[333] Vous savez, et bien l’avez oui dire et recorder plusieurs fois, que les ebatemens des dames et damoiselles encouragent voulontiers les cœurs des jeunes gentils-hommes, et les elevent, en requerant et desirant tous honneur. Froissart, vol. iv. c. 6. ed. Lyons, 1560.
[334] “Ye may know well that Charles the French King was sore desirous to be at those jousts: he was young and light of spirit, and glad to see new things. It was shewed me that from the beginning to the ending he was there present, disguised as unknown, so that none knew him but the Lord of Garansyers, who came also with him as unknown, and every day returned to Marquise.” Froissart, vol. i. c. 168.
[335] As the weather was bright, according to Froissart, I wonder he did not, in his fondness for detail, mention the number of barrels of water that were every evening poured on the dusty plain. On one occasion he says, “The knights complained of the dust, so that some of them said they lost their deeds by reason thereof. The King made provision for it: he ordained more than two hundred barrels of water that watered the place, whereby the ground was well amended, and yet the next day they had dust enough, and too much.” vol. ii. p. 157.
[336] Du Cange (Dissertation 7. on Joinville) is incorrect in saying that a joust seldom terminated without some knights being slain, or very grievously wounded. The jousts at St. Ingilberte were on the most extensive scale, and nothing worse than a flesh-wound or a bruise from falling was felt, even by the most unskilful or unlucky knight. Froissart perpetually describes jousts of three courses with lances, three strokes with axes, three encounters both with swords and daggers; and generally concludes with saying, “And when all was done, there was none of them hurt.” “You should have jousted more courteously,” was the reproach of the spectators to a knight, when his lance had pierced the shoulder of the other jouster. Froissart, vol. ii. c. 161. Du Cange preserved no clear idea in his mind of the difference between the joust à la plaisance and the joust à l’outrance, and most subsequent writers have only blindly followed him. I shall notice in this place another popular error on the subject of jousts. Mr. Strutt, (Sports and Pastimes of the People of England, book iii. c. 1.) and an hundred writers after him, assert that the authority of the ladies was more extensive in the joust than in the tournament. Mr. Strutt says, that “in the days of chivalry jousts were made in honor of the ladies, who presided as judges paramount over the sports.” Now there are many jousts mentioned in Froissart and other chivalric historians that were held only in the presence of knights. But I can find no instance of a tournament being held without ladies. The joust was a martial exercise; but the tournament was connected with all the circumstances of domestic life.
[337] “Et si aimoit, par amour, jeune dame: dont en tous estats son affaire en valoit grandement mieux.” Froissart, vol. iii. c. 12. edit. Lyons, 1560.
[338] Froissart, vol. ii. c. 160. 162. 168. Memoires du Mareschal de Boucicaut, partie i. c. 17. The writer of those memoirs, a contemporary of Boucicaut’s, in his zeal for his hero, gives all the honor to the French knights. Juvenal des Ursins (p. 83, &c.) is more modest, and he makes certain judges of the court compliment many of the knights for their valiancy.
[339] Most of these circumstances are unnoticed by our historians. I can pardon their unacquaintance with the Lansdowne manuscripts, for those are but recently acquired national treasures: but every scholar is supposed to know the Biographia Britannica,—and in the article Caxton, some of the chivalric features of the joust in question are mentioned.
[340] A very amusing little volume might be made on the romance of flowers, on the tales which poetry and fancy have invented to associate the affections and the mind with plants, thus adding the pleasures of the feelings and the imagination to those of the eye. The reader remembers the Love in Idleness, in Shakspeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. The Floure of Souvenance, the Forget-me-not, is an equally pleasing instance. The application of this name to the Myosotis Scorpioidis of botanists is of considerable antiquity: the story in the text proves that the plant with its romantic associations was known in England as early as the days of our Edward IV. The following tale of the origin of the fanciful name has been communicated to me by my friend Anthony Todd Thomson, whose Lectures on the Elements of Botany, at once scientific and popular, profound and elegant, take a high place in the class of our most valuable works.
“Two lovers were loitering on the margin of a lake, on a fine summer’s evening, when the maiden espied some of the flowers of Myosotis growing on the water, close to the bank of an island, at some distance from the shore. She expressed a desire to possess them, when her knight, in the true spirit of chivalry, plunged into the water, and, swimming to the spot, cropped the wished-for plant, but his strength was unable to fulfil the object of his achievement, and feeling that he could not regain the shore, although very near it, he threw the flowers upon the bank, and casting a last affectionate look upon his lady-love, he cried, ‘Forget-me-not,’ and was buried in the waters.”
“There are three varieties of the plant,” Mr. Thomson adds; “the one to which the tradition of the name is attached is perennial, and grows in marshes and on the margins of lakes.”