XXII. FEUDALISM AND KNIGHTHOOD
FEUDAL AND CHRISTIAN ORIGIN OF KNIGHTLY VIRTUE; THE ORDER OF THE TEMPLE; GODFREY OF BOUILLON; ST. LOUIS; FROISSART’S CHRONICLES
The world is evil! the clergy corrupt, the laity depraved! none denounces them! Awake! arise! be mindful! Such ceaseless cry rises more shrilly in times of reform and progress. It was the cry of the preacher in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when preaching was reviving with the general advance of life.[651]
Satire and pious invective struck at all classes: kings, counts and knights, merchants, tradesmen, artisans, even villain-serfs, came under its lash.[652] And properly, since every class is touched with universal human vices, besides those which are more peculiar to its special way of life. All men fall below the standards of the time; and each class fails with respect to its own ideals. The special shortcomings are most apparent with those classes whose ideals are most definitely formulated.
Among the laity the gap between the ideal and the actual may best be observed in the warrior class whose ideals accorded with the feudal situation and tended to express themselves in chivalry. Not that knights and ladies were better or worse than other mediaeval men and women. But literature contains clearer statements of their ideals. The knightly virtues range before us as distinctly as the monastic; and harsh is the contrast between the character they outline and the feudal actuality of cruelty and greed and lust. Feudalism itself presents everywhere a state of contrast between its principles of mutual fidelity and protection, and its actuality of oppression, revolt, and private war.
The feudal system was a sprawling conglomerate fact. The actual usages of chivalry (the term is loose and must be allowed gradually to define itself) were one expression of it, and varied with the period and country. But chivalry had its home also in the imagination, and its most interesting media are legend and romantic fiction. Still, much that was romantic in it sprang from the aggregate of law, custom, and sentiment, which held feudal society together. Chivalry was the fine flower of honour growing from this soil, embosomed in an abundant leafage of imagination.
The feudal system was founded on relations and sentiments arising from a state of turbulence where every man needed the protection of a lord: it could not fail to foster sentiments of fealty. The fief itself, the feudal unit of land held on condition of homage and service, symbolized the principle of mutual troth between lord and vassal. The land was part of mother earth; the troth, the elemental personal tie, existed from of yore. In this instance it came from the German forests. But the feudal system of land tenure also stretched its roots back into the rural institutions of the disintegrating Roman Empire. In the fifth century, for example, when what was left of the imperial rule could no longer enforce order, and provincial governments were decaying with the decay of the central power from which they drew their life, men had to look about them for protection. It became customary for men to hand over land and liberty to some near lord, and enter into a relationship akin to serfage in return for protection. Thus the Gallo-Roman population were becoming accustomed to personal dependence even while the Merovingians were establishing their kingdom.
On their side the Franks and other Teutons had inherited the institution of the comitatus, which bound the young warrior to his chief. They were familiar with exacting modes of personal retainership, which merged the follower’s freedom in his lord’s will. If during the reigns of Pepin and his prodigious son the development of local dominion and dependence was held in some abeyance, on the death of Charlemagne it would proceed apace. All the factors which tend to make institutions out of abuses and the infractions of earlier custom, sprang at once into activity in the renewed confusion. Everything served to increase the lesser man’s need of defence, weld his dependence on his lord, and augment the latter’s power. Moreover, long before Charlemagne’s time, not only for protection in this life, but for the sake of their souls, men had been granting their lands to monasteries and receiving back the use thereof--such usufruct being known as a beneficium. This custom lent the force of its example and manifest utility to the relations between lay lords and tenants. And finally one notes the frequent grant to monasteries and individuals of immunity from governmental visitation, a grant preventing the king’s officers from entering lands in order to exercise the king’s justice, or exact fines and requisitions.[653]
From out of such conditions the feudal system gradually took form. Its central feature was the tenure of a fief by a vassal from his lord on condition of rendering faithful military and other not ignoble service. As the tenth century passed, fiefs tended to become hereditary. So long as the vassal fulfilled his duty to his lord, the rights of the lord over the land were nominal; more substantial was the mutual obligation--on the part of the lord to protect his vassal against the violence of others, and on the vassal’s part to make good the homage pledged by him when he knelt and placed his hands within his lord’s hands and vowed himself his lord’s man for the fief he held. His duty was to aid his lord against enemies, yield him counsel and assistance in the judgment of causes, and pay money to ransom him from captivity, knight his eldest son, or portion his daughter. The ramifications of these feudal tenures and obligations extended, with all manner of complications, from king and duke down to such as held the meagre fief that barely kept man and war-horse from degrading labour. All these made up the feudal class whose members might expect to become knights on reaching manhood.
Neither this system of land tenure, nor the sentiments and relations sustaining it, drew their origin from Christianity. But the Church was mighty in its influence over the secular relationships of those who came under its spiritual guidance. Feudal troth was to become Christianized. The old regard for war-chief and war-comrade was to be broadened through the Faith’s solicitude for all believers; then it was raised above the human sphere to fealty toward God and His Church; and thereupon it was gentled through Christian meekness and mercy.
This Christianized spirit of fealty, broadening to courtesy and pity, was to take visible form in a universal Order into which members of the feudal class were admitted when their valour had been proved, and into which brave deeds might bring even a low-born man. Gradually, as the Order’s regula, a code of knighthood’s honour was developed, valid in its fundamentals throughout western Christendom; but varying details and changing fancies from time to time intruded, just as subsequent phases of monastic development were grafted on the common Benedictine rule.
Investing a young warrior with the arms of manhood has always in fighting communities been the normal ceremony of the youth’s coming of age and his recognition as a member of the clan. The binding on of the young Teuton’s sword in the assembly of his people was an historical antecedent of the making of a knight. In all the lands of western Europe--France, Germany, Anglo-Saxon England, Lombard Italy, and Visigothic Spain--this ceremony appears to have remained a simple one through the ninth and tenth centuries. As for the eleventh, one may note the following passages: William of Malmesbury (d. 1142 cir.) speaks of William of Normandy receiving the insignia of knighthood (militiae insignia) from the King of France as soon as his years permitted.[654] Henry of Huntington (d. 1155) says that this same William the Conqueror, in the nineteenth year of his reign, invested his younger son Henry with the arms of manhood (virilibus induit armis); while another chronicler says that Prince Henry: “sumpsit arma in Pentecostem”--a festival at which it was customary to make knights. And again, Ordericus Vitalis says of the armour-bearer of Duke William that after five years’ service he was by that same duke regularly invested with his arms and made a knight (decenter est armis adornatus et miles effectus).
These short references[655] do not indicate the nature of the ceremony. But one notes the use of the Latin words miles and militia as meaning knight and knighthood. Like so many other classical words, miles took various meanings in the Middle Ages. But it came commonly to signify knight, chevalier, or ritter.[656] And whatever other meanings militia and militare retained or acquired, they signified knighthood and the performance of its duties. Frequently they suggested the relationship of vassal to a lord: and in this sense miles meant one who held a fief under the obligation to do knightly service in return.
But how did this word miles (which in classical Latin meant a soldier and sometimes specifically a foot-soldier as contrasted with an eques) come to mean a knight? It was first applied to the warriors of the various Teutonic peoples, who for the most part fought on foot. But the wars with the Saracens in the eighth century appear to have made clear the need of a large and efficient corps of horse. From the time of Charles Martel the warrior class began to fight regularly on horseback;[657] and thus, apparently, the term miles began to signify primarily one of these tried and well-armed riders.[658] Such were the very ones who would regularly be invested with their arms on reaching manhood. Many of them had inherited the sentiments of fealty to a chief, and probably were vassals of some lord from whom they had received lands to be held on military tenure. They were not all noble (an utterly loose term with reference to these early confused centuries) nor were they necessarily free (another inappropriate term with respect to these incipiently mediaeval social conditions).[659] But their mainly military duties would naturally develop into a retainer’s relationship of fealty.
The ninth century passes into the tenth, the tenth into the eleventh, the eleventh into the twelfth. Classes and orders of society become more distinct. The old warrior groups have become lords and vassals, and compose the feudal class whose members upon maturity are formally girt with the arms of manhood, and thereupon become knights. The ceremony of their investiture has been gradually made more impressive; it has also been imbued with religious sentiment and elaborated with religious rite. It now constitutes the initiation to a universally recognized fighting Order which has its knightly code of honour, if not its knightly duties. In a word, along with the clearer determination of its membership, and the elaboration of the ceremonies of entry or “adoubement,” knighthood has become a distinct conception and has attained existence as an Order. And an Order it remains, into which one is admitted, but into which no one is born, though he be hereditary king or duke or count. Moreover, although the candidates normally would be of the feudal class, the Order is not closed against knightly merit in whomsoever found.[660] Of course there was no written regula or charter, except of certain special Orders. Yet there was no uncertainty as to who was or was not a knight.
A knight could be “made” or “dubbed” at any time, for example, on the field of battle or before the fight. But certain festivals of the Church, Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost, came to be regarded as peculiarly appropriate for the ceremony. Any knight, but no unknighted person however high his rank, could “dub” another knight.[661] This appears to have been the universal rule, and yet it suffered infringements. For example, at a late period a king might claim the right to confirm the bestowal of knighthood, which in fact commonly was bestowed by a great lord or sovereign prince. On its negative side, the general rule may be said to have been infringed when Church dignitaries, no longer content with blessing the arms of the young warrior, usurped the secular privilege of investing him with them and dubbing him a knight.[662]
The ceremony itself probably originated in the girding on of the sword. As these warriors in time changed to mounted riders with elaborate arms and armour, it became more of an affair to invest them fully with their equipment. There would be the putting on of helm and coat of mail, and there would be the binding on of spurs; and at some time it became customary for the youth to prepare himself by a bath. But girding on the sword was still the important point, although perhaps the somewhat enigmatical blow, given by him who conferred the dignity, and not to be returned (non repercutiendus), became the finish to the ceremony. That blow existed (we find it in the Chansons de geste) in the twelfth century as a thwack with the fist on the young man’s bare neck; then in course of years it refined itself into a gentle sword-tap on the mailed shoulder.[663]
At an early period the Church sought to sanctify the ceremony through religious rites; for it could not remain unconcerned with the consecration of the warriors of Christendom, whose services were needed and whose souls were to be saved. What time so apt for inculcating obedience and other Christian virtues as this solemn hour when the young warrior’s nature was stirred with the pride and hopes of knighthood? And the young knight needed the Church’s blessing. Heathen peoples sought in every enterprise the protection of their gods, usually obtained through priestly magic. And when converted to the faith of Christ, should they not call on Him who was mightier than Odin? Should not His power be invoked to shield the Christian knight? Will not the sword which the priest has blessed and has laid upon Christ’s miracle-working altar, more surely guard the wearer’s life? Better still if there be blessed relics in its hilt. The dying Roland speaks to his great sword:
“O Durendel cum ies bele et seintisme!”
“O Durendel how art thou fair and holy! In thy hilt what store of relics: tooth of St. Peter, blood of St. Basil, hairs of my lord St. Denis, cloth worn by the Holy Mary.”[664] These relics made the “holiness” of that sword, not in the way of sentiment, but through their magic power. And we shall not be thinking in mediaeval categories if we lose sight of the magic-religious effect of the priest’s blessing on the novice’s sword: it is a protection for the future knight.
Doubtless the religious features of the “adoubement” revert to various epochs. The ancient watch-nights preceding Easter and Pentecost, followed at daybreak by the baptism of white-robed catechumens, may have been the original of the novice’s night vigil over his arms laid by the altar. His bath had become a symbol of purification from sin. He heard Mass in the early morning, and then came the blessing of the sword, the benedictio ensis, of which the oldest extant formula is found in a Roman manuscript of the early eleventh century: “Exaudi, quaeso, Domine, preces nostras, et hunc ensem quo hic famulus N. se circumcingi desiderat, majestatis tuae dextera benedicere dignare.”[665]
Through the Middle Ages the fashions of feudalism did not remain unchanged; likewise its quintessential spirit, chivalry, was modified, and one may say, between the ninth and the fourteenth centuries, passed from barbarism to preciosity. Nevertheless the main ideals of chivalry endured, springing as they did from the fundamental and but slowly-changing conditions of feudal society. Since that society was constantly at war,[666] the first virtue of the knight was valour. Next, since life and property hung on mutual aid and troth, and a larger safety was ensured if one lord could rely upon his neighbour’s word, the virtues of truth-speaking and troth-keeping took their places in the chivalric ideal. Another useful quality, and means of winning men, was generosity (largesse). When coin is scarce, and stipulations for fixed pay unusual, he who serves looks for liberality, which, in accordance with feudal conditions, made the third of the chief knightly virtues.
Valour, troth, largesse, had no necessary connection with Christianity. It was otherwise with certain of the remaining qualities of a knight. According to Christian teaching, pride was the deadliest of sins. So haughtiness, boasting, and vain-glory were to be held vices by the Christian knight. He should show a humble demeanour, save toward the mortal enemies of God; and far from boasting, he should rather depreciate himself and his exploits, though never lowering the standard of his purpose to achieve. Humility entered knighthood’s ideal from Christianity; and so perhaps did courtesy, its kin, a virtue which was not among the earliest to enter knighthood’s ideal, and yet reached universal recognition.
Christianity also meant active charity, beneficence, and love of neighbour. These are virtues hard to import into a state of war. Fighting means harm-doing to an enemy; and only indirectly makes for some one’s good. Let there be some vindication of good in the fighting of a Christian knight: he shall be quick to right the wrong, succour distress, and quickest to bear help where no reward can come. Since knighthood’s ideals took form in crusading times, the slaughter of the Paynim became the supreme act of knightly warfare.
If such elements of the knightly ideal were of Christian origin, others still were even more closely part of mediaeval Christianity. First of these was faith, orthodox faith, heresy-uprooting, infidel-destroying, fides in the full Church sense. Without faith’s sacramental credentials--baptism, participation in the mass--no one could be a knight: and heresy degrades the recreant even before the scullion’s cleaver hacks off his spurs.
