Du Cange gives references to three English provincial synods of the thirteenth century, as if ivory pyxes were distinctly ordered by their canons. But it is not so. Order is merely given that the Sacrament should be reserved and carried to the sick in proper pyxes: “in pyxide munda et honesta;” again, “circa collum suum in theca honesta, pyxidem deferat.” But the synod of Exeter in 1287 is more precise and to our present purpose, which orders the priest to carry the eucharist to the sick “in pyxide argentea vel eburnea.”
We find from inventories printed by Dugdale in the Monasticon that in the fourteenth century, a.d. 1384, there were in the treasury of St. George’s, Windsor, “una pixis nobilis eburnea, garnita cum luminibus argenteis deauratis,” etc.: and “una pixis de eburneo gemellato argenteo, cujus coopertorium frangitur.” In Lincoln cathedral, in 1557, “A round pix of ivory, having a ring of silver;” and two others, both of ivory with similar bands. Four other ivory pyxes are named in the earlier inventory of the same cathedral, before the spoliation in 1536.
Two other very important and beautiful caskets, at South Kensington, are no. 176 and no. 263. The subject of the first of these, the life of the blessed Virgin, is unusual, although that may probably be not because it was unusual at the time but because very few examples have been preserved. The panels of the other are most richly carved and in the best style of the fourteenth century with scenes from the life of St. Margaret.
CHAPTER VII.
The famous romances of the middle ages supplied endless subjects for sculptors in ivory as well as for the painter, the illuminator, and the enameller. They may be referred, in general, to four classes, of which the first and the fourth seem to have been the favourite sources from which were taken the decorations of caskets and mirror cases. They were— 1. Those relating to Arthur and the knights of the round table. 2. Those connected with Charlemagne and his paladins. 3. The Spanish and Portuguese romances, which chiefly contain the adventures of Amadis and Palmerin. 4. What may be termed classical romances, which represent the heroes of antiquity in the guise of romantic fiction: such, for example, as the romance of Virgil, of Jason, or of Alexander. To these may be added one more, the romance of the Rose, an allegorical poem which was probably more widely read than any other of the time. From this, realising an allegory, came the frequent subject of the siege of the castle of Love. Many of the romances were written both in prose and verse: three splendid volumes, French manuscripts of the beginning of the fourteenth century, in the British museum, contain the Saint Graal and Lancelot du Lac. The histories of Merlin, Perceval, Meliadus, Tristan, and Perceforest were also amongst the most popular.
The French manuscripts just referred to (additional, 10,292) are full of illuminations, some illustrating in an especial way the carvings on ivories of the same date. Another, of the same character and of like interest and value, is in the Bodleian: the romance of Alexander.
The romance of the Rose was a dull and monotonous poem of perhaps ten thousand lines, from which for nearly three hundred years its readers, if they looked at it with pious and religious eyes, learnt their maxims of morality, of science, and philosophy. Others, again, read it as men now read Ovid’s Art of love and saw nothing of its mysticism or scholastic subtleties. It was written somewhere about the year 1300, and, with the omission of some five thousand lines in the middle, Chaucer’s translation is very accurate and good. It was frequently moralised: in France, by Clement Marot; and in England (perhaps from the French also) long before, by Grosseteste, bishop of Lincoln. These made the Rose to be the Virgin Mary, and the towers and the defences of the castle are the four cardinal virtues, and holy chastity, and buxomness, and meekness. The castle itself is thus described:
“This is the castel of love and lisse, Of solace, of socour, of joye, and blisse, Of hope, of hele, of sikernesse, And ful of alle swetnesse.”