Flowers from Mediæval History

by Minnie D. Kellogg

What a problem the mystics of the eleventh century, with their tremendous following and their curious allegorical interpretations of everything great or small in heaven or on earth, must have been to a statesman! Listen to this eleventh century letter of thanks from Saint Ivo to Gerard of Ham, for “an instrument of the whiteness of snow for combing the hair.” This comb is agreeable to him in and of itself, like other objects of beauty; but above all, it pleases him because of the elevation of ideas, which it so beautifully symbolizes: he is quite sure that thy prudence (ta prudence) has wished hereby to give a suggestion to his vigilance to seek constantly by all sorts of exhortations to reform the disorderly manners of his people, whom he compares to a disarranged head of hair. And yet Saint Ivo was in his day a strictly practical person, not to be fooled as Savonarola was four hundred years later by the ordeal of fire. Saint Ivo forbids a husband to condemn his wife even when the man he has accused could be burned by hot irons; and when the martial old bishop of Le Mans, who is accused of having treacherously surrendered that town, offers to walk on hot irons to prove his innocence, Saint Ivo writes him that ordeals are uncanonical and that he must not submit to them. But then no reader of his correspondence can fail to see that Saint Ivo was very timid. How he did dread the Channel! He entreats the holiest men of his acquaintance to pray unceasingly for him while he is on the water.

But let us turn to the Conqueror’s own review of his life, as he discussed it on his death-bed. Two of his clergy took it down. Thus, as he would speak to his sons, he speaks to history. Here we have his perplexities at first hand. That we may put ourselves in his place as literally as possible, let us repair with the document to the beautiful Abbey aux Dames, so tenderly connected with the Conqueror’s queen. There, it is said, she made her thank-offering for her lord’s safe deliverance, alike from the perils of war and the perils of the Channel. This abbey was consecrated the year of the Conquest, eleven years before the Abbey aux Hommes (ladies first). Many of the Conqueror’s followers supplied their own ships, but Mathilda herself fitted out the Conqueror’s,—the regal Mora—so splendidly stocked with wine. Her good ship bore him safely to England and victory, and brought him back, as ever, true to his queen. To this abbey they dedicated their daughter Cicely, when she was a child, and she became a great and powerful abbess. Here we may picture her praying, as a woman in the intense Age of Faith could pray, for the souls of her parents.

Eight hundred and twenty-five years after its original construction we found another high-bred cloistered Lady of the Trinity in passionate prayer at the tomb of Mathilda. Was this pretty young nun a legitimate part of the restoration? Though the cloisters of France were supposed to have been abolished, this one had been passed by, for the Conqueror holds Caen, and some iron hand of the past seems to have retained this spiritual young girl in prayer at the tomb of his queen. A strange sight it was, one of the curious tragedies of conservatism; but like many every-day tragedies imperceptible to its actors.

To the eye all seemed beauty. From a fine old garden we stepped into a majestic aisle of a great abbey. As we walked down in its dim half-light, a curtain was drawn displaying a brass grill impassable in the eyes of the church. Impassable it had been, in fact, for nearly eight hundred and fifty years, but now to climb over it would be a minor athletic feat. It separated the chapel of the foundress and the nuns of the order of the Trinity from the whole outside world. The entire central space of this chapel was occupied by Queen Mathilda’s enormous cream-colored sarcophagus (restored). One might read the inscription in eleventh-century characters, fresh from a modern chisel. The chapel walls were lined with dark, carved wooden stalls, freshly oiled, and new-born sunbeams peered decorously through rich-colored glass on two kneeling nuns clad in the old-time flowing ivory-colored robes of the Ladies of the Trinity.

One was a fleshy, middle-aged woman, mechanically counting her beads, the other was young and beautiful. She was looking up, and, though she was as motionless as the tomb beside her, her attitude expressed action as sculpture may. What was she thinking of? Is the life of today any less inscrutable than that of one thousand years ago? Here, in the charity of the church, let us consider the Conqueror’s apology (apologia); we are translating the word too literally, but the spirit of the document is humble and explanatory and, withal, very winning.

In this apologia William considers that he has done his duty to the church, and history endorses him; in general, when he was at variance with it he was in the right. But of his expedition to England—every move of which is justified upon the Bayeux Tapistry—he repents, although, fortunately, not fanatically enough to try and undo the deed. He only makes what reparation he can to certain victims. Though on his death-bed he liberated Harold’s son and nephew, he seems to overlook a curious persecution, cruel in intent but easily repaired, that, in the confidence and fury of his power, he had directed against the soul of the defeated king. The Conqueror carried Harold’s body from the battlefield (he wrapt it in the purple, it is true), but he had insisted upon burying it in unhallowed ground, although for it Harold’s mother had offered the weight in gold,—both parties firmly believing that to lie in unconsecrated ground would militate against the repose of the spirit. Though he tried to undo many a deed, the Conqueror ignores entirely his arrogant revenge upon a soul. Facing death matures our sense of value.

Though but one century removed from a forebear whose God was Odin, whose Valhalla was a place where heroes cut each other to pieces daily in fair fight, but where the blest are perpetually restored to life at meal-time that they may eat of the wild boar and fight again and forever,[4] at least the Conqueror came to shudder at his massacres at Hastings and York, to truly repent and to die humbly commending his soul to Mary.

The spirit of the nineteenth century was iconoclastic; it demolished alike old heroes, old superstitions and old faiths. But the twentieth century would call them back, not as realities, but as heroes, superstitions and faiths, treating them philosophically, as great moving forces, or poetically, as starting points for new ideals. The hard, rational doubt which emancipated thought in the nineteenth century develops into the sympathetic doubt of the twentieth. The nineteenth century laughed at barbaric old heroes, while the twentieth century smiles at them. Who wants to live in a world without heroes? All men are not equal; but by reverent appreciation the small man may become brother to the genius.

Every place, every document connected with the Conqueror bears his strong individuality. Read of him where you may, between the lines of the Domesday Book (that conscientious effort to tax all that the traffic will bear), or in the broken lays of the troubadours, or by the light or the density of contemporary chroniclers, Norman or Saxon, you find before you a man great in himself and a forerunner of greater things: a great builder, building better than he knew; a great ruler, ruling farther than he knew—a true hero of the strenuous life.

Following the chance records from which the Conqueror’s biography is put together, one is amazed by the integrity of his political instinct. William the Norman is an instance for the poet who said, “The world is what a few great men have made it.” The Conqueror seems such a typical Englishman, alike in his love of the forests and the “high deer,” of which the old Saxon chronicler complains, and in his appreciation of justice and stability, for which the same chronicler gives thanks on the spot. The Conqueror’s appeal is a very wide one. Even the economists, who hold that the world is what demand and supply have made it, write with an enthusiasm peculiarly their own of the Domesday Book and its wisely self-seeking, avaricious author.