From faith knighthood advances to obedience to the Church, a vow expressly made by every knight on taking the Cross, and also incorporated in the Constitutions of the crusading Orders of Templars and Hospitallers. But does the knight pass on from obedience to chastity? This virtue might or might not enter knighthood’s ideal. It scarcely could exist with courtly or chivalric love;[667] and, in fact, knights commonly were either lovers or married men--or both. Yet even in the Arthurian literature there is the monkish Galahad, and many a sinful knight becomes a hermit in the end; and among real and living knights, the Templars and Hospitallers were vowed to celibacy. In these crusading orders the orbits of knighthood and monasticism cross; and it will not be altogether a digression to review the foundation and constitution of one of them.
The Order of the Temple was founded in the year 1118 by Hugh of Payns (Champagne) and other French knights; who placed their hands within those of the Patriarch of Jerusalem, and vowed to devote themselves to the protection of pilgrims in the Holy Land. Probably they also bestowed their lands for the support of the nascent Order. Ten years afterwards Hugh passed through France and England, winning new recruits and appearing at the Council of Troyes. With the authority of that Council and of Pope Honorius II. the Regula pauperum commilitonum Christi Templique Salomonici was promulgated. St. Bernard, to whom it is ascribed, was in large part its inspiration and its author. It still exists in some seventy-two chapters; but one cannot distinguish between those belonging to the original document of 1128 and those added somewhat later.[668]
This regula with its amendments and additions was translated from Latin into Old French (par excellence the tongue of the Crusades), and became apparently the earliest form of the Regle dou Temple, upon which was grafted a mass of ordinances (retrais et establissemens). Apparently the whole of the extant Latin regula was prior to everything contained in the French regle; and accordingly we shall simply regard the Latin as containing the earliest regulations of the Temple, and the French as exhibiting the modifications of tone and interest which came in the course of years.
The hand of St. Bernard ensured the dominance of the monastic temper in the original regula; and Hugo, the first Master of the Temple, could not have been the Saint’s close friend without sharing his enthusiasms. So the prologue opens with a true monastic note:
“Our word is directed primarily to all who despise their own wills, and with purity of mind desire to serve under the supreme and veritable King; and with minds intent choose the noble warfare of obedience, and persevere therein. We therefore exhort you who until now have embraced secular knighthood (miliciam secularem) where Christ was not the cause, and whom God in His mercy has chosen out of the mass of perdition for the defence of the holy Church, to hasten to associate yourselves perpetually.”
This phraseology would suit the constitution of a sheer monastic order. And the first chapter exhorts these venerabiles fratres who renounce their own wills and serve the King (Christ) with horses and arms, zealously to observe all the religious services regularly prescribed for monks. The regula contains the usual monastic commands. For example, obedience to the Master of the Order is enjoined sine mora as if God were commanding, which recalls the language of St. Benedict.[669] Clothes are regulated, and diet; habitual silence is recommended; the brethren are not to go alone, nor at their own will, but as directed by the Master, so as to imitate Him who said, I came not to do mine own will, but His who sent me.[670] Again, chests with locks are forbidden the brothers, except under special permission; nor may any brother, without like permission, receive letters from parents or friends; and then they should be read in the Master’s presence.[671] Let the brethren shun idle speech, and above all let no brother talk with another of military exploits, “follies rather,” achieved by him while “in the world,” or of his doings with miserable women.[672] Let no brother hunt with hawks; such mundane delectations do not befit the religious, who should be rather hearing God’s precepts, and at prayer, or confessing their sins with tears. Yet the lion may always be hunted; for he goes seeking whom he may devour.[673]
The religio professed by the Templars is called, in the Latin rule, religio militaris, which the French translates “religion de chevalerie,” not incorrectly, but with somewhat different flavour.[674]
“This new genus religionis, as we believe, by divine providence began with you in the Holy Land, a religio in which you mingle chivalry (milicia). Thus this armed religion may advance through chivalry, and smite the enemy without incurring sin. Rightfully then we decree that you shall be called knights of the Temple (milites Templi) and may hold houses, lands and men, and possess serfs and justly rule them.”[675]
The pomp of the last sentence seems to remove from the tone of the earlier chapters, and suggests a later date. Another, possibly late, chapter (66) permits the knights to receive tithes, since they have abandoned their riches for spontaneae paupertati. Still another accords to married men a qualified admission to the brotherhood, but they may not wear the white robe and mantle (55). The next forbids the admission of sorores; and the last chapter of all (72) warns against the sight of women, and forbids the brethren to kiss one, be she widow, virgin, mother, sister or friend.
Thus the Latin regula formulates an order of monasticism with only the modifications imperatively demanded by the exigencies of holy warfare. The French regle elaborates the military organization and enhances the chivalric element. This begins to appear in the portions which are a translation (usually quite close) of the Latin rule. But even that translation makes changes, for example, omitting the period of probation required in the Latin text, before admitting a brother to the Order.[676] A striking change was made by the later French ordinances in the interrogations and proceedings for admission. The Latin formula begins in Cistercian phrase:
“Vis abrenunciare seculo?
“Volo.
“Vis profiteri obedientiam secundum canonicam institutionem et secundum preceptum domini papae?
“Volo.
“Vis assumere tibi conversationem (the monastic mode and change of life) fratrum nostrorum?
“Volo.”[677]
And so forth.
The substance of these and other questions was retained in the far longer French formula, which exacted specific promises of compliance with all the Order’s ordinances. But far removed from the original are such questions as the following: “Biau dous amis” (the ordinary phrase of the chivalric romance) have you, or has any one for you, made any promise to any one in return for his aid in procuring your admission, which would be simony? “Estes vos chevalier et fis de chevalier?”
Is the candidate a knight, and son of knight and lady, and are his “peres ... de lignage de chevaliers”? This means chivalry and gentle blood; and if the candidate answers in the negative, he cannot be admitted as a knight of the Temple, although he may be as “sergent,” or in some other character. Most noble and courtly is the phrasing of these statutes. Their frequent “Beaus seignors freres” is the address proper for knights rather than monks.[678]
Usually wherever the translation of the Latin regula ends, the Regle dou Temple passes on to provisions meeting the requirements of a military, rather than a monastic order. We enter upon such in the chapters governing the powers and privileges of the (Grand) Master, of the Seneschal, of the Marshal, of the “Comandeor de la terre de Jerusalem.” Many sections have to do with military discipline, with the ordering of the knights and their followers on the march and in the battle; they forbid the knights to joust or leave the squadron without orders.[679] Horses, armour, and accoutrements are regulated, and, in short, full provision is made for everything conducing to make the army efficient in war. There is also a long list of faults and crimes for which a knight may be disciplined or expelled; the latter shall be his punishment if he flee before the Saracens and forsake his standard in battle.[680]
The history of the Templars, significantly epitomized in the amendments to their regula, shows the necessary as well as inevitable secularization of a military monastic order; an order which for the purposes of this chapter may be placed among the chief historical examples of chivalry. For in this chapter we are not straying through the pleasant mazes of romantic literature, but are keeping close to history, with the intention of drawing from it illustrations of chivalry’s ideals. We shall not, however, enter further upon the story of the Order of the Temple, with its valorous and rapacious achievements and most tragic end; but will rather look to the careers of historic individuals for the illumination of our theme.
Reaching form and consciousness in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, chivalry became part of the crusading ardour of those times. All true knights were or might be Crusaders; and of a truth there was no purer incarnation of the crusading spirit than Godfrey of Bouillon, that figure of veritable if somewhat slender historicity, upon whom in time chronicler and trouvère alike were to fasten as the true hero of the enterprise that won Jerusalem. And so he was. Not that Godfrey was commander of the host. He was not even its most energetic or most capable leader. Boemund of Tarentum and Raymond of Toulouse were his superiors in power and military energy. But neither Boemund, nor Tancred, nor Raymond, nor any other of those princes of Christendom, was what Godfrey appears to us, the type and symbol of the perfect, single-hearted, crusading knight, fighting solely for the Faith, with Christian devotion and humility, and, like them all, with more than Christian wrath. The First Crusade (1096-1099) was stamped with hatred and slaughter: on the dreadful march, at the more dreadful siege and final sack of Antioch, and finally when the holy sepulchre’s defilement was washed out in Saracen blood. And there was no slaughterer more eager than Godfrey.
The cruelty and religious fervour of the Crusade are rendered in the words of Raymond of Agiles, one of the clergy in the train of Count Raymond of Toulouse, and an eye-witness of the capture of Jerusalem. After days of despairing struggle to effect a breach, success came as by the mercy of God:
“Among the first to enter was Tancred and the Duke of Lothringia (Godfrey), who on that day shed quantities of blood almost beyond belief. After them, the host mounted the walls, and now the Saracens suffered. Yet although the city was all but in the hands of the Franks, the Saracens resisted the party of Count Raymond as if they were never going to be taken. But when our men had mastered the walls of the city and the towers, then wonderful things were to be seen. Numbers of the Saracens were beheaded--which was the easiest for them; others were shot with arrows, or forced to jump from the towers; others were slowly tortured and were burned in flames. In the streets and open places of the town were seen piles of heads and hands and feet. One rode about everywhere amid the corpses of men and horses. But these were small matters! Let us go to Solomon’s temple, where they were wont to chant their rites and solemnities. What had been done there? If we speak the truth we exceed belief: let this suffice. In the temple and porch of Solomon one rode in blood up to the knees and even to the horses’ bridles by the just and marvellous Judgment of God, in order that the same place which so long had endured their blasphemies against Him should receive their blood.”
So the Crusaders wrought; and what joy did they feel! Raymond continues:
“When the city was taken it was worth the whole long labour to witness the devotion of the pilgrims to the sepulchre of the Lord, how they clapped their hands, exulted, and sang a new song unto the Lord. For their hearts presented to God, victor and triumphant, vows of praise which they were unable to explain. A new day, new joy and exultation, new and perpetual gladness, the consummation of toil and devotion drew forth from all new words, new songs. This day, I say, glorious in every age to come, turned all our griefs and toils into joy and exultation.”[681]
So new songs of gladness burst from the hearts of the soldiers of the Cross. In a few days the princes made an election, and offered the kingdom to Count Raymond: he declined. Then Godfrey was made king; though he would not be crowned, nor would he ever wear a crown where his Lord had worn a crown of thorns. As a servant of Christ and of His Church he fought and ruled some short months till his death. His fame has grown because his heart was pure, and because, among the knights, he represented most perfectly the religious impulse of this crusade which fought its way through blood, until it poured out its new song of joy over the blood-drenched city. He errs who thinks to find the source and power of the First Crusade elsewhere than in the flaming zeal of feudal Christianity. There was doubtless much divergence of motive, secular and religious; but over-mastering and unifying all was the passion to wrest the sepulchre of Christ from paynim defilement, and thus win salvation for the Crusader. Greed went with the host, but it did not inspire the enterprise.
Doubtless the stories of returning knights awakened a spirit of romantic adventure, which stirred in later crusading generations. It was not so in the eleventh century when the First Crusade was gathering. The romantic imagination was then scarcely quickened; adventure was still inarticulate, and the literature of adventure for the venture’s sake was yet to be created. So the First Crusade, with its motive of religious zeal, is in some degree distinguishable from those which followed when knighthood was in different flower. If not the Crusades themselves, at least the Chansons of the trouvères who sang of them, follow a change corresponding with the changing taste of chivalry: they begin with serious matters, and are occupied with the great enterprise; then they become adventurous in theme, romantic, till at last even romantic love is infelicitously grafted upon the religious rage that won Jerusalem.
This process of change may be traced in the growth of the legends of the First Crusade and Godfrey of Bouillon. Something was added to his career even by the Latin Chronicles of fifty years later. But his most venturesome development is to be found in those French Chansons de geste which have been made into the “Cycle” of the First Crusade. Two of these, the Chansons of Antioche and Jerusalem, were originally composed by a contemporary, if not a participant in the expedition. They were refashioned perhaps seventy-five or a hundred years later, in the reign of Philip Augustus, by another trouvère, who still kept their old tone and substance. They remained poetic narratives of the holy war. In them the knights are fierce and bloody, cruel and sometimes greedy; but their whole emprise makes onward to the end in view, the winning of the holy city. These poems are epic and not romantic: they may even be called historical. The character of Godfrey is developed with legendary or epic propriety, through a heightening of his historic qualities. He equals or excels the other barons in fierce valour, and yet a touch of courtesy tempers his wrath. In Christian meekness and in modesty he surpasses all, and he refuses the throne of Jerusalem until he has been commanded from on high. At that he accepts the kingdom as a sacred charge in defence of which he is to die.
It is otherwise with a number of other chansons composed in the latter part of the twelfth and through the thirteenth century. Some of them (the Chanson des chétifs, for example) had probably to do with the First Crusade. Others, like the various poems which tell of the Chevalier au Cygne, were inaptly forced into connection with the family of Godfrey. They have become adventurous, and are studded with irrelevant marvels, rather than assisted to their denouements by serious supernatural intervention. Monsters appear, and incongruous romantic episodes; Godfrey’s ancestor has become the Swan-knight, and he himself duplicates the exploits previously ascribed to that half-fairy person. Knightly manners, from brutal have become courteous. Women throng these poems, and the romantic love of women enters, although not in the finished guise in which it plays so dominant a role in the Arthurian Cycle. Such themes, unknown to the earlier crusading chansons, would have fitted ill with a martial theme driving on through war and carnage (not through “adventures”) to the holy end in view.[682]
The Crusades open with the form of Godfrey of Bouillon. A century and a half elapses and they deaden to a close beneath the futile radiance of a saintlike and perfect knightly personality. St. Louis of France is as clear a figure as any in the Middle Ages. From all sides his life is known. We see him as a painstaking sovereign meting out even justice, and maintaining his royal rights against feudal turbulence and also against ecclesiastical encroachment. During his reign the monarchy of France continues to advance in power and repute. And yet there was no jot of worldly wisdom, and scant consideration of a realm sorely needing its ruler, in the Quixotic religious devotion which drew him twice across the sea on crusades unparalleled in their foolishness. For the world was growing wiser politically; and what was glorious feudal enthusiasm in the year 1099, was deliberate disregard of experience in the years 1248 and 1270.
