SEAL OF UPPINGHAM SCHOOL

CORPORAL PUNISHMENT IN A 14TH-CENTURY CLASSROOM
(FROM MS. ROY. VI. E. 6. f. 214)

CHAPTER XVII

THE GAY SCIENCE

“Madamë, whilom I was one
That to my father had a king;
But I was slow, and for nothing
Me listë not to Love obey;
And that I now full sore abey....
Among the gentle nation
Love is an occupation
Which, for to keep his lustës save,
Should every gentle heartë have.”
Gower, “Confessio Amantis,” Bk. IV

The facts given in the foregoing chapter may explain a good deal in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue that might otherwise be ascribed to wide poetical licence; but they may seem strangely at variance with the “Knight’s Tale” or the “Book of the Duchess.” The contradiction, however, lies only on the surface. Neither flesh nor spirit can suffer extreme starvation. When the facts of life are particularly sordid, then that “large and liberal discontent,” which is more or less rooted in every human breast, builds itself an ideal world out of those very materials which are most conspicuously and most painfully lacking in the ungrateful reality. The conventional platonism and self-sacrifice of love, according to the knightly theory, was in strict proportion to its rarity in knightly practice. We must, of course, beware of the facile assumption that these medieval mariages de convenance were so much less happy than ours; nothing in human nature is more marvellous than its adaptability; and Richard II., for instance, seems to have bought himself with hard cash as great a treasure as that which Tennyson’s Lord of Burleigh won with more subtle discrimination. But at least the conditions of actual marriage were generally far less romantic then than now; and, at a time when the supposed formal judgment of a Court of Love, “that no married pair can really be in love with each other,” was accepted even as ben trovato, it was natural that highly imaginative pictures of love par amours should be extremely popular.

Let us consider again for a moment the conditions of life in a medieval castle. In spite of a good deal of ceremonial which has long gone out of fashion, the actual daily intercourse between man and woman was closer there than at present, in proportion as artificial distances were greater. The lady might stand as high above the squire as the heaven is in comparison with the earth; but she had scarcely more privacy than on board a modern ship. They were constantly in each other’s sight, yet could never by any possibility exchange a couple of confidential sentences except by a secret and dangerous rendezvous in some private room, or by such stray chances as some meeting on the stairs, some accident which dispersed the hunting-party and left them alone in the forest, or similar incidents consecrated to romance. The three great excitements of man’s life—war, physical exercise, and carousing—touched the ladies far less nearly, and left them ordinarily to a life which their modern sisters would condemn as hopelessly dull. The daily-suppressed craving for excitement, the nervous irritability generated by artificial constraint, explain many contrasts which are conspicuous in medieval manners. Moreover, there were men always at hand, and always on the watch to seize the smallest chance. The Knight of La Tour Landry is not the only medieval writer who describes his own society in very much the same downright words as the Prophet Jeremiah (ch. v., v. 8). The very raison d’être of his book was the recollection how, in younger days, “my fellows communed with ladies and gentlewomen, the which [fellows] prayed them of love; for there was none of them that they might find, lady or gentlewoman, but they would pray her; and if that one would not intend to that, other would anon pray. And whether they had good answer or evil, they recked never, for they had in them no shame nor dread by the cause that they were so used. And thereto they had fair language and words; for in every place they would have had their sports and their might. And so they did both deceive ladies and gentlewomen, and bear forth divers languages on them, some true and some false, of the which there came to divers great defames and slanders without cause and reason.... And I asked them why they foreswore them, saying that they loved every woman best that they spake to: for I said unto them, ‘Sirs, ye should love nor be about to have but one.’ But what I said unto them, it was never the better. And therefore because I saw at that time the governance of them, the which I doubted that time yet reigneth, and there be such fellows now or worse, and therefore I purposed to make a little book ... to the intent that my daughters should take ensample of fair continuance and good manners.” The tenor of the whole book more than bears out the promise of this introduction: and the good knight significantly recommends his daughters to fast thrice a week as a sovereign specific against such dangers (pp. 2, 10, 14).