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.