Yet who would have had St. Louis wiser in his generation? The loss to France was mankind’s gain, from the example of saintly king and perfect knight, kept bright in the narratives of men equal to the task. Louis was happy in his biographers. Two among them knew him intimately and in ways affording special opportunities to observe the sides of his character congenial to their respective tempers. One was his confessor for twenty years, the Dominican Geoffrey of Beaulieu; the other was the Sire de Joinville. Geoffrey’s Vita records Louis’ devotions; Joinville’s Histoire notes the king’s piety; but the qualities which it illuminates are those of a French gentleman and knight and grand seigneur, like Joinville himself.
The book of the Dominican[683] is not picturesque. It opens with an edifying comparison between King Josiah and King Louis. Then it praises the king’s mother, Queen Blanche of pious memory. As for Louis, the confessor has been unable to discover that he ever committed a mortal sin: he sought faithful and wise counsellors; he was careful and gracious in speech, never using an oath or any scurrilous expression. In earlier years, when under the necessity of taking oath, he would say, “In nomine mei”; but afterwards, hearing that some religious man had objected to this, he restricted his asseverations to the “est, est” and “non, non” of the Gospel.
From the time he first crossed the sea, he wore no scarlet raiment, but clothed himself in sober garments. And as such were of less value to give to the poor than those which he had formerly worn, he added sixty pounds a year to his almsgiving; for he did not wish the poor to suffer because of his humble dress. Geoffrey gives the long tale of his charities to the poor and to the mendicant Orders. On the Sabbaths it was the king’s secret custom to wash the feet of three beggars, dry them, and kiss them humbly. He commanded in his will that no stately monument should be erected over his grave. He treated his confessors with great respect, and, while confessing, if perchance a window was to be closed or opened, he quickly rose and shut or opened it, and would not hear of his confessor doing it. In Advent season and Lent he abstained from marital intercourse. Some years before his death, if he had had his will, he would have resigned his kingdom to his son, and entered the Order of the Franciscans or Dominicans. He brought up his children most religiously, and wished some of them to take the vows.[684]
He confessed every Friday and also between times, if something occurred to him; and if he thought of anything in the night, he would send for his confessor and confess before matins.[685] After confession he always took his discipline from his confessor, whom he furnished with a scourge of five little braided iron chains, attached to an ivory handle. This he would afterwards put back into a little case, which he carried hanging to his belt, but out of sight. Such little cases he sometimes presented to his children or friends in secret, that they might have a convenient instrument of discipline. He wore haircloth next his flesh in the holy seasons, a habit distressing to his tender skin, until his confessor persuaded him to abandon this form of penance as ill comporting with his station. He replaced it by increasing his charities. His fasts were regular and frequent, till he lessened them upon prudent advice; for he was not strong. He would have liked to hear all the canonical hours chanted; and twice a day he heard Mass, and daily the Office for the Dead. Sometimes, soon after midnight, he would rise to hear matins, and then would take a quiet time for prayer by his bed. Likewise he loved to hear sermons. On returning over the sea, when the ships suffered a long delay, he had preaching three times a week, with the sermon specially adapted to the sailors, a class of men who rarely hear the Word of God. He prevailed on many of them to confess, and declared himself ready at any time to put his hand to a rope, if necessary, so that a sailor while confessing might not be called away by any exigency of the sea.
While beyond the sea, this good king, hearing that a Saracen Sultan had collected the books of their philosophy at his own expense for his subjects’ use, determined not to be outdone whenever he should return to Paris, a purpose which he amply carried out, diligently and generously supplying money for copying and renewing the writings of the Doctors. At enormous expense he obtained the Saviour’s crown of thorns and a good part of the true cross, from the emperor at Constantinople, with many other precious relics; all of which the king barefooted helped to carry in holy procession when they were received by the clergy of Paris.
The king was very careful in the distribution of ecclesiastical patronage, always seeing to it that the candidate was not already enjoying another benefice. His heart exulted when it came to him to bestow a benefice upon some especially holy man. He was most zealous in the suppression of swearing and blasphemy, and with the advice of the papal legate then in France issued an edict, providing that the lips of those guilty of this sin should be seared with hot irons; and when certain ones murmured, he declared that he would willingly suffer his own lips to be branded if that would purge his realm of this vice.
Such were the acts and qualities of Louis which impressed his Dominican confessor. They were the qualities of a saint, and would have brought their possessor to a monastery, had not his royal station held him in the world. The Dominican could not know the knightly nature of his royal penitent, and still less reflect it in his Latin of the confessional. For this there was needed the pen of a great gentleman, whose nature enabled him to picture his lord in a book of such high breeding that it were hard to find its fellow. This book is stately with the Sire de Joinville’s consciousness of his position and blood, and stately through the respect he bore his lord--a book with which no one would take a liberty. Yet it is simple in thought and phrase, as written by one who lived through what he tells, and closely knew and dearly loved the king. From it one learns that he who was a saint in his confessor’s eyes was also a monarch from his soul out to his royal manners and occasional royal insistence upon acts which others thought unwise. We also learn to know him as a knightly, hapless soldier of the Cross, who would not waver from his word plighted even to an infidel.
That St. Louis was a veritable knight is the first thing one learns from Joinville. The first part of my book, says that gentleman, tells how the king conducted his life after the way of God and the Church, and to the profit of his realm; the second tells of his “granz chevaleries et de ses granz faiz d’armes.” “The first deed (faiz) whereby ‘il mist son cors en avanture de mort’ was at our arrival before Damietta, where his council was of the opinion, as I have understood, that he ought to remain in his ship until he saw what his knights (sa chevalerie) should do, who made a landing. The reason why they so counselled him was that if he disembarked, and his people should be killed and he with them, the whole affair was lost; while if he remained in his ship he could in his own person renew the attempt to conquer Egypt. And he would credit no one, but leaped into the sea, all armed, his shield hanging from his neck, his lance in hand, and was one of the first upon the beach.”
This is from Joinville’s Introduction. He recommences formally:
“In the name of God the all powerful, I, John, Sire of Joinville, Seneschal of Champagne, cause to be written the life of our sainted king Louis, as I saw and heard of it for the space of six years while I was in his company on the pilgrimage beyond the sea, and since we returned. And before I tell you his great deeds and prowess (chevalerie), I will recount what I saw and heard of his holy words and good precepts, so that they may be found one after the other for the improvement of those who hear.
“This holy man loved God with all his heart, and imitated His works: which was evident in this, that as God died for the love which He bore His people, so he (Louis) put his body in peril several times for the love which he bore his people. The great love which he had for his people appeared in what he said to his eldest son, Louis, when very sick at Fontainebleau: ‘Fair son,’ said he, ‘I beg thee to make thyself loved by the people of thy kingdom; for indeed I should prefer that a Scot from Scotland came and ruled the people of the kingdom well and faithfully, rather than that thou shouldst rule them ill in the sight of all.’”
Joinville continues relating the virtues of the king, and recording his conversations with himself:
“He called me once and said, ‘Seneschal, what is God?’ And I said to him, ‘Sire, it is a being so good that there can be no better.’
“‘Now I ask you,’ said he, ‘which would you choose, to be a leper, or to have committed a mortal sin?’ And I who never lied to him replied that I had rather have committed thirty than be a leper. Afterwards he called me apart and made me sit at his feet and said: ‘Why did you say that to me yesterday?’ And I told him that I would say it again. And he: ‘You speak like a thoughtless trifler; for you should know there is no leprosy so ugly as to be in mortal sin, because the soul in mortal sin is like the devil. This is why there can be no leprosy so ugly. And then, of a truth, when a man dies, he is cured of the leprosy of the body; but when the man who has committed a mortal sin dies, he does not know, nor is it certain, that he has so repented while living, that God has pardoned him; this is why he should have great fear that this leprosy will last as long as God shall be in paradise. So I pray you earnestly that you will train your heart, for the love of God and of me, to wish rather for leprosy or any other bodily evil, rather than that mortal sin should come into your soul.’ He asked me whether I washed the feet of the poor on Holy Tuesday. ‘Sire,’ said I, ‘quel malheur! I will not wash those villains’ feet.’ ‘Truly that was ill said,’ said he; ‘for you should not hold in contempt what God did for our instruction. So I pray you, for the love of God first, and for the love of me, to accustom yourself to wash them.’”
Joinville was some years younger than his king, who loved him well and wished to help him. The king also esteemed Master Robert de Sorbon[686] for the high respect as a preudom in which he was held, and had him eat at his table. One day Master Robert was seated next to Joinville.
“‘Seneschal,’ said the king, smiling, ‘tell me the reasons why a man of wisdom and valour (preudom, prud’homme) is accounted better than a fool.’ Then began the argument between me and Master Robert; and when we had disputed for a time, the king rendered his decision, saying: ‘Master Robert, I should like to have the name of preudom, so be it that I was one, and all the rest I would leave to you; for preudom is such a grand and good thing that it fills the mouth just to pronounce it.’”
Master Robert plays a not altogether happy part in another scene, varicoloured and delightful:
“The holy king was at Corbeil one Pentecost, and twenty-four knights with him. The king went down after dinner into the courtyard back of the chapel, and was talking at the entrance with the Count of Brittany, the father of the present duke, whom God preserve. Master Robert de Sorbon came to seek me there, and took me by the cloak, and led me to the king, and all the other gentlemen came after us. Then I asked Master Robert: ‘Master Robert, what would you?’ And he said to me: ‘If the king should sit down here, and you should seat yourself above him, I ask you whether you would not be to blame?’ And I said, Yes.
“And he said to me: ‘Yet you lay yourself open to blame, since you are more nobly clad than the king: for you wear squirrel’s fur and cloth of green, which the king does not.’
“And I said to him: ‘Master Robert, saving your grace, I do nothing worthy of blame when I wear squirrel’s fur and cloth of green; for it is the clothing which my father and mother left me. But you do what is to blame; for you are the son of a vilain and vilaine, and have abandoned the clothes of your father and your mother, and are clad in richer cloth than the king.’ And then I took the lappet of his surcoat and that of the king’s, and said to him: ‘See whether I do not speak truly.’ And the king set himself to defend Master Robert with all his might.”
“Afterwards Messire the king called to him Monseigneur Philippe his son, the father of the present king, and the king Thibaut (of Navarre), and laid his hand on the earth and said: ‘Sit close to me, so that they may not hear.’
“‘Ah Sire,’ say they, ‘we dare not sit so close to you.’
“And he said to me, ‘Seneschal, sit down here.’ And so I did, so close that our clothes touched. And he made them sit down by me, and said to them: ‘You have done ill, you who are my sons, who have not obeyed at once all that I bade you: and see to it that this does not happen with you again.’ And they promised. And then he said to me, that he had called us in order to confess to me that he was in the wrong in defending Master Robert against me. ‘But,’ said he, ‘I saw him so dumbfounded that there was good need I should defend him. And do none of you attach any importance to all I said defending Master Robert; for, as the seneschal said to him, you ought to dress well and becomingly, so that your wives may love you better, and your people hold you in higher esteem. For the sage says that one should appear in such clothes and arms that the wise of this world may not say you have done too much, nor the young people say you have done too little.’”
The hopelessly worthy parvenu was quite outside this charmed circle of blood and manners.
Another story of Joinville opens our eyes to Louis’ views on Jews and infidels. The king was telling him of a grand argument between Jews and Christian clergy which was to have been held at Cluny. And a certain poverty-stricken knight was there, who obtained leave to speak the first word; and he asked the head Jew whether he believed that Mary was the mother of God and still a virgin. And the Jew answered that he did not believe it at all. The knight replied that in that case the Jew had acted like a fool to enter her monastery, and should pay for it; and with that he knocked him down with his staff, and all the other Jews ran off. When the abbot reproached him for his folly, he replied that the abbot’s folly was greater in having the argument at all. “So I tell you,” said the king on finishing his story, “that only a skilled clerk should dispute with misbelievers; but a layman, when he hears any one speak ill of the Christian law, should defend that law with nothing but his sword, which he should plunge into the defamer’s belly, to the hilt if possible.”
Well known is the hapless outcome of St. Louis’ Crusades: the first one leading to defeat and captivity in Egypt, the second ending in the king’s death by disease at Tunis. Yet in what he sought to do in his Lord’s cause, St. Louis was a true knight and soldier of the Cross. The spirit was willing; but the flesh accomplished little. Let us take from Joinville’s story of that first crusade a wonderfully illustrative chapter, giving the confused scenes occurring after the capture of Damietta, when the French king and his feudal host had advanced southerly through the Delta, along the eastern branch of the Nile. Joinville was making a reconnaissance with his own knights, when they came suddenly upon a large body of Saracens. The Christians were hard pressed; here and there a knight falls in the melée, among them
“Monseigneur Hugues de Trichatel, the lord of Conflans, who carried my banner. I and my knights spurred to deliver Monseigneur Raoul de Wanou, who was thrown to the ground. As I was making my way back, the Turks struck at me with their lances; my horse fell on his knees under the blows, and I went over his head. I recovered myself as I might, shield on neck and sword in hand; and Monseigneur Erard de Siverey (whom God absolve!), who was of my people, came to my aid, and said that we had better retreat to a ruined house, and there wait for the king who was approaching.”
One notes the high-born courtesy with which the Sire de Joinville speaks of the gentlemen who had the honour of serving him. The fight goes on.
“Monseigneur Erard de Siverey was struck by a sword-blow in his face, so that his nose hung down over his lips. And then I was minded of Monseigneur Saint Jacques, whom I thus invoked: ‘Beau Sire Saint Jacques help and succour me in this need.’
