No. 185. Lady at her Toilette.
Our cut [No. 185], from another volume of the manuscript last quoted (MS. Addit. No. 10,293, fol. 266), represents a lady at her toilette. It is a subject on which our information at this period is not very abundant. The round mirror of metal which she is employing was the common form during the middle ages, and was no doubt derived from the ancients. The details of the ladies’ toilette are not often described, but the contemporary moralists and satirists condemn, in rather general terms, and evidently with more bitterness than was called for, the pains taken by the ladies to adorn their persons. They are accused of turning their bodies from their natural form by artificial means, alluding to the use of stays, which appear to have been first employed by the Anglo-Norman ladies in the twelfth century. They are further accused of plucking out superfluous hairs from their faces and eyebrows, of dyeing their hair, and of painting their faces. The chevalier de la Tour-Landry (chap. 76) tells his daughters that the whole intrigue between king David and the wife of Uriah arose out of the circumstance of the lady combing her hair at an open window where she could be seen from without, and says that it was a punishment for the too great attention she gave to the adornment of her head. The toilette of the day seems to have been completed at the first rising from bed in the morning. There are some picturesque lines in the English metrical romance of “Alisaunder,” which describe the morning thus:—
In a moretyde (morrow-tide) hit was;
Theo dropes hongyn on the gras;
Theo maydenes lokyn in the glas,
For to tyffen (adorn) heare fas.
—Weber, i. 169.
The chamber, as it has been already intimated, was properly speaking the women’s apartment, though it was very accessible to the other sex. It was usually the place for private conversation, and we often hear of persons entering the chamber for this purpose, and in this case the bed seems to have served usually for a seat. Thus, in the romance of “Eglamour,” when, after supper, Christabelle led the knight into her chamber— That lady was not for to hyde,
Sche sett hym on hur beddys syde,
And welcomyd home thet knyght.
Again, in a fabliau printed by Meon, a woman of a lower grade, wishing to make a private communication to a man, invites him into her chamber, and they sit on the bed to converse— En une chanbre andui en vont,
Desor un lit asis se sont.
And in the fabliau of “Guillaume au Faucon,” printed by Barbazan, Guillaume, visiting the lady of a knight in her chamber, finds her seated on the bed, and he immediately takes a seat by her side to converse with her. In the illuminated manuscripts, scenes of this kind occur frequently; but in the fourteenth century, instead of being seated on the bed, the persons thus conversing sit on a bench which runs along the side of the bed, and seems to belong to the bedstead. A scene of this kind is represented in our cut [No. 186] (taken from a manuscript of the romance of “Meliadus,” in the British Museum, MS. Addit. No. 12,228, fol. 312), which is a good representation of a bed of the fourteenth century. A lady has introduced a king into her chamber, and they are conversing privately, seated on the bench of the bed. In some of these illuminations, the persons conversing are seated on the bed, with their feet on the bench.
No. 186. Conversation in the Chamber.
No. 187. Taking Clothes from the Chest.
The illuminators had not yet learned the art of representing things in detail, and they still too often give us mere conventional representations of beds, yet we see enough to convince us that the bedsteads were already made much more elaborately than formerly. Besides the bench at the side, we find them now with a hutch (huche) or locker at the foot, in which the possessor was accustomed to lock up his money and other valuables. This hutch at the foot of the bed is often mentioned in the fabliaux and romances. Thus, in the fabliau “Du chevalier à la Robe Vermeille,” a man, when he goes to bed, places his robe on a hutch at the foot of the bed— Sur une huche aus piez du lit
A cil toute sa robe mise.
Another, having extorted some money from a priest, immediately puts it in the hutch— Les deniers a mis en la huche.
The hutch was indeed one of the most important articles of furniture in the mediæval chamber. All portable objects of intrinsic value or utility were kept in boxes, because they were thus ready for moving and taking away in case of danger, and because in travelling people carried much of their movables of this description about with them. Hence the uses of the hutch or chest were very numerous and diversified. It was usual to keep clothes of every description in a chest, and illustrations of this practice are met with not uncommonly in the illuminated manuscripts. One of them is given in our cut [No. 187], taken from an illumination in a manuscript of the fourteenth century, given by Willemin. Jewels, plate, personal ornaments of all kinds, and all descriptions of “treasure,” were similarly locked up in chests. In our cut No. 188, taken also from a manuscript in the British Museum (MS. Reg. 2 B. vii., of the beginning of the fourteenth century), a man appears in the act of depositing in a chest fibulæ or brooches, rings, buttons, and other objects, and a large vessel probably of silver. Our cut No. 189, from a manuscript in the National Library in Paris (No. 6956), represents a miser examining the money in his hutch, which is here detached from a bed; but in some other illuminations, a hutch of much the same form appears attached to the bed foot. In Anglo-Saxon the coffer was called a loc, whence our word locker is derived; or a cyste, our chest; or an arc: from the Anglo-Normans we derive the words hutch (huche) and coffer (coffre). The Anglo-Saxons, as we have shown in a former chapter (p. 79), like our forefathers of a later period, kept their treasures in lockers or hutches. In the “Legend of St. Juliana,” an Anglo-Saxon poem in the Exeter Book, it is remarked in proof of the richness of a chieftain:—
þeah þe feoh-gestreon Although he riches under hord-locan, in his treasure-lockers, hyrsta únrím, jewels innumerable, æhte ofer eorþan. possessed upon earth. —Exeter Book, p. 245.