Ivories Ancient and Mediæval

by William Maskell

Knights tilting, or a tournament, or ladies and gentlemen riding through woods and preceded by attendants with dogs, are also common subjects. The contemporary manuscripts illustrate the same design. Both on the mirror cases and in the illuminations the lady is generally seen riding astride. Women are so represented more than once in the romance of Lancelot: for example fol. 120a, and 163a. A queen is riding, fol. 181b. In queen Mary’s psalter, the treatment on the mirror cases of people riding is almost exactly repeated, fol. 217; again, 218b, and 223b. Other examples may be seen in the Bodleian manuscript of the romance of Alexander, fol. 100 and 130. The same custom lasted in Lithuania until, at least, the year 1800.

There is one other ornamental design very common on mirror cases; people playing at chess or draughts. Margaret Paston writes in the reign of Richard the third to her husband, and says that at the Christmas following the death of lord Morley his widow would permit no amusements in her house, “non dysgysyngs ner harpyng ner lutyng—but pleying at the tabyllys and schesse.” This brings us to an interesting and important class of carvings in ivory.

The date of the introduction of the games of chess and draughts into Europe, and more particularly among the northern nations and our own ancestors the Anglo-saxons, is a historical question upon which there has been great dispute. The game of chess was certainly played at a very early period in the east, and from thence probably passed through the Arabs into Greece. There are allusions to chess and chessmen in many writers before the twelfth century, and these incidental references are of more value than the positive assertions which later authors, after the manner of their day, did not hesitate to advance.

For example Caxton, or rather the author of the “Playe of the Chesse.” “This playe fonde a phylosopher of thoryent whych was named in caldee Exerces, for which is as moche to say in englissh as he that louyth Justyce and mesure.” And this decision was not without due consideration of the matter; for just before we are told: “Trewe it is that somme men wene that this play was founden in the tyme of the bataylles and siege of troye. But that is not so.... After that cam this playe in the tyme of Alixaunder the grete in to egypt, and so unto alle the parties toward the south.”

This treatise on chess is said to have been written nearly two hundred years before Caxton lived by Jacobus de Casulis, a French Dominican friar, about 1290. A copy is in the British museum, MS. Harl. 1275; and it was printed at Milan in 1479.

Chaucer however, in “the Dreame,” names not Exerces but Athalus as the supposed inventor of the game, in a passage worth quoting:

“Therewith Fortune saith, check here, And mate in the mid point of the checkere, With a pawne errant, alas, Ful craftier to playe she was Than Athalus that made the game, First to the chesse, so was his name.”

We may, however, put aside the old guesses of early writers, for evidence still exists which sets at rest all doubt that chess was known and played in France in Carlovingian times, and we can understand easily, therefore, why mediæval poets and romance writers so often introduced stories about the game. Some ivory chessmen, six in number, were long preserved in the treasury of the abbey of St. Denis, and the old tradition was that they were given with the chess-table by Charlemagne himself. The greater number of the pieces and the table had been lost for many years, as long ago as 1600. The remainder, transferred at the revolution from St. Denis, are now in the public library at Paris. Sir Frederic Madden, in a very able and learned paper in the Archæologia, says of them: “The dresses and ornaments are all strictly in keeping with the Greek costume of the ninth century; and it is impossible not to be convinced, from the general character of the figures, that these chessmen really belong to the period assigned them by tradition, and were, in all probability, executed at Constantinople by an Asiatic Greek, and sent as a present to Charlemagne, either by the empress Irene, or by her successor Nicephorus.... One thing is certain, that these chessmen, from their size and workmanship, must have been designed for no ignoble personage: and, from the decided style of Greek art, it is a more natural inference to suppose them presented to Charlemagne by a sovereign of the lower empire, than that they came to him as an offering from the Moorish princes of Spain, or even from the caliph Haroun al Raschid, who gave many costly gifts to the emperor of the west.”