“When I had made my prayer, Monseigneur Erard de Siverey said to me: ‘Sire, if you think that neither I nor my heirs would suffer reproof, I would go for aid to the Count of Anjou, whom I see over there in the fields.’ And I said to him: ‘Messire Erard, I think you would do yourself great honour, if you now went for aid to save our lives; for your own is in jeopardy.’ And indeed I spoke truly, for he died of that wound. He asked the advice of all our knights who were there, and all approved as I had approved. And when he heard that, he requested me to let him have his horse, which I was holding by the bridle with the rest. And so I did.”
The knightliness of this scene is perfect, with its liege fealty and its carefulness as to the point of honour, its carefulness also that the vassal knight shall fail in no duty to his lord whereby the descent of his fief may be jeopardized. Monseigneur Erard (whom God absolve, we say with Joinville!) is very careful to have his lord’s assent and the approval of his fellows, before he will leave his lord in peril, and undergo still greater risk to bring him succour.
Well, the Count of Anjou brought such aid as created a diversion, and the Saracens turned to the new foe. But now the king arrives on the scene:
“There where I was on foot with my knights, wounded as already said, comes the king with his whole array, and a great sound of trumpets and drums. And he halted on the road on the dyke. Never saw I one so bravely armed: for he showed above all his people from his shoulders up, a gilded casque upon his head and a German sword in his hand.”
Then the king’s good knights charge into the battle, and fine feats of arms are done. The fighting is fierce and general. At length the king is counselled to bear back along the river, keeping close to it on his right hand, so as to reunite with the Duke of Burgundy who had been left to guard the camp. The knights are recalled from the melée, and with a great noise of trumpets and drums, and Saracen horns, the army is set in motion.
“And now up comes the constable, Messire Imbert de Beaujeu, and tells the king that the Count of Artois, his brother, was defending himself in a house in Mansourah, and needed aid. And the king said to him: ‘Constable go before and I will follow you.’ And I said to the constable that I would be his knight, at which he thanked me greatly.”
Again one feels the feudal chivalry. Now the affair becomes rather distraught. They set out to succour the Count of Artois, but are checked, and it is rumoured that the king is taken; and in fact six Saracens had rushed upon him and seized his horse by the bridle; but he had freed himself with such great strokes that all his people took courage. Yet the host is driven back upon the river, and is in desperate straits. Joinville and his knights defend a bridge over a tributary, which helps to check the Saracen advance, and affords an uncertain means of safety to the French. But there is no cessation of the Saracen attack with bows and spears. The knights seemed full of arrows. Joinville saved his life with an arrow-proof Saracen vest, “so that I was wounded by their arrows only in five places”! One of Joinville’s own stout burgesses, bearing his lord’s banner on a lance, helped in the charges upon the enemy. In the melée up speaks the good Count of Soissons, whose cousin Joinville had married. “He joked with me and said: ‘Seneschal, let us whoop after this canaille; for by God’s coif (his favourite oath) we shall be talking, you and I, about this day in the chambers of the ladies.’”
At last, the arbalests were brought out from the camp, and the Saracens drew off--fled, says the Sire de Joinville. And the king was there, and
“I took off his casque, and gave him my iron cap, so that he might get some air. And then comes brother Henry de Ronnay, Prevost of the Hospital, to the king when he had passed the river, and kisses his mailed hand. And the king asked him whether he had news of the Count of Artois, his brother; and he said that he had indeed news of him, for he was sure that his brother the Count of Artois was in Paradise. ‘Ha! sire,’ said the Prevost, ‘be of good cheer; for no such honour ever came to a king of France as is come to you. For to fight your enemies you have crossed a river by swimming, have discomfited your enemies and driven them from the field, and taken their engines and tents, where you will sleep this night.’ And the king replied that God be adored for all that He gave; and then the great tears fell from his eyes.”
One need not follow on to the ill ending of the campaign, when king and knights all had to yield themselves prisoners, in most uncertain captivity. The Saracen Emirs conspired and slew their Sultan; the prisoners’ lives hung on a thread; and when the terms were arranging for the delivery and ransom of the king, his own scruples nearly proved fatal. For the Emirs, after they had made their oath, wished the king to swear, and put his seal to a parchment,
“that if he the king did not hold to his agreements, might he be as shamed as the Christian who denied God and His Mother, and was cut off from the company of the twelve Companions (apostles) and of all the saints, male and female. To this the king consented. The last point of the oath was this: That if the king did not keep his agreements, might he be as shamed as the Christian who denied God and His law, and in contempt of God spat on the Cross and trod on it. When the king heard that, he said, please God, he would not make that oath.”
Then the trouble began, and the Emirs tortured the venerable patriarch of Jerusalem till he besought the king to swear. How the oath was arranged I do not know, says Joinville, but finally the Emirs professed themselves satisfied. And after that, when the ransom was paid, the Saracens by a mistake accepted a sum ten thousand livres short, and Louis, in spite of the protest of his counsellors, refused to permit advantage to be taken and insisted on full payment.
Many years afterwards, when Louis was dead and canonized, a dream came to his faithful Joinville who was then an old man.
“It seemed to me in my dream that I saw the king in front of my chapel at Joinville; and he was, so he seemed to me, wonderfully happy and glad at heart; and I also was glad at heart, because I saw him in my chateau. And I said to him: ‘Sire, when you go hence, I will prepare lodging for you at my house in my village of Chevillon.’ And he replied, smiling, and said to me: ‘Sire de Joinville, by the troth I owe you, I do not wish so soon to go from here.’ When I awoke I bethought me; and it seemed to me that it would please God and the king that I should provide a lodging for him in my chapel. So I have placed an altar in honour of God and of him there, where there shall be always chanting in his honour. And I have established a fund in perpetuity to do this.”
Godfrey of Bouillon and St. Louis of France show knighthood as inspired by serious and religious motives. We pass on a hundred years after St. Louis, to a famous Chronicle concerning men whose knightly lives exhibit no such religious, and possibly no such serious, purpose, so far at least as they are set forth by this delightful chronicler. His name of course is Sir John Froissart, and his chief work goes under the name of The Chronicles of England, France, Spain, and the adjoining Countries. It covers the period from the reign of Edward II. to the coronation of Henry IV. of England. Have we not all known his book as one to delight youth and age?
Let us, however, open it seriously, and first of all notice the Preface, with its initial sentence giving the note of the entire work: “That the grans merveilles and the biau fait d’armes achieved in the great wars between England and France, and the neighbouring realms may be worthily recorded, and known in the present and in the time to come, I purpose to order and put the same in prose, according to the true information which I have obtained from valiant knights, squires, and marshals at arms, who are and rightly should be the investigators and reporters of such matters.”[687]
“Marvels” and “deeds of arms”--soon he will use the equivalent phrase belles aventures. With delicious garrulity, but never wavering from his point of view, the good Sir John repeats and enlarges as he enters on his work in which “to encourage all valorous hearts, and to show them honourable examples” he proposes to “point out and speak of each adventure from the nativity of the noble King Edward (III.) of England, who so potently reigned, and who was engaged in so many battles and perilous adventures and other feats of arms and great prowess, from the year of grace 1326, when he was crowned in England.”
Of course Froissart says that the occasion of these wars was King Edward’s enterprise to recover his inheritance of France, which the twelve peers and barons of that realm had awarded to Lord Philip of Valois, from whom it had passed on to his son, King Charles. This enterprise was the woof whereon should hang an hundred years of knightly and romantic feats of arms, which incidentally wrought desolation to the fair realm of France. Yet the full opening of these matters was not yet; and Froissart begins with the story of the troubles brought on Queen Isabella and the nobles of England through the overbearing insolence of Sir Hugh Spencer, the favourite of her husband Edward II.
The Queen left England secretly, to seek aid at Paris from her brother King Charles, that she might regain her rights against the upstart and her own weak estranged husband. King Charles received her graciously, as a great lord should receive a great dame; and richly provided for her and her young son Edward. Then he took counsel of the “great lords and barons of his kingdom”; and their advice was that he should permit her to enlist assistance in his realm, and yet himself appear ignorant of the matter. Of this, Sir Hugh hears, and his gold is busy with these counsellors; so that the Court becomes a cold place for the self-exiled queen. On she fares in her distress, and, as advised, seeks the aid of the great Earl of Hainault, then at Valenciennes. But before the queen can reach that city, the earl’s young brother, Sir John, Lord of Beaumont, rides to meet her, ardent to succour a great lady in distress, “being at that time very young, and panting for glory like a knight-errant.” In the evening he reached the house of Sir Eustace d’Ambreticourt, where the queen was lodged. She made her lamentable complaint, at which Sir John was affected even to tears, and said, “Lady, see here your knight, who will not fail to die for you, though every one else should desert you; therefore will I do everything in my power to conduct you and your son, and to restore you to your rank in England, by the grace of God, and the assistance of your friends in those parts; and I, and all those whom I can influence, will risk our lives on the adventure for your sake.”
Is not this a chivalric beginning? And so the Chronicle goes on. King Edward III. is crowned, marries the Lady Philippa, daughter of the Earl of Hainault, and afterwards sends his defiance to Philip, King of France, for not yielding up to him his rightful inheritance, and this after the same King Edward had, as Duke of Aquitaine, done homage to King Philip for that great duchy.
So the challenge of King Edward, and of sundry other lords, was delivered to the King of France; and thereupon the first bold raid is made by the knightliest figure of the first generation of the war, Sir Walter Manny, a young Hainaulter who had remained in the train of Queen Philippa. The war is carried on by incursions and deeds of derring-do, the larger armies of the kings of England and France circumspectly refraining from battle, which might have checked the martial jollity of the affair. It is all beautifully pointless and adventurous, and carried out in the spirit of a knighthood that loves fighting and seeks honour and adventure, while steadying itself with a hope of plunder and reward. There are likewise ladies to be succoured and defended.
One of these was the lion-hearted Countess of Montfort, who with her husband had become possessed of the disputed dukedom of Brittany. The Earl of Montfort did homage to the King of England; the rival claimant, Charles of Blois, sought the aid of France. He came with an army, and Montfort was taken and died in prison; the duchess was left to carry on the war. She was at last shut up and besieged in Hennebon on the coast; the burghers were falling away, the knights discouraged; emissaries from Lord Charles were working among them. His ally, Lord Lewis of Spain, and Sir Hervé de Leon were the leaders of the besiegers. Sir Hervé had an uncle, a bishop, Sir Guy de Leon, who was on the side of the Countess of Montfort. The nephew won the uncle over in a conference without the walls; and the latter assumed the task of persuading the Lords of Brittany who were with the countess to abandon the apparently hopeless struggle. Re-entering the town, the bishop was eloquent against the countess’s cause, and promised free pardon to the lords if they would give up the town. Now listen to Froissart, how he tells the story:
“The countess had strong suspicions of what was going forward, and begged of the lords of Brittany, for the love of God, that they would not doubt but she should receive succours before three days were over. But the bishop spoke so eloquently, and made use of such good arguments, that these lords were in much suspense all that night. On the morrow he continued the subject, and succeeded so far as to gain them over, or very nearly so, to his opinion; insomuch that Sir Hervé de Leon had advanced close to the town to take possession of it, with their free consent, when the countess looking out from a window of the castle toward the sea, cried out most joyfully, ‘I see the succours I have so long expected and wished for coming.’ She repeated this twice; and the town’s people ran to the ramparts and to the windows of the castle, and saw a numerous fleet of great and small vessels, well trimmed, making all the sail they could toward Hennebon. They rightly imagined it must be the fleet from England, so long detained at sea by tempests and contrary winds.
“When the governor of Guingamp, Sir Yves de Tresiquidi, Sir Galeran de Landreman, and the other knights, perceived this succour coming to them, they told the bishop that he might break up his conference, for they were not now inclined to follow his advice. The bishop, Sir Guy de Leon, replied, ‘My lords, then our company shall separate; for I will go to him who seems to me to have the clearest right.’ Upon which he sent his defiance to the lady, and to all her party, and left the town to inform Sir Hervé de Leon how matters stood. Sir Hervé was much vexed at it, and immediately ordered the largest machine that was with the army to be placed as near the castle as possible, strictly commanding that it should never cease working day nor night. He then presented his uncle to the Lord Lewis of Spain, and to the Lord Charles of Blois, who both received him most courteously. The countess, in the meantime, prepared and hung with tapestry halls and chambers to lodge handsomely the lords and barons of England, whom she saw coming, and sent out a noble company to meet them. When they were landed, she went herself to give them welcome, respectfully thanking each knight and squire, and led them into the town and castle that they might have convenient lodging: on the morrow, she gave them a magnificent entertainment. All that night, and the following day, the large machine never ceased from casting stones into the town.
“After the entertainment, Sir Walter Manny, who was captain of the English, inquired of the countess the state of the town and the enemy’s army. Upon looking out of the window, he said, he had a great inclination to destroy that large machine which was placed so near, and much annoyed them, if any would help him. Sir Yves de Tresiquidi replied, that he would not fail him in this his first expedition; as did also the lord of Landreman. They went to arm themselves, and then sallied quietly out of one of the gates, taking with them three hundred archers, who shot so well, that those who guarded the machine fled, and the men at arms, who followed the archers, falling upon them, slew the greater part, and broke down and cut in pieces this large machine. They then dashed in among the tents and huts, set fire to them, and killed and wounded many of their enemies before the army was in motion. After this they made a handsome retreat. When the enemy were mounted and armed they galloped after them like madmen.
