But Raoul de Cambrai had no regard for his knightly word; he quarrelled with the townsfolk and swore to burn Origny about their ears.
“The rooms burn,” the chanson continues, “The ceilings crumble: the barrels catch fire and their hoops burst. Woe and sin it is, for the children burn too. Evil has Count Raoul done, for the day before he gave his faith to Marcens that they should not lose so much as a fold of silk; and on the morrow he burned them in his wrath. In Origny, that great and rich town, the sons of Herbert, who love the place had put Marcens, Bernier’s mother, and a hundred nuns to pray to God. Count Raoul, the hot-heart, sets fire to the streets; the houses burn, the ceilings melt, the wine spills and the cellars flow with it; the bacon burns, the larders fall, the fat makes the great fire burn more fiercely. It strikes up to the tower and to the high belfry and the roofs fall in, so great is the blaze between the two walls. The nuns are burnt, all hundred of them are burnt (woe it is to tell); burnt is Marcens that was Bernier’s mother, and Clamados the daughter of Duke Renier. The smell of burning flesh rises from the flames and the brave knights weep for pity. When Bernier sees the fire grow worse, he is near mad with grief. Could ye but have seen him sling on his shield! With drawn sword he comes to the church and sees the flames pouring from the doors; no man can come within a shaft’s throw of the fire. Bernier sees a rich marble pavement, and upon it lies his mother, with her tender face laid on the ground and her psalter burning upon her breast. Then says the boy, ‘I am on a foolish errand. Never will any succour avail her now. Ha! sweet mother, yesterday you kissed me; you have but a poor heir in me, for I can neither aid nor help you. God, who will judge the world, keep your soul!’”[1369]
So ends this terrible episode; but that chivalry in this matter at least suffered no change from the twelfth to the fourteenth century Froissart’s account of the burning of this same Origny-Saint-Benoît by the peerless John of Hainault and his troops in 1339 will show[1370]. If the code of knighthood and the fear of God could not save the nuns from mischances such as these, it is plain that no injunctions against the breach of their enclosure could have done so. These were the risks of war, which nuns shared in common with all unhappy women. But the siege of Origny and even the outrage at Goring were still exceptional events; and the Church found its chief problem not in these unwelcome incursions, but in the number of welcome visitors who hung about the nunneries. “The Lord deliver them from their friends” was in effect the bishop’s prayer. The expulsion of these friends was a necessary corollary to the enclosure movement; and, like the injunctions to nuns to keep within their cloister, the injunctions to lay folk to keep outside remained a dead letter. John of Ayton’s conclusion is true here also:
Why, then, did the holy fathers thus labour to beat the air? Yet indeed their toil is none the less to their own merit; for we look not to that which is, but to that which of justice should be.
CHAPTER XI
THE OLDE DAUNCE
A child of our grandmother Eve, a female; or, for thy more sweet understanding, a woman.
Love’s Labour’s Lost, I, i, 266-8.