.

[3] See the _Comptes des Frères Bonis_, merchants at Montauban during the second half of the fourteenth century, published (1890) by M. Ed. Forestier. Bonis himself possessed in the vicinity of Montauban lands and houses to the value of sixty or seventy thousand pounds sterling, modern value;--which did not prevent his selling his goods with his own hands, down to the smallest detail.

[4] See _Bonis_, ccviii. Among Bonis’ servants the swineherd, Jean Chaussenoire, bought a vineyard; the neatherd, Salona, two houses in town; another neatherd, a house on the banks of the Aveyron. In 1366, under the English, a shepherdess comes to Bonis and entrusts him with her savings: three and thirty pounds! Bonis’s valet, a man at wages of five pounds a year, possessed enough land to take 430 litres (two septiers) of wheat at the sowing: from six to eight acres of land.

[5] Léopold Delisle, _L’Agriculture Normande au Moyen Age_. See pp. 8-17, an account of the position of the _hospites_, who, often burghers in the town, were little better than serfs in the country.

[6] For example, the Marmosets of Charles V.; but this king also knighted numerous burghers of Paris.

[7] For the full description of the origin and class of vavassours, we refer our reader to L. Delisle, _L’Agriculture Normande au Moyen Age_.

[8] Bonis.

[9] Thorold Rogers, i. 16.

[10] _History of Prices_, _loc. cit._, and p. 66.

[11] See especially the treatise on gardening in the _Menagier de Paris_. There is also a valuable chapter on the kitchen-garden in M. L. Delisle’s _L’Agriculture Normande au Moyen Age_. Most of the plants quoted were already grown in the gardens of Charlemagne.

[12] Delisle, p. 221.

[13] Delisle, p. 616.

[14] Thorold Rogers, i. 54.

[15] Delisle, p. 583.

[16] _Régistres du Châtelet_, i. p. 3; and ii. pp. 100, 351, 370, 460, and 461.

[17] Bonis, cxcvii.

[18] _Régistres du Châtelet_: varlet thatcher, one sol and his keep (i. 393). Joubert, _Vie privée en Anjou_: hedgers paid per day, one sol and their food (p. 98). Thorold Rogers: for mowing an acre, 8½_d._; harvesters for carting corn, one sol two deniers, and their food (i. 255).

[19] _Régistres du Châtelet_, i. 427, 448, 558, _et passim_; and ii. 497.

[20] Bonis, p. cxciii.

[21] See the farm inventory in Joubert’s _Vie Privée en Anjou au XVme. siêcle_.

[22] Joubert.

[23] _Comptes des Frères Bonis, Marchands de Montauban_, publié par M. Edouard M. Forestier, 1890, p. ccx.

[24] _Châtelet_, ii. 509: “They took the bed, pulled the straw out of it, threw it in the chimney, and set fire to it.”

[25] Thorold Rogers, _History_, i. 13.

[26] See Vaissière, _Gentilshommes Campagnards de l’Ancienne France_; see also Thorold Rogers, _History of Prices_, i. 13. See _ibid._, inventory of John Senekworth’s effects, for the furniture of a Cambridgeshire manor in 1314. We notice six sheets, a mattress, a coverlet, a counterpane, a “banker” or stuffed cushion for a bench, three cushions, three table-cloths and two napkins, two drinking glasses, four silver spoons, basin and ewer, two silver seals, and _three books of romance_!

[27] Douët d’Arcq, ii. 139. 6.

[28] Joubert, _La Vie Privée en Anjou_.

[29] Léopold Delisle, _L’Agriculture Normande_, p. 189.

[30] _Régistres du Châtelet_ for 1392, i. 174.

[31] _Ibid._, 427.

[32] _Ibid._, 526.

[33] Delisle, _L’Agriculture Normande_, 189.

[34] _L’Agriculture Normande._

[35] _Ibid._, 190.

[36] _L’Agriculture Normande_, 190.

[37] Joubert, _Vie Privée en Anjou_, p. 94.

[38] Joubert, _Vie Privée en Anjou_, p. 60.

[39] Bonis, cxxi.

[40] All these remedies are taken from the _Accounts of Bonis_, _loc. cit._, _et seq._

[41] Henri de Parville, “Revue des Sciences,” in the _Journal des Débats_, 23rd January, 1890.

[42] Thorold Rogers, i. 399.

[43] Bonis.

[44] Joubert, p. 60. But see especially for this subject the masterly passage of M. Léopold Delisle, _L’Agriculture Normande au Moyen Age_, p. 175, _et seq._

[45] It will be remembered that in the Third Order of St. Francis special provision is made for laymen who can read, evidently a considerable class.

[46] _Registres du Châtelet_, ii. 103.

[47] See D. Bessin, _Concilia_, part i., p. 78, quoted by Delisle, p. 116.

[48] Eustache Deschamps, _Ballades_, édition du Marquis de Queux de St. Hilaire. Ballade 835.

[49] In the disastrous years immediately preceding the accession of Charles V., the price of corn doubled.

[50] Eustache Deschamps, ii.

[51] _Voyage du Seigneur de Caumont_, quoted by Viollet-le-Duc, _op. cit._, v. p. 83.

[52] See, for instance, Douët d’Arcq, _Comptes de l’Hotel des Rois de France_.

[53] Labarte, _Mobilier de Charles V._

[54] The “chamber” generally consisted of bed-curtains, a baldaquin, counterpane and covering for the couch or sofa, hangings for the wall, doors, and windows, cushions for the benches and chairs.

[55] The Knight of La Tour makes a mock of certain eccentric “Gallois” who strew their floors and deck their hearths, in winter, “comme en esté,” with herbs and holly.--p. 242.

[56] Labarte, _Mobilier de Charles V._

[57] _Le Livre du Chevalier de La Tour Landry._

[58] “Après mengier al miédi, et lors tout nuz il se couçoit, dormir deux heures, puis levoit” (Philippe Mouskes: _Chronique_).

[59] Quoted by Herr Alwin Schultz, _op. cit._, i. 362.

[60] See, for instance, the _Comptes de la Trémoille_ and the _Comptes de l’Hotel des Rois_.

[61] “Les Lais de France,” par J. Bédier: _Revue des Deux Mondes_, Oct. 15, 1891.

[62] Guillaume de Dole. Quoted by Herr Alwin Schultz, t. i. p. 470.

[63] Douët d’Arcq, _Comptes de l’Hotel du Roy Charles V_.

[64] Le Victorial, _Chronique de Don Pedro Niño, Comte de Buelna_, par Gutierre Diaz de Gomez, son Alferez, 1379-1449. Traduit de l’Espagnol d’après le manuscrit, avec une introduction et des notes, par le Comte Albert de Circourt et le Comte de Puymaigre.

[65] _Les Amours de Ponthus et de la belle Sidonie_ is the name of a once famous romance of chivalry.

[66] _Le Petit Jehan de Saintré_, édition Guichard.

[67] Quoted from Herr Alwin Schultz, _op. cit._, t. i. p. 215.

[68] _Ballades d’Eustache Deschamps_, in five volumes. Edited by the Marquis de Queux de St. Hilaire.