“Sir Walter Manny, seeing this, exclaimed, ‘May I never be embraced by my mistress and dear friend, if I enter castle or fortress before I have unhorsed one of these gallopers.’ He then turned round, and pointed his spear toward the enemy, as did the two brothers of Lande-Halle, le Haze de Brabant, Sir Yves de Tresiquidi, Sir Galeran de Landreman, and many others, and spitted the first coursers. Many legs were made to kick the air. Some of their own party were also unhorsed. The conflict became very serious, for reinforcements were perpetually coming from the camp; and the English were obliged to retreat towards the castle, which they did in good order until they came to the castle ditch; there the knights made a stand, until all their men were safely returned. Many brilliant actions, captures, and rescues might have been seen. Those of the town who had not been of the party to destroy the large machine now issued forth, and, ranging themselves upon the banks of the ditch, made such good use of their bows, that they forced the enemy to withdraw, killing many men and horses. The chiefs of the army, perceiving they had the worst of it, and that they were losing men to no purpose, sounded a retreat, and made their men retire to the camp. As soon as they were gone, the townsmen re-entered, and went each to his quarters. The Countess of Montfort came down from the castle to meet them, and with a most cheerful countenance, kissed Sir Walter Manny, and all his companions, one after the other like a noble and valiant dame.”
In this manner the genial chronicler goes on through his long delightful ramble. After a while the chief combatants close. Cressy is fought and Poictiers. The Black Prince, that extremest bit of knightly royalty, fills the page. The place of Sir Walter Manny is taken by the larger figure of Sir John Chandos, and, on the other side, the usually unfortunate but unconquerable Bertrand du Guesclin. Froissart is at his best when he tells of the great expedition of the Black Prince to restore the cruel Don Pedro of Castille to the throne from which he had been expelled by that picturesque bastard brother Henry, who had a poorer title but a better right, by virtue of being fit to rule.
This whole expedition was--as we see it in Froissart--neither politics nor war, but chivalry. What interest had England, or Edward III., or the Prince of Wales in Don Pedro? None. He was a cruel tyrant, rightfully expelled. The Prince of Wales would set him back upon his throne in the interest of royal legitimacy, and because there offered a brilliant opportunity for fame and plunder: the Black Prince thought less of the latter than the Free Companies enlisted under his banner, and less than his own rapacious knights.
So in three divisions, headed by the most famous knights and in a way generalled by Sir John Chandos, the host passes through the kingdom of Navarre, and crosses the Pyrenees. Then begin a series of exploits. Sir Thomas Felton and a company set out just to dare and beard the Castillian army, and after entrancing feats of knight-errantry, are all captured or slain. Much is the prince annoyed at this; but bears on, gladdened with the thought, often expressed, that the bastard Henry is a bold and hardy knight, and is advancing to give battle.
And true it was. One of Henry’s counsellors explains to him how easy it is to hem in the Black Prince in the defiles, and starve him into a disastrous retreat. Perish the thought! “By the soul of my father,” answers King Henry, “I have such a desire to see this prince, and to try my strength with him, that we will never part without a battle.”
So the unnecessary and resultless battle of Navaretta took place. Don Pedro, the cruel rightful king, was knighted, with others, by the Prince of Wales before the fight. The tried unflinching chivalry of England and Aquitaine conquered, although one division of King Henry’s host had du Guesclin at its head. That knight was captured; somehow his star had a way of sinking before the steadier fortune of Sir John Chandos, who was here du Guesclin’s captor for a second time. King Henry, after valiant fighting, escaped. Don Pedro was re-set upon his throne; and played false with the Black Prince and his army, in the matter of pay. The whole expedition turned back across the Pyrenees. And not so long after, Henry bestirred himself, and the tardily freed du Guesclin hurried again to aid him. This time there was no Black Prince and Sir John Chandos; and Don Pedro was conquered and slain, and Henry was at last firm upon his throne.
Could anything have been more chivalric, more objectless, and more absolutely lacking in result? It is a beautiful story; every one should refresh his childhood’s memory of it by reading Froissart’s delightful pages. And then let him also read at least the subsequent story of the death of Sir John Chandos in a knightly brush at arms; he, the really wise and great leader, perishes through his personal rash knighthood! It is a fine tale of the ending of an old and mighty knight, the very flower of chivalry, as he was called.
So matters fare on through these Chronicles. All is charming and interesting and picturesque; charming also for the knights: great fame is won and fat ransoms paid to recoup knightly fortunes. Now and then--all too frequently, alas! and the only pity of it all!--some brave knight has the mishap to lose his life! That is to say, the only pity of it from the point of view of good Sir John. But we can see further horrors in this picture of chivalry’s actualities: we see King Edward pillage, devastate, destroy France;[688] we see the awful outcome of the general ruin in the rising of the vile, unhappy peasants, the Jacquerie; then in the indiscriminate slaughter and pillaging by the Free Companies, no longer well employed by royalties; and then we see the cruel treachery of many an incident wrought out by such a flower of chivalry even as du Guesclin.[689] Indeed all the horrors of ceaseless interminable war are everywhere, and no more dreadful horror through the whole story than the bloody sack of Limoges commanded by that perfect knight, the Black Prince, himself stricken with disease, and carried in a litter through the breach of the walls into the town, and there reposing, assuaging his cruel soul, while his men run hither and thither “slaying men, women and children according to their orders.”[690]
But when King Edward was old, and the Prince of Wales dying with disease, the French and their partisans gathered heart, and pressed back the English party with successful captures and reprisals. Du Guesclin was made Constable of France; and there remained no English leader who was his match. From this second period onwards, the wars and slaughters and pillagings become more embittered, more horrid and less relieved. The tone of everything is brutalized, and the good chronicler himself frequently animadverts on the wanton destruction wrought, and the frightful ruin. All is not as in the opening of the story, which was so fascinating, so knightly and almost as purely adventurous as the Arthurian romances--only that there was less love of ladies and a disturbing dearth of forests perilous, and enchanted castles. It was then that the reader had ever and anon to remind himself that Froissart is not romance or legend, but a contemporary chronicle; and that in spite of heightened colours and expanded (if not invented) dialogues, his narrative does not belong to the imaginative or fictitious side of chivalry, but to its actualities.[691]
Froissart’s pictures of the depravity and devastation caused by the wars of England and France, disclose the unhappy actuality in which chivalry might move and have its being. And the knights were part of the cruelty, treachery, and lust. One may remark besides in Froissart a certain shallowness, a certain emptying, of the spirit of chivalry. One phase of this lay in the expansion of form and ceremony, while life was departing;--as, for example, in the hypertrophe of heraldry, and in the pageantry of the later tournaments, where such care was taken to prevent injury to the combatants. A subtler phase of chivalry’s emptying lay in its preciosity and in the excessive growth of fantasy and utter romance--of which enough will be said in the next chapter.
XXIII. ROMANTIC CHIVALRY AND COURTLY LOVE
FROM ROLAND TO TRISTAN AND LANCELOT
The instance of Godfrey of Bouillon showed how easy was the passage from knighthood in history to knighthood in legend and romance: legend springing from fact, out of which it makes a story framed in a picture of the time; romance unhistorical in origin, borrowing, devising, imagining according to the taste of an audience and the faculty of the trouvère. A boundless mediaeval literature of poetic legend and romantic fiction sets forth the ways of chivalry. Our attention may be confined to the Old French, the source from which German, English, and Italian literatures never ceased to draw. Three branches may be selected: the chansons de geste; the romans d’aventure; and the Arthurian romances. The subjects of the three are distinct, and likewise the tone and manner of treatment. Yet they were not unaffected by each other; for instance, the hard feudal spirit of the chansons de geste became touched with the tastes which moulded the two other groups, and there was even a borrowing of topic. This was natural, as the periods of their composition over-lapped, and doubtless their audiences were in part the same.
The chansons de geste (gesta == deeds) were epic narratives with historical facts for subjects, and commonly were composed in ten-syllable assonanced or (later) rhyming couplets, laisses so called, the same final assonance or rhyme extending through a dozen or so lines. They told the deeds of Charlemagne and his barons, or the feuds of the barons among themselves, especially those of the time following the emperor’s death. So the subject might be national, for instance the war against the Saracens in Spain; or it might be more provincially feudal in every sense of the latter word.[692] It is not to our purpose to discuss how these poems grew through successive generations, nor how much of Teutonic spirit they put in Romance forms of verse. They were composed by trouvères or jongleurs. The Roland is the earliest of them, and in its extant form belongs to the last part of the eleventh century. One or two others are nearly as early; but the vast majority, as we have them, are the creations, or rather the remaniements, of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
These chansons present the feudal system in epic action. They blazon forth its virtues and its horrors. The heroes are called barons (ber) and also chevaliers;[693] vassalage and prowess (proecce) are closely joined; the Roland speaks of the vassalage of Charles le ber (Charlemagne). The usages of chivalry are found:[694] a baron begins as enfant, and does his youthful feats (enfances); then he is girt with manhood’s sword and given the thwack which dubs him chevalier. Naturally, the chivalry of the chansons is feudal rather than romantic. It is chivalry, sometimes crusading against “felun paien,” sometimes making war against emperors or rivals; always truculent, yet fighting for an object and not for pure adventure’s sake or the love of ladies. The motives of action are quite tangible, and the tales reflect actual situations and conditions. They tell what knights (the chevaliers and barons) really did, though, of course, the particular incidents related may not be historical. Naturally they speak from the time of their composition. The Roland, for example, throbs with the crusading wrath of the eleventh century--a new fervour, and no passionate memory of the old obscure disaster of Roncesvalles. It does not speak from the time of the great emperor. For when Charlemagne lived there was neither a “dulce France” nor the sentiment which enshrined it; nor was there a sharply deliminated feudal Christianity set over against a world of “felun paien”--those false paynim, who should be trusted by no Christian baron. The whole poem revolves around a treason plotted by a renegade among vile infidels.
In this rude poem which carries the noblest spirit of the chansons de geste, the soul of feudal chivalry climbs to its height of loyal expiation for overweening bravery. The battle-note is given in Roland’s words, as Oliver descries the masses of paynim closing in around that valiant rear-guard.
Said Oliver: “Sir comrade, I think we shall have battle with these Saracens.”
Replied Roland: “God grant it! Here must we hold for our king. A man should suffer for his lord, endure heat and cold, though he lose hair and hide. Let each one strike his best, that no evil song be sung of us. The paynim are in the wrong, Christians in the right!”[695]
Then follows Oliver’s prudent solicitation, and Roland’s fatal refusal to sound his horn and recall Charles and his host: “Please God and His holy angels, France shall not be so shamed through me; better death than such dishonour. The harder we strike the more the emperor will love us.” Oliver can be stubborn too; for when the fight is close to its fell end, he swears that Roland shall never wed his sister Aude, if, beaten, he sound that horn.[696]
The paynim host is shattered and riven; but nearly all the Franks have fallen. Roland looks upon the mountains and the plain. Of those of France he sees so many lying dead, and he laments them like a high-born knight (chevaliers gentilz). “Seigneurs barons, may God have pity on you and grant Paradise to your souls, and give them to repose on holy flowers! Better vassals shall I never see; long are the years that you have served me, and conquered wide countries for Charles--the emperor has nurtured you for an ill end! Land of France, sweet land, to-day bereft of barons of high prize! Barons of France! for me I see you dying. I cannot save or defend you! God be your aid, who never lies! Oliver, brother, you I must not fail. I shall die of grief, if no one slay me! Sir comrade, let us strike again.”[697]
Roland and Oliver are almost alone, and Oliver receives a death-stroke. With his last strength he slays his slayer, shouts his defiance, and calls Roland to his aid. He strikes on blindly as Roland comes and looks into his face;--and then might you have seen Roland swoon on his horse, and Oliver wounded to death. “He had bled so much, that his eyes were troubled, and he could not see to recognize any mortal man. As he met his comrade, he struck him on his helmet a blow that cut it shear in twain, though the sword did not touch the head. At this Roland looked at him, and asked him soft and low: ‘Sir comrade, did you mean that? It is Roland, who loves you well. You have not defied me.’
“Says Oliver, ‘Now I hear you speak; I did not see you; may the Lord God see you! I have struck you; for which pardon me.’”
Roland replied: “I was not hurt. I pardon you here and before God.”
“At this word they bent over each other, and in such love they parted.” Oliver feels his death-anguish at hand; sight and hearing fail him: he sinks from his horse and lies on the earth; he confesses his sins, with his two hands joined toward heaven. He prays God to grant him Paradise, and blesses Charles and sweet France, and his comrade Roland above all men. Stretched on the ground the count lies dead.[698]
A little after, when Roland and Turpin the stout archbishop have made their last charge, and the paynim have withdrawn, and the archbishop too lies on the ground, just breathing; then it is that Roland gathers the bodies of the peers and carries them one by one to lay them before the archbishop for his absolution. He finds Oliver’s body, and tightly straining it to his heart, lays it with the rest before the archbishop, whose dying breath is blessing and absolving his companions. And with tears Roland’s voice breaks “Sweet comrade, Oliver, son of the good count Renier, who held the March of Geneva; to break spear and pierce shield, and counsel loyally the good, and discomfit and vanquish villains, in no land was there better knight.”[699] Knowing his own death near, Roland tries to shatter his great sword, and then lies down upon it with his face toward Spain; he holds up his glove toward God in token of fealty; Gabriel accepts his glove and the angels receive his soul.
This was the best of knighthood in the best of the chansons: and we see how close it was to what was best in life. As the fight moves on to Oliver’s blow and Roland’s pardon, to Roland’s last deeds of Christian comradeship, and to his death, the eyes are critical indeed that do not swell with tears. The heroic pathos of this rough poem is great because the qualities which perished at Roncesvalles were so noble and so knightly.
The poem passes on to the vengeance taken by the emperor upon the Saracens, then to his return to Aix, and the short great scene between him and Aude, Roland’s betrothed:
“Where is Roland, the chief, who vowed to take me for his wife?”
Charles weeps, and tears his white beard as he answers: “Sister, dear friend, you are asking about a dead man. But I will make it good to thee--there is Louis my son, who holds the Marches....”
Aude replies: “Strange words! God forbid, and His saints and angels, that I should live after Roland.” And she falls dead at the emperor’s feet.
