Ringwaldt, 1582.
The heavy castle gates in mediæval times were gladly opened to the minstrels who came to charm with their art the banquets of the noble lords and ladies—troubadours and minstrels, the ancestors of that vast and still thriving fraternity of poets whose blood runs too quickly through their veins to keep them content in the quiet monotony of a home. With the sailing clouds, with the migrating birds, and the rising sun they wander through woods and fields “to be like their mother the wandering world.” With Walt Whitman they love the open road and hate the confinement of the stuffy room:—
“Afoot and light-hearted, I take the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me, leading wherever I choose.”
Never do they feel happier than when the long, long road lies before them, which now seems to dip down into the green sea of the forests and now to climb straight into the bright blue heaven. Jean Richepin, himself a “chemineau,” now well settled as an honorable member of the French Academy, has sung the open road’s praise. All poets feel deeply the words of Kleist, “Life is a journey.” And how bitter the journey often was in the days of the minstrels, how glad they were when the dark forests and unsafe roads lay behind them and the big hearth-fire of the castle hall brightened face and soul! Gratefully they praised the noble lord for his hospitable reception and his kindly welcome. Thus Walter von der Vogelweide, Germany’s greatest minstrel:—
“Nun ich drei Höfe weiss, wo Ehrenmänner hausen,
Fehlt mir es nicht an Wein, kann meine Pfanne sausen...
Mir ist nicht not, dass ich nach Herberg fernumher noch streiche.”
Impoverished knights may have occasionally hung out an iron helmet over the castle door as a sign that they were willing to receive and to entertain paying guests: certainly a more honorable method of gaining one’s livelihood than to plunder the passing merchant or even one’s own peasants, as was the noble fashion at the end of mediæval times. But it is more likely that such poor noblemen would first think of using their city houses for such commercial purposes and not their lonely and uninviting fortified castles. Here on one of their city houses, where they used to lodge in time of markets or city festivities, the first iron helmet perhaps appeared as a knightly sign. Certain it is that we find inns of such name in France as well as in Germany, the most famous one in Rothenburg on the Tauber, the best preserved mediæval city in existence, infinitely more charming than the much-talked-about Carcassonne, reconstructed by Viollet-le-Duc with such cold correctness. Here in the quaint hall of the “Eisenhut,” under the glittering arms of knights dead and gone, we will rest awhile and gladden our heart with the golden Tauber wine. Let the comfort-seeker go to the modern prosaic hotel outside the city wall!