Comment me prendre pour dans ce couvent entrer?”
How ready was the ecstatic young scamp with his reply:—
“Sire il faut prendre quatorze chevaliers,
Et tous en nonnes il vous les faut habiller,
Puis, à nuit close, à la porte il faut heurter.”
What came of this advice, the song tells in very joyous terms, for which the reader may be referred to that grand collection the “Chants et Chansons de la France.”
On the other hand, Mr. Kenelm Digby, who is, be it said in passing, a painter of pages, looking at his object through pink-colored glasses, thus writes of these young gentlemen, in his “Mores Catholici.”
“Truly beautiful does the fidelity of chivalrous youth appear in the page of history or romance. Every master of a family in the middle ages had some young man in his service who would have rejoiced to shed the last drop of his blood to save him, and who, like Jonathan’s armor-bearer, would have replied to his summons: ‘Fac omnia quæ placent animo tuo; perge quo cupis; et ero tecum ubicumque volueris.’ When Gyron le Courtois resolved to proceed on the adventure of the Passage perilleux, we read that the valet, on hearing the frankness and courtesy with which his lord spoke to him, began to weep abundantly, and said, all in tears, ‘Sire, know that my heart tells me that sooth, if you proceed further, you will never return; that you will either perish there, or you will remain in prison; but, nevertheless, nothing shall prevent me going with you. Better die with you, if it be God’s will, than leave you in such guise to save my own life;’ and so saying, he stepped forward and said, ‘Sire, since you will not return according to my advice, I will not leave you this time, come to me what may.’ Authority in the houses of the middle ages,” adds Mr. Digby, “was always venerable. The very term seneschal is supposed to have implied ‘old knight,’ so that, as with the Greeks, the word signifying ‘to honor,’ and to ‘pay respect,’ was derived immediately from that which denoted old age, πρεσβευω being thus used in the first line of the Eumenides. Even to those who were merely attached by the bonds of friendship or hospitality, the same lessons and admonitions were considered due. John Francis Picus of Mirandola mentions his uncle’s custom of frequently admonishing his friends, and exhorting them to a holy life. ‘I knew a man,’ he says, ‘who once spoke with him on the subject of manners, and who was so much moved by only two words from him, which alluded to the death of Christ, as the motive for avoiding sin, that from that hour, he renounced the ways of vice, and reformed his whole life and manner.’”
We smile to find Mr. Digby mentioning the carving of angels in stone over the castle-gates, as at Vincennes, as a proof that the pages who loitered about there were little saints. But we read with more interest, that “the Sieur de Ligny led Bayard home with him, and in the evening preached to him as if he had been his own son, recommending him to have heaven always before his eyes.” This is good, and that it had its effect on Bayard, we all know; nevertheless that chevalier himself was far from perfect.
With regard to the derivation of Seneschal as noticed above, we may observe that it implies “old man of skill.” Another word connected with arms is “Marshal,” which is derived from Mar, “a horse,” and Schalk, “skilful,” one knowing in horses; hence “Maréchal ferrant,” as assumed by French farriers. Schalk, however, I have seen interpreted as meaning “servant.” Earl Marshal was, originally, the knight who looked after the royal horses and stables, and all thereto belonging.