As was fitting, the poem closes with the trial of the traitor Ganelon, by combat. His defence is feudal: he had defied Roland and all his companions; his treachery was proper vengeance and not treason. But his champion is defeated, and Ganelon himself is torn in pieces by horses, while his relatives, pledged as hostages, are hanged. All of which is feudalism, and can be matched for savagery in many a scene from the Arthurian romances of chivalry--not always reproduced in modern versions.
So the chansons de geste are a mirror of the ways and customs of feudal society in the twelfth century. The feudal virtues are there, troth to one’s liege, orthodox crusading ardour, limitless valour, truth-speaking. There is also enormous brutality; and the recognized feudal vices, cruelty, impiousness, and treason. In the Raoul de Cambrai, for example, the nominal hero is a paroxysm of ferocity and impiety. All crimes rejoice him as he rages along his ruthless way to establish his seignorial rights over a fief unjustly awarded him by Louis, the weak son of Charlemagne. His foil is Bernier, the natural son of one of the rightful heirs against whom Raoul carries on raging feudal war. But Bernier is also Raoul’s squire and vassal, who had received knighthood from him, and so is bound to the monster by the strongest feudal tie. He is a pattern of knighthood and of every feudal virtue. On the day of his knighting he implored his lord not to enter on that fell war against his (Bernier’s) family. In vain. The war is begun with fire and sword. Bernier must support his lord; says he: “Raoul, my lord, is worse (plu fel) than Judas; he is my lord; he has given me horse and clothes, my arms and cloth of gold. I would not fail him for the riches of Damascus”: and all cried, “Bernier, thou art right.”[700]
But there is a limit. Raoul is ferociously wasting the land, and committing every impiety. He would desecrate the abbey of Origni, and set his tent in the middle of the church, stabling his horse in its porch and making his bed before the altar. Bernier’s mother is there as a nun; Raoul pauses at her entreaties and those of his uncle. Then his rage breaks out afresh at the death of two of his men; he burns the town and abbey, and Bernier’s mother perishes with the other nuns in the flames.
Now the monster is feasting on the scene of desolation--and it is Lent besides! After dining, he plays chess: enter Bernier. Raoul asks for wine. Bernier takes the cup and, kneeling, hands it to him. Raoul is surprised to see him, but at once renews his oath to disinherit all of Bernier’s family--his father and uncles. Bernier speaks and reproaches Raoul with his mother’s death: “I cannot bring her back to life, but I can aid my father whom you unjustly follow up with war. I am your man no longer. Your cruelty has released me from my duties; and you will find me on the side of my father and uncles when you attack them.” For reply, Raoul breaks his head open with the butt of his spear; but then at once asks pardon and humiliates himself strangely. Bernier answers that there shall be no peace between them till the blood which flowed from his head returns back whence it came. Yet in the final battle he still seeks to turn Raoul back before attacking him who had been his liege lord. Again in vain; and Raoul falls beneath Bernier’s sword. Here are the two sides of the picture, the monster of a lord, the vassal vainly seeking to be true: a situation utterly tragic from the standpoint of feudal chivalry.
It is not to be supposed that a huge body of poetic narrative could remain utterly truculent. Other motives had to enter;--the love of women, of which the Roland has its one great flash. The ladies of the chansons are not coy, and often make the first advances. Such natural lusty love is not romantic; it is not l’amour courtois; and marriage is its obvious end. The chansons also tend to become adventurous and to fill with romantic episode. An interesting example of this is the Renaud de Montaubon where Renaud and his three brothers are aided by the enchanter, Maugis, against the pursuing hate of Charlemagne and where the marvellous horse, Bayard, is a fascinating personality. This diversified and romantic tale long held its own in many tongues. In the somewhat later Huon de Bordeaux we are at last in fairyland--verily at the Court of Oberon--his first known entry into literature.[701] Thus the chansons tend toward the tone and temper of the romans d’aventure.
The latter have the courtly love and the purely adventurous motives of the Arthurian romances, with which the men who fashioned them probably were acquainted, as were the jongleurs who recast certain of the chansons de geste to suit a more courtly taste. Of the romans d’aventure, so-called, the Blancandrin or the Amadas or the Flamenca may be taken as the type; or, if one will, Flore et Blanchefleur and Aucassin et Nicolette, those two enduring lovers’ tales.[702] Courtly love and knightly ventures are the themes of these romans so illustrative of noble French society in the thirteenth century. They differ from the Arthurian romances in having other than a Breton origin; and their heroes and heroines are sometimes of more easily imagined historicity than the knights and ladies of the Round Table. But they never approached the universal vogue of the Arthurian Cycle.
It goes without saying that tastes in reading (or rather listening) diverged in the twelfth century, just as in the twentieth. One cannot read the old chansons de geste in which fighting, and not love, is the absorbing topic, without feeling that the audience before whom they were chanted was predominantly male. One cannot but feel the contrary to have been the fact with the romances in verse and prose which constitute that immense mass of literature vaguely termed Arthurian. These two huge groups, the chansons de geste and the Arthurian romances, overlap chronologically and geographically. Although the development of the chansons was somewhat earlier, the Arthurian stories were flourishing before the chansons were past their prime; and both were in vogue through central and northern France. But the Arthurian stories won adoptive homes in England, Germany, Italy, and elsewhere. Indeed their earlier stages scarcely seem attached to real localities: nor were their manners and interests rooted in the special traditions of any definite place.
The tone and topics of these romances suggest an audience chiefly of women, and possibly feminine authorship. Doubtless, with a few exceptions, men composed and recited them. But the male authors were influenced by the taste, the favour and patronage, and the sympathetic suggestive interest of the ladies. Prominent among the first known composers of these “Breton” lays was a woman, Marie de France as she is called, who lived in England in the reign of Henry II. (1154-1189). Her younger contemporary was the facile trouvère Chrétien de Troies, of whose life little is actually known. But we know that the subject of his famous Lancelot romance, called the Conte de la charrette, was suggested to him (about 1170) by the Countess Marie de Champagne, daughter of Louis VII. Surely then he wrote to please the taste of that royal dame, whose queenly mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, was also a patroness of this courtly poetry.
These are instances proving the feminine influence upon the composition of these romances. And the growth of this great Arthurian Cycle represents, par excellence, the entry of womanhood into the literature of chivalry. Men love, as well as women; but the topic engrosses them less, and they talk less about it. Likewise men appreciate courtesy; but in fact it is woman’s influence that softens manners. And while the masculine fancy may be drawn by what is fanciful and romantic, women abandon themselves to its charm.
Of course the origin or provenance of these romances was different from that of the chansons de geste. It was Breton--it was Welsh, it was walhisch (the Old-German word for the same) which means that it was foreign. In fact, the beginnings of these stories floated beautifully in from a weiss-nicht-wo which in the twelfth century was already hidden in the clouds. When the names of known localities are mentioned, they have misty import. Arthurian geography is more elusive than Homeric.
In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries these stories took form in the verse and prose compositions in which they still exist. Sometimes the poet’s name is known, Chrétien de Troies, for instance; but the source from which he drew is doubtful. It probably was Breton, and Artus once in Great Britain fought the Saxons like as not. But the growth, the development, the further composition, of the matière de Bretagne is predominantly French. In France it grows; from France it passes on across the Rhine, across the Alps, then back to what may have been its old home across the British Channel. With equal ease on the wings of universal human interest it surmounts the Pyrenees. It would have crossed the ocean, had the New World been discovered.
Far be it from our purpose to enter the bottomless swamp of critical discussion of the source and history of the Arthurian romances. Two or three statements--general and probably rather incorrect--may be made. Marie de France, soon after the middle of the twelfth century, wrote a number of shortish narrative poems of chivalric manners and romantic love, which, as it were, touch the hem of Arthur’s cloak. Chrétien de Troies between 1160 and 1175 composed his Tristan (a story originally having nothing to do with Arthur), and then his Erec (Geraint), then Cligés; then his (unfinished) Lancelot or the Conte de la charrette; then Ivain or the Chevalier au lion, and at last Perceval or the Conte du Graal. How much of the matter of these poems came from Brittany--or indirectly from Great Britain? This is a large unsolved question! Another is the relation of Chrétien’s poems to the subsequent Arthurian romances in verse and prose. And perhaps most disputed of all is the authorship (Beroul? Robert de Boron? Walter Mapes?) of this mass of Arthurian Old French literature which was not the work of Chrétien. Without lengthy prolegomena it would be fruitless to attempt to order and name these compositions. The Arthurian matters were taken up by German poets of excellence--Heinrich von Veldeke, Hartmann von Aue, Gottfried von Strassburg, Wolfram von Eschenbach,--and sometimes the best existing versions are the work of the latter; for instance, Wolfram’s Parzival and Gottfried’s Tristan. And again the relation of these German versions to their French originals becomes still another problem.
For the chivalry of these romances, one may look to the poems of Chrétien and to passages in the Old French prose (presumably of the early thirteenth century), to which the name of Robert de Boron or Walter Mapes is attached. Chrétien enumerates knightly excellences in his Cligés, and, speaking from the natural point of view of the jongleur, he puts largesce (generosity) at their head. This, says he, makes one a prodome more than hautesce (high station) or corteisie or savoirs or jantillesce (noble birth) or chevalerie, or hardemanz (hardihood) or seignorie, or biautez (beauty).[703]
Such are the knightly virtues, which, however, reach their full worth only through the aid of that which makes perfect the Arthurian knight, the high love of ladies, shortly to be spoken of. In the meanwhile let us turn from Chrétien to the broader tableau of the Old French prose, and note the beginning of Artus, as he is there called. The lineage of the royal boy remains romantically undiscovered, till the time when he is declared to be the king. It is then that he receives all kinds of riches from the lords of his realm. He keeps nothing for himself; but makes inquiry as to the character and circumstances of his future knights, and distributes all among them according to their worth. This is the virtue of largesce.
Now comes the ceremony of making him a knight, and then of investing him with, as it were, the supreme knighthood of kingship. The archbishop, it is told, “fist (made) Artu chevalier, et celle nuit veilla Artus a la mestre Eglise (the cathedral) jusques au jour.” Then follows the ceremony of swearing allegiance to him; but Arthur has not yet finally taken his great sword. When he is arrayed for the mass, the archbishop says to him: “Allez querre (seek) l’espee et la jostise dont vos devez defendre Saincte Eglise et la crestiante sauver.”
“Lors alla la procession au perron, et la demanda li arcevesques a Artu, se il est tiels que il osast jurer et creanter Dieu et madame Sainte Marie et a tous Sains et toutes Saintes, Sainte Eglise a sauver et a maintenir, et a tous povres homes et toutes povres femmes pais et loiaute tenir, et conseiller tous desconseillies, et avoier (guide) tous desvoies (erring), et maintenir toutes droitures et droite justice a tenir, si alast avant et preist l’espee dont nostre sire avoit fait de lui election. Et Artus plora et dist: ‘Ensi voirement com Dieus est sire de toutes les choses, me donit-il force et povoir de ce maintenir que vous avez dit.’
“Il fu a genols et prit l’espee a jointes mains et la leva de l’enclume (anvil) ausi voirement come se ele ne tenist a riens; et lors, l’espee toute droite, l’enmenerent a l’autel et la mist sus; et lors il le pristrent et sacrerent et l’enoindrent, et li firent toutes iceles choses que l’en doit faire a roi.”[704]
All this is good chivalry as well as proper feudalism. And there are other instances of genuine feudalism in these Romances. Such is the scene between the good knight Pharien and the bad king Claudas, where the former renounces his allegiance to the latter (je declare renoncer a vostre fief) and then declares himself to be Claudas’s enemy, and claims the right to fight or slay him; since Claudas has not kept troth with him.[705]
There is perhaps nothing lovelier in all these Romances than the story of the young Lancelot, reared by the tender care of the Lady of the Lake. His training supplements the genial instincts of his nature, and the result is the mirror of all knighthood’s qualities. He is noble, he is true, he is perfect in bravery, in courtesy, in modesty, the Lady imparting the precepts of these virtues to his ready spirit.[706] There is no knightly virtue that is not perfect in this peerless youth, as he sets forth to Arthur’s Court, there to receive knighthood and prove himself the peerless knight and perfect lover. In this Old French prose his career is set forth most completely, and most correctly, so to speak. One or two points may be adverted to.
Lancelot is not strictly Arthur’s knight. Originally he owed no fealty to him; and he avoided receiving his sword from the king, in order that he might receive it from Guinever, as he did. And so, from the first, Lancelot was Guinever’s knight, as he was afterwards her accepted lover. Consequently his relations to her broke no fealty of his to Arthur.
Again, one notices that the absolute character of Lancelot’s love and troth to Guinever is paralleled by the friendship of the high prince Galahaut to him. That has the same précieuse logic; it is absolute. No act or thought of Galahaut infringes friendship’s least conceived requirement; while conversely that marvellous high prince leaves undone no act, however extreme, which can carry out the logic of this absolute single-souled devotion. At last he dies on thinking that Lancelot is dead; just as the latter could not have survived the death of Guinever. In spite of the beauty of Galahaut’s devotion, its logic and preciosity scarcely throb with manhood’s blood. It will not cause our eyes to swell with human tears, as did the blind blow and the true words which passed between Oliver and Roland at Roncesvalles.[707]
Chivalry--the institution and the whole knightly character--began in the rough and veritable, and progressed to courtlier idealizations. Likewise that knightly virtue, love of woman, displays a parallel evolution, being part of the chivalric whole. Beginning in natural qualities, its progress is romantic, logical, fantastic, even mystical.
Feudal life in the earlier mediaeval centuries did not foster tender sentiments between betrothed or wedded couples. The chief object of every landholder was by force or policy to secure his own safety and increase his retainers and possessions. A ready means was for him to marry lands and serfs in the robust person of the daughter, or widow, of some other baron. The marriage was prefaced by scant courtship; and little love was likely to ensue between the rough-handed husband and high-tempered wife. Such conditions, whether in Languedoc, Aquitaine, or Champagne, made it likely that high-blooded men and women would satisfy their amorous cravings outside the bonds of matrimony. For these reasons, among others, the Provençal and Old French literature, which was the medium of development for the sentiment of love, did not commonly concern itself with bringing lovers to the altar.
