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!