Scenes and Characters of the Middle Ages / Third Edition

by Edward Lewes Cutts

n the British Museum are two volumes containing a rather large number of illuminated pictures which have been cut out of MSS., chiefly of the early fourteenth century, by some collector who did not understand how much more valuable they would have been, even as pictures, if left each by itself in the appropriate setting of its black letter page, than when pasted half-a-dozen together in a scrap-book. That they are severed from the letterpress which they were intended to illustrate is of the less importance, because they seem all to be illustrations of scenes in romances, and it is not difficult to one who is well versed in those early writings either to identify the subjects or to invent histories for them. Each isolated picture affords a subject in which an expert, turning the book over and explaining it to an amateur, would find material for a little lecture on mediæval art and architecture, costume, and manners.

In presenting to the reader the subjects which illustrate this chapter, we find ourselves placed by circumstances in the position of being obliged to treat them like those scrap-book pictures of which we have spoken, viz., as isolated pictures, illustrating generally our subject of the Knights of the Middle Ages, needing each its independent explanation.

The first subject represents a scene from some romance, in which the good knight, attended by his squire, is guided by a damsel on some adventure. As in the scene which we find in Caxton’s “Prince Arthur”: “And the good knight, Sir Galahad, rode so long, till that he came that night to the castle of Carberecke; and it befel him that he was benighted in an hermitage. And when they were at rest there came a gentlewoman knocking at the door, and called Sir Galahad, and so the hermit came to the door to ask what she would. Then she called the hermit, Sir Ulfric, ‘I am a gentlewoman that would speak with the knight that is with you.’ Then the good man awaked Sir Galahad, and bade him rise and speak ‘with a gentlewoman which seemeth hath great need of you.’ Then Sir Galahad went to her, and asked what she would. ‘Sir Galahad,’ said she, ‘I will that you arm you and mount upon your horse and follow me, for I will show you within these three days the highest adventure that ever knight saw.’ Anon, Sir Galahad armed him, and took his horse and commended him to God, and bade the gentlewoman go, and he would follow her there as she liked. So the damsel rode as fast as her palfrey might gallop till that she came to the sea.”

Lady, Knight, and Squire.

Here then we see the lady ambling through the forest, and she rides as ladies rode in the middle ages, and as they still ride, like female centaurs, in the Sandwich Islands. She turns easily in her saddle, though going at a good pace, to carry on an animated conversation with the knight. He, it will be seen, is in hauberk and hood of banded mail, with the curious ornaments called ailettes—little wings—at his shoulders. He seems to have genouillières—knee-pieces of plate; but it is doubtful whether he has also plate armour about the leg, or whether the artist has omitted the lines which would indicate that the legs were, as is more probably the case, also protected by banded mail. He wears the prick spur; and his body-armour is protected from sun and rain by the surcoat. Behind him prances his squire. The reader will not fail to notice the character which the artist has thrown into his attitude and the expression of his features. It will be seen that he is not armed, but wears the ordinary civil costume, with a hood and hat; he carries his master’s spear, and the shield is suspended at his back by its guige or strap; its hollow shape and the rampant lion emblazoned on it will not be overlooked.

Romance writers are sometimes accused of forgetting that their heroes are human, and need to eat and drink and sleep. But this is hardly true of the old romancers, who, in relating knightly adventures, did not draw upon their imagination, but described the things which were continually happening about them; and the illuminators in illustrating the romances drew from the life—the life of their own day—and this it is which makes their pictures so naive and truthful in spite of their artistic defects, and so valuable as historical authorities. In the engraving above is a subject which would hardly have occurred to modern romancer or illustrator. The crowd of tents tells us that the scene is cast in the “tented field,” either of real war or of the mimic war of some great tournament. The combat of the day is over. The modern romancer would have dropped the curtain for the day, to be drawn up again next morning when the trumpets of the heralds called the combatants once more to the field. Our mediæval illuminator has given us a charming episode in the story. He has followed the good knight to his pavilion pitched in the meadow hard by. The knight has doffed his armour, and taken his bath, and put on his robes of peace, and heard vespers, and gone to supper. The lighted candles show that it is getting dusk. It is only by an artistic license that the curtains of the tent are drawn aside to display the whole interior; in reality they were close drawn; these curtains are striped of alternate breadths of gay colours—gold and red and green and blue. Any one who has seen how picturesque a common bell tent, pitched on the lawn, looks from the outside, when one has been tempted by a fine summer evening to stay out late and “have candles,” will be able to perceive how picturesque the striped curtains of this pavilion would be, how eminently picturesque the group of such pavilions here indicated, with the foliage of trees overhead and the grey walls and towers of a mediæval town in the background, with the stars coming out one by one among the turrets and spires sharply defined against the fading sky.

Knight at Supper.