In literature, as in life, marriage is usually the goal of bliss and silence for love-song and love-story: attainment quells the fictile elements of fear and hope. Entire classes of mediaeval poetry like the aube (dawn) and the pastorelle had no thought of marriage. The former genre of Provençal and Old French, as well as Old German, poetry, is a lyric dialogue wherein the sentiments of lover and mistress become more tender with the approach of the envious dawn.[708] The latter is the song of the merry encounter of some clerk or cavalier with a mocking or complaisant shepherdess. Yet one must beware of speaking too categorically. For in mediaeval love-literature, marriage is looked forward to or excluded according to circumstances; and there are instances of romantic love where the lovers are blessed securely by the priest at the beginning of their adventures. But whether the lover look to wed his lady, or whether he have wedded her, or whether she be but his paramour, is all a thing of incident, dependent on the traditional or devised plot of the story.[709]
Like all other periods that have been articulate in literature--and those that have not been, so far as one may guess--the Middle Ages experienced and expressed the usual ways of love. These need not detain us. For they were included as elements within those interesting forms of romantic love, which were presented in the lyrics of the Troubadours and their more or less conscious imitators, and in the romantic narratives of chivalry. This literature elaborately expresses mediaeval sentiments and also love’s passion. Its ideals drew inspiration from Christianity and many a suggestion from the antique. More especially, in its growth, at last two currents seem to meet. The one sprang from the fashions of Languedoc and the courtly centres of the north; the other was the strain of fantasy and passion constituting the matière de Bretagne.
Languedoc had been Romanized before the Christian era, and thereafter did not cease to be the home of the surviving Latin culture. By the eleventh century, castles and towns held a gay and aristocratic society, on which Christianity, honeycombed with heresy, sat lightly, or at least joyfully. This society was inclined to luxury, and the gentle relationships between men and women interested it exceedingly. Out of it as the eleventh century closes, songs of the Troubadours begin to rise and give utterance to thoughts and feelings of chivalric love. These songs flourished during the whole of the twelfth century, and then their notes were crushed by the Albigensian Crusade, which destroyed the pretty life from which they sprang.
She whom such songs were meant to adulate or win, frequently was the wife of the Troubadour’s lord. The song might intend nothing beyond such worship as the lady’s spouse would sanction; or it might give subtle voice to a real passion, which offered and sought all. To separate the sincere and passionate from the fanciful in such songs is neither easy nor apt, since fancy may enhance the expression of passion, or present a pleasing substitute. At all events, in this very personal poetry, passion and imaginative enhancings blended in verses that might move a lady’s heart or vanity.
Love, with the Troubadours and their ladies, was a source of joy. Its commands and exigencies made life’s supreme law. Love was knighthood’s service; it was loyalty and devotion; it was the noblest human giving. It was also the spring of excellence, the inspiration of high deeds. This love was courteous, delicately ceremonial, precise, and on the lady’s part exacting and whimsical. A moderate knowledge of the poems and lives of the Troubadours and their ladies will show that love with its joys and pains, its passion, its fancies and subtle conclusions, made the life and business of these men and dames.[710]
In culture and the love of pleasure the great feudal courts of Aquitaine, Champagne, and even Flanders, were scarcely behind the society of Languedoc. And at these courts, rather than in Languedoc, courtly love encountered a new passionate current, and found the tales which were to form its chief vehicle. These were the lays and stories, as of Tristan and of Arthur and his knights, which from Great Britain had come to Brittany and Normandy. They were now attracting many listeners who had no part with Arthur or Tristan, save the love of love and adventure. Marie de France had put certain Breton lays into Old French verse. And one or two decades later, a request from the great Countess Marie de Champagne led Chrétien de Troies, as we have seen, to recast other Breton tales in a manner somewhat transformed with thoughts of courtly love. These northern poems of love and chivalry were written to please the taste of high-born dames, just as the Troubadours had sung and still were singing to please their sisters in the south. The southern poems may have influenced the northern.[711]
In the courtly society of Champagne and Aquitaine diverse racial elements had long been blending, and acquirements, once foreign, had turned into personal qualities. Views of life had been evolved, along with faculties to express them. Likewise modes of feeling had developed. This society had become what it was within the influence of Christianity and the antique educational tradition. It knew the Song of Songs, as well as Ovid’s stories, and likewise his Ars amatoria, which Chrétien was the first to translate into Old French. Possibly its Christianity had learned of a boundless love of God, and its mortal nature might feel mortal loves equally resistless. And now, in the early twelfth century, there came from lands which were or had been Breton, an abundance of moving and catching stories of adventure and of passion which broke through restraint, or knew none. Dames and knights and their rhymers would eagerly receive such tales, and not as barren vessels; for they refashioned and reinspired them with their own thoughts of the joy of life and love, and with thoughts of love’s high service and its uplifting virtue for the lover, and again of its ways and the laws which should direct and guide, but never stem, it.
Thus it came that French trouvères enlarged the matter of these Breton lays. Their romances reflected the loftiest thoughts and the most eloquent emotion pertaining to the earthly side of mediaeval life. In these rhyming and prose compositions, love was resistless in power; it absorbed the lover’s nature; it became his sole source of joy and pain. So it sought nothing but its own fulfilment; it knew no honour save its own demands. It was unimpeachable, for in ecstasy and grief it was accountable to no law except that of its being. This resistless love was also life’s highest worth, and the spring of inspiration and strength for doing valorously and living nobly. The trouvère of the twelfth century created new conceptions of love’s service, and therewith the impassioned thought that beyond what men might do in the hope of love’s fruition or at the dictates of its affection, love was itself a power strengthening and ennobling him who loved. Thought and feeling joined in this conviction, each helping the other on, in interchanging rôles of inspirer and inspired. And finally the two are one:
“Oltre la spera, che più larga gira, Passa il sospiro ch’esce del mio core: Intelligenza nuova, che l’Amore Piangendo mette in lui, pur su lo tira.”
No one can separate the thought and feeling in this verse. But they were not always fused. The mediaeval fancy sported with this love; the mediaeval mind delighted in it as a theme of argument. And the fancy might be as fantastic as the reasoning was finely spun.
The literature of this love draws no sharp lines between love as resistless passion and love as enabling virtue; yet these two aspects are distinguishable. The first was less an original creation of the Middle Ages than the second. Antiquity had known the passion which overwhelmed the stricken mortal, and had treated it as something put upon the man and woman, a convulsive joy, also a bane. Antiquity had analyzed it too, and had shown its effects, especially its physical symptoms. Much had been written of its fatal nature; songs had sung how it overthrew the strong and brought men and women to their death. Looking upon this love as something put on man and woman, antiquity pictured it mainly as an insanity cast like a spell upon some one who otherwise would have been sane. But the Middle Ages saw love transformed into the man and woman, saw it constitute their will as well as passion, and perceived that it was their being. If the lover could not avoid or resist it, the reason was because it was his mightiest self, and not because it was a compulsion from without; it was his nature, not his disease.
The nature, ways, and laws of this high and ennobling love were much pondered on and talked of. They were expounded in pedantic treatises, as well as set forth in tales which sometimes have the breath of universal life. Ovid’s Ars amatoria furnished the idea that love was an art to be learned and practised. Mediaeval clerks and rhymers took his light art seriously, and certain of them made manuals of the rules and precepts of love, devised by themselves and others interested in such fancies. An example is the Flos amoris or Ars amatoria of Andrew the Chaplain, who compiled his book not far from the year 1200.[712] He wrote with his obsequious head filled with a sense of the authority in love matters of Marie de Champagne, and other great ladies. His book contains a number of curious questions which had been laid before one or the other of those reigning dames, and which they solved boldly in love’s favour. Thus on solicitation Countess Marie decided that there could be no true love between a husband and wife; and that the possession of an honoured husband or beautiful wife did not bar the proffer or acceptance of love from another. The living literature of love was never constrained by the foolishness of the first proposition, but was freely to exemplify the further conclusion which others besides the countess drew.
Andrew gives a code of love’s rules. He would have no one think that he composed them; but that he saw them written on a parchment attached to the hawk’s perch, and won at Arthur’s Court by the valour of a certain Breton knight. They read like proverbs, and undoubtedly represent the ideas of courtly society upon courtly love. There are thirty-one of them--for example:
(1) Marriage is not a good excuse for rejecting love.
(2) Who does not conceal, cannot love.
(3) None can love two at once. There is no reason why a woman should not be loved by two men, or a man by two women.
(4) It is love’s way always to increase or lessen.
(9) None can love except one who is moved by love’s suasion.
(12) The true lover has no desire to embrace any one except his (or her) co-lover (co-amans).
(13) Love when published rarely endures.
(14) Easy winning makes love despicable; the difficult is held dear.
(15) Every lover turns pale in the sight of the co-lover.
(16) The lover’s heart trembles at the sudden sight of the co-lover.
(18) Prowess (probitas) alone makes one worthy of love.
(20) The lover is always fearful.
(23) The one whom the thought of love disturbs, eats and sleeps little.
(25) The true lover finds happiness only in what he deems will please his co-lover.
(28) A slight fault in the lover awakens the co-lover’s suspicion.
(30) The true lover constantly, without intermission, is engrossed with the image of the co-lover.
These rules were exemplified in the imaginative literature of courtly love. Such love and the feats inspired by it made the chief matter of the Arthurian romances, which became the literary property of western Europe; and the supreme examples of their darling theme are the careers and fortunes of the two most famous pairs of lovers in all this gallant cycle, Tristan and Iseult, Lancelot and Guinevere. In the former story love is resistless passion; in the latter its virtue- and valour-bestowing qualities appear. In both, the laws forbidding its fruition are shattered: in the Tristan story blindly, madly, without further thought; while in the tale of Lancelot this conflict sometimes rises to consciousness even in the lovers’ hearts. How chivalric love may reach accord with Christian precept will be shown hereafter in the progress of the white and scarlet soul of Parzival, the brave man proving himself slowly wise.
Probably there never was a better version of the story of Tristan and Iseult than that of Gottfried of Strassburg, who transformed French originals into his Middle High German poem about the year 1210.[713] The poet-adapter sets forth his ideas of love in an elaborate prologue. Very antithetically he shows its bitter sweet, its dear sorrow, its yearning need; indeed to love is to yearn--an idea not strange to Plato--and Gottfried uses the words sene, senelîch, senedaere (all of which are related to sehnsucht, which is yearning) to signify love, a lover, and his pain. His poem shall be of two noble lovers:
“Ein senedaere, eine senedaerin.”
The more love’s fire burns the heart, the more one loves; this pain is full of love, an ill so good for the heart that no noble nature once roused by it would wish to lose part therein. Who never felt love’s pain has never felt love:
“Liep unde leit diu waren ie An minnen ungescheiden.”
It is good for men to hear a tale of noble love, yes, a deep good. It sweetens love and raises the hearer’s mood; it strengthens troth, enriches life. Love, troth, a constant spirit, honour, and whatever else is good, are never so precious as when set in a tale of love’s joy and pain. Love is such a blessed thing, such a blessed striving, that no one without its teaching has worth or honour. These lovers died long ago; yet their love and troth, their life, their death, will still give troth and honour to seekers after these. Their death lives and is ever new, as we listen to the tale. Evidently, in Gottfried’s mind the Tristan tale of love’s almighty passion carried the thought of love as the inspiration of a noble life. Yet that thought was not native to the legend, and finds scant exemplification in Gottfried’s poem.
The tragic passion of the main narrative is presaged by the story of Tristan’s parents. His mother was Blancheflur, King Mark’s sister, and his father Prince Riwalin. She saw him in the May-Court tourney held near Tintajoel. She took him into her thoughts; he entered her heart, and there wore crown and sceptre.
She greeted him; he her. She bashfully began: “My lord, may God enrich your heart and courage; but I harbour something against you.”
“Sweet one, what have I done?”
“You have done violence to my best friend”--it was her heart, she meant.
“Beauty, bear me no hate for that; command, and I will do your bidding.”
“Then I will not hate you bitterly. I will see what atonement you will make.”
He bowed, and carried with him her image. Love’s will mastered his heart, as he thought of Blancheflur, of her hair, her brow, her cheek, her mouth, her chin, and the glad Easter day that smiling lay in her eyes. Love the heartburner set his heart aflame, and lo! he entered upon another life; purpose and habit changed, he was another man.
Sad is the short tale of these lovers. Riwalin is killed in battle, and at the news of his death Blancheflur expires, giving birth to a son. Rual the Faithful names the child Tristan, to symbolize the sorrow of its birth.
The story of Tristan’s early years draws the reader to the accomplished, happy youth. He is the delight of all; for his young manhood is courtliness itself, and valour and generosity. He is loved, and afterwards recognized and knighted, by his uncle Mark. Then he sets out and avenges his father’s death; after which he returns to Mark’s Court, and vanquishes the Irish champion Morold. A fragment of Tristan’s sword remained in Morold’s head; Tristan himself received a poisoned wound, which could be healed, as the dying Morold told him, only by Ireland’s queen, Iseult. Very charming is the story of Tristan’s first visit to Ireland, disguised as a harper, under the name of Tantris. The queen hearing of his skill, has him brought to the palace, where she heals him, and he in return becomes the teacher of her daughter, the younger Iseult, whom he instructs in letters, music and singing, French and Latin, ethics, courtly arts and manners, till the girl became as accomplished as she was beautiful, and could write and read, and compose and sing pastorelles and rondeaux and other songs.
