Women of England

by Bartlett Burleigh James

The Women of the Middle Ages

There was an almost total lack of central authority or of legal restraint throughout the land during the long conflict between Stephen and Matilda, wife of the Count of Anjou, whom the feudal party, in violation of their vows to Henry I., refused to accept as queen; and to the other terrors of war were added the depredations of a host of mercenary soldiers brought over from the continent. To quote the chronicler William of Newburgh: "In the olden days there was no king in Israel, and everyone did that which was right in his own eyes; but in England now it was worse; for there was a king, but impotent, and every man did what was wrong in his own eyes." The Petersborough continuation of the English Chronicle gives as dark a picture of the state of affairs: "They filled the land full of castles and filled the castles full of devils. They took all those they deemed had any goods, men and women, and tortured them with tortures unspeakable; many thousands they slew with hunger—they robbed and burned all the villages, so that thou mightest fare a day's journey nor ever find a man dwelling in a village nor land tilled. Corn, flesh, and cheese there was none in the land. The bishops were ever cursing them, but they cared naught therefor, for they were all forcursed and forsworn and forlorn.... Men said openly that Christ slept and His saints. Such and more than we can say we suffered for our sins," Such grim experiences of unlicensed feudalism did much for the social education of the English people, and similar lawlessness was never repeated in the history of the country. Out of the furnace through which England passed, the English character emerged, purified of some of its dross of Anglo-Saxon sluggishness and Norman arrogance, and finely representative of the tempered elements of both peoples. A sense of solidarity was awakened.

The feudal system found its expression in various forms of homage and of fealty, upon which it was founded. It embraced, among many services and liabilities, some that related to women. On the death of a tenant leaving an heiress under fourteen years of age, the lord upon whose lands the tenant had dwelt, and to whom he owed the military and other services of his lower position, became the guardian in chivalry to the maiden, and had charge of her person and her lands until she was twenty-one—unless, on reaching the age of sixteen, she availed herself of her right to "sue out her livery" by the payment of a half-year's income of her estate. Moreover, he was entitled to dispose of her in marriage to any person of rank equal to her own. In case the young lady did not approve of the selection made for her, and rejected her guardian's choice or married without his consent, she had to forfeit to him a sum of money equal to what was called the value of her marriage—a sum equal to what the lord might have expected to receive if the marriage as planned by him had taken place. During her wardship the lord had the right to her land, and might assign or sell his guardianship over her. These rights which the lord held over the person and possessions of his ward applied, in the later feudal period, equally to male and female.

Such was the relationship of the ward to her lord, and the same system of knight service which gave him these rights in orphaned minors gave him, as well, the right to collect a fee upon the marriage of the daughters of any of his tenants. Such a system, while it deprived the young woman of absolute freedom in her selection of a husband, did not of necessity work great hardship, as each fair young woman had her knight dedicated to her by the solemn vows of chivalry, from whom her troth, once given, was not apt to be easily wrested. Upon the merits of the system itself we are not called upon to pass judgment; but certainly chivalry, which was its finest product, was responsible for the introduction into the English character of splendid ideals of womanhood, which found expression in a deference amounting almost to worship.

Yet the picture has a reverse side as well, and it is only by considering both aspects of the age that its real meaning as regards its effect upon the womanhood of the time becomes clear. This other side of chivalry is well expressed by Freeman, than whom no one is better qualified to speak. He says: "The chivalrous spirit is, above all things, a class spirit. The good knight is bound to endless fantastic courtesies towards men and still more towards women of a certain rank; he may treat all below that rank with any degree of scorn or cruelty.... Chivalry is short in its morals very much what feudalism is in law: each substitutes purely personal obligations, obligations devised in the interest of an exclusive class, for the more homely duties of an honest man and a good citizen."

The extravagant reverence and regard paid to women of the higher ranks of society did not have a firm basis in inherent moral principle either in them or in their worshippers, so that it was an easy passage from idealized woman to materialized woman. Life cannot long subsist on the perfervid products of a social imagination. As a revulsion of noble minds from coarseness and as a protest against tyranny and vice, chivalry fulfilled a high mission; but, unfortunately, its exalted admiration of woman fell to a physical appreciation of its subject. Not her womanhood, but her graces of person came to evoke the passionate devotion of the knight. An admiration fantastic and romantic, expressing itself in all sorts of extravagance, a worship of mere physical beauty—such was the nature of chivalry in its later expression. Instead of an idol, woman became but a toy.

In no respect was this sentimentality better illustrated than in the nature of the knightly devotion of the time. When not in the camp, the life of the knight was an idle one, and was spent for the most part in sentimental attendance upon ladies at court or castle. It was there that his deeds of prowess won rewards rather more generously than discreetly given by the lady to whom he had pledged his devotion; so that, with all the circumstances of outward respect for women, surpassing in ostentatious display that shown by any other age, it is a painful fact that in no other age was there such license in the association of the sexes. It is a striking comment upon the manners of the times that "gallantry" should have come to signify both bravery and illicit love. Chastity was not one of the ornaments of the age of chivalry.

In curious contrast to the attitude of chivalry—a product of the Church—toward women was that of the Church in its official character and expression. The knight elevated woman to the plane of angels, while the priest went to the other extreme. Saint Chrysostom's definition of woman as "a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic peril, a deadly fascination, and a painted ill," continued to be the orthodox view of the Church, Woman was to be avoided as a temptation by all those who valued the security of their souls; and yet it was the Church, more than any other social force, which gave to woman the dignity and worth that she achieved.