[652] Certain kinds of literature, in nature satirical or merely gross, portray, doubtless with grotesque exaggeration, the ways and manners of clerks and merchants, craftsmen and vile serfs, as well as those of monks and bishops, lords and ladies. A notable example is offered by the old French fabliaux, which with coarse and heartless laughter, rather than with any definite satirical intent, display the harshness, brutality, the degradation and hardship of the ways of living coming within their range of interest. In them we see the brutal and deceived husband, the wily clerk, the merchant with his tricks of trade, the vilain, raised above the brute, not by a better way of life as much as by a certain native wit. The women were reviled as coarsely as in monkish writings; but a Rabelaisian quality takes the place of doctrinal prurience. In weighing the evidence of these fabliaux their satirical nature should be allowed for. Cf. Langlois, La Vie en France au moyen âge d’après quelques moralistes du temps (Paris, 1908); also the Sermons of Jacques de Vitry; Pitra, Analecta novissima spicilegii Solesmensis, t. ii., and Haurèau upon the same in Journal des savants, 1888, p. 410 sqq.
[653] Such immunities were common before Charlemagne. Cf. Brunner, Deutsche Rechtsgeschichte, ii. 243-302.
[654] Gesta regum Anglorum, iii. (Migne 179, col. 1213).
[655] Taken from the note to p. 274 of Gautier’s Chevalerie.
[656] See Du Cange, Glossarium, under “Miles,” etc.; where much information may be found uncritically put together.
[657] Cf. Brunner, Deutsche Rechtsgeschichte, ii. 202-216.
[658] The way that miles came to mean knight, has its analogy in the etymological history of the word “knight” itself. In German and French the words “Ritter” and “chevalier” indicate one who fought on horseback. Not so with the English word “knight,” which in its original Anglo-Saxon and Old-German forms (see Murray’s Dictionary) as cniht and kneht might mean any armed follower. It lost its servile sense slowly. “In 1086 we read that the Conqueror dubbade his sunu Henric to ridere; this ... is the next year Englished by cniht” (Kington-Oliphant, Old and Middle English, p. 130; Macmillan, 1878).
[659] We naturally use the term “free” with reference to modern conditions, where law and its sanctions emanate, in fact as well as theory, from a stable government. But in these early feudal periods where a man’s life and property were in fact and theory protected by the power of his immediate lord, to whom he was bound by the strongest ties then recognized, to be “free” might be very close to being an unprotected outlaw.
[660] In these respects it exhibits analogies to monkhood, which likewise was recruited commonly from the upper classes of society.
[661] See Gautier, La Chevalerie, p. 256 sqq.; Du Cange, under the word “Miles.”