On his return to Cornwall he told Mark of the young Iseult, and then, at Mark’s request, set forth again to woo her for him. The Irish king has promised his daughter to whoever shall slay the dragon. Tristan does the deed, cuts out the dragon’s tongue as proof, and then falls overcome and fainting. The king’s cupbearer comes by, breaks his lance on the dead dragon, and, riding on, announces that he has slain the monster; he has the great head brought to the Court upon a wagon. Iseult is in despair at the thought of marrying the cupbearer; her mother doubts his story, and bids Iseult ride out and search for the real slayer. The ladies discover Tristan, with him the dragon’s tongue. They carry him to the palace to heal him, and the young Iseult recognizes him as the harper Tantris, and redoubles her kind care. But after a while she noticed the notch in his sword, and saw that it fitted the fragment found in Morold’s head--and is not Tantris just Tristan reversed? This is the man who slew Morold, her mother’s brother! She seizes the sword and rushes in to kill him in his bath. Her mother checks her, and at last she is appeased, Tristan letting them see that an important mission has brought him to Ireland. There is truce between them, and Tristan goes to the king with Mark’s demand for Iseult’s hand. Then the cupbearer is discomfited, peace is made between the Irish king and Mark, and the young Iseult, with Brangaene her cousin, makes ready to sail with Tristan. The queen secretly gave a love-drink into Brangaene’s care, which Iseult and Mark should drink together. The people followed down to the haven, and all wept and lamented that with fair Iseult the sunshine had left Ireland.
Iseult is sad. She cannot forget that it is Tristan who slew her uncle and is now taking her from her home. Tristan fails to comfort her. They see land. Tristan calls for wine to pledge Iseult. A little maid brings--the love-drink! They drink together, not wine but that endless heart’s pain which shall be their common death. Too late, Brangaene with a cry throws the goblet into the sea. Love stole into both their hearts; gone was Iseult’s hate. They were no longer two, but one; the sinner, love, had done it. They were each other’s joy and pain; doubt and shame seized them. Tristan bethought him of his loyalty and honour, struggling against love vainly. Iseult was like a bird caught with the fowler’s lime; shame drove her eyes away from him; but love drew her heart. She gave over the contest as she looked on him, and he also began to yield. They thought each other fairer than before; love was conquering.
The ship sails on. Love’s need conquered. They talk together of the past, how he had once come in a little boat, and of the lessons: “Fair Iseult, what is troubling you?”
“What I know, that troubles me; what I see, the heaven and sea, that weighs on me; body and life are heavy.”
They leaned toward each other; bright eyes began to fill from the heart’s spring; her head sank, his arm sustained her;--“Ah! sweet, tell me, what is it?”
Answered love’s feather-play, Iseult: “Love is my need, love is my pain.”
He answered painfully: “Fair Iseult, it is the rude wind and sea.”
“No, no, it is not wind or sea; love is my pain.”
“Beauty, so with me! Love and you make my need. Heart’s lady, dear Iseult, you and the love of you have seized me. I am dazed. I cannot find myself. All the world has become naught, save thee alone.”
“Sir, so is it with me.”
They loved, and in each other saw one mind, one heart, one will. Their silent kiss was long. In the night, love the physician brought their only balm. Sweet had the voyage become; alas! that it must end.
With their landing begins the trickery and falsehood compelled by the situation. The fearful Iseult plotted to murder the true Brangaene, who alone knew. After a while Mark’s suspicion is aroused, to be lulled by guile. Plot and counterplot go on; the lovers win and win again; truth and honour, everything save love’s joy and fear and all-sufficiency, are cast to the winds. Even the “Judgment of God” is tricked; the hot iron does not burn Iseult swearing her false oath, literally true. Many a time Mark’s jealousy has been fiercely stirred, only to be tricked to sleep again. Yet he knows that Tristan and Iseult are lovers. He calls them to him; he tells them he will not avenge himself, they are too dear to him. But let them take each other by the hand and leave him. So, together, they disappear in the forest.
Then comes the wonderful, beautiful story of the love-grotto and the lovers’ forest-life; they had the forest and they had themselves, and needed no more. One morning they arose to the sweet birds’ song of greeting; but they heard a horn; Mark must be hunting near. So they were very careful, and again prepared deception. Mark has been told of the love-grotto in the wood. In the night he came and found it, looked through its little rustic window as the day began to dawn. There lay the lovers, apart, a naked sword between them. A sunbeam, stealing through the window, touches Iseult’s cheek, touches her sweet mouth. Mark loves her anew. Then fearful lest the sunlight should disturb her, he covered the window with grass and leaves and flowers, blessed her, and went away in tears. The lovers waken. They had no need to fear. The lie of the naked sword again had won. Mark sends and invites them to return.
Insatiable love knew no surcease or pause. The German poet is driven to a few reflections on the deceits of Eve’s daughters, the anxieties of forbidden love, and the crown of worth and joy that a true woman’s love may be. At last the lovers are betrayed--in each other’s arms. They know that Mark has seen them.
“Heart’s lady, fair Iseult, now we must part. Let me not pass from your heart. Iseult must ever be in Tristan’s heart. Forget me not.”
Says Iseult: “Our hearts have been too long one ever to know forgetting. Whether you are near or far, nothing but Tristan enters mine. See to it that no other woman parts us. Take this ring and think of me. Iseult with Tristan has been ever one heart, one troth, one body, one life. Think of me as your life--Iseult.”
The fateful turning of the story is not far off: Tristan has met the other Iseult, her of the white hands. The poet Gottfried did not complete his work. He died, leaving Tristan’s heart struggling between the old love and the new--the new and weaker love, but the more present offering to pain. The story was variously concluded by different rhymers, in Gottfried’s time and after. The best ending is the extant fragment of the Tristan by Thomas of Brittany, the master whom Gottfried followed. In it, the wounded Tristan dies at the false news of the black sails--the treachery of Iseult of the white hands. The true Iseult finds him dead; kisses him, takes him in her arms, and dies.
From the time when on the ship Tristan and Iseult cast shame and honour to the winds, the story tells of a love which knows no law except itself, a love which is not hindered or made to hesitate and doubt by any command of righteousness or honour. Love is the theme; the tale has no sympathy or understanding for anything else. It is therefore free from the consciously realized inconsistencies present at least in some versions of the story of Lancelot and Guinevere. In them two laws of life seem on the verge of conflict. On the one--the feebler--side, honour, troth to marriage vows, some sense of right and wrong; on the other, passionate love, which is law and right unto itself, having its own commands and prohibitions; a love which is also an inspiration and uplifting power unto the lover; a love holy in itself and yet because of its high nature the more fatally impeached by truth and honour trampled on. In the conflict between the two laws of life in the Lancelot story, the rights and needs and power of love maintain themselves; yet the end must come, and the lovers live out love’s palinode in separate convents. For this love to be made perfect, must be crowned with repentance.
Who first created Lancelot, and who first made the peerless knight love Arthur’s queen? This question has not yet been answered.[714] Chrétien de Troies’ poem, Le Conte de la charrette, has for its subject an episode in Lancelot’s long love of Guinevere.[715] Here, as in his other poems, Chrétien is a facile narrator, with little sense of the significance that might be given to the stories which he received and cleverly remade. But their significance is shown in the Old French prose Lancelot, probably composed two or three decades after Chrétien wrote. It contains the lovely story of Lancelot’s rearing, by the Lady of the Lake, and of his glorious youth. It brings him to the Court of Arthur, and tells how he was made a knight--it was the queen and not the king from whom he received his sword. And he loves her--loves her and her only from the first until his death. He has no thought of serving any other mistress. And he is aided in his love by the “haute prince Galehaut,” the most high-hearted friend that ever gave himself to his friend’s weal.
From the beginning Lancelot’s love is worship, it is holy; and almost from the beginning it is unholy. From the beginning, too, it is the man’s inspiration, it is his strength; it makes him the peerless knight, peerless in courtesy, peerless in emprise; this love gives him the single eye, the unswerving heart, the resistless valour to accomplish those adventures wherein all other knights had found their shame--they were not perfect lovers! Only through his perfect love could Lancelot have accomplished that greatest adventure of the Val des faux amants;--Val sans retour for all other knights.[716] Lancelot alone had always been, and to his death remained, a lover absolutely true in act and word and thought; incomparably more chastely loyal to Guinevere than her kingly spouse. Against the singleness of this perfect love enchantments fail, and swords and lances break. Yet this love, fraught with untruth and dishonour, must conceal itself from that king who, while breaking his own marriage vows as passion led him, trusted and honoured above all men the peerless knight whose peerlessness was rooted in his unholy holy love for Arthur’s queen.
The first full sin between Lancelot and Guinevere was committed when Arthur was absent on a love-adventure, which brought him to a shameful prison. He was delivered by Lancelot, and recognizing his deliverer, he said in royal gratitude: “I yield you my land, my honour, and myself.” Lancelot blushes! Thereafter, as towards Arthur, Lancelot and Guinevere are forced into stratagems almost as ignoble as those by which King Mark was tricked. And Guinevere--she too is peerless among women; perfect in beauty, perfect in courtliness, perfect in dutifulness to her husband--saving her love for Lancelot! Guinevere’s dutifulness to Arthur is not shaken by his outrageous treatment of her because of the “false Guinevere,” when he cast off and sought to burn his queen. She will continue to obey him though he has dishonoured her--and all the time, unknown to her outrageous, unjustly accusing lord, how had she cast her and his honour down with Lancelot! Only while she is put away from her lord, and under Lancelot’s guard, for that time she will be true to marriage vows; and Lancelot assents.[717]
The latter part of the story, when asceticism enters with Galahad,[718] suggests that the peerless knight of “les temps adventureux” was sinful. But the main body of the tale put no reproach on Lancelot for his great love. It told of a love as perfect and as absolute as the author or compiler could conceive; and the conduct of Lancelot was intended to be that of a perfect lover, whose sentiments and actions should accord with the idea of courtly love and exemplify its rules. Their underlying principle was that love should always be absolute, and that the lover’s every thought and act should on all occasions correspond with the most extreme feelings or sentiments or fancies possible for a lover. In the prose narrative, for example, Lancelot goes mad three times because of his mistress’s cruelty, a cruelty which may seem to us absurd, but which represents the adored lady’s insistence, under all circumstances, upon the most unhesitating and utter devotion from her lover.
Chrétien’s Conte de la charrette is a clear rendering of the idea that love shall be absolute, and hesitate at nothing; it is an example of courtly love carried to its furthest imagined conclusions. It displays all the rules of Andrew the Chaplain in operation. In it Lancelot will do anything for Guinevere, will show himself a coward knight at her command, or perform feats of arms; he will desire the least little bit of her--a tress of hair--more than all else which is not she; he will throw himself from the window to be near her; engaged in deadly combat, the sight of her makes him forget his enemy; at the news of her death he seeks at once to die. Of course his heart loathes the thought of infringing this great love by the slightest fancy for another woman. On the other hand, when by marvels of valour Lancelot rescues Guinevere from captivity, she will not speak to him because for a single instant he had hesitated to mount a charrette, in which no knight was carried save one who was felon and condemned to death. This was logical on Guinevere’s part; Lancelot’s love should always have been so absolute as never for one instant to hesitate. Much of this is extreme, and yet hardly unreal. Heloïse’s love for Abaelard never hesitated.
Such love, imperious and absolute, shuts out all laws and exigencies save its own;[719] it must be virtue and honour unto itself; it is careless of what ill it may do so long as that ill does not infringe love’s laws. Evidently before it the bonds of marriage break, or pale to insignificance. It is its own sanction, nor needs the faint blessing of the priest. The poet--as the actual lover likewise--may even deem that love can best show itself to be the principle of its own honour when unsustained by wedlock; thus unsustained and unobscured it stands alone, fairer, clearer, more interesting and romantic. Again, since mediaeval marriage in high life was more often a joining of fiefs than a union of hearts, there would be high-born dames and courtly poets to declare that love could only exist between knight and mistress, and not between husband and wife. Marriage shuts out love’s doubts and fears; there is no need of further knightly services; and husband and wife by law are bound to render to each other what between lovers is gracious favour; this was the opinion of Marie de Champagne, it also was the opinion of Heloïse. In chivalric poetry the lovers, when at last duly married, may continue to call each other ami et amie rather than wife and lord;[720] or a knight may shun marriage lest he settle down and lose worship, doing no more adventurous feats of arms, like Chrétien’s Erec, till his wife Enide stung him by her speech.[721] Some centuries later Malory has Lancelot utter a like sentiment: “But to be a wedded man I think never to be, for if I were, then should I be bound to tarry with my wife, and leave arms and tournaments, battles and adventures.”
If allowance be made for the difference in topic and treatment between the Arthurian romances and Guillaume de Lorris’s portion of the Roman de la rose, the latter will be seen to illustrate similar love principles. De Lorris’s poem is fancy playing with thoughts of love which had inspired these tales of chivalry. Every one knows its gentle idyllic character;--how charming, for instance, is the conflict between the Lover-to-be and Love, who quickly overcomes the ready yielder. So he surrenders unconditionally, gives himself over; Love may slay him or gladden him--“le cuers est vostre, non pas miens,” says the lover to Love, and you shall do with it as you will. Then Love sweetly takes his little golden key, and locks the lover’s heart, after which he safely may impart his rules and counsels: the lover must abjure vilanie, and foul and slanderous speech--the opposite of courtesy. Pride also (orgoil) must be abandoned. He should attire himself seemingly, and show cheerfulness; he must be niggardly in nothing; his heart must be given utterly to one; he shall undergo toils and endure griefs without complaint; in absence he will always think of the beloved, sighing for her, keeping his love aflame; he will be shameful, confused and changing colour in her presence; at night he will toss and weep for love of her, and dream dreams of passionate delight; then wakeful, he will rise and wander near her dwelling, but will not be seen--nor will he forget to be generous to her waiting-maid. All of this will make the lover pale and lean. To aid him to endure these agonies, will come Hope with her gentle healings, and Fond-thought, and Sweet-speech of the beloved with a wise confidant, and Sweet-sight of her dwelling, maybe of herself. The Roman de la rose is fancy, and the Arthurian romances are fiction. In the one or the other, imagination may take the place of passion, and the contents of the poem or romance afford a type and presentation of the theory of love.